Dissolve

One shot fading into the next, briefly overlapping. A softer join than the cut, and a quiet passage of time.

The dissolve overlaps departure and arrival: one image yields while the next gathers, and for a breath both are true. Where the cut asserts adjacency, the dissolve proposes kinship, this flows from that, time has passed gently, the two worlds are briefly one chord.

A quiet passage of time is its traditional duty, and its double exposure is an image in itself, the face over the landscape, the past bleeding through the present. Fashion has made it rarer, which sharpened it: in a grammar of hard cuts, one dissolve now lands like a rest in music. Interfaces inherited it whole as the crossfade.