Untitled

A revealing single-take portrait of two Nepali newlyweds at rest and play. Uncut and without subtitles, Untitled rejects editorial guidance, confronting ethnography's fraught gaze and inviting viewers to derive meaning from presence, intimacy and duration alone.

Stephanie Spray: 'Within visual anthropology, subtitling has become de rigueur for ethnographic films, a tendency that effectively highlights the role of semantic meaning in our apprehension of the world. Untitled is a playful 14-minute piece that deliberately thwarts expectations for linguistic interpretations to instead highlight other kinds of meaning — those which would otherwise be dictated, if not eclipsed, by the flickering text of subtitles. Without these semantic guides, the viewer is encouraged to seek whatever meaning may be found in looking, listening, and loitering with the unnamed subjects. Phenomenological appreciation is not, however, the end point; rather it is a place from which to consider aesthetic decisions, namely the willful determinacy of the frame for what it highlights and organises spatially — as well as for what it dismisses or conceals.’