Footage of Nothing
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Footage of Nothing.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Danae Shore stands beside a recording machine on a tall stand, tapes boxed on the floor, a chair squared to the light. Reels are already turning. A subject, a man in a work coat, sits long enough to be the reason the machine is running. He answers nothing of importance. He looks at his own hands. The hands rest on his knees and do not perform. Then he stands, buttons the coat, and leaves by the far door. His steps are ordinary. The door shuts. The latch seats. The chair is empty.
Habit in any other room would be to stop the reels now that the face is gone. Danae does not stop them. Her hand rests near the switch and stays there. What the machine takes of the empty room is still the recording. She does not call the man back, and she does not sit in his place to give the machine a person. The reels turn. The chair keeps the dent his weight made and slowly loses it, the cushion rising from the edges inward. A tape box waits with its label half written: a name, then a blank. She does not finish the label with a summary. The machine runs on air, on the chair, on the shut door.
The boxed tapes on the floor keep their full labels, hours and names already finished on other days. Today's box is the only one that stops mid-line. Danae watches the empty chair the way the machine does, without sitting, without supplying a face to replace the one that buttoned a coat and left. Light from the window moves a little along the floor and reaches the stand's foot. It does not reach a person. The motor of the machine holds one note. A slack loop in the tape tightens as the reels find their pace and then runs true. She takes her hand off the area of the switch entirely, so even a rest near it will not become a stop. The far door stays shut. No shadow returns under it, and no knock follows the second click of the latch.
She remains at the side of the stand. The subject does not return. Time passes as the take-up reel thickens with recorded nothing and the supply reel thins. The cushion's nap, almost recovered, keeps a smaller oval of flattened cloth and then that oval eases too, until the chair looks unused. The far door's latch clicks a second time, tested from the other side, and is not opened. She does not go to it. The half-written label dries with the blank still blank. The machine keeps running on the room the subject has already left, reels turning, switch untouched, the chair square to a light that has no one in it.
The chair stays empty under the light and the reels keep turning.