The lectorial and the reading on editing left me thinking about something I’ve rarely considered: empty space. The gap between two images and the enormous role it plays is easy to forget, I suppose, because you’re so swept up in the active visual component. Of course, the audience makes assumptions without really realising it — a cut from a woman waving to a man smiling assumes that the woman is waving to him and that the man is reacting happily to her. This isn’t the only interpretation, though; every audience member brings their own history to a film. Similarly, a film can set up an expectation that something different will happen. Empty space encourages us to make expectations that may or may not be dashed.

In my cinema studies class a few weeks ago we watched an experimental film by Jackie Farkas called The Illustrated Auschwitz. It was based around an interview of one woman’s experience of the Holocaust and featured abstract, archival footage (a lot of which came from the Wizard of Oz).

A series of stills from The Illustrated Auschwitz

 These small, flickering images are centred in a pool of black; here, the empty space is almost tangible. But Farkas chooses to explore emptiness further, leaving the screen blank for several moments and abruptly cutting off the audio. In The Illustrated Auschwitz, the blank space that encourages the audience to make leaps of their own, essential to editing, is expanded to force the audience to think. It’s used as a moment of silence to reflect on what Zsuzsi Weinstock, the interviewee, has told us. Emptiness becomes more than a vehicle for the assumptions necessary to the development of a film and challenges us to make assumptions about what it would be like, how it would feel, how we might react in these situations.