Tag: Contextual Research

Four books about slow cinema

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I was into slow cinema before I was into slow cinema. The first essays I wrote on my film Masters were on Antonioni, Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Kelly Reichard’s Meek’s Cutoff, respectively considered one of the godfathers of slow, and two directors using slow for their features. Gideon Koppel’s documentary sleep furiouslyblew me away when I came across it (and I’m still astonished he likes my work enough to want to supervise my PhD project) and includes a mesmerizingly-beautiful 4-minute shot of sheep being herded through filthy weather across a Welsh hillside. I’ve explored elsewhere how the long take and the slow film are used to communicate landscape through anti-narrative surplus, allowing the eye to wander across a scene to alight on the incidental and the peripheral, lending a form of agency to the non-anthropocentric elements of film. However, I’ve not faced the phenomenon of slow cinema head-on until recently. I’ve looked at four books – their introductions so far, but over time I will read them all. Two focus generally on slow cinema, while the others focus on crucial facets of it – the long take and stillness/ stasis. 

Drawing on many of the same theorists and filmmakers as Campany (2007), in their introduction to their edited collection de Tuca and Jorge (2015) describe slow cinema as a reaction to ‘the accelerated tempo of late capitalism’ (p.3) and to the assumption that cinema needs to be a narrative form by including ‘dead time’ up to the exclusion of any form of narrative. They argue that doing so makes time noticeable – Chantal Akerman says much the same thing of her own work. Duration is thus accentuated, rather than action, but stillness – or ‘silence’ – is also central, as slow cinema is not defined by the long take – hence Ozu’s static camera, slow pace and use of filmed still life compositions make him an important precursor to contemporary directors working this way. 

By eschewing the rapidity of most filmmaking, a space is opened up for the spectator to reflect on what is before them by the creation of a type of what Deleuze famously describes as the ‘time image’ (Deleuze is a common connection in all discussions of slow cinema). This radical rejection of what Campany calls the ‘dehumanizing, repetitive and monotonous’ world of the accelerated image led to ‘slowness, the deliberate refusing of speed, becom[ing] central in vanguard art and culture’ (p. 9), a form that has been made more practicable through digital video recording which has allowed for a global explosion of such types of filmmaking, a hybrid form that inhabits both cinema and gallery and the grey area between both (slow cinema filmmakers such as Koppel, Ackerman and Kairostami also exhibit in galleries). 

The authors dismiss claims that slow cinema is a nostalgic flight from the contemporary, arguing that on the contrary it permits a reflection on and confrontation of the contemporary in a manner not afforded by more conventional film. In particular, it challenges the attentional dominance of the internet, which threatens to leave all moments occupied, squeezing what Crary calls ‘daydream or…any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow and vacant time’ (p. 16). 

Jaffre’s Slow Movies(2014) similarly notes the importance of stillness and duration, connecting slow cinema to a wider artistic tradition in which ‘nothing is happening’ and includes the paintings of Barnett Newman and the plays of Samuel Beckett. He also points to a wider ‘slow movement’ such as Slow Food and Slow Medicine which can readily be seen as a reaction against consumerism and the time poverty brought about by consumer lifestyles. 

Jaffre goes further than de Tuca and Jorge in dismissing the understanding of slow cinema as nostalgic by arguing that much slow cinema is bleak, empty and desolate. He also points to the importance of peripheral, liminal settings, such spaces being central to the creation of Deleuze’ time-image through more easily hosting the ‘halting of time’ and also to the activation of Bellour’s pensive spectator. Jaffre also demonstrates that slow is a quality that can be subsumed by more active elements – My Dinner with Andremight never move from a restaurant but its conversational fireworks are anything but slow, while The Russian Ark’s single shot nevertheless encompasses a vast array of characters and stories. 

In Motion(less) Pictures (2015), Remes describes watching Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line, which opens on 11 minutes of a fixed frame of almost entirely fog-shrouded landscape and in which the only movements are the very, very slow retreat of the fog and the occasional easy-to-miss silhouettes of horses. Remes speaks of this in terms of a photograph, or a painting, but through its duration experiencing these very, very subtle movements; this blurring of boundaries between media is, he argues, a foundational quality of these ‘cinemas of stasis’ in which movement may only be perceptible outside of the frame through sound. 

