This rather formal exercise creates new questions as to what is mediation. If "nothing" is happening with the camera work.
The camera work includes the framing and the structured cutting from one inclusive closed frame (complete in showing the subject - she/they don't get cut off by the composition) to the other. It is mannered and therefore formal. Formalism may seem to mask the mediation, but this examples shows how it actually forgrounds the apparent "lack" of mediation.
While other mediated texts may be aestheticaly motivated by subject or narrative or other diagetic context (see previous posts in this series, in which the subject and her production strategy becomes text as well as subtext), a formalism is mannered as objective. It is a rigourous and "stubborn" refusal to demonstrate mediation - it is invisible.
There is something awesome about the initial shot, of the girl sitting down and beginning to watch some porn, and opening her pants. The shot to the front, a change in angle, suddenly creates a new relationship between the subject (her masturbating) and the viewer (us), anonymous but now involved.
It forces confrontation with the viewer on a theoretical level, and unlike an "anonymous" or directorless spectacle, which may emphasize content (and may have no choice), it distances content from form by making form influenced by it.
The edits here - arbitrary but definitive - create an aesthetic which only emphasizes the invisible mediator while it pretending to be uninvolved. Additionally, the "staged" elements in the mise-en-scene, including the curiously anachronistic but charming use of a VHS tape, with a remote to f-f through to her "favorite" bits, and the pictorially-placed burning candle, complete with wax spills on top of the player, further distract from an anonymous and "invisible" mediator.
The piece has been "framed," and works aesthetically differently than one less pre-meditated.