When Mr. A returned to the U.S. having not found the Manakis brothers’ lost tapes, a search that had taken him as far as Azerbaijan, assuming they must have been destroyed in some tribal conflict or another, he went back to his daily routines as a film director. In the studio one day, drinking coffee as he edited his most recent film, an accident happened: the sound was perfectly audible, but the upper section of the rushes, approximately 1/3 of each image, had been cut off. This meant that the voices came from headless, faceless actors. Mr. A found that the sensation produced was like reading a book, not like watching a film; rather than cinema, what he had here was literature in its purest state. It dawned on him that books and reading in the future would not consist of hypertexts or any other technological offshoot, but this: decapitated films. Then Mr. A began cutting off the top third of everything he came across. Taking a pair of scissors, he unearthed every photograph in his house and, having carried out these top-third amputations, found they were now wider than they were tall: suddenly what he had were horizons. Amplitudes previously unknown. The soul of landscapes. So that whatever the subject of the photograph—a crowded Sarajevo street, food and drink on a table, 2 audacious boys he came across lost on the side of a road, the gapped teeth of a drunken Greek taxi driver, a refrigerator, or the view through his living room window of the neon sign for a place called Steve’s Restaurant—all suddenly became the landscape of a new planet, and if he allowed it to unfold somehow vertically, a kind of ascent, it would produce a new world altogether; these distorted photographs, he saw, comprised the natural habitat of a new literature, the product of a headless cinema. And over time he came to understand that those 3 lost Manakis brothers tapes, the original vision he had failed to find in the Balkans, were today precisely that, a faceless gaze, the definitive decapitation, and it led him to think of them as the most radical exponents of this new literature. On the night he came to this realization he went to bed thinking that every night was a hoax, like cloudy days when the rain never decides to fall but stays incubating up above, up in that troposphere of sorts.