Dennis Lim's Remarkable "How Should a Pixel Be"?

A still from Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf (2025)

Every now and then a review appears that is so original, so audacious, so delightful, it blows my mind. Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” is such a piece. And so is Patricia Lockwood’s “Malfunctioning Sex Robot.” And so is T. J. Clark’s recent “V is for Vagina.” Now comes Dennis Lim’s transfixing “How Should a Pixel Be?” in this month’s New York Review of Books. It’s a review of Alexandre Koberidze’s new film Dry Leaf. 

What is thrilling about Lim’s piece is that he defends what, for me, seems artistically indefensible, and that he does so brilliantly and persuasively. Dry Leaf, Lim tells us, was shot with the camera of a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson W595. Lim says,

The W595 shoots video at fifteen frames per second—producing a choppier moving image than the customary twenty-four frames per second, deemed the minimum for perceived smoothness of motion—and a maximum resolution of 240 pixels, which is to say its images contain at least eighty times less visual information than the current 4K standard. 

Lim comments, “Even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use a camera like this, with its weak sensors and puny pixel counts, for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film.” The result is a film consisting entirely of blurry images – an “unstable smear,” in Lim’s words. Who wants to watch that? Not me. I hate blurry images. I love sharp focus – the sharper the better. Lim is well aware of the issue. He quotes the scholar Martine Beugnet: “an unexpectedly blurry image draws attention to the workings of the camera; it risks undoing the illusion of reality.” Yes, exactly.

Dry Leaf is a road movie – “a quest narrative, in which a father travels the length and breadth of Georgia in search of his adult daughter, a sports photographer who has left home for reasons unknown.” This sounds like my kind of film. Why did Koberidze have to ruin it by using an outmoded camera that blurs everything? 

This is where Lim’s piece surprises. He loves Dry Leaf’s blur. He compares it to Impressionism:

Dry Leaf lingers at length on landscapes, on their flora and fauna, on the weather and light conditions that determine their legibility before the gaze of an easily overwhelmed camera. These soft, vague images are so distant from contemporary photographic realism that, for many, the reference that will first spring to mind is painting. Koberidze encourages this comparison with a few still lifes, directing our attention to, say, a plate of apples or a handful of freshly picked apricots. The landscapes at times evoke Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.

Okay, I can dig this. I love impasto. Lim continues,

Experienced as cinema, every frame of Dry Leaf enacts a drama of form. Figure and ground lose their distinctness. A smudge turns out to be a person, who seems to vanish before our eyes as they recede toward the horizon only to reappear moments later. Clouds take on serrated edges; power cables resemble dotted lines. The pixel, an unwanted video artifact, becomes a compositional element, a visible unit of information that periodically fills the screen with grids and gradients. Even apparently static shots are alive with contingency. Scenes in which nothing much happens are in fact trembling battles between darkness and light, as the camera struggles to adapt to its environment. The throbbing lag of the image, a result of digital compression, comes to seem like the very pulse of the movie, its electronic heartbeat. In its lack of nuance and tendency to overcorrect, the color range produces striking, often beautiful distortions: radioactive sunsets, a golden-hour glow. Paradoxically, the lo-fi aesthetic betrays a sensitivity to the atmospheric, or at least a compatibility with the gaseous and liquid states that Koberidze keeps returning to: the ever-present fog and mist of mountain terrain, the incessant flows of streams and waterfalls.

Lim makes me want to see this strange film. He calls Dry Leaf “a bet as well as an experiment”: “Koberidze’s wager is that these blurred images, to twenty-first-century eyes accustomed to the crisp edges of high definition, will be not just sufficient but replenishing.”

I never thought I’d see any value in a blurred image. Lim has persuaded me otherwise.