There are a surprising number of movies in which photography has an important role. Like writers who write novels about novelists, it’s almost as if film-makers need to engage in the same self-reflexive practice. What does it mean to see the world through a lens? Why do we do it? Why do we care? These questions come up quite pointedly in Smoke. Harvey Keitel plays Auggie, who owns a tobacco shop in New York. One evening, as he’s closing up, Paul (played by William Hurt) runs up, hoping he’s not too late to get some cigars. Auggie lets him into the shop, and as he’s getting the cigars, Paul notices a 35 mm camera sitting on the counter. He assumes another customer has left it behind, but Auggie tells him that it’s his camera. He spends a little time each day taking photographs. In fact, there’s a little more to it than that; Auggie has a personal project and pursues it obsessively. Every day, at the same time each day, he stands outside his shop and takes a photograph across the intersection.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that Auggie uses a tripod and cable release. Clearly, he is serious about his project.
Paul expresses interest; Auggie isn’t “just some guy who pushes coins across a counter.” Soon the two of them are back at Auggie’s place, eating Chinese food, smoking (of course), and flipping through Auggie’s fourteen albums. It turns out, he’s been doing this for fourteen years straight and has accumulated more than 4,000 images of the same thing. He’s never taken a vacation because he needs to get his shot.
Paul is dismayed. Here’s the dialogue that follows:
PAUL
It’s kind of overwhelming.AUGGIE
(Still smiling)
You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.PAUL
What do you mean?AUGGIE
I mean, you’re going too fast. You’re hardly even looking at the pictures.PAUL
But they’re all the same.AUGGIE
They’re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings and your dark mornings. You’ve got your summer light and your autumn light. You’ve got your weekdays and your weekends. You’ve got your people in overcoats and galoshes, and you’ve got your people in shorts and T-shirts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones. And sometimes the different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.PAUL
(Looks up from the album at AUGGIE)
Slow down, huh?AUGGIE
Yeah, that’s what I’d recommend. You know how it is. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, time creeps on its petty pace.
I enjoy the modesty of the project. Auggie is after subtle differences. He’ll never be the kind of photographer who tries to shoot the (thoroughly unsubtle ) HDR sunrise over misty mountains. I wonder if we, as observers, have allowed ourselves to become so desensitized to subtle variations that the only way we can respond to photographs is if they are so shockingly over-the-top that they jolt our eyeballs.
Maybe we need to quiet our seeing.