Late in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, Gene Hackman as surveillance expert Harry Caul rents a hotel room next door to the room in which a murder has ostensibly taken place. Crouched beneath the sink next to the toilet, he drills a hole in the wall between the rooms, flushing repeatedly to hide the sound, and inserts a microphone. In the morning he goes next door to Room 773, kneels down and picks the lock, then straightens up again. The camera is behind him. Then the camera shows his face from inside the open door. This is editor and sound-man Walter Murch's DVD commentary: 'When he actually does come through into the adjacent room, there is a wonderful shot, a hundred-eighty-degree pan around the room, in which we pan off of Harry, leaving him on the left-hand side of the screen, and then the camera pans around the room. Presumably this is his point of view. And then he emerges into the frame on the right-hand side of the frame, which under certain logistics is perfectly reasonable, but it's very surprising, because it's as if he's walking into his own point of view.'

I'd walked into Juliette Mapp's class with no idea who she was, aside from a few sentences she'd written to describe the class, in search of a venue for improvisational movement. (Mapp is a well-known choreographer, dancer, and teacher. Her classes through New York City's downtown Movement Research ...