Not quite know-your-French-Algerian-authors, Mitsuo Yanahimachi’s Who’s Camus Anyway? may just be the most perfect summing up of the burden of hyper-awareness to date. Set at an anonymous university in Tokyo, it grafts the hummingbird structure of an Altman comedy onto postmodern parody. But whereas the latter usually ends up a clothesline for yesterday’s freshly-painted skeletons, Yanahimachi assaults the rude emptiness of each re-animation.

Tracking the final five days of a shoot, he shows an entire universe – both on-screen and off – spotlit in cinema’s gaudy halo; vomiting names like unspooled celluloid, the students are so waterlogged with film that it becomes their only measure of response: a clingy ex-girlfriend is dismissed as “Adele” from The Story of Adele H.; cafes in Tokyo are bemoaned as being unable to measure up to those in Masculin-Feminine; and a ghostly professor twins fates with Aschenbach from Death in Venice. Hence, life becomes a simulacrum of itself; a geeky dystopia erected inside postmodernism’s rotting hollows. And because every action there is a re-action, true chaos lies in the threat of arbitrary multiplication (as when three crew members pursue the same girl, to no avail). Only the stubborn opacity of Camus’ The Stranger seems to offer reprieve in this world connected at the dots; when the students call on the existential don as a mentor for their movie’s unmotivated murder, they’re left with a useless double negative. Nevertheless, production persists, with lead Ikeda growing increasingly obsessed by the novel’s Meursault. His sexual identity paralyzed, Ikeda sees the role as a chance to finally impose himself. Yet, to the camera-in-camera, his leap at self-liberation – actually murdering the old woman – reads no differently to if he’d simply acted. With sly apocalypse, Yanahimachi renders death’s presence so encompassing that when it does finally surface, it’s all but unrecognisable.—David Levinson