THE ARTIFACT

The Show

A mug ends up at the fire, and nobody there has ever met one. It is passed from hand to hand while six species take turns being certain about it: a rock that was in orbit, a vessel, a thing a week old, and finally, once somebody reads the writing on the side, a king.

Three shots, twenty-nine lines, and one cup. The joke is that every one of them is partly right.

It is the first film where a prop is genuinely held. The mug is parented to whichever hand has taken it, at a grip measured off the mug's own handle rather than guessed, and it travels with the body that walks: grip to palm is zero to the millimetre through the whole film. Getting there meant finding that the shadow of every body had been one frame stale since the engine was written, that a document's first actor could not be handed anything at all, and that a cue written at the top of a shot never fired.