Freeze Frame: when a moving picture stops moving

When I started writing film criticism my first editor commented on my use of tense:

I moved between past and present effortlessly. I would talk of a film as if it were over
forever; I always assumed that its world stopped once I stopped watching. But then
I would slip up. I sometimes would treat the characters like people I know, people
who continue to live with me--within me. Maybe this is why I identify with the freeze frame ending?
Caught between the film and real life, trying to decide which world I live in, which world
is imagined, which world I want to live in.

When a character stares into the camera at the end of a film what are they looking at?
Is it the audience? Is it their own self reflection in the lens?
Their suspended gaze stops to break the spell, to separate between their pasts watched in the film
and unknowable futures, the end between an audience watching the film marked by the audience
being watched. These endings sometimes feel like an embarrassing challenge to me:
Who will look away first?
How long are they going to stare?
How long was I staring?

Mid-action freeze frames withhold resolution: two sides fight, a punch is thrown, guns fired, a car

driven off a cliff. The watcher must conclude for themselves who they want to win, who is good
and who is bad, who will live and who will die. The meaning of hero is left to linger with the
audience, eerily internalized into the rules of right and wrong.

Romantic freeze frames hover with expectancy. Embracing a hopefulness outside of the
audience’s journey, a new chapter of possibility. There’s a buddy-film sub-genre of freeze frame
too that enforces some masculine, head nod of acknowledgment “I got you but, like, no touching.”

The high-fiving, fist-pumping, joyous jumping freeze frames imply a bright and ongoing feeling of

“YES!.” These films transport to a state of euphoria and excitement, breathing a sense of shared
love for life. “We did it! We can all do it! Let’s get out there and do..something!”

Then there’s the extra layer of artifice of the freeze frame ending: the credits appear, a zoom,
a dissolve, a burnout, a photo frame. The freeze frame and after is a slap into reality, a way to
make the magic instantly evaporate as the audience confronts the world beyond the screen.
The collective dream is broken, the film taunts “Your turn.”