Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception

The Still/Moving Image: Cinema and the Arts, 2010

"The usefulness of this book lies above all in the judicious and felicitous choice of contrasting complementary case studies, each of which is given a highly original historical placement and subjected to a complex multi-layered historical hermeneutics," Professor Thomas Elsaesser writes. What happens when we suddenly feel that a moving image is being slowed down or halted? Nowadays it happens all the time in the cinema and the art galleries. A basic question of life - is it still or is it moving? - here urgently addresses emotional and aesthetical issues as well as questions concerning media. The still/moving image compels a new sensibility. (from Saarbrucken: Lamber Academic Publishing, 2010)

As a scholar of film, I am constantly torn in two different directions when I use my eyes. I am trained to read. I sift through written material quickly to find the nuggets of information or analysis that will help me to make sense of something else. But I am also trained to look – and looking isn’t always reading. Looking is as much to do with observation, as it is to do with analysis. It is as much about understanding how to describe what I see, as it is about interpreting those things that I see. Fittingly, one of the dominant paradigms of Film Studies lies in the textual analysis of films. This is the one that I was initially trained in. For the purpose of textual analysis, our powers of observation and informed scrutiny enable us to ‘read’ films as flat, legible surfaces. Characters reveal ethical, behavioural or narrative features of the film. Mise-en-scène can be decoded for political or aesthetic means. But how does one ‘read’ an image floating on a screen, when the screen itself is different every time? Is a moving image the same moving image if we’ve seen it on a tablet, or as a massive immersive multi-screen installation? How do we account for the differences between experiencing moving images in a cinema auditorium, versus the experience of moving image projection in a gallery, or in another site-specific installation? All of these seem like logical and valid questions. But perhaps in the rush to distinguish what we ‘read’ into a film from the individual acts of looking that we each commit when viewing the moving image, there is something of an artificial barrier put in place. If films are flat ‘texts’, then they can only be read in certain lights and from certain angles. What becomes legible – eligible even – as ‘film’ stays firmly in the realm of screen images that can be sustained in an upright manner in a fairly limited set of circumstances: in a cinema auditorium, on a television screen or more likely, on a portable computing device. So where does that situate all the marginal, evanescent examples of moving images, that still have an extremely powerful effect on the ways that we look at and experience screen media?

Dominique Chateau, José Moure (eds.), Post-cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020

Some filmmakers or artists decide to put art at the heart of their creation, applying not only the relationship between cinema and art to their concept but also to various aspects of the process of creation. Miriam De Rosa addresses this kind of "art contemporary turn" by examining the different incursions of cinema from the point of view of the contemporary art space: "how the contemporary experience of moving images is articulated when it enters art spaces." The presence of film in this foreign space, transforming it into a different and personalized place, can be observed in recent exhibitions: Sleepwalkers ;

Gawan Fagard Joint Doctoral Seminar, Bozar Brussels, 28 november 2013 Some of you might remember that in Laurent Busine's emphatic exhibition "A toutes les morts, égales et cachées dans la nuit" in the Musée des arts contemporains du Grand Hornu of 2010, David Claerbout's video piece "A long goodbye" featured as a final statement of the show. In this 12 minute long video, shot in one single take, we see a middle-aged women appearing in the dark entrance of a Provençal neoclassical mansion. While the camera is pulled back slowly, the women appears to be serving tea in slow motion. It is only a few minutes later, when the camera is sufficiently far away from the scene in order to reveal a large part of the sunlit facade of the house, that an attentive spectator can notice the rapidly fleeting time of the daylight: sharp shadows evolve in an accelerated way through the otherwise almost still image. After approximately 8,5 minutes, the two artificial timeframes -one being the slow motion of the women and the other the acceleration of the daylight -collide in a dramatic moment. As the woman has served tea for two, one would expect a second person to arrive soon. Instead, a cold breeze seems to roll through the air causing the women to pull her jumper over her shoulders. Immediately thereafter, her attention seems to be attracted by something coinciding with the camera itself. As struck by awe, she puts the teacup in her hand back on the table, and turns her body slowly in a frontal position -that is: towards the camera, looking straight into the lens -all the while covering herself once more. This movement is accompanied by a rapid appearance of the giant, fastly moving shadows of tree leaves, covering the whole scene in a chilly darkness.While the camera still pulls back, the woman walks to the front of the terrace, making large gestures of goodbye, until the whole façade of the house appears, surrounded by nervously waving trees in the rapidly setting sun. The film ends in the dusk of the night.