As with other, previously discussed writers on the subject, Remes demonstrates that while moving becamethe defining quality of movingpictures, not only is this illusory (the moving image gives the impression of movement through technological trickery playing on our flawed cognitive machinery), but hardly a quality inherent to what film and later video capture any more than sound or colour. Nevertheless, so integral is movement to the general perception of what the moving image is for, that capturing an absence of movement becomes radical, subversive, perverse. ‘What is the point?’ exclaims Carroll, ever the contrarian (p.9). Like Campany, he argues that the defining quality of the moving image is not movementbut duration, and this is certainly suggested by the fine art concept of time-based mediawhich includes film. 

The philosopher Bergson is central to Remes’ – and others’ – discussion of the moving image. Bergson believed not only that motion is indivisible (and thus one cannot say that Muybridge’s series are in any sense a precursor to ‘moving’ images) and that absolute stasis is impossible (even a still photograph is in the process of decay, albeit incredibly slowly), but that the human imagination is, for some reason, ill equipped to animate thought. (This has been used as an account of the memory/ dream dichotomy of the still/ moving images). So is Roland Barthes, who, Remes argues, was unable to lose himself in the moving image which excluded him from pensiveness(p.20). It is interesting, as a side note, that here is another example of fans and practitioners of each form thinkingin fundamentally different ways and this leads me to wonder whether the difficulty I have in developing a visual language through photography and my antipathy towards Barthes might be not simply an effect of personal history but more fundamentally grounded in my cognitive machinery. 

Remes denies the existence of the cinema of stasis as a distinct genre as it is expressed across too many structural formats, exhibition styles and primary subjects of interest. Nevertheless, he argues that all such works promote an immersive, meditative experience that very subtly brings about introspection through undermining the cultural expectations which are unavoidably brought to experiencing the moving image. 

While Koepnick’s Long Take (2017) often strays close to polemic, it is compelling in its passion and makes its central argument well: the long take nurtures and makes possible a sense of wonder. Koepnick describes the philosophical basis of wonder, tracing it back to Homer and on through Descartes (while at the same time demonstrating the long take to directly challenge the individual rationalism which Descartes ushered in to the Western mind, to mixed results). Like Remes, Koepnick sees the long take as occupying ‘the gray zone between black box and white cube’ (p.1), the ‘border between film and photography’ (p.4.) and like de Tuca and Jorge, he sees it as sharpening attention in reaction to cultural – and especially digital – acceleration and by frustrating the hungry expectations of the contemporary viewer. He sees the long take as making possible the sudden, unbidden reflex of wonder, which permits a rupturing of accepted reality and provokes deep curiosity. A long take can test one’s endurance and through surrendering to it, one becomes aware not of the modern and post-modern subjects of identity, culture and medium, but the biological and affective processes involved in cognitive perception: one becomes aware not just of one’s self, one’s cultural milieu, and the mechanisms interceding between the two, but one becomes aware of one’s mind. Having a background and a long, personal interest in cognitive psychology, I find this way of looking at the moving image exciting and enlivening – even where it is not as well argued as it might be and where it veers too uncritically towards Romantic spiritualism. There is certainly something somewhat Blakean in Remes’ belief that the wonder available through the long take can move the viewer beyond reason and self-reflexivity and towards seeing the world anew and as it is (as opposed to the flights of reverie, not the kind of wonder he is arguing for here). This, he argues, is exactly Bellour’spensive spectator. 

This is not an essay but a summary. My engagement with these works remains at a very superficial level, as I’ve yet to read them in their entirety. Nevertheless, the ideas will be drawn on extensively as I come to edit my work in progress submission, as I will be detailing next week. 

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

Jaffre, I. 2014. Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Kopenick, L. 2017. The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Luca, T. de., & Jorge, N. B. (eds.) 2015. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Remes, J. 2015. Motion (less) Pictures: the Cinema of Stasis. New York: Columbia University Press. 

David Campany (ed.): The Cinematic.

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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. 

The still and the moving – an autobiographical approach

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I’ve not considered how autobiographical features have shaped my connection to film and photography and my practice of these. It’s really important, I now see, and it cuts right to the heart of why my feelings about my photography on this course are declining and my feelings about my film are strengthening. 

