This night, this nothing

Two boys sit at a school desk, three others slightly blurred out in the background. When we hear the teacher’s voice, we also locate the body to which the left sleeve of a white shirt on the far-right corner of the shot belongs. The master’s voice, harsh and rude: ‘How many times have I told you to write your homework in the notebook?!’ The pupil on our right responds: ‘Three times.’ – ‘How many?’ – ‘Three.’ Everything happens in a single shot, but what contributes to its ‘editing’ is the look of the pupil on the left, searching for the source of the voice and fearfully glancing at his classmate’s face. This gives us an agent in the picture for what follows; it gives us someone who has already done the work of locating the voices and looks, the heard and the seen, for us. The director enables us to delegate our spectating perspective to the actor within the shot – to enter the shot, step over the bar gate.