The Virtual Possibilities of Valentin Noujaïm’s Cinema

What longing eyes he has. Reticent but undoubtedly alluring, they are often cast downward, gazing from elevated windows or at illumined screens. They belong to Najib, the young French-Lebanese protagonist of Valentin Noujaïm’s 24-minute film, Oceania (2024). Situated in an apartment complex in a hushed French suburb, Noujaïm’s short subtly unravels the haunting traces of interwoven world-historical events, which pierce the quotidian, ‘post’-imperial normalcy that otherwise saturates the film’s European setting.

The narrative is set in motion when Najib overhears his mother learning of the sudden death of their Algerian neighbour, Amir, whom she had cared for in his old age. Stealthily grabbing the keys to Amir’s apartment, which have fallen into his mother’s possession, Najib, by way of an unspoken desire, repeatedly lets himself into the deceased neighbour’s home over the course of the film. Najib’s yearning eyes study the leftist ephemera populating Amir’s flat. In one scene, Najib plays a VHS tape from Amir’s collection, containing footage of the Pan-African Festival of Algiers in 1969 – that almost-surreal cultural convening which, energized by insurgent, transnational networks of anti-imperialist organizing, would soon be interrupted by a global counter-revolutionary alignment of neocolonial and post-independence statist interests.

This spectral fragment of decolonial possibility unexpectedly gives way to another of Amir’s recordings, perhaps produced in the same space and time. Sedimented with traces of a different affective order, it shows Amir and friends on a beach, laughing and posing for photos. Najib becomes transfixed by the sight of Amir romantically embracing another man, and crouches towards the television screen upon witnessing this moment of intimacy. When Najib eventually goes through Amir’s diary, he learns that the Black African lover in question, Bachir, had written Amir a letter from the US during the Reagan era, conveying news of his imminent death from AIDS.

Oceania depicts other histories in contrapuntal fashion, like in Najib’s conversations with his friend Théo, who obliquely discusses the traumatic silence imposed on his Vietnamese family by their country’s subjection to French and American imperialism. Platonic and sexual relationships in this quiet, intergenerational tale become allegories for historical narratives of structural violence and anti-colonial solidarity – an indeterminately queered, diasporically accented Third Cinema, if you will.

But it is to Najib’s eyes that I return, as does Noujaïm’s camera, time and again. I remain particularly struck by the screen-cast, Jarman-esque blue glow that lights his face while he plays fantasy video games in his bedroom or replays vintage tapes at Amir’s flat. Projected onto Najib’s eyes, and reflected in turn by our own, this entrancing luminosity bears the residual matter of future-past memories and virtual possibilities: a self-reflexive working out of cinema’s capacity to convey the not-yet.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘Glow in the Dark’

Valentin Noujaïm’s ‘PANTHEON’ is on view at Kunsthalle Basel until 25 May

^{Main image: Valentin Noujaïm, Oceania (detail), 2024, film still. Courtesy: © Valentin Noujaïm; production: La Belle Affaire}