[T]

"[T] is a film at the limit of cinema, an experiment in the moving image where stillness and movement converge on each other to produce an experience of time as space. Philippe Leonard shot the footage for this remarkable work at Times Square, in New York City, during the hours of artificial illumination. Partly for this reason, it is an oneiric diary, tempted by myth and, at the same time, suffused by a melancholy sense that myth has lost its magical power. Faces appear and disappear in spasmodic waves of light, which emanate from billboards and mobile telephone screens and confuse the boundary between the organic and the artificial. The dilation of time and the miniaturization that that enables in [T] also ensures that the momentary betrayal of excitement, suspicion, attraction, hesitation, boredom and relief that traverses these faces approaches pure physicality. A smile, a blank stare, a fluttering eyelash: what the film permits us to encounter in these isolated elements is a materiality drained of eroticism, a society of bodies beneath the neon signs, where the market has abducted everything and everyone. The meticulously edited image track is brilliantly echoed in a sound track that renders the underground subway as a haunting residue and subtext. Times Square is a stop on the subway line; [T] is a film that arrests the mania of that space, giving to the viewer a rare experience of visual redemption." - Rosalind Morris