Jesper Just’s film works are emotionally charged with ambiguous narratives that perplex the viewer; constructed plots that remain apparently unresolved. Just’s films focus on the loaded maze of interpersonal relationships by creating sudden encounters and unexpected correspondences. Situations and events eventually unfold into actual confrontations, sometimes physical but always complex and sensitive.

Visually enticing and equivocal, Just’s films employ cinematic methods but only to confuse viewers’ expectations. His films avoid conventional, expected resolutions and ideas of human interactions.

Just builds a continuum between the self and the ‘other’ in his film works. He reveals how the ‘other’ is integrally embedded in our comprehension of any social situation and reminds us that the ‘other’ is a reflection of the constructed self. Just tackles our perpetual attempts at self-definition by awakening otherness through the consciousness of our difference.

In This Nameless Spectacle (2011) the ‘other’ is a distant and unreachable mystery. Taking William Carlos Williams’ poem The Right of Way (1923) as his point of origin Just creates a voyeuristic narrative. The desire for the ‘other’ explodes into a physical reverie.

The film begins in the romantic setting of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Paris, where a woman in a wheelchair moves towards a residential complex, followed by a man exuding an enigmatic and intimidating intensity. The tension between the characters oscillates between agitation and attraction. Once safe in her home, in the high-rise housing project, the woman is able to move again freely. She approaches her window where she is struck by the light and the intensity of the man’s stare. The violence of the male gaze penetrates her privacy and the light blinds her sight. This double ray triggers a convulsion, something between an epileptic seizure and orgasmic turmoil. Just combines pain with pleasure, a fit with orgasm, rendering an agonising yet erotic transfiguration.

In Just’s oeuvre, movement spans beyond physicality, beyond the objective and beyond functionality. It entails the transitory moment, the passing that, in the case of This Nameless Spectacle, is also a part of the significant spatial experience of the installation. Here, Just creates the feeling of a space, both the idyll of the park and the murkiness of the apartment, by smoothly, uninterruptedly drifting from scene to scene, intentionally under emphasising the increasing suspense.

In This Nameless Spectacle Just explores the social context by conveying viewers’ contradictory feelings of unease and curiosity provoked by the imbalance between the private, the intimate and the shared. Just exposes the desire and impossibility of being together by introducing a paradox of alienation and intimacy between his characters. The subjective spectacle remains an unresolved ambiguity.