Harun Farocki's cinema is a kind of pressure chamber designed to make photographs (and their cinematic analogues) yield their hidden meanings....Memory and metaphor are central to Farocki's often dense and ascetic meditations on "images of the world," proving, as do the masters to whom he is often compared (Bresson, Godard, Marker), that rigor does not preclude poetry....The German title of this film translates as "Something Coming to Light," a phrase that could stand for the whole of Farocki's work. A meditation on the images produced by the Vietnam War, and on the experience of the war from a privileged distance, Before Your Eyes is also very much about personal loss and the ephemeral nature of love. Ranging from a portrait of a disintegrating relationship, to analyses of newspaper photos of the war, to reenactments of battles by Vietnamese children and German actors, Before Your Eyes becomes a stirring essay on the differences between personal and official memory.-James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario