12. Waking up and going out to work in the uncanny valley

Abstract

Film folklore has it that, in Francois Truffaut’s film Tirez sur le pianiste (1960), Charles Aznavour’s central character never actually occupies the centre of the frame. This does not seem to be entirely true; it’s what we might call a stylized fact. It is true though that for a protagonist, he certainly spends a lot of time round the edges, down the bottom, or out of shot entirely. It’s an apt visual mirror: there’s a gap between his great artistic aspirations and the reality of his achievements. He has an air of the current attention always having moved somewhere just slightly different from wherever he is.