objects, by exploring commonplace milieu under the ingenious guidance of the camera,

the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our

lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of

action" ("The Work of Art" 236). What Benjamin conceived as the "hidden details of

familiar objects" are precisely those details that signify beyond their narrative function.

The familiar objects are things that no longer have mere use value. As Andre Bazin

asserted in relation to Charlie Chaplin's unconventional use of material objects-"It

looks as if things are only willing to be of use to him in ways that are purely marginal to

the uses assigned by society," he suggested (146)-we might be able to employ the stuff

of cinema to do other things. For "[t]oo many of the things that films do," as Geoffrey

Nowell-Smith has rightly argued, "evade attempts to subsume them under the heading of

meaning" (16). So, instead of interrogating these things for what they mean, gazing at

things "in incidental fashion" could lead to an unorthodox approach to cinematic

objects-perhaps a way of writing i/ i/h the stuff of cinema and not just about them.

 What then can we do with the thing that interrupts Stahr' s narrative? What, we

might ask again, is the nickel for? The nickel acts as a reminder that Hollywood

filmmaking was, from the beginning, a commercial venture, and it is this commercialism

that contributed most to continuity filmmaking. The nickelodeons popularized the motion

pictures-The Great Train Robbery being one of its earliest successes-not as high art

but as a form of narrative entertainment. But that is not all the nickel alludes to. After all,

the whole equation of pictures must also contain a certain amount of uncertainty. So, the

nickel also holds that kernel of knowledge that appears, as Benjamin would put it, "only

in lightning flashes." The narrative is "the long roll of thunder" that will certainly follow