paralleled the linear trail of the railroad. Its succession of framed, mobile images that told

a condensed, continuous tale resembled the onward momentum of the railways. As Mary

Ann Doane has argued, the mode of perception necessary for rail travel was "peculiarly,

entirely compatible with that required by filmic narrative, for it activated] the spatial and

temporal ellipsis, the annihilation of the space and the time 'in-between' events" (43).

This is especially true of forties noir cinema, whose central premise often revolved

around the solution of a puzzle or a crime. That solution required absolute adherence to a

single trail; deviation could be fatal. From a distance-perhaps from Stahr's overhead

position-studio cinema in the forties looks like a system driven by forward motion,

avoiding pauses, disallowing digression.

 But the view closer to the screen is fairly different. The film spectator was

presented with a continuous narrative, pieced together out of images flitting by at twenty-

four frames per second. However, at any moment, a single frame could distract from that

continuum. As the railway passenger did with the passing landscape, the spectator could

zoom in on particular objects in the scene, at the expense of the whole picture. So, while

Hollywood cinema encouraged its viewer to get absorbed in the plot, its captivating

images on screen sometimes interrupted the narrative. As Robert B. Ray notes, "although

continuity cinema's insistence on story often reduced the immediate attraction of its

components inadvertently, as the Impressionists and Surrealists saw, the movies

glamorized everything: faces, clothes, furniture, trains" (How a Film Theory 6).7 The

still, then, had the capacity to stall the tale.

 Even during moments that were carefully composed to advance the plot, the

spectator could get distracted by the stuff that movies were made of-especially when an