Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image

Contents

07

Foreword and Acknowledgements

09

Marking Time: Photography, Film and Temporalities of the Image

23

Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photographic Imaginary

39

Stillness Becoming: Reflections on Bazin, Barthes, and Photographic Stillness

David Green Mary Ann Doane

jonathan Friday

55

Thinking Stillness Yve Lomax

65

Portraits, Still Video Portraits and the Account of the Soul joanna Lowry

79

Melancholia

2

Kaja Silverman

97

Posing, Acting, Photography

"3

The Film-Still and its Double: Reflections on the 'Found' Film-Still

David Campany

john Stezaker

127

Frame/d Time: A Photogrammar of the Fantastic Garrett Stewart

151

The Possessive Spectator

165

Possessive, Pensive and Possessed

Laura Mulvey Victor Burgin

179

Notes on Contributors

183

List of Illustrations

Foreword and Acknowledgem ents

The s tarting point for this book was a conference bearing the sa me title organised by Photoforum and held at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Canterbury in 2004. Th e m ajority of the essays publis hed here were presented there for the first time. The thinking behind that ini tiative had been to open up a s pace for recons idering the relationship between photographic theory a nd the theory of the moving image as that has been articulated in th e study of fi lm. Each of these areas had developed a rich and sophi sticated body of ideas and modes of ana lysis during the 1970S and ea rly '980s, inAuenced by semiotics, Ma rxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism ;md phenomenology. Yet whil st in evitably there had been some degree of intercha nge between photog ra phy theory and fi lm theory each, neverth eless, rema in ed fairly di screte from the othe r. I ndeed, as the introd uctory essay in tli is book points out, the seminal writings by such figures as Walte r Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazi n , Roland Barthes and Chris tian Metz te nded 10 focus upon wha t were seen as the essential diffe rences between the two ,"ediums of photography and film. Concepts of stillness, moveme nt and lime were articu lated in a manner in which those differences cou ld be both ide ntified and maintained. It seemed to us that thi s implicit understanding was in need of re

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These passages could have been written by Barthes who - fifty years later - commenting on a photograph of himself noted that: 'Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me .. .is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph'. 10 Later in the same text, however, he extends the sentiment to the photograph in genera l, noting that 'however lifelike we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made up face beneath which we see the dead.' 11 There is no need here to pursue in any deta il the complex and often enigmatic nature of Barthes' morbid reRections on photography's intimate relationship to death which have given rise to countless commentaries. What needs to be stressed, however, is that in the course of writing about death as the eidos of photography, Barth es elaborates an argument about the distinctive nature of the temporality of the photographic image, one which he describes as resulting from 'a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live'. He continues: ... by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it. is ali.ve, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting t.his reality to the past ("this has been"), the photograph suggests that it is ail'eady dead. 12

Thi s paradoxical coexistence within the photograph of the ' Real' , the authentication of a past-present, and the ' [jve', the illusion of a presentpresence, Barthes later describes more simply as the simultaneity of the 'this will be' and th e 'this has been' or, in more macabre fashion, as a state ofa future anterior 'of which death is the stake'. The latter provides the cue for Barthes' response to a photograph of his mother with yet further and more direct resonance with the words of Kracauer: 'I tell myself she is going to die: J shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subj ect is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.' I \ As I argue below, Barthes' attempt to account for ti,e distinctive phenomenology of the photographic image through such contortions of grammatical tense as that of the notion of a future anterior has not always led to discussions of photography with such equally complex analytical ambitions. What needs to be stressed in th e present context, however, is that Barthes reRections on photography contained in Camera Lucida and which in essence are concerned with time (as much as they are inseparable from the sub ject of death) are conducted in direct dialogue with the medium of film. Indeed, those passages of the text in which he tackles the issue of the

photograph's temporality contain repeated references to the cin ema and it is clear that fo r Barth es it is only in the comparative distinction with the moving image that photography finds its inimitable identity. The term s of this

argument had been laid out much earlier in writing on photography in The Rhetoric of the Image where he had described the unique temporal register of the photograph as being forged in 'an illogical conjunction between the herenow and the there-then. ' From which he goes on to deduce that the photograph must be related to a pu.re spectatorial consciousness and not to the more projective, more magical fictional consciousness on whi.ch film by and large depends. This would lend authority to the view that the distinction between film and photograph is not a simple difference of degree but a radical

opposition. Film can no longer be seen as animated photographs: the havingbee n-there gives way before a being-there of the thing... " Bartlles' own preferences fe ll sha rply on one side of this divide. Hi s dislike of narrative forms, which demand of the reade r th at he submit to the irrevers ible Row of lin ear time, is in stark contrast to his fascination with the stasis of the photograph th at allows for a n unrestrained mode of co ntemplation. Thus when Barthes chooses to write about film he directs his attention to the film-sti ll , the individual photogram , that - once isolated from the Aux of its apparent a nimation - 'scorns logical time'. 15 Leaving aside these persona l prejud ices Barthes writing on photograph y needs to be understood in terms of what it ta kes [rom, and gives ba ck, to film theory. As regards the former there is the unacknowledged debt to Andre Bazin. Like Kraca uer's Theory of Film, Bazin's major work What is Cinema? opens with an essay devoted to photography. 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image' serves to lay the theoretica l foundations for Bazin's particular theory of cinematic realism. Products of th e same technical means of image production, photography and film partake in the unprecedented ability of the camera not only to reproduce the mere appearance of something but to capture the thing itself: 'No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacki ng in docum entary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction ; it is the model.' '" This said, however, photograph and film diverge as to realism's relationship to time. Photography's realism is one that assumes a particular spatio-temporal character, one that Bazin implies through opening his essay with reference to the origins of the visual arts in the primitive 'practice of embalming the dead'. Just as such funeral effigies attempted to preserve the appearance oflife 'to snatch it from the Row of time' - so the photographs in a family album testify to 'th e di sturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their

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duration, freed from the destiny'." 'Film', on the other hand, 'is no longer content to preserve the eject, enshrouded as it we re in an instant, as the bodies of insects are prerved intact, out of the dis ta nt past, in amber. The film delivers baroque arirom its convu lsive catalepsy.''" If all of this foretells arthes, hi s own formulation of the having-been-there of the photograph as oPlsed to the being-there of the fi lm , was taken up by his one-time student Chstian Metz. Seizing on Barthes' notion that the photograph can neve r teify to the presence of the obj ect but only to the fact of its once havi ng bm prese nt, Metz adva nces the a rgument tha t fi lm ove rcomes th is lim itatioand presents us with an im pression of reality which is so much more ivid': 'Th e movie s pectator is absorbed, not by a "has been there", but by sense of "The re it is"'. And the reason that film is able to convince us o[Je actua l presence of something, Me tz argues, is because of th e appearan' of move ment. The reasons that Metz offers for this are main ly twofold. lrstly, by presenting us with successive images of ob jects existing withi 8pace, movement le nds the m a greater sense of corporeality (which for m is the meas ure of the real) . In addition, however, Metz argues that whilst e might assu me that, ra ther as the photograph can only offer a trace of wha1aS been, so the film can on ly be 'the trace of a past motion', spectator always sees movement as being present' ." The reason fothis, Metz agues, is that whil st the differentiation between materia l propeJt:s of a n object and the form in which th ey appear within visual representa>n are easily proven to exist - the latter cann ot for example be touched, an(actility for Metz is the most obvious means by which we ca n distinguis between the object a nd its image co py - such a distinction 'dissolves on le threshold of m otion."· Motion, as it were, ca n never be represented, it always motion_ Because movement is ,ver material but is always visual, to repmduce its appearance is to duplite its reality. In truth, one cannot even "reproduce" a movement: one can .ly re-produce it in a second production belonging to the same order of reality,J the spectator, as the first. It is not sufficient to say that film is more "living", "re "animated" than still photography, or even that filmed objects are mor:materialised". In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of irr.-ession, the real presence of motion. 'I Wh ilst for Metz - ag)r Kracauer and Bazin - cinema is technologically and aes thetically depenot upon photography, ulti mately it is seen as ontologically quite The differences between the two mediums appear as stark a nd abs(lte: on the one hand we have movement that not only is prese nt but also 1ds to the inlage a 'presence' that is associated wi th life. and . on tit ' otlr hand , we have a moment frozen in time and a n

immobili ty that is lodged within an ever-receding past that can on ly testifY to an absence that carries with it the s pectre of death. This perception is not limited to writers discussed here. No r is it, I think, simply confined to the relatively rarefied domains of film and photographic theory. Yet clea rl y it is an orthodoxy that is open to being ch allenged, and perhaps necessa rily so. In the case of the belie f in the ' presentness' of film this is easily don e. Film s hares the same temporal properties of th e index with the photograph and for all of its illusion of' here and now' the filmic image is equa lly prey to the passage of ti me and the slow bu t inevitable recess ion from now to the n. Consequen tly the s pectre of dea th hau nts the moving images of Greta Garbo (if not the screen characters she played) as much as it does the photograph of Barthes' mother. The dominant perce ption of the 'pastness' of the photograph has proven more intractable, pa rticularly in the shadow of th e cloying melancholi a of a post-Ba rth ian era of photograph ic theory. El sewhe re I have argued tha t one of the poss ible ways of countering this tendency lies with understanding the photogra ph as a kind of perfonnative utte rance, a mea ns by which things are not so much represented as simpl y designated. n The idea that the powe r of photography is as an act of oste ntation , which bestows sign ificance on something by poin ting to it, has consequences for how we conce ive of the temporality of the image. An n Banfield has suggested that Barthes' attempt to acco unt for the photograph in te rms of 'a n illog ica l conjunction between the here-now and the there-then' might better be reform ulated as 'Th is was now here'. " However, th ink ing of th e photograph's particular kind of referentiality as analogous to deixis a nchors mea ning to the immediate spatio-tem poral context of the com municative act and to that which is immediately present. In other words 'This now here'. Thi s m ight lead us to conjecture that it is poss ibl e to conceive of the ph otog raph as occupying what has been referred to as an 'eternal present tense'. But perhaps be tter still we m ight abandon the notion of te nse altogether and conclude that what the photograph offers us is pLUely and simply 'This'. Another way of exploring th e relationsh ip between time and the photograph has been s uggested by Peter Wollen, who is also dubious as to the exclusive association of the photograph wi th the past tense: 'Clea rly th ere is no intrinsic 'tense' of the still image, any 'past' in contras t to the fi lmic 'present' , as has often been averred_ Still photography, like fi lm _.. lacks any structure of tense, though it can order and dema rcate time.''' In his short essay Wollen tentatively lays out a schema for the analysis of various kinds of photography us in g what linguistic theorists refer to as 'aspect'. What theories of 'aspect' allow fo r, accord in g to Wollen, is the description and analys is of

