A Nonfictional New York and a Man with a Movie Camera

"Lost Book Found."

Jem Cohen takes his 8 mm and 16 mm cameras and gets out of his home . He starts to shoot the streets of New York for several days. While he was recording, he turns his camera towards the inhabitants of the street: homeless people, stores, cars, buildings, metro stations, pouches levitating with the wind, shops and street vendors. The world in "Lost Book Found" is silent, autonomous, almost hidden. The only sound is the narrator, he tells the stories of the inhabitants. Repetitions, coincidences, irrelevances and changes of the streets are told by him.

The camera is on the first person's point of view, so the movie is a story of the streets, told by a "friend who saw them". The viewer and the narrator are in the same room, sitting on the same couch and watching the records on a TV, and the narrator directly tells his memories of the images on the TV. It is his stories, it is just the memories which are shared.

This documentary subtly asks the question "What are you watching? A documentary, a fiction, or a home video?" The streets are signified by all the citizens of New York. The inhabitants of the streets are partially known by common sense. So, what are the viewer watching? What do the viewer focuses on, on their own memories, or the narrator's selections? What is projected on the screen is the reality without any interruption; the ordinary daily life of the streets, however, the narrator's stories are voice-over. So, it can be said that the stories of him is his own home video, the narrator can focus only the sense of the images. The viewer is not directly linked to the perception of the camera. The engagement of the viewer with the image is on the outside of the frame, is on his/her general knowledge. This statement leads the one to consider this movie as a fictional narration, even if the images on the screen tells their own story.

In fact, the narrator is not the man with the movie camera. Jem Cohen recorded the scenes and Monroe Cohen creates a narration from the voice of the camera. In this aspect, the genre of this movie -as a documentary- can be discussed.

PS: While watching the movie, you will see a surprise about The American Beauty. Remember the boy with the camera.