Comment

A man's face takes up all the space on screen as he waits, scanning the horizon off-screen. From the outset, all our attention as spectators is focused on this act of waiting, because if what he is looking out for is hidden from us at the start, the song of the birds and the wind that shakes the leaves of the trees reach us very clearly in contrast, as if amplified by impatience and the desire to see. Like him, we are on the lookout, while the train arrives at the station in a panning shot. The long-awaited object finally appears - a moped, firmly attached to a freight car. This story of a man who receives a coveted object is told entirely through the medium of sensations: close-ups detailing the object are contrasted with other shots of the man, filmed from the back, frozen as if in front of an apparition: the sound of the bell that he rings with a sense of almost religious ceremony, the hands that gently caress the leather of the new saddle that creaks and squeaks, the smell of the oil that escapes from the new engine. Despite their prosaic and material aspect, these discoveries seem to arouse his wonder. Here the sensations are assigned to the character, they do not pass through the viewer who nevertheless empathises with his bliss: at the end of the extract, we watch the man's silhouette move away, alone, pushing his moped to the side, into the depth of the shot until he is almost engulfed by the landscape.