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photographs in terms of 'states', 'processes' or 'events' in which notion s of change and duration, of the ordering and dema rcation of time, of narrativity and so forth , are still available but without necessa rily being enmeshed in the ri gid polarisation of pas t and present tense. As Wollen implies, and what many of the essays in this volume also s uggest, is that photograph y's relations hip to time is a far mo re complex affai r than is often gra nted. Something of that complexity might be glea ned from the study of those phenomena in which one encounters the direct juxtaposition of the filmi c and the photographic, of movement and stillness, as with Raymond Bell ou r's analysis of the occurre nce of the image of the photograph in the certain exa mples of class ica l narrative cinema. Whi lst Bellou r grants that photographs re presented as ob jects with in a film are used to adva nce a story and that they are the refore caught up in the tim e of an unfolding narrative, their appearance nonetheless is pro blema tic for the film 's dieges is. In the exam ples he gives, the photograph is used as a n em blematic motif aro und which the plot of the fil m might h inge (often at poi nts in the na rrative in which th e pa ssage of time is being marked through acts of re membrance), yet at precisely th is moment the temporal Aow of the film is a rres ted , its narrative momentum sus pen ded , albei t brie Ay. At this point in which 'the film seem s to freeze , to s uspend itself', the viewer is made aware of two kinds of temporali ty, that wh ich belongs to the fi lm and the intrinsic forward movement of the narrative, and that which is the time of viewing the film and wh ich carries the phenome nological force of the here and now. Thus paradoxically it is the photograph caught on fi lm that directs our attention to the present - even as it fun ctions within the narrative of the film in accordance with its predominant cu ltural form s to symbolize the past.

The p"esence of the photograph, diverse, diffuse, ambiguous. thus has the effect of uncoupling the spect.ator from the image, even if only slightly, even if only by virtue of the extra fascination it holds_ It pulls the spectator out of this imprecise, yet pregnant force: the ordina,y imaginary of the cinema ... {tJhe photo thus becomes a stop within a stop, a ji-eezeji-ame within a ji-eeze1mme; between it and the fil m from which it eme"ges, two kinds of time blend together, always and inextricable, but without becoming confused. " Extending this argument, Garrett Stewart notes that Bello ur's analysis is constrai ned by the cinematic phenomena he uses . The placing of a pho tograph as an identifiable ob ject within the illu sory space of the film , even where that object may be co-extensive with the screen frame, whilst not without ramifications for film's narrative spatio-temporal diegesis, u ltima tely leaves it in place. What Stewa rt contrasts with thi s phe nomenon of an i," al4l'-within -an -image is the in s t'ln C oftlw Inlc freezc-frame, where

'11... difference in question is between imaged motionlessness and the " IIIIti o nless' image: '" It is only in the case of the latter, when the elemental IIIIil of film itself - a s ingle photogram - is isolated and then multiplied and l" I>j('cted that the critical interrogation of 'the ord inary imaginary of the ,1I11'1I1a' is trul y engaged. Since the freeze-fram e is actual stas is, and not ' IInd the event was thrilling; every min imal movement was tran sformed irto a small concuss ion.''' In dislocating the frame from its II orma lized lin'ar trajectory, piece touchee reasserts the explosive instantaneity "tthe hea rt of:inema tic co ntinuity. The recur renl fru stration of the ""co mpleted r,ovcment he re mirrors Ihal of Iltc inslanta neo us photograph. i\n,o ld's work in il s perve rse rc-e mbodi' ''''III (If III\' d" sire IIf Marcy and

Mllybridge, seems to literalize Ben jam in's 'optical unconscious.' The goa l I,('re is to see differently, indeed, to see more. Yet, in the process of dismantling the deceptive naturalness of cinematic movement, the films II'vcal that movement's grounding in a spastic mechanicity, a series of violent Ilisia ntaneities masquerading as flow. In a somewhat different vein, Ute Friederike Jurss, makes use of digital '" ln positing to produce a video installation, You Never Know the Whole Story, wllich models itself upon a series of still photographs derived from newspaper jlllirnalism. The verisimilitude the piece strives for is a form of media 1I'"lism, a fidelity to newspaper photography. In a structure reminiscent of " Ill/J/ea." vivant, the figures in the video (all played by Jurss herself) assume IIi

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Yet, is n't this tendency to valorize violent in stan ts re mini scent of ins tantaneous photography, of de Duve 's snaps hot with its abruptness and aggressivity (rega rdless of content)? Of in stantaneous photography's des ire for an imposs ible presence? Or perhaps it echoes the ex plosive instantaneity at the hea rt of filmic continuity that sometimes eme rges as a forma l mediation on th e photogram. What Jameson sees as a di stinctive trait of postmode rnity - the reduction to the present and the body - ca n also be located in the proj ects of Marey and Muybridge, for whom the probl em , approached by way of instantaneous photography, becomes how to theorize the instant, how to think the poss ibility of its re prese nta tion . Both photography and film deal with the problematic and co ntrad ictory task of ardliving the prese nt - of producing the oxymoron that continues to hau nt contempora ry media - a historic present. It is arguab le tha t our inclination to thi nk of new periods (such as postmoderni ty) as a form of ru pture, as a com plete break with the past, is itself a symptom of mod ernity, obsessed as it was, or is, with pure presence and the annih ilation of tradition. The problema tic relation to time that Jameson find s so spec ific to pos tmodern ity e merged much ear li er in the technica l and psychi cal pursuit of in stantan eity. What I have atte mpted to do he re is to trace a preh istory of the concept of instantan eity th at rests on the re fu sa l to recogn ize it so lely as th e property of our alleged postmodernity. To assume that real time is only the time of the computer age is to e ffectively era se a hi s tory of fa sci natio n with the concept toge th er with the ve ry process whereby time became potentia lly unrea l. The logics of the televisual and the digital a re not so foreign to those of photography and film; and the ce lebrated rupture of the poslmodern may be no more than a blip on the screen of a modern ity that, from its beginn ings, sought the assurance of a rea l s ignified by life and pursued a dream of in stantan eity and a present without memory.

I

Sti llness Becoming: ReAections on Bazin , Barthes and Photographic Stillness Jonathan Friday

Stilln ess becoming alive, yet still Theodore Roethke

If one thinks of photograp hy, as it is ofte n tem pting to do, from a pe rs pective in wh ich this m ed ium's qua li ties are primaril y ide ntified through a co ntrast with cinema, then the s tillness of the photographic medium is almos t too trivial a matter to merit se riou s exam ination. But th en the cinematic conception can exe rcise s uch an inAue nce that it obscures other co nception ' of photographic stillness , blinding us to th e multifaceted natu re of this '1 lla lity. Long be fore th e invention of cine ma, for exa mple, photograph y wa s "ssociated with stillness in a way that oth e r pi ctorial media we re not. In th e co ri y days of the medium , before th e wides pread adoption of hi gh-speed cameras and film in th e 1890S, photograph s we re orten ca lled 'still s' in part beca use photographers we re prone to shout "sti ll" to alert th ei r s ubjects tha t Ihe shutter was abou t to be ope ned a nd that they were to hold thei r pose withou t moving. The s tillness of these photograph s is cond itioned by the lIeed of the ir subjects to pos ition themselves so as to rema in motion less for ,, " ywhere between twenty seconds and two minutes, imbui_ng the ima ge wit h slIbtle signs of self-imposed avo ida nce of na tural motion, such as the stiffness of' posture characte ris tic of many ea rl y photographic portraits. The invention of cin ema, however, chan ged the conception of photo14raphic still ness at least as much as the invention of high-speed came ra s and lilill. Indeed, from our position in an age in which the cinema is a mature Ill cdium , it can be hard to shake off the conceptions of photogra phic stillness 111;,1 defi ne this property in relation to cinematic motion and to recover what sl illn ess might have meant before the advent of cin ema - and indeed what it Illight mean when freed of cinematic ways of thinking about photography. II is interesting for example that it took many decades before photographers hql" n delibe rately to blur parts of the image to suggest movement. This Ilidica tes that photograph y was at least in part conceived of as still in the "' lIse of being properl y conce rned with re presenting its subjects in the sort III s'illn ess farniliar from the genre of still -life painting. The stillness achieved

