The Next Shot

The house leans to one side, and a man crawls out through a doorway that has tilted with it; just as he returns to the open ground, another facade is already falling toward him. These few seconds come from 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. The long shot does not change. The wall comes down from one side of the roof, and the doors and windows tilt with it. The man remains in the frame throughout. Only when the entire wall has spread across the ground does the second-story opening coincide with his body.

Watched forward, this coincidence arrives too quickly. The facade falls, dust rises, the body appears unharmed through the opening, and the action is almost immediately carried off by laughter. I cut these two seconds out of the storm and play them backward: the opening and the body coincide from the start, then the wall rises, the doors and windows return to their height, the opening passes over the man’s head, and the two gradually separate. The building lying flat stands upright again, yet the man remains in front of the wall. Forward playback ends with a coincidence; reverse playback begins from that coincidence and pulls it apart into a stiff displacement.

Reverse playback has its temptation: it lays out the perilous mechanism, allowing the eye at last to keep up. The opening did not actively seek the body, nor did it grant shelter at the final moment; it was simply a void in the entire facade, moving with the wall and happening to pass through the man’s position. But seeing this clearly also has a cost. The slower the action becomes, the more the wind in the original film seems shut outside the frame; the man’s fall, another collapse, and the confusion that immediately follows are all trimmed into the silent border of these two seconds. For a fragment to become clear does not mean this span of time has been restored to wholeness. It has merely been rearranged: certain actions gain duration, while others lose their adjacency.

I restore the film to forward playback. The facade lands again, the opening coincides with the body, and the storm does not pause an extra instant for this closer look. The image cuts at once. In the next shot, a woman raises her hand to shield her face and walks up the steps against the wind.