In Unas fotos en la ciudad del Sylvia, José Luis Guerin's experimentation takes on another, even more exciting form. Its silent, frozen black-and-white images might be compared to a photo essay that has landed from another planet, like Marker's La Jetée. Rather than voiceover narration, though, text appears onscreen, a running commentary of places, people and events: the film's movement is palpable. It began as a video journal taken by Guerin using a small DV camera towards the making of Dans la ville, but the result is something significant. Again, we start in Strasbourg, where the "author" has returned to find the girl he saw two decade ago; he tries, using logical deduction, to find her, but soon his eyes waver to other women, in whom he finds echoes of Sylvia.

But then Guerin branches out, adventurously, drawing a line between his project and its literary precedents: the object of Goethe's affection who nearly drove him (and Young Werther) to suicide, Lotte, hailed from Strasbourg. But the flaneur's spirit is prominent in Unas fotos, and there are echoes of Guerin's amorous search in other cities, especially Italian: he explores the relationship between Dante and his young crush Beatrice, and, also Petrarch's glimpse of Laura, celebrated in his sonnets. Carefully structured and minutely edited--some material was part of Guerin's entry in this year's Venice Biennale--this is a striking celebration of the possibility of the new medium. It shows an unconventional artist liberated from traditional means, an artist at his most free.

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