There are a number of curious paradoxes that throb at the heart of Margaret Salmon’s rather enigmatic short films; some are formal, some technical, some are what we might even term “philosophical,” and some—because it is art that we are considering here, after all—are a somewhat uncertain combination of all of these. This is not to present them as dense or forbidding; on the contrary, these are works of disarming simplicity and a rare beauty, albeit one discovered from within that which is most commonplace (yet another paradox). Their complexity derives simply from looking at people.

Ingmar Bergman once said that cinema begins with the face, and I suspect Salmon would countenance such a claim. There is certainly a pellicular quality to her work, the skin of her subjects—time folded in their creases—worn smooth or marked by age, as textured as the scratch-and-grain of the film on which she catches them. Yet for all that she considers her subjects somehow special, and particular in what makes them special, Salmon is drawn to them less for their appearance as individuals than for what they appear to represent as narrative tropes; as she describes them: “the new mother, the middle-aged man, the pensioner.” Instead  she considers these figures as archetypes, the embodiment of certain human themes, the everyday truths and experiences that can be found in the photographs of Walker Evans, the short stories of Tillie Olsen or Raymond Carver, or the films of Roberto Rossellini and his Neorealist contemporaries, all important points of reference for Salmon. These are the ghost narratives that haunt our lives, and the lives of others; unremarkable and usually unremarked-on events that, by a process of slow accretion, are drawn into the mass of which we are composed.

Of course when such events are laid out before us they can often seem to amount to little. The female subject of Ramapo Central (2003), for example, is seen undertaking the tasks of a seemingly contented domesticity: baking pies, gardening, drying clothes, sinking her head back into bathwater. We see her at work too, taking calls from teachers hoping to find employment in this particular school district in upstate New York, its name becoming her spoken refrain on answering each call and, in turn, the film’s title. One cannot help but suspect that it is not only the film that takes a sense of its identity from this but also the woman—never named herself—who is the film’s ostensible subject. It is only really while she’s at work that we become aware of her interaction with other people, by turn welcoming, kind, helpful, concerned, and then only over the telephone. We do see her with a colleague or among people during an exercise class, but these moments seem less encounters than coincidences, and only strengthen the palpable sense of an unspoken loneliness.

This may be presuming too much by too little, and there is undoubtedly much to this woman about whom we know nothing (to this district too: one would never know that it was here, in 1943, that Thurgood Marshall won his case against the segregation of children in the town, a full 11 years before his landmark victory in the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education). Perhaps this is coincidence also; nevertheless it emphasizes something that I think is fundamental to Salmon’s films: a subtle, one might say oblique, engagement with a society beyond that of art. It also suggests that this engagement is made by each of us every day, through the most seemingly innocuous of gestures. Indeed who else is there who could do so? While it is certainly possible to consider what occurs during this and Salmon’s other films as a litany of everyday frustrations and disappointments, we should not take this as an invitation to judge (or worse) those who appear in them. As André Bazin wrote in his 1948 essay “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” reprinted by Salmon in the publication to accompany her recent show at Rotterdam’s Witte de With: “Reduced to their plots, they are often just moralising melodramas, but on the screen everybody in the film is overwhelmingly real. Nobody is reduced to the condition of an object or a symbol that would allow one to hate them in comfort without first having to leap the hurdle of their humanity.”