Emile Hirsch

Emile Hirsch plays Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn. Chosen as the month's film in the archive, it draws this observation: the canniest move of the director and his cinematographer was to turn the aesthetic admiration they feel for landscapes reaching from the shores of the Salton Sea to the slopes of Mount McKinley onto the youngster himself, in equal measure. The camera has always loved him, it writes, but this is the first film in which that became a relationship in full, touching him over and over in slow motion. It notes a breaking of the fourth wall in one scene too, where the character fiddles with an apple and the image seems for a moment to become his own private video diary.