Phantom limbs (2022)

Phantom Limbs takes as its starting point a fundamental question about cognition and time: does sequence produce meaning, or does meaning produce sequence? Drawing on the Kuleshov effect as its structural logic, the film proposes that montage is not a tool of narration but a model of thought itself, that the mind, like the editor, constructs coherence from interruption, and that what we believe we perceive is always already an act of interpretation.
The title borrows from neurology: the phenomenon in which the body continues to register sensation from a limb that is no longer there. In the same way, the film examines what persists in an image after its moment has passed, the feeling of presence in the face of absence, the ache of the already-happened. Through Torschlusspanik, the German concept of gate-shut panic, and Susan Sontag's meditation on the spectatorship of suffering, the work raises the question of what it means to watch: whether looking constitutes a form of witness, or merely a confirmation of distance. What the eye receives and what the mind constructs are never the same thing. Phantom Limbs makes that gap visible.