Happy New Year!

New Year's is my favorite holiday for the same reason that dissolves are my favorite formal device in movies. I don't know whether I prefer New Year's Eve, as a chance for reflecting back upon the year, or New Year's Day, launching forward into a whole new series of "firsts" and of hopefully emended habits. As in the dissolve, the outgoing and the incoming are held in momentary, overlapping suspension, and I love the sense of smooth continuity from the past to the future, notwithstanding the certain feeling that a change is in progress. I love how dissolves can endow movies with lightness, delicacy, and circumspection, and that you're never quite sure whether the dissolve is dramatically motivated (i.e., a cue for a flashback or a fantasy) or whether the filmmakers have chosen it primarily for texture, like chefs and musicians do when they add a flavor or a note for their own, accentuating sake.

I love when the superimposed images turn out to resonate with or even decode each other, if you're paying enough attention to the brief moment when they share the screen. I love how the dissolve can suggest symbolic associations without seeming to bonk you over the head, because the moment whisks by so fast. I love Tarkovsky, Ophuls, Sternberg, Dash, and Welles for their dissolves. I love when a director I associate more with rectilinear frames and strong cuts, like Stanley Kubrick or Todd Haynes, suddenly opts for the softness of the dissolve. I love that even when the world seems unduly wracked with nerves and threats and broken cease-fires, history can quietly dissolve from one year to another, right in the middle of the night, and you remember that time is not a series of studded events, but a pliant and sensuous flow.


Eyes Wide Shut, 0:03:24, © 1999 Warner Bros. Pictures