The Screen

David Wharry
2021-02-19

0
4 min

The actors: a projector, a screen, a voice, an audience and a cinema. The locations: “here” and “there.” The situation: an audience is sitting in the dark in a cinema. The film begins when the projector is switched on. The projector is running empty, projecting only a bright white rectangle on the screen. The action begins when the voice asks the audience: “Are you there?” “Yes, you’re there,” the voice replies for us. “But one day you won’t be there, will you?” The voice isn’t “there.” Where is it? “Here.” Where? On the other side of the screen. The voice then asks us to project ourselves into a scenario, into the film of that inevitable eventuality we all prefer not to think about: the passage from one side of the screen to the other, from being “there” to “no longer being there,” from “here” to “there.” And what better place to do this than in a cinema?