Limits: 1st Person

A tiny spot in the desert turns out to be a woman. The camera moves and a voice-over explains what we are seeing. Was this footage recorded by accident, or did the woman know she was being filmed? She moves stiffly, hardly noticeable. Then the camera zooms in, and she appears to turn around and look at it -- so she know it was there. Subsequently, the perspective changes -- not that of the camera, but that of the viewer. The voice-over takes on a new tone and explains what we are actually looking at. It turns out to be a completely different story. Using clever but extremely simple means, plays with the ambivalent meaning of images. The filmmaker manages to completely invert the significance of the images not once, but twice. Where are the boundaries of the viewer's perspective, of the first person, as the title suggests? It appears they are all over the place. The viewer can think he knows what he is seeing, but a smart filmmaker takes that viewer by the hand and determines his place in the world like a god. If a mise-en-scène as apparently straightforward as a woman in a desert can so enthrall us, then just how powerful is the art of film?