"They're all the same, but each one is different from every other one": Photographs, Harvey Keitel, and William Hurt in Wayne Wang's "Smoke" (1995)

In Wayne Wang's "Smoke" (1995), tobacconist Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) takes a photograph kitty corner from his store every morning at 8 am and collects the photos in albums. When he shows them to writer Paul Benjamin (William Hurt, 1950-2022), Auggie tells Paul how to look at them: "They're all the same, but each one is different from every other one." Paul slows down, and a montage of pictures takes over the screen until he suddenly stops: in one of the photos is his late wife, who was shot a few years earlier as a bystander during a holdup. The mechanical repetition of variations on the "same" image eventually generates emotion. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 March 2022)