Miranda Pennell’s Man Number 4 opens on a pixelated reddish-brown screen.
It is an extreme close-up of one small section from a photograph that was shared on social media in December of 2023. The complete image depicts a camp in Gaza, where civilians are treated inhumanely. Pennell’s film examines this image, interrogating its various components through a roving frame that punches in on barely distinguishable details, questioning both their implications and their composition. By thoroughly probing this single image of barbaric violence, that would have been scrolled past on thousands of timelines, Man Number 4 raises uncomfortable questions about our complicity in violence through the passive consumption of such startling media.
The film’s imagery is accompanied by a voiceover, delivered by British artist John Smith – whose own short film, Being John Smith is also playing at IDFA and reviewed here. The narration continually refers to “you,” the viewer. You look something up on the internet, you have trouble understanding what it is you’re looking at, you wonder what is in the box. The visuals follow a mouse icon as it hovers over and drags around photograph that consumes the screen. This film is an accusation, a confrontation with the role we all play in a hyperconnected contemporary society, an unwavering finger that reaches out and points at us from the screen.
The nature of Man Number 4’s narrative progression, through which it reveals more and more specifics both from within and about the creation of the image. The intention here is less to mimic the detective work of the likes of Forensic Architecture and instead to question in the very nature of the image, and as such encourage us to do the same. Our attention is drawn to artificial light – “you wonder about the unseen photographer” – and the various lines of power that are drawn by the photograph’s inception and its distribution. The horror of the entire image is inarguable, but Pennell’s film is more of a horrific reflection that we might find it more difficult to accept.
