Frame

A single still image, and the border around everything the audience is allowed to see. To frame is to decide what the world is, for a moment.

The frame is a claim of relevance: everything inside it has been declared worth looking at, and everything outside it has been declared, for this moment, not to exist. No other choice in film is this absolute. The border is invisible and it governs everything.

Framing is therefore an ethics as much as an aesthetics: what you include, you endorse as meaningful; what you exclude, you protect or suppress. The discipline on set and in layout alike is to read the edges, the eye checks the corners of a frame the way a proofreader checks line ends, because whatever touches the border is speaking loudly.