Thirty-five years after Keep in Touch , Jean-Claude Rousseau's cinema returns to the city of Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton. It looks like a miniature remake of Rear Window , but a New York version. Rear Window flattened by a New York minimal artist. The window occupies almost the entire frame, the photographer is absent. The gaze, no longer voyeuristic, flutters across the surface of a red brick facade, on the other side, pierced by a myriad of equal openings. On the surface of the windows or in the depths of the rooms, life passes, disappears, returns, always inaccessible. Combining the greatest simplicity—a fixed and immutable frame—with the highest degree of sensitive and affective modulation, the author of De son appartement (Grand Prix FID 2007) here takes his art of variation to its peak. The variations of light convert the hours of the day into seasons of the year or of life. Objects appear and disappear on the windowsill, a piece of cardboard flaps in the wind, a phrase from a Fauré quintet returns like the refrain of an endless prayer. The triptych window, erected on its intensely black, shining sill, ends up appearing as what it is: an altar. An altar before which the man does not kneel but gestures, with a hand that trembles with fear and emotion, seized by the beating of absence and presence on either side of the window. Then he sits down, and it is his image that, when evening falls, is imprinted on the altarpiece—a receding reflection, a spectral self-portrait on the central pane. New York no longer exists. He barely does. Welcome is a ceremony of homage and farewell to a city and a bygone past. The paradoxical title formulates the enigma that is the film: Who is welcoming in this farewell? Where are we welcomed? What does this altar-window mark the threshold of? Beware, vertigo.