ABSTRACT
Reverse motion – action seeming to run backwards in time – is probably the most magical of all filmic devices. Like slowed or accelerated motion, and time-lapse photography, it exploits film’s sequential structure. But unlike these, it offers a spectacle which is ‘impossible’, yet wholly realistic. The demolished wall that miraculously rebuilds itself, the diver who rises from the water to regain precisely the end of the diving board – no matter that we know how easy the effect is to achieve, by simply running the filmstrip backwards, the experience remains in some sense magical.
