A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF CLARITY

Teenagers are watching a video on internet while videotaping their own reactions. Fragments after fragments, this loose community express their comments and witness a deep trouble in an ever more invading off-camera space. We are caught between two images: the missing one being watched and the image of the spectator. This ultra thin angle opens a breach on the multiple dimensions of dismay. « It's a glimpse into the horror that strokes the world » concludes one of the teenagers.

A certain amount of clarity is a film made from internet found footage describing the spreading in the community of teenagers of one viral video showing a real murder. Between morbid passion, terror, defy and curiosity, each teenager captures its own emotional response in order to expose it on internet. In this perverse play where the off-camera horror clones itself in the face of the viewer, the image is reflecting itself like a ricochet up to another viewer, who attempts in his reactions to decrypt the nature and the meaning of a chain evoking the motif of the “mise en abîme”.
The phenomenon of reaction videos is reflecting to the extreme the contemporary condition of the viewer, thorn apart by the asymmetry between the undefinable character of a world transformed into a flux and the impossibility of the viewer to adopt the position of witness. It raises question on how our identity establishes itself in relation to what reflect of ourselves society is sending back to us. The film attempts to capture the very moment of a metamorphosis; the one, more general, of a change in the paradigm in the relation to oneself and to the image of the world, metamorphosis of the perception engendered by the current industrial revolution in the domain of communication tools and new technologies.