Daruwalla just leaves us in the ambience of certain musings rich in
self-reflexive history, anthropology, politics, arts, nature, and, above all, lives - his own, mostly, among others' - seeking a little grace, dignity.
Among the events the narrator describes are a
self-reflexive encounter with the ghost of the hit man's mother, a trip to a thrift shop to buy dead people's clothes, a sinister attempt by the hit man to feed her hellish food: sweet and succulent marrow.
Pieroth had borrowed the wall label for the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in order to show it in London as an unassisted readymade, using this
self-reflexive gesture to reenact the paradigmatic shift from work to frame (to borrow Craig Owens's phrase) established in Conceptual art in the late '60s.
Notable is his suggestion that Gide's equation of Narcissus with autobiographical activity (now a commonplace in criticism of
self-reflexive writing) is a 'banalisation' of the mythological figure: Gaubert invites us to compare Gide's use of Prometheus and Theseus as metaphors of himself with Valery's vision of Narcissus as a foundation myth, distant and beyond deployment as a literary character.
These poems are also quite
self-reflexive, in that they refer to themselves, to the act of poetic utterance and the significance of words in what is construed to be a vast, possibly empty, universe.
Debord's On the Passage (whether Godard or anyone else in the Nouvelle Vague knew about it) is a compendium of metacinematic tropes exceeding those often assumed to have originated with the French New Wave: the inclusion of slates as a distancing device, critical interventions in the form of intertitles, visual breakdowns of still photographs,
self-reflexive voice-over critique, the blurring of the line between documentary and fiction, clear leader with voice-over and black leader with silence, the cutting of TV commercials and newsreels against staged sequences, the creation of a critical urban psychogeography, the deliberate inclusion of bad takes, and so on.
The study shifts from Classical rhetoric and the visual arts (especially the device of ecphrasis), via Enlightenment sensibility and Romantic relation of Italy to self, to a consideration of contemporary Italian journeys in which the country becomes
self-reflexive emblem of artistic creation.
In any case, the work generates a high degree of tension, as it becomes radically intransitive and
self-reflexive.
I would go so far as to say that the film qualifies him as a practitioner of institutional critique, one who examines the constraints and possibilities that confront artists in the music business in an entertainingly
self-reflexive way.