The film. “We experience the joy of reembracing the real”

What if the film were a membrane of some sort, a tenuous reel, upon which ordinary lives take shape, by making them visible? The article focuses on the films Lonesome by Paul Fejos and Diary by David Perlov, which offer two paradoxical approaches to everyday life: one emerging from the fleeting, anonymous and unpredictable character of the street; the other arising from the thorough observation of one life form, that of the film maker. From these everyday life figures appears what one struggles to see, which the film may expose: the matter of a living world in motion. The writings of Siegfried Kracauer and Maurice Blanchot are mobilized to make sense of the Proustian joy of reembracing the real.