This work was originally a forty-minute 1/2 inch video. Since the tape had deteriorated, it had to be cleaned and the sequences that could still be viewed selected; these are represented in the e leven minutes of this video film.

It is an in camera performance for video, performer and spectator. The audience is facing a monitor, which reflects its own image, recorded live by Mona Hatoum. Like a demiurge, she scrutinises and searches the spectators bodies wit h her camera, which she uses not only to transmit it to the screen, but also to exhibit, by some improbable artifice, something more than a simple representation: revealing another, more intimate layer of the being.

This indiscreet eye breaks through the boundaries of intimacy by means of the zoom-in, while three assistants, not visible to the audience, film their naked bodies live and from time to time superimpose these sequences - using dissolve lapse - onto the images taken of the audience.In the Eighties, Mona Hatoum was to make performance into an important medium of her work. If the image of an injured body becomes a strong image in this path, the action here is hypersensitive and shows the limits of the confrontation of t he intimate with the social body. The title Don't Smile, You're on Camera indicates by reversal of the expression "smile you're on camera", the discreet embarrassment and the interplay of this video performance generated by the impac t of the image. A similar device revealed the intimity of the performer's body and the contents of her pockets in a film made the same year, entitled Video Performance. The video medium takes on the revealing sense of hidden reality.

Thérèse Beyler