A HUMAN CERTAINTY
DIRECTED BY MORGAN QUAINTANCE
UNITED KINGDOM // 2021
21 MINS
Voices from the past haunt A Human Certainty, whose entangled threads link its multifarious narratives of suffering: a recent break-up; the romantic sweep of mid-century pop music; Weegee’s crime-scene photography; and images taken by the artist’s grandmother, a spirit medium, on her travels in Asia and Africa. Here, Quaintance’s montage becomes a codec for assembling these disparate threads, and for making sense of mortality and loss in all its forms.
Reflective Encounters
“Before TMZ there was Weegee, the ambulance-chasing paparazzo extraordinaire who stalked the streets of Manhattan in the mid-20 th century with his camera seeking out the grisly and the gruesome. His story is an early port of call in A Human Certainty’s trip through the psyche of its unseen narrator’s post-breakup ennui, a journey which later takes in the subject of his own grandmother, a peripatetic spiritualist who recorded her communions with the dead.
Both Weegee and the protagonist’s grandmother, in their own way, were making a record of mortality – the former its instantaneous reality, the latter what might possibly lie beyond it. The narrator returns to the scene of his heartbreak and records footage of it, born of a similar impulse to make a record of a kind of death. Perhaps this impulse is the root of all art? Even the ostensibly comforting doo-wop songs which punctuate the film’s soundtrack, the kind which repeat the lie of happily-ever-afters, were in some ways attempts to reckon with death: to capture fleeting emotions in order to somehow transcend their ephemerality in the face of life’s single, unavoidable certainty.”
— Jonathan Bygraves