ABSTRACT
The audience in the shadows is repose; the eye still possesses a streak of light, left outside, in the late afternoon, when the gold of the sun becomes a purple red and one recovers little by little the dazzling phosphorus of the screen. Rest: and as with insomnia, your gaze wanders over the darkness of the ceiling, finding slices of light projected from the street, and so you grab on to those two strips of light that spring from the projectionist’s cabin and like two bridles guide the action on that short and immense phantom canvas sheet that does not betray, like the Shroud of Turin, the marks of sweaty passion, agony, and death. You wander, because the film is not good; its action, casting masks of distress on the shadowy faces of people sitting in the underground chamber, with such solemn attention that it is as if they are glimpsing the final moments of a man condemned to death, doesn’t make your heart leap. And then, in the silence, the drumming of the little motor that automatically produces the narrow and long arch of vision is like that aery signal, which reaches us uninterruptedly on the sea beaches like the shafts of torpedoes at night, in a still sea, and which seems like the message of millions of cicadas that have just finished chirping and dying, and you are on the bench waiting for the wind to close all its banners up there, far away in the calmed sea.
