thrown back, he recalls Robert Capa’s famous Spanish Civil War photo of
a shot soldier, combined with an athletics photo finish. Or think ofButch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid(George Roy Hill, 1969 ), in which the out-
laws are stilled as they run into a hail of gunfire, the freeze fading hastily
to sepia to convert their violent demise into mythic destiny. Other direc-
tors adapt the freeze to expository ends. Martin Scorsese frequently turns
his players into momentary portraits. InGoodfellas( 1990 ), Ray Liotta’s
face is held as he witnesses a murder, and in voice-over he confides: ‘As
far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’ It is stylish
and it feels sharply modern, but it is a classical and thoroughly literary
device, updating what is really the novelist’s way of suspending the
narrative for a paragraph or so in order to flesh out a character.
Theinevitablejolt of the freeze frame stems from morethan the sud-
56 den switch from movement to stillness. Sound is always disrupted. Sound
42 Freeze frames fromFunny Face
(Stanley Donen, 1957).
