A camera glides down a dark corridor, swings across a room and finds nobody. That is the trick of "Footage". It borrows the grammar of film, with its tracking shot, its panning shot and a final camera that shuts "its eyelid of shadows", to describe what it feels like to be alone with your own mind at night. The room is shabby: cloths and papers on the floor, scant furniture, a window like an "inky gap". The only thing that moves in it is thought.
The central idea is that memory cannot be tidied. The thoughts make "a retrospective start", a phrase that also works as a pun, since a retrospective is a showing of old films. Then they come back to "the untidy place", and the dashed aside "–there's always a return–" sounds like a shrug. Whatever they attempt is a "worthless struggle". In the third stanza the thoughts become a "piercing stem of wishes" that bends toward the past the way a plant bends toward light. But what they reach for is not golden. It is "the chaotic, indigestible waste of the world elapsed". The image of food the mind can neither absorb nor expel is unpleasant and exact. The mess on the floor mirrors the mess inside, and the title fits too. Footage is raw, uncut material, the leftovers before anyone has made a story of them.
The poem is also aware of its own devices. The thoughts bend their backs "as waves would do", and the speaker then stops to remark that a simile has been used, one that "approaches the magnificent tedium of the sea on the shores". The phrase holds a contradiction. Waves are grand and also boring, because they keep repeating. The "invisible hero" is called "absurd and stubborn", so the poem teases its own protagonist, who exists only as a point of view. Judging by the text, this hero could be the viewer, the thoughts themselves or the camera's gaze. The poem never says which, and the ambiguity is the point. "There's no one in this room" appears twice, yet the room is full of someone's thinking.
The senses do much of the work. Jazz "assails the quietness", a violent verb for music, and the lamp "sheds a yellow print", as if light were a stain left behind. The winter wind pulls "its dirty fingers through the inky gap / of the inky-black window". Repeating "inky" makes the darkness seem to thicken as we read. Then comes the drunkard, heard but never seen: "unsteady steps" and coughs on the stairs. The only other human being exists as sound alone, outside the frame. It is like a film whose soundtrack has more life than its picture.
The form works with this deadpan tone. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only long, prose-like lines in plain speech, and the sentences run on as a voice-over might. Since nothing clicks into place with rhyme, the poem ends by shrinking instead. Its stanzas run ten, eight, seven and finally three lines, like an iris closing on the screen. The last stanza repeats the earlier sentence "There's no one in this room", but now it is followed by "If only...", and the dots leave the wish unfinished. In a poem about wishes bending toward the past, this is the one moment of open longing, and it is cut off. Because the earlier tone is so flat, the break hurts more.
The poem matters because it shows how much our inner life may be shaped by cinema. We describe loneliness and remembering as if we were editing a film we cannot control. It is also honest. It offers no comfort and no redeeming memory, only a mind rewinding scraps in a cold room until the light goes out. By letting the camera comment on itself, with its own simile, its own absurd hero and its own blink, it manages to be a film and a critique of filmmaking in a few dozen lines.