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eludes actualisation in the present. Yes, you could say that the becoming of dancing is when dancing - its next move - remains in question, as it were, 'up in the air'. I am seeing th at becoming is never what is and , at the sa me time, I am hearing Deleuze say that becomin gs - and events - are not part of history." The living present, in which the definitive now of dancing happens, is wha t brings abo ut the event of ' to dance'; however, the becoming of this event brings out a time that differs fro m the living present or, indeed, the success ion of moments that are made to measure the day and do not sleep through the night. Yes, with every event, every becoming , there is what comes about and perishes in history; but, on the other hand, there is what escapes this historical time, which is the meanwhile th at belongs to becoming in its pure state, which en joys a virtua l existence. Becomin g, in its pure state, is born from history, but it is not ofi t. In seeing becoming in itself, what I am seeing is that becoming never comes to rest upon a fixed point. Yes, what I am see in g is that becoming never stops where it is but always goes, in two directions at once, further. Which is to say: I am seeing un stoppable movement. Moveme nt, nothing but movement, yet this movement has noth ing whatsoever to do with a traversal of space. Rather, the movement I am seeing is the movement tha t comes about when the time of ch ange is on the move and anyth ing could happen but as yet hasn't happened. And I will ri sk sayi ng that when ch ange is on the move, and absolutely anything could happen , the movement involved is in fi nite. And what such infinite movement si lently s peaks to me of is the as yet un re presentable, the as yet to be determined; th at is to say, the time to come that is coming but as yet has not actually arrived. I say that I am seein g th is infini te movement, but I have to say: it is too m uch for m e. I n the empty m eanwhile - in terval - of that part of the event that esca pes hi story, Deleuze sees the whole of time occurring" Nothing is actually moving in the unhistorical time of the interval, yet the whole of time is a bso lutely moving. But seeing th is m akes me say aga in : it is too much for me. The meanwhile that belongs to becom ing and wherein anything could happen is like being at the edge of the world before the world is. It is like being "tthe edge of a terrifyingly ancient void. It is like hearing the silent calls of a people who do not yet exist. Intolerable? Almost. Unthinkable? Almost. The mea nwhile of the event and becoming in itself is, as far as I ca n see, hardl y liveable, yet I hea r Deleuze and Guattari saying th at this even t, this empty mea nwhile, is pure reserve. H, Wou ld my th inking be going too far in ,ay in g that th is pure rese rve is potcn ti :.liil y it self? I wo uld be the firs t to ad mi t that potential it y is the ha rci t st th int: to 'o!lsklt 'r: yl' t. !l OW, what I ca nnot stop

thin king is that, in rela tion to what is actually happening in the present, potentiality itself constitutes an empty - nothing- time. With the time of becom ing nothing is taking place in the present, and now what I cannot stop thi nki ng is th at this 'nothing time' is absolute poten tiality. Indeed, with the e mpty time of becoming, in which we are given neither this nor that, what I now ca nnot stop seeing is the 'abyss of potentiality'." I am seeing that becoming in its pure state never comes to rest upon a fixed point and with this I see not only the a bsol ute movement of the time that occurs when anything could - or could not - happen (pure potentiali ty) but also a moment of grace whe re positions and oppositions don' t take up a place. Indeed, in the em pty mea nwh ile - interva l - of becom ing what I see is both absolute moveme nt and a mome nt of grace. And sayi ng this prompts me to think again of still ness. In the empty meanwhile nothing ha ppe ns or moves in the present and th is 'nothing happens in the present' cou ld be a way to (re) th ink stiUness. To think stillness in thi s way wou ld be, at the same tim e, to th ink the 'movement', albeit virtual, of becoming. Indeed , thinki ng stillness in this way does not hring my thinking to a halt; on the co ntra ry, it invites my thinking to go with becoming in itself, which is nothing but the turning of time where chance is given a chance, wh ich is what marks time's res is ta nce to bana lity. Nothi ng of the present happens in the meanwhile yet what this e mpty time does is to prevent becoming - and pure potentia li ty - fro m being ('xhausted in actua lisatio n; indeed , it ca n be sa id that with this e m pty tim e th cre is a resista nce to the present that keeps becomin g - the emergence of a new world - from never ending. Yes, in res is ting the present, what the nlca nwhile holds in reserve is an inca lcul able and irred ucible 'not yet'. It docs n't hold in reserve a historica l future, a prefiguratio n of what is to come; ra lher, it holds in reserve what can only be called a n ocea nic future . Let me risk saying this: in the mea nwhi le there is a stillness with respect to anything happening or moving in the present, yet what this still ness speaks ')' is a res istance to the present for the benefi t not of a past but of the reserve 01 a ll ocea nic fu ture. To think stillness in this way gives my thinking a )nornent of grace from what is, but the reserve th at stillness speaks of here wil l always be too much for me to think, to bear. And it will always be too )Ollch for me because the empty time and pure reserve takes my thought to .)11 IInthinkable 'not yet': as Deleuze and Guattari would say, it takes my tl)illk in g to the unthought within thought. This unthought will always be too ">I)eh for me; however, although it is what cannot be thought it is what must 1""I)oll gh!. " And it must be thought for doing so is what makes thinking I,,)v.- 10 ex peri ment , and th is is what puts thinking - and practice - to the test.

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visual articulation of this loss. lts second and most important image shows a woman wearing a red suit standing between two men, one dressed in black and the other in jea ns and a gray jacket. She is turned slightly toward the man on the right, who extends his hand to her. Although he is literally present, the man on the left seems to fall out of the field of vision . As we look, Tom identifies the woman as 'Jill', the man with the outstretched hand as 'Jo', and himself as the site of the 'fading' or 'aphanisis.''' He also tells us that Jill has turned toward Jo in a negative response to his own request that she come to him. Thi s refusal evokes the fai lure of another attachment - the end of the childhood love between himself and Jo . ' I hoped ... it would last .. .f.. .forever... fo rever ... Jo', Tom says at a key moment in this sequence. And although this part of Background m arks the beginning of one relationship, as well the frustration of another, later sequences will show how hard It IS to achIeve or sustain a union , whether it be a marriage, a sentence, or the synchronization of sound and image. But this is far from delimiting the uses to which Coleman puts the affect of melancholy in this work. The atmosphere of negativity which suffuses Background also has a crucial conceptual dimension. In it, as in Lapsus Exposure, I NIT I A L 5 and Photograph, Coleman both theorizes and .. reinvents still photography. He reinvents still photography by temporaUzmg it in a number of different ways. But his account of this form as It now eXIsts also represents an expansion of our usual way of thinking about it,. since it constitutes for him not only a technology, but also a perceptual lOgIC, and a way of 'being' . Melancholy resides at the hea rt of all three because the still photograph signifies first and foremo st 'mortification'. The story which Background tells begins with what appea rs to be a nostalgic conversation between Tom and JO about a group of photographs documenting the origin of Jo' s relationship with Jill. Tom locates the latter unequivocally in the past. However, the words he utters prior to the first images are suggestive of an event taking place in the present somethmg which need not be feared, since it will be over in a second. ThIS event IS photographic in nature. ' In a fla sh ...it's o.k .... it's o.k.', is how his discourse begins. There is a parallel ambigIlity about who is speaking at gIven moment of the first sequence. A moment ago I attnbuted the vOIce-over text to Tom , but it is clear that Tom often speaks for Jo as well , not only in indirect, ,. but also in direct discourse. In later sequences, he will do the same for other characters as well . Because of this, Tom's voice moves around spatially as well as temporally. Over the course of BQckgl'Olwd, it becomes less and less his

'own'. In subsequent works, Coleman will stress even more the exteriority to the subject of the words she speaks. The term 'voice-over' also needs to be quali fied. Although Background Lapsus Exposure, I N IT I A L 5, and Photograph all include voices, and are, indeed, based upon a technology which precludes syncl1Tonization , the relationship which they establish between word and image defies the usual ca tegorizations. There is no 'outside' or 'above' to the space and time .which Coleman's works traverse - no vantage-poin t from whIch a metacntlca l d iscourse might be marshaled. The voices in these works consequently do not speak 'over' the images to wh ich they refer but ra ther from within them. ' The author of Background emphasizes the all-encompassing nature of the space hiS camera di scloses by never leavi ng the room housing the prehistoric skeleton. Every linage III th is work was shot there; the apparent shifts of scene are due only to different ca mera set-ups. Coleman gives time an analogous circularity in Background. Not only does this work begin and end with Tom's voice speaking in the dark, but the past also doubles back upon the present,. hke a mob IUS stnp. Shortly after the evocation of an ongoing photographIC seSSion , Tom proceeds to resituate this occurrence in the past. In the next sequence, though, he reverts to the presen t tense, speaking first f,om the perspective of a photographer coaching his subject, and then from that of the one being photographed. Noth ing in the sound or image permits LI S to sItuate the photograph ic transaction before the conversa tion about the resulting images which takes place in the first sequence; ra ther, the two seem to be happening at the same time. Later, Jill and Jo look at the photographs which are ostensIbl y III the process of being shot, and Tom also situates their verbal exchange in the present. Now we are asked to think the simultaneity of three distinct moments. Thereafter, all verbal transactions transpire in the present. This ImpiJes, however, not the abolition of temporality, but rather the opcnrng up of the 'now' to include the past and the future. In a ddition to staging the production of a photograph , Background offers :' Ined,tatlOn on the nature of photography. As we learn in the first sequence, ,I photograph IS Illstantaneous, a 'snap'. It has no duration. It also arrests or II ('czes movement. Paradoxically, though, it seems to provide the permanence wilich human relatlons lack; unlike the love between Tom and Jo, it is 'forever' . til both of these ways, the photograph immortalizes what it shows. It also what it depicts in the form of a 'having been'. The flash of the light hll ih With wh ich Coleman metaphorizes the production of a photo could be H'Vl'S LI S

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graph attests to the actuality of what it locates in the past, it constitutes a form of proof. and he nce an agency of poss ible incrimination . Coleman underscores thi s la st feature of photography obliquely, by having Tom say threatenin gly at one point, on behalf of Jo: ' I have the ph ... photograph s' .

