But in a movie, every shot is preceded or followed by another shot. That’s why the juxtaposition of shots is such a great tool. In the agonizing, soul-baring fights in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the shots kept getting wider and wider as father and son found themselves telling each other the cruel, ugly truths about each other. At the culmination of the fight, two extreme close-ups ended the scene; the frames were so tight that foreheads and chins were lost. The impact of the close-ups was doubled because of the wide shots that had preceded them. In Prince of the City, when Ciello was considering suicide, the presence of the sky mattered so much because the sky had never appeared before in the movie. In The Verdict, the most important transition in the movie was illuminated by the close-ups of Paul Newman examining a Polaroid photograph. He had taken the picture of the victim, and he watched it develop. As the photograph took on life, he did too. I could feel the present breaking through for a man who, up until then, had been trapped in the detritus of his past life. It was the intercutting between the developing Polaroid and the close-ups of Newman that made the transition palpable.