Fade

An image resolving from or into black. The film breathing in, or letting go.

The fade passes through black: an image surrendering to darkness, or assembling out of it. Black is film's silence, and the fade is punctuation at the paragraph level, the full stop that ends a movement, the slow breath before the first image speaks.

Breathing in, or letting go maps its two directions, and duration is its dial: a fast fade merely punctuates, a long one mourns. The fade to black then up again is cinema's deepest ellipsis, time passed that we are not shown. Every quiet transition on a dark surface, this site's included, descends from this figure.