So far, Cole man's account of photography echoes that offe red by othe r theo rists of photography, s uch as Walle r Benj amin , Rol and Barthes and Chri stian Metz." Where it goes beyond establi shed assumption s is in its depiction of photograph y as a form of ide nti ty; a perceptual system: and a negation of Bein g. Coleman begi ns thi s part of hi s discourse by stressi ng the interpellatory nature of the photographic event. " A cam era s ummon s people and things to pregive n places within space and ideology. At one of the points in Background when Tom talks about standi ng in front of the ca me ra, ra ther than behind it, he says portentously: 'we we re ... being posi tioned '. And at one of th e moments when he see ms to be on the oth er side of th e camera , he tell s Jo and Jill to 'come into ...the li ght'. Photography can interpellate us formally as well as spatially or ideologically. When someone reaches for a camera, most of uS freeze into an anticipatory still. And even when a camera is not present, we often offer ourselves to the look of those around us in the guise of the photograph we would like to be.'" We do so by mea ns of the pose. The pose is one of the most recurrent eleme nts of Coleman's work. Althou gh its role shifts from work to work, it function s in Background primarily as a m eans of expanding the notion of the photograph to include the bodily ego. By means of the stiff and studied ways in which they hold themselves, whether they are looking at a photograph of themselves, or being photographed, the characters in this work make evident that they are playing to an internal as well as an external camera. Cra ig Owe ns maintains in Beyol·,d Recognition: Representation, Power, and O,lture that posi ng takes place in the middle vo ice - that it is neither strictly G active, nor strictly pa ss ive, but somewhere between these poles This is because the one who poses simultaneously dis plays something, and attempts to be seen - because she is both subject and object. This is an extremely help ful formulation . But in an important sequence in Background, Cole man sugges ts that pos ing may also include a subsequent mome nt - one which in vo lves a far more radical form of objectifi cation. In thi s seque nce, Jill and Jo look at the ph otographs of them selves which arc s imultaneously in th e procc'ss "f bei ll g shot. An elabo rate Airtation

,'lI s ues, in wh ich Jill gives herself via one o[the photogra phs to Jo, and th e n loyly demands that he re turn her to he rself. At one mome nt Tom says, on 1,(, 1' beha lf, 'let's pose - freeze.' '' It is unclea r whether these wo rd s s ign ify I,e r des ire to establish an absolute on eness with tbe images at which she and 10 arc lookillg, o r her wish that she might achi eve a s imilar uni on with a new ,llId better one, but in either case th ey reAect th e subordination of her bodily q.;o to th e photograph. But the pose signi fi es even more than the immobili zation or objectification "I II", body, or its solicitation of the camera. It also implies the isolation of the It"d y from the surround ing field of visio n. This is o ne of the ways in wh ich ( '" I("l11on uses it in Background. Both because of the seeming impermeability "ll heir bodies to their sur rou ndings, and the co ntrast of their brightl yclothin g again st the drab wa ll s of th e room in which they stand , the

I 'I: III"I'S ill Ihi s work see m to have been cut o ut of another photogra ph , and

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199 1-94.

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pasted into the ones we see. This has the effect of underscoring their isolation from each other, as well as their removal from time and space . Coleman dedicates a whole sequence of the installation to this topic. The sequence in question comes near the end of Backgrou/'Id. Four characters appear in it - Tom , Jill , Joe, and a red·haired woman , who also figures in several earlier sequences, and who appears to have been romantically linked with Jo before his involvement wIth JIll. These four figures are dressed in contrasting colours: Jill in red, the other woman m green, Joe in black, and Tom in brown. Each also stands at a SIgn ificant distance from the others; faces away from them; and occupIes a different plane of the image. Now deploying a third-person narrating voice, Tom says: 'One eyejl...here ... the other. .. there ... each ... their own way'. Through the . parsing of his sentence, he mimics the atomization he descnbes. Coleman teaches us that photography encroaches as fully upon Bemg as it does upon identity - that it is an ontological as well as an egoic affair. In Background, 'camera' signi fie s an affectless kind of human perceptiOn , as well as a machine for the automatic production of images. It represents a kind of vision, that is, which is inimical to love. Coleman m akes this point in two back-to-back sequences of Backgrou/'Id. The first of these sequences immediately follows the one where Jill and Jo exchange the photographs, of themselves. One of those characters says 'in images .... to Im-mort-alize , and the other adds 'our love' , extending death from what is shown in the

10 our narcissistic desires.

photograph to their feelings for each other. . In the second sequence, Coleman makes an even more overt hnk between photography and the arrestation of passion. He uses the word . 'stoppage' to refer simultaneously to a snapshot and the relatiOnshIp of JIll and Jo. 'Why are you ... sad?' Jo asks Jill (or Jill asks JO) . '\ was thmking ... of our. .. situation ... l...am afraid ... stoppages', she (or he) rephes. Tom then says, as much on his own behalf as on that of Jill or Jo , '\ closed my eyes'. These last words also carry a double meaning - one bearing both upon the photographs at which Jill and Jo have been looking, and the role played by Tom' s look in the photographic transaction. With them, Coleman characterizes photography as a blindness which is capable of afftICtmg the human eye, as well as a represen tational form that seldom conforms The stoppage of love which the ca me ra signifies has ontological rami fi cations. No creatu re or thin g ca n bc itself without the hbldmal ill volvcmcn t or a itllman subjcct. Coleman characte ri zes fove in visuaftcl"l llli bCGlli SC il is firsl an I rorclllosl a slOI ir "fr"ir be-ca li se it requires Ih '11 1('(' ,ill p,' or or' ,is:-; ta" :llld 'l' Yl 'S,' Slllli :111 ('vv lll docs nOllra llNplH

every day. Most of the times when our eyes are literally open, they are metaphoncally shut. The meeting oflook and world occurs, imparting reality to the real, only when a creature or thing steps forth, requesting to be seen In a partIcular way, and is then apprehended both in its own specificity, and from the singularity of a particular subjectivity." The look satisfies this seemingly impossible mandate by establishing correspondences between what it sees in the present, and what it has seen in the past. The more complex and profuse these correspondences are, the greater is its love. As should be evident by now, the kind oflooking I have just described requIres tIme: the time it takes for a pulsa ting and shimmering creature or Ihmg to disclose enough of its formal parameters to a seer to be apprehended as somethmg other than an 'entity', and that unique and ever-changing time wh ich IS at the heart of every sub jectivity, whose temporality is not the past, lite present, or the future, but the past and the future i/'l the present. The still Glm era signifi es a failure of vision for Coleman beca use it does not have "ccess to this time. In 0/'1 Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin also contrasts photography to Ifll' kll1d oflooking which is creative of correspondences, and makes time the flllnum ofthis opposition. Whatever is looked at photographically, he tells li S . scems lIke 'food for the hungry or drink for the thirsty' - eminently " Hl s".mable. We are under the impress ion that we could exhaust its meaning III ,III In stant. To em bed a creature or a thing in an associative network, on III!" olite r hand, is to tap into the infinitude of human desire. It becomes that '" I wllich our eyes can never have their fill'. We oft en look in a way that is photographic in nature because technology , ,1111'01 1101 e ncroach upon the human look, and ours is a photographic age. IIll1t'vn y lechnology, as Heidegger tells us, harbors a saving power. " If the II/Ilk (;111 P"SS under the influence of the still camera , then the still camera I Ii II ,d, ,, pass under the influence of the look; it can even become the agency wlll'lt 'by lit e Being disclosed by one pair of eyes becomes available to others I w,'11 III " sense, these are also the moments when the analogue image 11111111 IIIlI y rc,dl zes Its own potentiality. Is it not finally because of its capacity III "how liS what no other form can reveal - the participation in tlhe event of 1111 1I 1'11(',II 'lli Ce of the world, as well as the look - that we find photography " , Ildlt'NH ly fascinating and compelling'

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"" m comment upon the interpellatory nature of photography by saying ... here ,' he has him add, by way of correction , 'no.:.not stand ... dance.:. d ' 21 Coleman accompanies thi s remark WIth a senes of tableaux of hIS doing ju st that. Through these tableaux, a crucia l althou gh almost imperceptible transformation occurs: the still photograph mutates mto what might be called the 'stilled photograph.' . . 'No crime committed but. .. passion,' Tom says at another pomt m BackgrOLmd, not only calling into question photography's status as but also invoking the affect which the eye must enlist If It IS to look m t e wa that permits it to meet tissue. The word 'passion' refers back to an . moment in Backgmuttd , where it emerges preCIsely in lelabon to the look. ' I could .. .feel see in g,' the narrator says there: on behalf of oneor . 0 f tllC wOI'k's'.clnnclL'rs tl ndersco rtn g the affectIve bases pc rlaps mOle '" I of th e trul y human look .

Coleman's final rhetorical break with photography is absolute. Tom orders his companions to 'pack up ... the Nikon ... the latex,' as if to have done with it altogether. This command follows immediately upon the heels of the each 'eye/I' in its 'own way' meditation, making the latter an invitation to the look to ass ume its difficult s ingularity, ove r and again st the easy automati s m of the camera, as well as a description of the isolation to which photographic articu lation leads. Given that it is a temporal form, which involves actual movement along with the re presentation of movement, cinema might seem to provide a way out of the impasses of photography. The kind of movement which cinema s hows us , however, is primarily physical in nature, and is genera ll y used to ecl ipse rather than to disclose temporality. A short-hand phra se often used in discuss io ns of ea rl y cinema - 'race to the finish' - can still be used to describe IlIOSt contempo ra ry action film s; th ey encourage a prole psis whicll is inimi cal to time, Coleman himself uses a variant of the phrase ' race to the finish' late in Backgml.lt'Id, without naming cinema as s uch. He has Tom say that 1, 0 is afraid not only of time s topped , but also of' time ... racin g.' As will become increas ingly clear in Lapslls Exposure, J N J T J A L 5 and Phot.ograph, lit e kind of movement which rea lly interests Colema n is pe rceptual, not pllysical , and for this he needs another set of teclmical coordina tes. Background, Lapsl",s Expos"re, J N J T 1 A L 5 and Phot.ograph all require lo r their viewin g the precise linin g up of th ree diffe rent s lide projectors, and (,I I least in the form in which I saw these works) an audio cd., computer prowammed to proceed in tandem with the s lides wh ich have been in serted 1111 0 th eir carousels. The proj ectors go on and off at planned inte rvals , Plojl'Cling the images onto a large scree n. Somel'imes wha t is shown is a slide. and sometilnes a superimpos ition of two or three. At times, ti ll" s lid e appears mid-way through the tenure of anothe r, and pe rhaps oll l"' s ts it. At other times, a slide disappea rs almost as soo n as a seco nd ha s IlI 'l'lI projected onto the screen n This system has the capacity to volati li ze IIII' slill photograph. It is also ca pable both representing and activating IIII' II ,,)vernent at the beart ofvision.'3 The spectator who enters the room in wlll( II Background, Lapsus Exposure, I N IT I A L 5, o r Photograph is projected IllId s 110 chair to sit on , and no limits on when she may enter or leave. This M[ll ' lator must decide for herselfwhetber to stand, or sit on the Aoor, as wI'II ,IS al what di stance [rom the sc reen; whether to look at the slides or the 1111i 'llo, king pro jectors which are projecting them; when to begin watching, 11 1111 wi" ' II 10 break off; and wheth e r to stay in th e same position, o r move 11 1111111. AlllloII gh cac h of th ese freedo ms migltl see m quite limited , togeth er

