The Next Image

One roll of images fades to white. In the next roll, the bitten mushroom is a little more whole again.

The film rolls of Eat do not continue in the order in which they were shot. The person in the image is still eating, yet a new roll may bring with it another state of remainder. The food does not steadily diminish according to the order of projection, and the gap left by the previous roll cannot mark time on behalf of the next. Each time the fade to white has passed, the mushroom has to appear before the eye again; the viewer cannot judge, simply from how much of it remains, which bite happened first.

In the kitchen, the figure sits on the floor eating pie. The camera leaves a fixed wide shot from some distance, and the take preserved in the finished film lasts about nine minutes. Just now, after a new roll of film appeared, the mushroom changed into a different state of remainder; here, the next image does not arrive. No new image delivers another state of the food, and the act of eating before us is not handed off elsewhere. Nine minutes are occupied by it. The figure sits, the pie is beside them, and the kitchen maintains its original distance. What the screen gives is only the same take, and the length that it refuses to compress into a summary. Time is no longer rewritten by a seam, nor does a voice-over emerge to explain how much time has passed. The wide shot simply continues to contain the scene before it, ordinary almost to the point of embarrassment. It lets something that cinema could easily have omitted occupy cinema itself. The earlier mushroom made every new image carry the possibility of change; at this moment, change no longer comes from the replacement of one image by another, and can only take place within this image.

Later, the figure turns and vomits.