The Brooklyn Rail

I.
Surface tension: Bullet Piercing a Soap Bubble (or: Solid Chunk piercing Hollow Round), 1904

Lit in silhouette, a bubble is suspended from a short rod, filling most of a vignetted black-and-white frame. Immediately a solid form enters from the left, headed directly for the delicate sphere. The contour of this smaller round is irregular. Excreted from an unseen ejector, its stuttered trail reveals it traveled faster, thus farther, between film frames than was captured, but not by much. The bubble absorbs this intrusion. It conforms its surface around the foreign object as it moves. It forms the model of a gravitational black hole around the thing, growing deeper and narrower as the shadowed shape travels inward until its force stretches the bubble’s outer limits, and the chunk is inside. The bubble is intact. Its contour has reformed around the projectile still hurtling through its interior. Now it arrives at the far side of the bubble’s inner boundary, which at last it punctures as it stays its straight course. The perfect soapy circumference dissipates backward from the break in a shrinking arc, a hemispheric droplet in the last frame precisely as the bullet passes out of it.

There is a ruler on the right, a frame counter at the bottom edge, and the silhouette of other instruments on the left. The film is a demonstration, made in a controlled interior environment: an early studio film. The footage is looped at several speeds in the movie that circulates of the event, lengthening through repetition this very short, short where a glistening globe is punctured, reformed, then destroyed anew.

II. Pressure chamber: Annie Oakley (or: In order to capture smoke from a discharged rifle)

The action has already begun. Lit harshly against flat black, a woman donning a cowboy hat and a long dress with fringed sleeves cocks a rifle and aims across the frame toward a vertical white sheet hung with seven rounded targets. The targets’ angle is the only indication of scale in this interior, revealing a room barely bigger than the shooter and the assistant behind her, who wears a collared shirt, a vest, and an Alpine Derby hat. With each rapid discharge and reload, the shooter hits another mark until the paper has seven holes where the targets used to be. In the same beat she kneels and picks up a second rifle from the ground as her assistant strides across the frame while loading his right hand with objects he holds in his left. In near synchrony he kneels while tossing one of them into the air as the rifle is raised and fired. A contrail of smoke traces each vector. Every impact takes place above the top edge of the frame but one after another, through a fading smoke cloud each falls, dead weight, back into it.

The featureless, darkened interior is a vanishing point zoomed all the way in:
The absorption of frontier. A negative horizon turned inside out to make a small room.