It is more or less impossible to find out in advance what is coming to Seattle Art Museum's video room (in the museum's free zone, south of the admissions desk), so I have begun to think of it as a surprise zone.

What opened there last week continues the trend of pleasant surprises in the space (first, the Northwest video survey "Thermostat"; then, the short film "Young Americans" by Mary Simpson and Fionn Meade).

Now come five videos by the Belgian artist Nicolas Provost, ranging in length from one minute to 15. You can see snippets of all of them on Video Data Bank (click on the camera icons) here. He uses the universal language of filmmaking—the way you know what it looks like just before a kiss happens, the way you know the sound of suspense, the way you sense when a zoom is coming—and both shoots his own footage as well as uses footage from famous films.

• Tim van Laere Gallery, Antwerp
• This man is not an actor (in fact, he doesn't even know he's in a film). A still from Plot Point, 2007.

Bataille is a series of mirrored scenes from Kurosawa's Rashomon, which become monstrous in the doubling. Gravity is a tapestry of alternating kisses from movies (in one, the beach the couple reclines on in From Here to Eternity alternates with a couple on the hood of a car from a movie I can't place) that eventually start strobing and then disappear. It's seductive, then disorienting.

"My work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience," Provost has written. "That said, it's all about love."

The longest of the videos is also the most involving: Plot Point, shot using a hidden camera on New York City streets, culminates in the mass, silent exodus of a seemingly endless line of twinkling and blinking police cars on their way to some unidentified emergency. Nothing actually happens in the story, but it's entirely dramatic, because of the tensed-up music (by Moby) and the pans and zooms and cuts. This artifice has become our second nature.