The David Campany-edited book The Cinematic (2007) looks at the many varied examples of and ideas about instances where stills photography and the moving image come into contact with one another. It includes writing and writers I’ve come across many times – Deleuze, Varda and Peter Wollen’s influential Fire and Ice– as well as work that’s completely new to me. While for the most part, the collection coheres around a set of relatively complimentary ideas, some writers present starkly different arguments (I would personally like to pick a fight with Stimson’s belief that the film cannot be essayistic, not least for his apparent ignorance of the essay film). 

Campany’s introduction sets out the rationale of the collection with a quote from Deleuze, describing disciplines. That he does so immediately set me at ease, having previously struggled to accept what some, naively, believe that the two forms are practically one, a belief made all the more convincing now that stills and moving images are now typically recorded on the same device, at least up to a semi-professional level (i.e. by nearly everyone). Having studied both at postgraduate level, the disciplines of photography and film are, in fact, even more dissimilar than I had thought, making me consider, as does Crewdson, that a fundamentally different way of thinking is at play – it is for this reason that he has decided not to work in film. Deleuze’s quote is worth including at this point: 

‘The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on another, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other’. (p10). 

Penley describes the two forms as having completely different objectives and qualities from the outset, pointing to the common misperception of Muybridge as the ‘godfather’ of the moving image. In fact, she argues, Muybridge’s intention was the complete opposite of the moving image: to arrest movement such that it could be studied, to the point that his artistic reference was more indebted to sculpture than even to photography. This confirms what I have long believe about Muybridge’s work – that it becomes ‘animated’ as a by-product and only at the labour of the viewer and Metz has pointed out that the role of stroboscopy in the birth of cinema is almost wholly overlooked when one speaks of cinema as a form of photography by using technological arguments.

David argues that the schism, if such a schism exists, occurred in the 1920s, with the industrialisation of cinema putting it out of reach of those who had previously experimented with both forms. Pasolini, however, sees the schism as occurring through montage or editing: the long take being the primordial photograph which becomes utterly transformed (film becomes cinema) through this process, echoing Agnes Varda’s belief (though not quoted in this collection) that filming is documentary while editing is fiction. 

Pasolini also mentions that the experience of time changes once editing enters the frame (so to speak). In a single long-take, there is an illusion of presentness and while this is preserved once editing is involved, this intervention makes it become ‘a historic present’ 

In reference to ‘late photography’, Campany argues that this difference in perceptions of time is cultural rather than inherent: film and TV have used the still photograph to represent the past, and memory in particular, for so long that we accept this to be so without question. In fact, says Penley, the moving image itself created the idea of ‘still’ photography – which often itself bears the traces of movement and cannot wholly be described as such – as before it was, simply, just ‘photography’. 

Other writers see the schism as being essentially social. Metz describes the film as – largely – a collective activity and photography as – largely – a private one. While examples abound of the practices of lone filmmakers (such as myself) and team photographers – such as Crewdson, who does not in fact press the shutter himself – nevertheless the influence of this division is unavoidable, either as viewer or practitioner. 

It is reassuring to me that Campany begins to talk about slow cinema almost immediately in his introduction – though perhaps no surprise given that Campany’s Photography and Cinemadeals with this in great depth. Slow cinema and long-take video art, he argues, are resistances to the fast-paced modernity of which the Hollywood film is the ultimate expression; these forms work with a more photographic quality of ‘stillness’ to a point where, argues Jeff Wall, they risk becoming the cliched calling-card for ‘artiness’. Such a strategy is not without risk, as Wenders points out: ‘When people think they’ve seen enough of something, but there’s more, and no change of shot, then they react in a curiously livid way’ (p.11). Ackerman points out that such slowness allows for an experience of time as a dimension in her films: ‘With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass’ (p.197). She achieves this through the long take by holding a shot for long enough for it to become abstracted, and then allowing the viewer to come back to the ‘concrete’. A long take, like a long gaze at a photo, permits the ‘noticing’ that Wenders finds more important in his filmmaking than ‘getting over some kind of message’ (p. 88). Slow cinema is thus not, it needs to be said, cinema that is so slow it becomes a still at 25 fps, however closely it might appear that way. The choice of a motionless, fixed frame shot is deliberate, as Deleuze demonstrates in Ozu’s use of static still life shots throughout his oeuvre: they are part of an ontological pattern, phenomenologically and affectively, if visually scarcely noticeably, distinct from a still photograph. Argues Deleuze, ‘[a]t the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it’ (p. 64). I have completed some background reading into slow cinema and the long take and will report back on these in more depth in a subsequent post.

If film and photography were not so completely different, then the impact of hybridity and proximity would be less remarkable, as Deleuze argues. Bellour describes how the intrusion of a still image into a film demonstrates a still’s remarkable assertive power, while making the viewer more aware of the activity of film-watching, engaging them more critically and turning them into a ‘pensive spectator’. The fact that seamless editing, easy to achieve in film with practice, is almost impossible when sequencing still photography is what gives still photography a highly developed and distinctive allusive, tangential visual language that rarely works when attempted using the moving image.

Campany, D. 2007. The Cinematic. London: Whitechapel Gallery.