Max Mueller

The shot is a word. It is a phrase. It is a sentence. It is a paragraph, a story, a book. 

The shot is not a word. It is itself a language, neither spoken nor written. 

The shot is a flexible unit. It contains within its duration an idea. It contains within its duration an explosion of ideas. 

The shot is a hammer. The shot is a nail. The shot is the invention of architecture.  

While looking at a building on a spring day, the desire to create a taxonomy of common shots arose. It traveled like steam up from my heart to my head. I began to think: ‘There are shots of buildings for which shapes are the primary concern. There are shots that dance with moving bodies and which move along tracks laid down by the exposition of a drama. There are shots that merely concern themselves with a fascinating human face.’ I heard the kettle squeal of rushing blood in my head. 

So I sit in Bota and the Fuzzy’s guest bedroom on this gray day and am met with the unfortunate conclusion that an impassioned classification of shots is helpful only in a limited sense and perhaps even deeply unwise. 

Classification is a means by which the human mind wrestles the flow of stubbornly existent space-time into order. We communicate our ‘experience’ through our expressed ordering. Thus I may say to you, as a matter of functional expression, “It is an exterior shot.” I may say, “The composition is motivated by static shapes.” That, however, is for the public sphere alone. In the private sphere, it is only appropriate to take a shot on it’s individual terms, to allow for the freedom of a shot to open its doors to the fresh air of existence’s untamed nature.