Minute 25

Minute 25 (by Naemi Wünch)

The excerpt from the film shows different scenes like students on a school bus, settlers on a wagon and later two men and a woman who stand in front of the camera. Interesting to me was the way the people looked at the camera. The school children looked like they were deeply in thought and then suddenly turned to look directly into the camera. To me, it made their eyes very interesting. I thought about eyes and what they can tell about people’s emotions. There is a saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul.

To look further at the people in the film minute, I cut out the scenes where people looked away from the camera and put it next to the moments when they looked directly at the camera. That way I wanted to give people the chance to think about the difference it can make when someone looks directly at you. Suddenly the people appeared more active to me, as if they were directly addressing me.

Also, I walked around in the city or university and thought about how different people either look at you or look away. Eye contact can be intimidating for some people. They rather look anywhere else, than into a stranger’s eyes. Why is that? Is it not normal to look a person in the eye? Is it a phenomenon of our culture or just the same all around the world? I have no answer to that, but I wanted to get people to think about that in my presentation of minute 25.

I wondered what it is that makes our eyes so important to how we are perceived and what people think about our emotions and feelings. Eyes itself are very interesting to watch and compare. Every eye is different and special. No two persons have the same eyes. That was very exciting for me to think about.

Then I asked some children to paint eyes and included these in my presentation. It was nice to see how different they experienced eyes in general. Some kids painted these eyes close to how they are in real life, others drew very colorful eyes. It was nice to see how the kids liked these different versions of eyes and reminded me again of how special everyone’s eyes are and that everyone is different in that way.