the film student
I was going to make people see it. That was the whole pitch — you don’t argue with a street, you film it, you put the file in front of someone and the file does the arguing for you. A camera doesn’t want anything. That was the point of bringing one.
I shot the end house twice. Once walking up, once on the way back, maybe eleven seconds between, the timestamp says eleven. First pass it has a blue door, the pot beside it, the dead geranium that won’t go all the way dead. Second pass there’s a door too. I keep saying that. There’s a door. I just can’t get both passes open on the one screen without one of them being wrong, and it’s never the same one, it depends which I look at first.
The woman from the second house came out while I filmed and held her hand up at the wall down the end, like waving at someone in a window. Good footage, I thought. But playing it back her hand goes up at nothing and the wall’s just wall. I was standing right there. I saw her wave at someone.
I’ve watched the side-return clip about forty times. Going down, the camera caught the whole flank, every brick. Coming back it caught less. Not blurred. Less. Like there was less to catch and the lens agreed.
I’m uploading it tonight anyway. It’s good, people should see it. I just won’t be in the room when they do, because they’ll ask me which frame is true, and I was there, I was standing right there, and I’d have to tell them I don’t know.
Pull a thread:
- the ones who come to watch — the other watchers
- the auditor’s first morning — the auditor, the record that won’t hold
- Mr Ashe buys a photograph — Mr Ashe, who buys such things