"The Obvious and the Code"

There wasnt too much that I consider to be obvious about this reading; but before reading this article, I wouldn’t have thought much about the 12 shot sequence that was shown in The Big Sleep.  To be completely honest, I feel that Raymond Bellour takes 5 pages to describe something that could be written in one page… thus making it a bit difficult to follow. Raymond Bellour discusses how these shots alternated between two characters and one character and between each of the two characters in the specific sequence. Beyond camera shots, sound vs. silence is discussed and described in terms of the 12 shot sequence. These were points that I was able to understand and connect with my experience of viewing the film sequence. I found helpful that toward the end he breaks it down in saying that we must note a) the number of shots, b) The variation, c) the tendency toward repetition, d) balance that reveals relationships between shot to shot and symmetry to dissymmetry. I feel that in breaking it down from A-D, Bellour was able to effectively convey the point of his entire article and the summary made it much easier to understand his writing and take away from it, his observations.