[CFF ’22] ‘Self-Portrait’ Review — Surveillance doc finds beauty in the mundane

A review of the new experimental documentary, at the Chattanooga Film Festival Now

Joële Walinga’s new documentary Self-Portrait opens with a title card reading, “This film is made of real moments captured globally through unlocked surveillance cameras.” What follows is an assemblage of footage that the filmmaker collected online from security cameras and webcams left open to the Internet, whether by design or technical incompetence, and what emerges is what Walinga calls an “incidental” portrait of a world that is ever more aware of itself, watching itself always.

Rows of snow-covered cars sit silently in a wintry parking lot; a light turns on. Wind sweeps over a snowy mountain. Children walk down a sidewalk, tugging sleds behind them. A mountainous landscape. A ship pulls into port. A field. A beach, waves lapping at the shore. Any narrative or conflict that may exist within the frame — within the lives of the people who pass by the lens, likely unaware they are being filmed at all, and most definitely unaware they have been included in this film — is concealed by the surveillance camera’s passive gaze, by design static, unyielding, incessant.