Sequentiality, misdirection, and the grammar of deception

Jill Friedman, Getty Images

Three-Card Monte is not only a visual trick. It is a rhythmic one.

The dealer does not simply shuffle cards. She speaks continuously. A hypnotic patter accompanies the movement:

“Find the lady, win the money.”

“Keep your eye on the Queen.”

“Ten will get you twenty.”

“You see it, you win it.”

“You’ve only got two eyes. There are three cards.”

The language creates a false sense of clarity. The sequence appears transparent. The viewer believes the task is simple: follow the red card, track the Queen, trust your perception. Meanwhile, the operator controls rhythm, speed, and distraction. The structure is designed so that the mark feels agency while being guided toward loss.

The language creates a false sense of clarity. The sequence appears transparent. The viewer believes the task is simple: follow the red card, track the Queen, trust your perception. But the operator is not guiding attention toward the card - she is guiding it away from her hands. Rhythm, speed, and distraction do the real work.

Cinema operates on a surprisingly similar logic, and it begins with a defect.

The eye cannot fully register the gaps between images. It retains each frame just long enough for the next to overlap with it. This phenomenon, persistence of vision, allows a sequence of discrete photographs to be perceived as continuous movement. Fluidity is not inherent to film. It is constructed through interruption, produced from gaps. The medium depends on a limitation in human perception, the same kind of limitation the Monte dealer depends on.

Sequentiality in moving image is therefore never neutral. It is structured, timed, imposed. Once the film begins, duration and succession are externally determined. The viewer cannot alter the order of frames; time is delivered to them. As Jean-Louis Baudry argued, the cinematic apparatus conceals its own construction in order to produce a seamless subject position. Continuity hides the cut. The spectator experiences unity while the mechanism remains invisible. The Kuleshov experiments make this explicit: meaning does not inhere in the image itself but emerges from its placement within a sequence. Editing produces interpretation.

Robert Bresson understood this as both a formal and ethical question. For him, the power of an image does not come from what it shows in isolation, but from the transformation it undergoes through contact with surrounding images. The cut is not a joint, it is a collision, and something new is born from it. His insistence on stripping away performance, psychology, and theatrical effect was in service of this: to make the viewer feel the rhythm of juxtaposition directly, without the buffer of narrative convention. What the eye receives and what the mind constructs are never the same thing.

Gilles Deleuze later described classical cinema as operating through sensory-motor continuity, images arranged so that perception flows toward action without rupture. Montage, in this sense, is not merely aesthetic. It organizes attention. It structures thought. Like the Monte dealer, it whispers: "Keep your eye on the Queen."

https://vimeo.com/1171686620

This is the territory my practice tries to work inside, and sometimes against.

Phantom Limbs (2022) takes as its starting point a fundamental question about cognition and time: does sequence produce meaning, or does meaning produce sequence? Drawing on the Kuleshov effect as its structural logic, the film proposes that montage is not a tool of narration but a model of thought itself — that the mind, like the editor, constructs coherence from interruption, and that what we believe we perceive is always already an act of interpretation.

The film enacts its own methodology. The editing process begins not at the beginning but at the end, parts are switched, inverted, repositioned to see what emerges from displacement before detail is ever introduced. This is not intuition but method: the same method that governs scientific inquiry. The film applies the steps of the positive science research model: observation, hypothesis, experiment, analysis, communication, not as metaphor but as structural principle. The scientific method, it turns out, is already a theory of montage. Both depend on sequencing as a condition of knowledge.

The title borrows from neurology: the phenomenon in which the body continues to register sensation from a limb that is no longer there. In the same way, the film examines what persists in an image after its moment has passed, the feeling of presence in the face of absence, the ache of the already-happened. Theoretical texts form the film's foundation, voiced by AI narrators trained to mimic the cadence of the writers themselves, a doubling that raises its own questions about authenticity, authorship, and the mediation of thought. The editing timeline appears on screen; the backstage folds into the work, producing a kaleidoscope of process that refuses to pretend the film arrived fully formed. Archival footage, television news, advertisements, game shows, the spectacle of broadcast reality, interrupts the flow and anchors abstraction to the world it is thinking about.

The film moves then into William Kentridge's lecture on creativity and arrives at the question that underlies all of it: does the work communicate? Is it enough? This is the most vulnerable coordinate in any artistic practice, and Phantom Limbs does not resolve it. Instead it ends with a screen recording, a Wikipedia page, a search for the meaning of Torschlusspanik. The word is looked up in real time. A button is clicked. A digital voice pronounces it. The gate-shut panic, the fear that time and meaning are closing, is googled. It is a small, quietly comic gesture, thinking through artistic sensibility and digital solitude at once, arriving somewhere between theory and loneliness, which is perhaps where all research ends.

The Monte dealer's trick depends on the mechanism staying hidden. But the work I keep returning to asks what happens when you show it, when the edit is visible, the timeline is on screen. Not as transparency, more as a different kind of sleight of hand: look, here are my hands, and you still don't know quite what happened.

Bibliography

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus." Film Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2, 1974–75, pp. 39–47.

Bresson, Robert. Notes on Cinematography. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. Urizen Books, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Poorhouse Press, 1985.

Kuleshov, Lev. Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov. Translated and edited by Ronald Levaco. University of California Press, 1974.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.