Sarai Reader 09, 2013

“What do Moving Images Desire?” in Sarai Reader 09. Sarai Media Lab, Delhi (2013)

Aspasia Kazeli, 2022

Considering as the point of departure an examination of the concept of stillness - as it is present and perceived in our reality - my thesis research gradually unfolds the world of frame-by-frame drawn animation, exploring how stillness functions in an animated moment. Through these explorations, my research encounters a paradox in the field of frame-by-frame animation: namely, that movement is composed from still images. Proceeding from this paradox, I take up questions concerning the ways in which the spectator perceives these lingering moments in drawn animated films, and how they resonate intuitive emotional reactions. My thesis poses a final connection that interlaces theoretical aspects taken up in this study and my personal animating practice, and is represented through my graduation film η μητέρα μου, η θάλασσα (my mother, the sea). This work investigates physical tools - corporeal apparatuses - that enabled me to capture the movement of my transitional stillness through my emotional journey.

AM, 2022

In the age of digital re-materialization and the circulation of visual content, the discussion on the nature of the photographic image has its implications on the medium itself. In the context of new and interconnected media, it is somewhat relevant to reconsider the definitions of traditional visual forms. This article will examine the relations between photographic images in different media contexts. If it is considered that the photographic books and essays are the assemblages of still photographs structured in a particular order, the first question that arises is how to, in the first place, define the structural norms in the context of contemporary circulationism. Thematically and formally, the relations between photography and cinema, duration and time, movement and stillness have been questioned historically. In the contemporary context, we can find similar examples present in the form of cinema also as an expression in everyday communication on different platforms, which Lev Manovich describes as a specific language. This article will examine the nature of that language, the correlation between still and moving mediums of photography. Finally, the aim is to recontextualize the definition of cinematic photo-essay in its articulation in social media platforms, as the main generators in circulationsim of images in contemporary digital culture.

"Throughout the course of Western philosophy, the concept of contemplation has been forwarded to describe an inner state of visual attention (or attendance) to the world, freed from any fatal experience of time (Aristotle, Schopenhauer). Usually adopted by Christian theology as a model for sacred visuality related to static images such as altar pieces and devotional pictures (David Morgan), contemplation therewith seems to contradict the very nature of cinema as a medium relying on a mechanical evolvement of time. As Walter Benjamin argued, cinema resists firmly to contemplative experience (“Versenkung”) due to its shock-effect (“Chock-Wirkung”), disrupting the continuum of reality both in time and in space. However, filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Lav Diaz and Pedro Costa as well as video artists such as David Claerbout and Nathaniel Dorsky have claimed the concept of contemplation as an essential part of the cinematic experience. In their films, the gaze of the spectator is confronted with a “suspension of time” (Robert Bird) in which the absoluteness of mechanic/cinematic time is substituted by an experience of timelessness: all intentional attention to the moving image is defused by a timeless experience of “pure cinematic space” (Lav Diaz) or “cinematic atmosphere” (Andrei Tarkovsky). Not only in cinema, but also in video art this experience of “suspended time” has been increasingly explored in moving image production over the last decades, and has challenged film scholars to consider the philosophical concept of visual contemplation. Seemingly contradicting instances of classical film theory, which has stressed the fatal nature of cinematic time as a mechanized process of irrevocable snapshots of time past (Bazin, Barthes), as well as a dialectical montage of images (Eisenstein, Adorno), the phenomenon of visual contemplation instead might suggest a remarkable “return of religion” (Derrida) within the medium of film. In this contribution I wish to assess the paradoxical nature of the contemplative image in today’s visual culture, as it both seems to refer to sacred traditions of visual devotion as well as it incarnates a ‘profanized’ version of it. Rather than simply reading the contemplative image as an anachronistic or nostalgic attitude attempting to revitalize spiritual traditions, it might act as an instance of “pure presence” (Nancy) within a deconstructed concept of faith and revelation."