Matthew Buckingham
The starting point of Matthew Buckingham’s film installation A Man of the Crowd is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, a man sitting in café becomes fascinated by an older passerby, and decides to follow him, unnoticed. On the subsequent twenty-four hour pursuit, which crosses the city a number of times, the observer is unable to learn anything else about the 'man of the crowd.' While the plot in Poe’s story is vague, the motifs of pursuit, doubling, and urban alienation are given clear expression in the framework of an ultimate failure — the failure of Poe’s narrator to find out more about the other person by way of concealed, 'objective' observation. By way of a series of displacements, Buckingham’s filmic exploration of Poe’s "The Man of the Crowd" emphasizes the implications of the story for documentary and journalistic practice: he transfers the story settled in a fictive nineteenth-century London to today’s Vienna, and introduces a pursuant film camera into the narrative. In the case of Poe's observer and Buckingham's camera the growing desire to understand the stranger increasingly foregrounds the observer's own unawareness. Ultimately, the observer learns more about mechanisms of cognition and the production of meaning than about the original object of interest.