Joelle cleans, remembers the Work
Each cut to a flash of pained face had followed the crash of a petrified spectator toppling over in her chair. […] More like as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive, up there on stage, the flashes seemed to suggest.
Context
Studying M-v-O frame by frame, Joelle finds the buried thesis the film almost hides from her: three subliminal flashes of the combatants' faces twisted in torment, each one cut in right after a spectator has been petrified and toppled — and the pain isn't from wounds (the beautiful duelists never touch) but from what their beauty is doing to the people watching. The image is the theme's engine caught in the act: spectation as a mutual devouring, the watched consumed by the act of being watched even as the watchers are turned to stone by watching. JOI upped the film-speed on exactly these frames to thwart study, "as if they compromised him somehow" — the one human truth in the cold film, that being looked at eats you alive, smuggled in too fast to see.