Watch: The Film Frame Is a Kingdom, The Director Its Ruler

When you create a film, you are simultaneously creating a frame for it, a set of boundaries in which events will unfold. When you do that, you are creating a world–and by extension, you appoint yourself its emperor. The decisions you make about what takes place within a given frame, or how the frame is shaped, or what lies within and outside the frame, cannot help but reflect on the world parallel to the frame, the world in which viewers sit in a theater and watch the film. In this sense, framing, and its exploration, become political. These are the sorts of prescient ideas floating through Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s recent beautiful video essay for Fandor. Taking us through such films as George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ Xavier Dolan’s ‘Mommy,’ and Ruben Ostlund’s ‘Force Majeure, Galibert-Laîné shows us what it means to frame something in a film, on a political level as well as, I think, an emotional level. Who says, after all, that emotions and politics aren’t symbiotic?