What does a camera do? It records, documents, and observes. But before it can do any of these things, it first teaches us how to look. Herman Asselberghs’ Leçons d'objet takes this deceptively simple premise as the starting point for a subtle yet rigorous reflection on the relationship between film and education. Named after the traditional classroom exercise in which students carefully examine an everyday object, the film turns its gaze towards another familiar object: a Blackmagic cinema camera.

Set within the film department where Asselberghs has taught for more than twenty-five years, the film is performed almost entirely by students and recent graduates. Fixed portraits of attentive faces alternate with surveillance images, mobile phone footage and a measured voice-over spoken by one of the students herself. Asselberghs has described the project not as a "making-of," but as an “unmaking-of”: an attempt to examine the camera as a product, an object and a node within larger technological and institutional networks. Perhaps even more than an essay on filmmaking, Leçons d'objet is an essay on spectatorship.

The classroom and the cinema emerge as parallel spaces in which attention is carefully staged, distractions are temporarily suspended and the world is momentarily kept outside in order to let it in again. With remarkable clarity and formal precision, Asselberghs invites us to reconsider not only how images are made, but how they shape the ways we learn to see.

Leçons d'objet is screened with Being John Smith by John Smith, a film of the same year that reflects on the director’s life and work.

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