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has a coyness about it in thi s regard. The sense of thea trical dis play o rients the scene toward the viewer. At the sa me time the ignoring of the presence of the ca mera as pires to classical narrative cinema . Still photography always seems to carry with it a sen se of frontality, a sen se that the wo rld will recogn ise the presence of the camera and reconcile itself to it. When it admits as much, it gives rise to 'direct address' (e. g. the pass po rt photo, the fami ly s nap) but any photography that entertains indirectness seem s to end up competin g with th e med ium in some way, for good or bad. Craig Owen s' insight about th e parallel between posi ng and the still photo seem s stra ightforward enough . Yet it may not acco unt too well fo r wha t is going on in Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, no r indeed for the kinds of behaviour that have evolved in the art of s taged photography si nce the 1970s. Ir posing suggests consonance with the s till image, She rman inaugurated a much richer dissonance. Coming at the e nd of th e 1970s, he r pe rfo rma nce broke with what we traditionally think of as 'performance art' photography. Thi s was usually premised on an auth entic, non-fi ctional , direct relation between s ubject and ca mera , in which the image wa s ass umed to fun ction as a transpare nt document outsid e of the performan ce. Sherm an's camera is complicit in the perfo rmance, acceptin g that it wo uld always be at least as responsible for pos ing as the human body. This, I th ink , has been the lastin g inAue nce of those earl y images . I have always been strucK by a certa in rese rve in Sh erman's work, des pite all th e performance. Within the endless personae and masque rades the re is " re markabl e withdrawa l and I think it ha s to do with the fa ce. With a rew 1I 0ta bi e exceptions Sherman's fa ce re mains almost neutral, very lim ited in its ex pression . All about her there is thea tre, pe rfor mance and commu nication yet her fa ce gives little away. (Figure 23) She refuses to act o r pose with the 1:lce, eve n when appea rin g to cry. Instead tbe face g ravitates towards a lIles meris in g blankness, an immobili ty as sti ll and automatic as the image itself. Th e photography poses and acts, the mise-en-scene poses and acts, but She nnan re main s elusive and non-committa L" This bl ank ness is not the ( Iiche of th e artistic self portrait (arti sts, it seem s, will never smile whe n ta kin g the ir own picture, unless it's ironic). Instead Sherman alludes to those cool s ta rs of cin ema who ra rely smiled and made o nl y minimal gestures. !lu t She rman 's bla nkness fo r the still image is of a very different orde r. ·rhe o ppos ite of ove rt th eatricality is often thou gh t to be in tros pecti on o r :lbso rptio n. While I was thinkin g about this I glan ced at the image o n the (ove r of m y copy of 1/lll lllil"lfl liollS. ,"lt llol oJ.\y of Wa lte r Be nj amin 's essays. (I'i gllfe In C isek' I'r(' ull I's portr:lit fro lll 19l9. Ik llj:lrtlin is thinki ng. O r Ill' 'Il ts '.I S il" l,.. is Iltill kill g. I It .. is II, illkill ll lll :l ll,.. is Iltillkill g. O r ma ybe w('

think that beca use he is s uch a se rious thinker he mu s t be thin king. Maybe Ih at IS how Benjamin thought he o ug ht to appea r. Or perhaps Freu nd caught Itlm thlllKmg. 0,. she cau ght som ething that looked like thinking. We are so lam oil ar With chll1 s troking, re ticence and spectacles as s ig ns of th e Illtellectual that we do not give it much thought at all. . Fre und 's ca mera is so close to Ben jamin that he must s ureJy be aware " I II. Ther e IS nothing surreptitious here. He is eithe r pretending or he is 1':llhologlCa lly a bsorbed. We can relate th is to Michael Fried 's dis tinction 1,,"lwee n abso rption and theatrical ity in pain ting. OK Fried saw absorption as a IIllIde In whICh peopl e are depICted either bein g or doing someth ing oblivious lilt' prese nce of th e Viewer. They might be menta ll y active _ say, th in king o r "·,, dlng o r kllliling - but outw" rd ly nol I11l1 ch is go in g on. Wh il e theat rica lity 10

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involves an explicit recogniti on of the presence of an audience, depictions of absorption solicit a suspension of our disbelief. We imagine we are looki ng at an unobserved scene. In photography the issue is slightly different since it is quite possible to take a photo of an oblivious person , usually from a distance. Any sen se of theatre would stem from the photographic act, the posing of the scene as a scene by the camera. The 'authentic' photo of absorption at close range ca n only be achieved, strictly speaking, either with a hidden camera,. or with the subject' s familiarity or indifference. But it is easy to simulate lt wlth the resulting image becoming a theatrical representation of absorption. I am fairly sure about what this image of Benjamin mean s, but I am less s ure what is, or was, really going on. Thi s may be why it holds m y interest. I se nse mental move menl ben ea th his sti ll face and body. I sense too, a degree of melancholi a in the pori ra il and hy nsion in Benjamin . Melancholi a wa s a subjeci e nlrall u B"lIj:IIII ;II'" Il li llk;lI g :lIleI il is a di s positi on to which

he was himself prone." Melanchol ia has a very particular relation to photo· graphy because it is a state that exists on the threshold of self-performance and withdrawa l, between social ma sk and nothingness, between thea tricality and absorption. It is a condition not of the melancholic's conscious m aking but it is experienced by them as a conscio us cond ition. Th e melancholic is tra pped in a kind of attenuated self-performance - alone but feeling regulated by the gaze of others, or by his or ber own imaginary gaze at the mself. The condi ti on is lived from within and observed from without at the same time. Obviou sly m elancholy ca n be coded in highly s pecific ways in photogra ph s, and a numbe r of women photographers of the nin eteenth ce ntury refin ed this, such as Jui ia Margaret Cameron and Lady Hawarden. Less closely coded it sli ps in to a range of m oods - pen siveness, listless ness, boredom, fatigue, waitin g. These are all states that seem to appeal to contemporary photographers, not least because the actors o r models need not do very much. As long as they do littl e and the ph otogra phy does a lot - in th e form of 'production values' - a good resu lt can be achieved. Na rrative ca n still be present if e ntropic, whi le th e pitfalls of hammy performance - always lemptin g in the face of s tillness - can be avoided . (Coin ciden ta lly at th e time of writi ng th is essay, I saw an exhibition of Gregory Crewdson's seri es of cinematic ta bl ea ux ph otographs Beneath the Roses. At the heart ofCrewdson's spectacular over- production was the sa me basic human gesture, a sort of ex hausted sta nding a round, slump-s houldered with th e vacant face of a rbydreamer. The gap betweeen inactive humans amid th e grotesquely ove raCl ive photography was so extreme as to be comic. Although I'm not Slire th is was intentional.) _ This might also be the rea son why our galleries and art magazines have 01 late been populated with so many photograph s of adolescents standing :rrou nd. The adolescent embodies so many of the current paradoxes of pholography: the awkward fit between being and appearance; between surface ,1",1 depth; between a coherent identity and ch aos; between irrationality ,II lei order; between muteness and communication; between abso rption .,"d Ihea tricality; between stasis and narrativity; between posin g and acting. More significantly th is turn towards 'slow' , sedirnented photography ,oJ so chimes with the predominance of slowness in contemporary video art. l'I, olugraphy has aU but given up the 'decisive moment' in order to explore wlr:11 J moment is; video art has all but given up movement, the better to IIII IIk wha t movement is. This is why just about all the current art and writing 111.,1 ,"xplores s tillness and movement really only considers slowness and III ()Vl' IIl on!. Worked-up tableau photos and decelerated video art partake of the N,II'1l" kind of exploration. But mu st th e speedy always be sacrificed in all thi s)

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Need slowness be the only way> At this key point in the his tories of art and media, I think it is a questio n worth posing. And a pose worth questlOntng.

T he Fi lm-Still and its Double: Reflections on the 'Found' Film-Still

Johlt 5 tezaker

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As an a rti st wh o has often wo rked with found images th e latte r half of the 1970S offered m e a n unex pected bounty in the fo rm of ' fi lm-still s' - a type of photographic image whose fu nctio n has been to double for a s in gle fi lm frame in cine ma publicity. (See Fi gures 25 and 26) I wo uld li ke to emphas ise Iho ugh, from the outset, that m y a im is not 10 throw lighl on some previo us ly uncon s ide red genre of ph otog ra phy but rath er to in te rroga te a mysterious opac ity of those images whi ch F,rst attracted me whe n bu nd les of Ihem found the ir way into second-hand books ho ps as the res ult of a cris is in fil m dis tributio n which res ulted in the clos ure of the large-sca le s ingle scree n cinem as and th e consequent d ispe rsal of th e info rmal a rcl1i ves held the re uf past publicity m ate rial (ofte n da ti ng back seve ral decades). Thi s cris is in cinematic cons umptio n also heralded th e end of th is m icrocosm of pho too gra phy whose chie f fun ction was to adve rtise the film of the week with 'I" ite copi ous still re presentations of the narrative seq ue nce. Originall y di s pla yed in speciall y designed wi ndows o n th e o uts id e of the ,inema (a nd iii at night) o r else in the foyer, these pictures we re di splayed "' linear seque nces as s till ve rs io ns of Ihe cinema tic narra ti ve (without, o f «llI rSe, revea li ng the endi ng). T hey we re advertisements for the curre nt (i lll' l11atic en tertainment o n offer and dis pl ayed alon gs ide a sm all er sa mple " I Ihe next week's attractio n labeled 'comin g soon'. Those li ke m yself in the '1)50 '5 fo r whom these images we re fi rst encou ntered as represen ta ti ons "I ,III ex perience from which we we re pro hibited, at least te m po rari ly, will 1'," Slire tes tify to th e uni ve rsa l sense of di sa ppointment felt in the late r I " " " "11 mation of these adul t (x-rated) experiences. And whil st the fai lure of pi "d ucts to live up to the ir adve rtis ing im age is a taken-fo r-gra nted rite of p,lssage within consumeris m , the fail u re represented by the film-still seem s "cute. These im ages cl aimed to be sam ples ofa prom ised cin ema ti c l'III (' ,lai nment but never seemed to actuall y appear on the screen . They ""rrkl,d fo r me a s pectral and s hadowy unde ,wo rld. Even when the film s we re III (" Io ll r, the black and white stills suggested ' film no ir'. The other-wo rldl y 1J " ,dlly ur lhe fi lm -s l'ill (es peciall y the Briti sh o nes) beca me, fo r me , s paces of III '.lI: II ""·y habilalio n. Howeve r. Iili s a llra ur Ih e s lill ima ge wo "ld be in s l,lntly

