Shots Heard Round the World

OPEN ON MOTION. MOVING FROM RIGHT TO LEFT PAST a blurry, jittery landscape—maybe looking out from a car, maybe filmed on the run, possibly seen through a zoom lens, apparently captured on film yet projected digitally, definitely abstracted. There’s green, likely greenery, in the distance, and yellow, likely tall yellow grass, in the foreground, and in between there’s a lattice-like interference: dark, warping verticals impeding here from there. For three straight minutes it goes on like this—a sweep of cubistic kaleidoscopic motion leavened by a creeping sense of blockage, of imprisonment.

These are the first images in Joshua Bonnetta’s and J.P. Sniadecki’s , and many months later I’ve not been able to shake them. The sequence is tremendously arresting as cinematography, but it’s not only that. It lingers also because it’s a compact, oblique synecdoche for the whole film, the opening