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ending. It is important to realize, however, that at this point in time Chad has no sense what the future holds. He is merely expressing anxieties natural for a boy his age who has just been uprooted from his home in the city and deposited in a vastly different environment.
    As he tells his father, what he misses most is the sound of traffic. It seems the noise made by trucks and taxi cabs created for him a kind of evening lullaby. Now he finds it difficult to fall asleep in the quiet.
    “What about the sound of crickets?” Navidson asks.
    Chad shakes his head.
    “It’s not the same. I dunno. Sometimes it’s just silent… No sound at all.”
    “Does that scare you?”
    Chad nods.
    “Why?” asks his father.
    “It’s like something’s waiting.”
    “What?”
    Chad shrugs. “I dunno Daddy. I j ust like the sound of traffic.” [l3—The question of lengthy narrative descriptions In what is purportedly a critical exegesis is addressed in Chapter 5: footnote 67. — Ed.]
    Of course, Navidson’s pastoral take on his family’s move hardly reflects the far more complicated and significant impetus behind his project—namely his foundering relationship with longtime companion Karen Green. While both have been perfectly content not to many, Navidson’s constant assignments abroad have led to increased alienation and untold personal difficulties. After nearly eleven years of constant departures and brief returns, Karen has made it clear that Navidson must either give up his professional habits or lose his family. Ultimately unable to make this choice, he compromises by turning reconciliation into a subject for documentation.
    None of this, however, is immediately apparent. In fact it requires some willful amnesia of the more compelling sequences ahead, if we are to detect the subtle valences operating between Will and Karen; or as Donna York phrased it, “the way they talk to each other, the way they look after each other, and of course the way they don’t.” [14—Donna York’s “In Twain” in Redbook, v. 186, January 1996, p. 50.]
     
     
     
    Navidson, we learn, began his project by mounting a number of Hi 8s around the house and equipping them with motion detectors to turn them on and off whenever someone enters or leaves the room. With the exception of the three bathrooms, there are cameras in every corner of the house. Navidson also keeps on hand two 16mm Arriflexes and his usual battery of 35mm cameras.
    Nevertheless, as everyone knows, Navidson’s project is pretty crude. Nothing, for instance, like the constant eye of CCTV systems routinely installed in local banks or the lavish equipment and multiple camera operators required on MTV’s Real World. The whole effort would seem very home movie-ish at best were it not for the fact that Navidson is an exceptionally gifted photographer who understands how one sixtieth of a second can yield an image worth more than twenty-four hours of continuous footage. He is not interested in showing all the coverage or attempting to capture some kind of catholic or otherwise mythical view. Instead he hunts for moments, pearls of the particular, an unexpected phone call, a burst of laughter, or some snippet of conversation which might elicit from us an emotional spark and perhaps even a bit of human understanding.
    More often than not, the near wordless fragments Navidson selects reveal what explication could only approximate. Two such instances seem especially sublime, and because they are so short and easy to miss, it is worth reiterating their content here.
     
     
     
    In the first one, we see Navidson climbing to the top of the stairs with a crate full of Karen’s things. Their bedroom is still cluttered with lamps in bubble wrap and assorted unpacked suitcases and garbage bags full of clothes. Nothing hangs on the walls. Their bed is not made. Navidson finds some room on top of a bureau to set down his load. He is about to leave when some invisible impulse stops him.