19

dispelled by the context of the moving image (and w ith the everydayn ess of colour). Cinema tic encounter with the s till was Inva n ably dlSSllnulal1ve. Part of thei r ap peal is the sense of disguise refl ected in the label 'filmstills', a term that more properl y belongs to the si ngle fi lm fram e (or photogram) and with wh ich they are so metimes confused . Otherwise they are (equally misleadingly) ca lled ' productio n shots ' or ' produ ctIOn stIlls', . labels that refer to the pre-history of the film-still in ea rl y c.i nema where theIr function was to advertise the ftIm to potential s ponsors and for such reasons were often shot prospectively. (The re exist many such 'fi lm-stills' for scenes or sometimes entire films never shot). Besides this ea rl y history most films ti ll s were shot after or alongside the film itself at various levels of alignment with the vantage point of the m ovie came ra. They were presen ted as 'free sa mples' of the cinematic feast rather than as a menu. From nearly the o utset, film -still s were made by anonymous photographers workmg alongs ide the fIlm production team. In America, where there has been some "lte mpt to name the still photographers wo rkin g in Holl ywood, the 'auteurs' discovered are usually recO\4nized for tlteir po rtrai lure or glamour photographs.

Tlte ir work on production sti lls, however, is likely to be regarded as too IIlell ial to merit any serious attention. Despite a con siderable va riation in corres ponde nce between the film-s till ,lIld Ihe ci nematic mome nt it re presents, the re is a remarkable uniformity in l("r ll lS of the picto rial vernacular e mployed. The lighting, depth of fi eld , and 1(" lI ses employed amo un ts to a photographic protocol at any moment in tim e ,'v(l lvin g and only partly keeping up with the changing look of thei r cinem atic \ ol llli e rparts. In Britain they re mained in black and wh ite lo ng after co lour 1I ,Id beco me the norm in film productions . The rigid vernacular and tona li ty IlIlposed a sense of standardiza tion (and of interchangea bility) onto the (1 1I (' III"li c sce nes they re presented. This unintentional sense of pictori al fixity lit I Il4i dily is mirro red in a marked quality of stillness in these representatio ns " I II Illveme nl. The source of m y fascination seemed to be in their failure: in Wh,lllll cy "ccidentally revealed about the ci rcumstances of their production (,I lid 11,,, 1 of the fi lm's production). Sltol lypiGlll y as a 'seco nd-take' fo r Ihe s till cam era , they are mostly 1'11I11"1:"'ph s of 51ill or posing actors wlto It"v(' Ihe n reconve ned afte r the firs t 11111 '111,11, I"ke. The "clo rs who h" v(' :tr l("d for Ihe movie ca m(' ra , pose for Ihe

Figure 2.6 John Stezaker, The Trial, 1980

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sti ll camera. They are predominately photographs of tableaux vivants wh ich explains their rigid ity and th eir resem blance to early photo·graphic rep resentations of narrative where technical necess ity demanded an impos ition of 'stillness' on the world it re presented . There is also a tendency, wh ich film-stills s hare with early narrative photography, to attempt to ,o mpensate for th is sti ll ness wi th slight exaggerations of gesture and facia l ,·xpressions . In addition to the te mptation to 'ove ract' in posin g, there is "lly

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. . I. ea ns to close in, then , on the point of avoidance IS revealmg. TllS essay m I'ty nd narrative virtuality in the inte rsection betwee n photOgraphicfte mpora I narratives on bo th s ides . d h t wanl cal crux 0 numelous s . Impacte P oome d' :d I des'lre often un cannil y reammates A 1 ge nre IV1 e Wl e re " of the Euro- me [lca l . I 'h ' the simulated ki netic image ofli vmg a fi xed visual trace or, alterna te y, w ele rese nce marks the death of the real. . . d ' ent of filmi c p It should be noted tha t wh enever the medlum·s peclfic ru elm . fil 1I d . 1 such lanta sty m s, motion in pholograph ic techniq ue, a leftover the d ls tancrng I f intervening in the classic Iransparency of m s a Itua way 0 h from modernis . . . .' solidatio n as a nar rative system , owever, the cinemati c Image. BefOle Its con. . d ' sa il overt li lmic machination by . ' l' I yea rs was pe rceive " cinema rn ItS ea r les . . d' t evocation of cinema's elusive ils first s pectalors. As II an rn these sam e years in the latedifferential mohon comes down 10 uSr.fro e medium 10 which theori sts 01 Victorian art criticism of dance, a per ormtha nc h e always known cine ma' s . I' oe Deleuze among 0 e rs, av Ih e mech an lca lIna " ' ,' . I fi lm title from 19 24, affin ity - and to wh ich Fernand Leger s er, self-enactin g



Ballet Mechaniqu e, pays dlrecttestam enst. In ds : '.;ti:g in 18 9 8 wilhin 1111' . f the Decadent cntlc Art h ur ymon , .' f language 0 . , . ' n b cu ltural consciousness, the thlill 0 flrs l decade of Cinema absol ptlo fr. Y . t . cated in material ti me, 1asls \IIrI\ lLln dance is that each di sconlinuous, e eet'th a van ishing tracl' , wi ill I, lo ng enough to have been the re . I It IS e re as gone, . t ' I g enough to savour. o nl y attent,on can re aln on I rfi t the frame itself, also lasts on ly 1(1 111 In cinema, the mcreme nta e ec, h t I ave been surre nd ct'(·[\ , II, ,I b th e" only long enoug 0 1 e nough to have een er '.. d it shi fting it as iffrom within . btt1111 ,. is , to tl,e next rn Irne, aSS lm,htate to .. e from s lit-second to s plil -S .( .,"t!

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its suppl em ent in the perhaps. ulltil rl' III'W' ,I moment to momen tu : 1 fi l . may obtrude with II11I I1', vl lll . narrative whe re t le mlc by a g ive n screen .' . 0 fl d by an on -s 1'('\'11 f ' th - the cmematIC - olten agge purpose ro m WI In fram e o n the tra ck_Vario ll s 111'1111 • photograph within th e plot or a decades in the gen re 01 HI I II, Ih' helve differe nt uses for such effec fi' d . t r-no-return ill lit,· d 111 1'1." . . I t aph marked a xc pOln -o eV ldenl,ary p 10 ogr . t c. Seve r-,I o llll,· ldcII I" I f tinchl bodies and env,ronm en s. • lechno ogy 0 3 r , .. I fl ' .· de andlhe cu llur,, 1 :tllc ·, IIHllh III . I ' -' y . re the structlll ,' '1' "' " 111' III t llS ,essa a Tl"lditio mlly lhe pho lographed hurnall body 1111, 111 UClle rrc li .llec lOIy. , , . I d1\ II I. t" " " . ' ll r havin g been S lIllU a l l' I II 'tllIl bccil presc nllo , ep, esc ntdl lo , 'crec tl 10 IIl C"S Il IC I1Ie 1.1 It I I I /lIIId" Vt.s lt gl ,1 W P:IlI il.U !:1I s igll li( :lIl lt.' lIl p i lO IO)',raph y

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dys topia, not to mention within a cinema increasingly en hanced-or invadedhy the d igital. There are no faked or ambiguous or nostalgic photographs ;In ywhere in the Matrix trilogy (the Wachowski brothers, r999-2oo3)- Nor docs the photograph serve to anwor or contest the digital artifice of VR snuff Idlll s in a movie like Strange Days (Lyn e, '995). The transformation at stake IS 1I0t just of genre but of medium. Ye t, though the photographic benchmark of cinematic images has "" r"a singly lost ground with res pect to the reflexive ironies of d igital sci-fi , c, li as not disappeared. For the most part it has s imply shifted genres : most eellviolls ly when it leaves behind a con text in high-tech illusion for a narrative I" , Illal of high-profile magic. In the Harry Potter film s, for ins tance, every 1y I'! ·ri:l yed . as well by lir ttlrll ill g poi lll til t' l'vo llil lo ll 0 1 IIIl ,qW le( 1!!lolngy. Whal we III

lir e las t vesti ge of cinema's rotary motion in the form of a VH S reel. For the I"'roine 's second chance comes not by reverse digitial scan but by mechanical rl'w ind - even though spooling past us fa ster than any film strip cou ld. In He Loves Me . . . He Loves Me Not, the gra in of the rea l is so firml y I's l;lblished, if only in retrospect, that m iscues in the first ha lf ca n be ( 'JIlfidently set right in the second . Close r yet to the model offantas tic lI:1rrabve, however, and this by sustai ning its ambiguity almost to th e ve ry I·lId . is Ozon's Swimming Pool (20 0 3) , which recrui ts the device "I Iri ck beginnings as common to the thri ll er plot as a re trick end ings. Swimming Pool opens behind the title with a misleading shot of blue wa ter I ipp li ng across th e entire fram e. An upward pan soon reveals it to be a shot IIi Ihe Tham es rathe r than of the pool in question. The film then cuts to the lJ IId erground , whe re a reade r notices that the woman Sitting opposite her is IIII' au thor whose picture is on the cove r of he r myste ry novel. Yet here too, ,,, I IIlar mys tery and deception seem to have set in. This photographic "vlde nce is immediately deni ed : 'You mu st have mi staken m e with someone 1,1,,·,' says the presumed author. 'I'm not the person yo u think I am. ' Index d,,, ,s not guarantee identity. A throwaway moment, one assumes _ eas ily "' plai ned away by the autho r's revealed panic over her current writer's block. II, roll ghout th e rest of the film, however, we submit to an openl y voyeuristic pcctato rshrp W.I '> j".I.IIIII'. I II'1 eady In the hrslUfY of

