by TWY

---

Watching Theme Song at home was a bizarre experience which might not be how it was supposed to be, but I could be wrong. More than anything it intensifies the feeling of watching something in solitude, a feeling that put myself in tension with that of the artist, which could be entirely different should I saw the movie with an audience in more public space. But here, I found myself almost “face-to-face” with Acconci, as if having a video call, but then, not quite. But perhaps it is also fitting to watch the film alone in a room, because only in such a spacial relation, can I be reminded that Acconci, who addresses to the camera lens, was alone in his room as well.

I found that Acconci’s usage of the first- and second-person pronouns impactful, even to the point of being manipulative: I, You and We/Us are probably some of the most powerful and seductive words that we human had created, and here, Acconci addresses the viewer with those words, and the speech possess us just as they seem to move him, which works like magic.  Same with these “theme songs,” those melodramatic songs that always make us think somebody is talking to us. Acconci’s film seems to be representing the idea of a melodrama stripped down to its bare-bone, in which a man wants to move us. The actor/filmmaker knowingly attempts at something impossible: one plus one can only be two, and neither Acconci or the viewer can across the threshold of the frame. But even then, let us keep the two both remembered.  In two spaces, emotion arose, that’s the only truth.