In Waking Hours

Scholar Katrien Vanagt conducts an optics experiment taken from an antique medical treatise, and transforms the kitchen of her house in Brussels into a camera obscura. Her joyful, vigilant children take part. Filmmaker Sarah Vanagt records the phases of this experience in which Katrien, following the book’s instructions, takes the eye of a recently deceased cow, removes the optic nerve’s membrane, and uses it as a lens through which to view objects in the world. The film is a marvelous journey through the forms and colors of nature, which, observed through the lens, appear before our eyes as images from a painting. The medium of the cow’s eye becomes the same instrument provided to spectators, enabling them to see through the camera, narrowing the distance between fiction and reality.