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Shklovsky's expression, 'completed its journey from poetry to prose'. The decomposition of fiction films, once subversive, is now normal. Films are today dismantled and dislocated even without inte rvention by the spectator. The experience of a film was once locah sed in space and time, in the finite unreeling of a narrative in a particular thea tre on a particular day. But wi th time a film beca me no longer simply something to be 'visited' in the way on e might attend a li ve theatrical performance or visit a painting in a museum . Today, as I wrote in a previous book: ... a :film' may be encountered through posters, 'blurbs', and other advertisements, such as trailers and television clips; it may be encountered through newspaper reviews, referen ce work synopses and theoretical articles (with their :film·strip' assemblages of still images ); through production photographs, frame enlargements, memorabilia, and so on. Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come to feel familiar with a film we have /'tOt actually seen. Clearly this jilm' - a heterogeneous psychical object, constructed from image scraps scattered in space and ti me - is a very different object from that encountered in the context of jilm studies" The 'class ic' narrative film became the sole and unique object of film studies only through the eli sion of the negative of the film, the space beyond the frame - not the 'off screen space' eloquently theorised in the past, but a space formed from all the many places of transition between cinema and other images in and of everyday life. Michel Foucault uses the term 'heterotopia' to designate places where 'several sites that are in themselves incompatible' are juxtaposed." The term 'heterotopia' comes via anatom ica l medicine &om the Greek heteros and tapas, 'other' and 'place'. I am remind '0 of the expression einer anderer Lokalitat by which Freud referred to the unconscious. Although Foucault explicitly appl ies the concept of 'hetero toplll' only to real external spaces, he nevertheless arrives at his discussion of heterotopias via a reference to utopias - places with no physical substan other than that of representations: material signifiers, psychical rea lity, fantasy. What we may call the 'cinematic heterotopia' is constituted the va riously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of mnl" the Inte rnet, the media , and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as 'a kaleidoscope equiPJll,tI wilh consciousness' . Roland Barthes describes how one eve ning, ' half aslee p on a ballqlll'lI l' III a bar', he tried 10 enum erale all th c languages in his fi eld of hearing: co nve rsa lions, Ihe noiSl's o f chairs. of gla sses , an ent ire ste reo ph ony of wlill II " IIlarkclpla " ill 't;l lI gil'rs ... is 1111 ' sil c'. li e co nlinll cs:

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Eyes half closed, Ba rthes sees an homolo b h the cacophony of the bar and hi s in voluntary thoughts wh When Stanley Kubrick's film 'XC.;re e n s t at no 'sentence' forms. Sh b l ' e ut (19 99) was released on e reviewer compared it u f; n novella Dream Story' H dYto Its Source in Arthur Schnitzler's . e Ouserve that Sch 't I ' . series of di sconnected incidents which th nr .' er s narratIve consists of a . e wnter nevertheless unrfies Into a mea ningful whole through th e conhnuous presence of th ' The reviewer complained that Kubrick's r It" e narrator s Voice. the a bsence of this device and tI t ete Ing of the story suffe rs from disturbin I d· . . ' la as a resu lt the na rrative remains . g Y ISJoInted . The 'disjointedn ess' that th . C • Kubnck's film . h b e revIewer lOund In as own s[eheenm a strubetural [refl ection withi n the film of its , 'se-en-a yme 0 Its e t fl ' traile r (or Eyes Wide Sh ut pi d' . XIS en la settIng. A short film was released. It : CInemas (or several weeks before the a mirror whi le a pul sing rock r°lrrnclpa/ actors e mbraCi ng in fron t of g fro m thi s sa me sequence appea red °th son p aysho n the sound track. A still . roug h out l e CIty (Pafls " h' Instance) on posters advertising the film. For sev I k In t IS



poster to trailer to film th ere e wa s Iscovered em bedded in it. From was a progressIve unfoldin . fJ . sequence, to concatenation of se ue nces _ . g. rom unage, to presentation of commercl'al . q as If the pa tte rn of Industrial CInema were taki ng th ' . structures: &om the most cursori l cond on e unpnnt of psychical to the most articulated consc' ensed of unconsCIou s representations IOUS lorms as If th ' . f in the most literal sense was conli .' e nOI se 0 the marketplace' l3arthes' metaphor 0 d ormIng to the psychological sense of . pene onto Its outSide b tl bl" . spills its contents into the st f d Y Ie pu IClty sys tem the film detritus of everyday 0 ay H e, where they join other where no sentence forms. ma syntagms, ends of formulae ') and n,e sequence.image

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combine. Jea n Laplanche speaks of m emory and fantasy as a 'time of the human subject' that th e individual 'secretes' independently of historical time - the ci nematic heterotopia is also heterochronic, moreover its most atomic elements are indeterm inate with respect to motion. For exam ple, here is what I believe is m y ea rliest m emory of a film: A dark night, someone is walking down a narrow stream. I see only fee t splashing through water, and broker< reflections of light from somewhere ahead, where something mysterious and dreadful waits. The telling of the memory, of course, betrays it. Both in the sen se of there being something private about the memory that demands it remain untold (secreted) , and in the sense that to teU it is to misrepresent, to transform, to diminish it. Inevitably, as in the tell ing ofa dream , it places items from a synchronou s fi eld into the diachrony of narrative. What remains most tru e in my account is what is most abstract: the description of a sequence of such brev ity tbat I might almost be describin g a still image. Although this 'sequence-image' is in itself shar ply particular, it is in all other respects vague: uniting 'someone', 'somewhere' and 'somethin g', without s pecifying who, where and what. There is nothin g before, nothing after, and although the action gestu res out of frame, 'somewbere ahead ', it is nevertheless selfsufficient. I ca n recall nothi ng else of this film - no othe r sequen ce, no plot, no names of characters or actors, and no title. How can I be sure the memory is fro m a film ? I just know that it is. Besides, the image is in black and white. The m emory I have just described is of a differen t kind from my memory of the ligure of Death 'seen' by the small boy in Ingmar Bergman's fi lm Fanny and Alexander, or - from the same fi lm - my memory image of the boy's grandmother sea ted in a chair by a window. These examples were what fi rst came to mind wben I 'looked' in m emory for a film I saw recently. They are transient and provisional images, no doubt unconsciously selected for their association wi th thoughts already in m otion (childhood, the mother, death) , but no more or less suitable for this purpose than other memories I might have recovered, and destined to be forgotten once used. The 'night and strea m' memory is of a different kind. It belongs to a small permanent personal archive of images from films I believe I saw in early childhood, and which are distingu ished by having a particular affect associated with them in this present exam ple, a kind of apprehe nsion associated with the sense of ,so meth ing mysterious and dreadful' - and by the fact that they ap pea r unconn ecled to other memories. If I search furth er in my me mories of dli ldhood I ca n brin g 10 mind olh e r types of im oges from film s. What I bl' lievc 10 be Ih e "rliesl of lh esl' an ' Illainl y ge lll'ricall y inle rcha ngea ble picilires worl ill'" Ilri laili . TI I! 'Y lorlll " lihr,"'Yo f sl(' rl'otypes whi ch

represent what m ust have im ressed m . d e as a chl ld as the single most important fact about the to me as the reason for my me (not leas t beca use it was offered " er s a sence) 1 M ' of enigmatic images and a j lib .. n a ltlon to a sma ll collection Ii . , arger raIY of lma also retain other types of' Ii ges rom wartlme film s I tmages rom vis' t t th · · ., . 1 S 0 e cmema 1Il later chi ldhood. These are neither mysterious events in m y personal histo n otrhgenenc: they tend to be associated with . ry. el er 1I1 drrect rea f iii thll1g tha t bappened shortly aft . c lOn to a m, or to som eeell1 g I Can reca ll sequences from iii er sth h a fi lm. Later stilJ, from adulthOod, . ms at ave most i d c' . mpresse me as exam ples o f cmematic art, and from fi l I. h I m s seen lOr dlstractlo SOon forget. The totality of all tl iii n w ll c expect I s hall ms contribute to the 'a lready re d lei d I have seen both deri ve from and a , a rea y seen' ste ty. 1 . reo plca ston es Ihat may spo nta neously 'explain' an . n images of other kinds °b : pos ter for a film I have not seen, Or So far, tbe exam ples I have . y hancfe m the envrronment of the media. gIven are 0 lmage all d and I have not spoken of th ' . I . s rec e voluntarily, . elr Ie atlons to actua l pe' [' Im ages derived from film s I'k I lcep lon s. But mental a re as J e y to 0 . h f< association s, and are often provoked b ccur III t e orm of involuntary travelling by train through th F h Yexternal events. For exa mple: I am e renc co untrysid . c . London. Earlier, as I was wa itin [, h . e en loute from Pa n s to a middle-aged couple had passegd dor t e htrarn to leave the Gare du Nord, · Own t e carnage rn who I I .. Somet h mg in th e wom.a n's lace C b roug I11 to m' d lC 1 was slttlng. . The previous night seeki ng dl'st ' 1.' C U1 an lmage from a film. , Iac Ion I rom wO 'k I h d . . I, a swJtched on the television. The channel I sel t d . ec e was passrn g . to be broadcast in weeks to co . t. tI rn cursory revIew some films each. No doubt there was co me. a l e a few seconds of footage from mm entary vOlx-o lTbut I h d I young woman seen from beh ' d '1J a t le mute on. A rn ,executes a perf< t d " . , d ec Ive mto a SWlmming pool ; cut to the face of a midcl1 witnessed th is. I read woman who (the ed it tells me) ha s who had passed down the ca g h danxlety III her expression. The woman m age a an an' I k . XlOUS 00 . Now, as the train slices through the Fre nch coun t 'd flanked by trees on a green ;' ;:hmpse an arc of black tarmac prompts the memory of a similar in car IS tracmg the curve. This tile driver's seat of a ca r I had d I road, but now seen [rom rente t le pre' vacationing in a house with . . VlOUS s ummer, when I was a SWlmmlng pool My '. o[ road seen from the tr' . C 11 . aSSOCIatIon to the glimpse am IS 10 owed by II ' who h ad passed me in th .. . my reco ectlOn of the woman II ' e cam age (as If the the perception directly, without the rela o[ eCOon were provoked by Images have different Sources l Y e m Image). Although these . . m us t assume tha t th h h' ey ave a common somet lng unco . I nsclOUS t lat has join ed III

