The ancient crowds of the Great Dionysia could sniff dialogue from soapboxing, which they expressed with the elegant critique of dung-slinging. Consider that even the two most unstudied movie-goers can emerge from a film and say to one another, ‘I loved the scene where ’. Just as pups howl to the moon, we understand dramatic structure from birth. We’ve all abandoned an unworthy film in the second act and scoffed at inoffensive songs that reek of boardroom box-checking. Stasis is the absence of meaningful elements: the death of scene. The audience, in its pursuit for meaning and identity, animates even the most sedentary image, scouring left and right, backwards and forwards, until we detect the action of inaction. Indeed, there is no stasis in powerful art. The hands on the walls of Altamira have not moved since the paint dried 36,000 years ago, yet we cannot resist animating the amazement of our firelit ancestors sprawling in charcoal and ochre, giving birth to rampant expression. When the playwright pauses time, our eyes meet Macbeth’s, savouring and lamenting the eternal instant before tragedy strikes, as thane plunges dagger into king, and himself into damnation. For in Kubrick’s perfectly still space, our eyes dart between the stars, conceiving the paradox of a lifeless void which contains all life. Yet there is no such thing as stasis in powerful art. The prehistoric painters whose scores of hands line the cave walls in Altamira could never have dreamt of art in motion. For centuries, playwrights have halted time itself before our own eyes with the stage freeze. Of the 205 special-effects shots in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, many frame celestial still life landscapes, ossified gazes at ossified space. In powerful art, there is no such thing as stasis. SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for Portal (2007), Halo: Reach (2010), Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Crime and Punishment (1866).
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