The notebook is small enough to balance on one knee. Most pages are unreadable in daylight: slanted words, arrows with no destination, timestamps, question marks and descriptions shortened until they resemble code.
Writing without looking
Taking notes in a cinema is a physical skill. The critic watches the screen, writes by touch and trusts that the sentence can be deciphered later. Sometimes it cannot.
A notebook records attention before attention has been organized into an opinion.
The notes that survive
Certain details appear repeatedly: doorways, pauses before dialogue, music entering too early. Other scenes receive nothing at all, not because they were unimportant but because the critic forgot to write.
From fragment to argument
The review begins the next morning, when fragments are sorted into patterns. A note reading 'red coat / bus window / 42m' may become a paragraph or disappear completely.
The notebook also preserves wrong ideas. Early predictions sit beside later corrections. A character assumed to be minor becomes central. A visual motif noted eagerly in the first act never returns.
Published criticism hides much of this uncertainty. The finished essay sounds as though its argument was waiting inside the film from the beginning.
Keeping the failed sentences
The critic I spoke with stores notebooks even after reviews are published. They are useful less as drafts than as records of what once seemed worth noticing.
Years later, rereading them can be embarrassing, but also clarifying. Taste changes; habits of attention do too.
The last row is where the argument starts, badly and in the dark.