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them. As 1 recollect these associations in order to describe them it seems that they turn around the expression on the woman's face: 'something like anxiety' , but what is 'like' anxiety. It seems that the persistence of the Images . is due to this en igma. A train journey interrupted by a train of associations: a concatenatIOn of images raises itself, as if in bas relief. above the instantly fading , then fo rgotten , desu ltory thoughts and impressions passing through my mInd as the train passes through the countryside. The 'concatenation' does not take a linear form. It is more like a rapidly arpeggia ted musical chord , the indiv idual notes of wh ich , although sounded successively, vibrate simultaneously. This is what led me to refer to my ea rliest mem ory of a film as a 'sequence-image' rather than an 'image sequence'. The elements that co nstitute the sequence-image, mainly perceptions and recollectIons, emerge success ively but not teleologically. The order in which the; appear is insignificant (as in a rebus) and they present a co nfiguratIOn - lexIcal, sporadic' - that is more 'object' than narrative. What dIstInguIshes the elements of such a configuration from their evanescent neIghbours IS that they seem somehow more 'brilliant'." In a psychoanalytic perspective this suggests that they have been attracted into the orbit ofunconscious signifiers , and that it is from the displaced affect assoCIated WIth the latter that the form er derive their intensity. Neve rtheless, for aU that unconscIOUS fantasy may have a role in its production, the sequence-image as such is neither daydrea m nor delusion. It is a fact - a transitory state of percepts of a 'present moment' seized in their association with past affects and meanIngs .

Image, image sequence, sequence-image The sequence-image is a very different object from that addressed by film studies as the discipline aroused itself in the late 1960s and the ' 970s, revitalised by its love affair with linguistics. Half as leep, Roland Barthes hears hybrid mutterings that form no sentence. Barthes' account of hIs reverie on the banquette appears in his book Le plaisir du texte, whICh was published in 1973. Ten yea rs earlier he had been asked by the journal Cahiers du Cinema whether lin guistics had anything to offer the study of film. He replied that it did only if we chose 'a linguistics of the syntagm rather a lingui stics of the sign'. In Barthes' view, a linguistically informed analysIs of film could not be concerned with the filmic image as such , whIch he co nsidered 10 be pure analogy, bUI only with the combination of images into n'Irr"live sequences. As he ex pressed it: 'Ihe di stin ction between film and phologr" ph y is nol simpl y" l11 all ('r ordCf\rec bill" r"di ca l opposition'. Such a disl illclion belw('(, 11 i lll :!"," alld i,I' :QW :-it'(lIlt'lI({' il ;!S li s precursor In

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's differentiation, in 1766, between 'arts of space' and 'arts of time'. Lessing's dichotomy underwrites the categorical separation of the still and the moving image on the basis of a supposed absolute difference between simultaneity and succession. Film studies and photography studies have developed separately largely on the basis of this assumed opposition - even while, across the same period of time, there has been increasing technological convergence between the supposedly distinct phenomena of still and moving images, It accords with common sense to ass ign the still image to photogra phy theory and the moving image to film theory. But to equate movemen t with film and stasis with photography is to confuse the representatio n with its ma terial support. A film may depict an immobile ob ject even while the film strip itself is moving at 24 frames per second; a photograph may depict a moving object even though the photograph does not move,'" Writing in 197 1 the photographer and filmmaker Hollis Frampton envisaged an 'infin ite film' that would consist of a spectrum of possibilities extending from the stasis of an image resulting from a succession of completely identical fram es, to the chaos of an image produced by a succession of totally different frames." Cinema, 'the movies', inhabits only part of thi s spectrum : that portion where movement - frame to frame shot to shot, scene to scene - is intelligible, sentence-like, An interest 'in movement for its own sake may be found in ea rly twentieth century avantgarde fi lm and photography, and in painting under the impact of film and photography. The interes t is com paratively short-lived. It is not movement as such that fa scinates most people but purposive movement, movement with causes and consequences, What audiences find most interesting aboul characters on the screen is not thei r movements (albeit these may have their own, primarily erotic, interest) but their acts. Activity however is not necessarily bound to movement. Peter Wollen illustrates this point with reference to a book of photograph s by Andre Kertesz entitled On Reading," Wollen observes that although all the people in the photographs are motionless they are nevertheless doing something - they are all reading. Thus , he writes: 'We can see that activity is not at all the same thing as movemen t." 3

The disjunction of activity and movement was recognised early in the history of painting. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a body of doctrine was assembled in res ponse to the problem of how best to de pict a narrative in a painting. With only a single image at his or her di sposa l. it was agreed that the painter would do best to isolate the peripeteia - thai in stanl in th e story when all hangs in the balance. It went without question Ih al th e viewer already knew the story. The space in and between im ages is crossed

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recorded as 'the most important musical event of the 20'" century'. He wntes. The maJor mUSICal fact of the 20 '" century is that masses of ears start listening to music - ceaslessly, often the sa me old songs (les memes rertgames) , standardised, ... produced and reproduced in immense quantities, .. : and which will often be interlaced for many hours a day with global conSClOusnesses, producing a daily total of many milliards of hours of consciousness thus "musicalised" :27 The re"gaines sung by the actors in Same Old Song, songs their French audience are sure to know, conjure a commonality that ultimately devolves upon no subject other than the subjectIn-law that IS the corporation that produced it. For Stiegler, this is a source of the very unhappiness that the characters express in song: 'It is the already there of our unhappiness in being (Ie deja-Iii de notre mal-etre) that certain of these songs express so welt, which are therefore (these so"gs that we receive so passively) , i" eenai" respects, at the same t,me the cause, the expression, and the possibility, if not of cure, at least of a ppeasemen t. ," Agnes Jaoui defines quite precisely what she means when she refers to a song as a rengai"e: 'U"e re"gai"e, it's something universal that touches the collective unconscious and the culture of a generation, of a country, and at the same time, for each one of us, it can evoke a moment, an event in our Me: By 'collective unconscious ' I assume that Jaoui means that which I prefer to call the ' popul ar preconscious': 'those ... contents which we may reasonably suppose can be call ed to mind by the majority of individuals in a given society at a particular moment of its history: that which is "common knowledge": " Jaou i recognises the individual dimension of common knowledge - the rertgai"e both touches the collective and at the same time may evoke a personal experience. In another interview, Jaoui says that a consensus about the choice of songs to be used in the film had been difficult 10 achieve, because what a particular song meant to one member of the writing team was not what it meant to another. The perception that the words of a song may have both public and private meanings is commonplace, but nevertheless absent from Stiegler's description of the ideological determinations of 'cinema' (the audio-visual in general). Although he makes II bera l use of psychoanalytic terms in his essay on Resnais' film , he uses lI e,ther the term preconscious nor unconscious, speaking only of lO nSClousness, and 'consciousnesses' (a sort of 'collective conscious'). I Iwl,eve Stiegler is both right andwrong in presenting cinema as a totalisin g ,1I,d potentially totalrtanan machine for the production of synchronised and IIII1I ormconsciousnesses. It is no contradiction to say thi s if we di stin gui sh II,,, polrtlca l from the ideological. Stiegler is right in em phasisin g th e cxtenl

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Figures 15-18 James Colema n, Backgro'.llId , ' 99 " 94, Courtesy th e artist.

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Figure 19 Fi 'm still, The Wi,it" Sli eik/, , !"edc'rico !,,'lI illi,

Figure 20 Film still , Pickpocket, Robert Bresson, '959. Figure 21 Jeff Wall, Volunteer, I996 . Courtesy of the artist. Figure 22 Jeff Wall, Outburst, 1986. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 23 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still 10, 1978. Courtesy Metro Pictures, New York. Figure 24 Gisele Freund, Walter Benjamin, c. 1939, Gisele Freund/The John Hill elson Agency. As . reproduced on the cover of Benjamin's Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1992. Figure 25 John Stezaker, Blind, '979 . Courtesy the artist and Approach Gallery, London . Figure 26 John Stezake1, The Trial, 1980. Courtesy the artist and Approach Gallery, London. Figure 27 Film still, Peifect Understanding, Cyril Gardner, 1933. Figure 28 Theodor Van Baburen, The Procuress, 1622. Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 107.6 em. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. M. Theresa B. Hopkins Fund 50.2721. Photograph © 2005 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Figure 29 Film still, Kiss, Andy Warhol , 1964. © 2005 The Andy Warhol Museurn , PA , a museum ofC.l rnegie Institllt e. All ri ght s reserVl'd .



Figu re 30-31 Film stills, The Double Lifo of Veronique, Krzystnl Kieslowski, '991. Figures 32-37 Film stills, The Red Squirrel, Julio Mendern ,

Figures 38-40 Film stills, Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Julio Mcdl'lIl , 1999· Figures 41-42 Film stills, Le Temps RetrouIii, Raoul Ruiz I\lN ' Figure 43 Film still, The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan, '999. Figures 44-5 Film stills, The Others, Alejandro Almenabar, 200 1. Figure 46 Film still , A.I., Artificial IntelligerI ce, Steven Spielberg, 2001. Figure 47 Film still , Vanilla Sky, Cam eron Crowe, 200 1. Figures 48-5 1 Fi lm stills, One-[-[oltl" Phot.o, Mark Romane k, 2002. Figures 52-53 FiJm stills, Ele,.",,1 SlmsiIilli' of IIII: Spolli'SS Millil, Michel Gondry, 2004.