I’ve taken photographs since I was about nine. It’s always been a very private affair. The photos I’ve taken have been for my own enjoyment, and are personal experiments; I’ve only three times been asked to take photos for others, and only once been asked to do so for money. The majority of my photos have been taken as I go along in life. They’re generally not part of the things I’m doing, the people I’m with. They’re a conversation with myself, a puzzle to solve through aesthetics – and the creating of an aesthetic or affective object is, for me, the goal. They’re like the glances out of a train window, the fleeting things you grasp, the things that grab your attention. They’re often an escape from the boredom of my everyday life – which is often crushingly dull, crushingly lonely, and as such they are driven by novelty and adventure. I cannot take photos when I’m bored of what I’m doing or what I’m looking at, and this is one major factor in my currently dwindling interest in photography – I’m bored of Exeter, bored of my home, bored of what I’m doing. Put me in a context where I can explore something new, and I’ll start photographing again. It’s not really a practice, and that’s why I think I’ve struggled so much with trying to turn it into one on this course. Rather, it’s a by-product of other things that are happening – unless it’s a formalised occasion to take photographs. 

I’ve been making films for just over two years. Learning how to make film and then making film has always been a very social affair. I’ve sought and received training and feedback throughout. My films are made with their eventual viewers in mind – they are a conversation with the world, not just myself. The first film I ever made was funded, the second for a PhD application, the third made with a community organisation and for an academic conference as part of a panel about a specific place, the fourth was made with another community organisation and with a range of contacts. I’m currently making films for Devon Wildlife Trust and about to make another for the Pebblebed Heaths Conservation Trust. My films, in other words, are an event, a purpose. My filmmaking IS a practice. 

I realise these things are not inherent in the medium. Photography takes place in the throes of the most intensely social activities and is largely focussed on its viewers. Filmmaking can be deeply personal, private. And that’s not to say these things are fixed: should luck strike and let me work with others using photography, it would become more social, and there have been times of filmmaking inactivity when I didn’t feel like a filmmaker at all. Recognition has a significant part to play. But this is what the activities have come to mean to me. I think nothing of setting up a camera and filming an interview with someone I’ve just met. I am overcome with awkwardness taking someone’s portrait, even if I’ve known them forever. When I photograph, I feel like I’m taking, prying. When I film, I feel like I’m giving, connecting. 

But there are other personal differences beyond how I relate to each as a social (or anti-social) activity. I’ve always photographed one image at a time. For me, each photograph is its own world, even if I’m getting shots of the same thing. I’m not thinking about how each photograph is going to work with others. It’s just this one moment, within this one frame, very spontaneous and that makes it exciting for me. But with film, I’m aware that I’m gathering material, even if I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing with it all. I’m looking for a kind of balance between elements, looking for range and diversity, continuity and structure. I’m slower, more thoughtful, more considered. This is perhaps partly technical – I can keep photographing handheld forever, but when I’m filming, the slowness of setting up a tripod (though I’m starting to work more handheld now) and further limited by the knowledge that I’ve only so much free memory (just over an hour if I’m shooting the highest quality files equates to the maximum 140G memory card). But it’s also autobiographical: from the first time I ever filmed, and on through the training I had in filming, each shot was part of a whole, not its own world. 

This reverberates on through the difficulties I’ve had studying for this MA and the astonishing ease with which I’ve taken to filmmaking. I have taught myself to become adept at making single images on the basis of affect and aesthetics. Until beginning this MA, I didn’t see that as an issue. However, I now appreciate that for the purposes of this course, and much in photography besides, images need to form a whole, a body of work, a project, and as such they need to interrelate. This interrelation needs to occur in part through the making of the work – something that doesn’t come naturally to me – else the images are disjointed, and also through the structuring of the work on a page, as a sequence, on a gallery wall, in an installation. Again, this doesn’t come naturally to me. Finally, crucially, something contextual, something critical should be communicated through the images and their sequencing, and it’s this that, as I’ve mentioned previously, I just don’t get. 

But why should filmmaking, which is so much more recent an activity, offer me a facility for criticality which in photography is elusive? I’ve not had any visual training beyond the explorations of my own looking, but until 2017, I knew nothing of editing film. I think it’s because I picked up soft skills elsewhere. When I began editing, it reminded me instantly of electronic music software – Protools, specifically. And it also reminded me to editing essays and novels. So it’s not the ability to use words alone that makes film more appealing. It’s something that’s fundamental to the two media. 

Photography and film are – at least by photographers – referred to as ‘lens-based media’. Their incredibly close technologies are undeniable, but what is the difference? It’s not movement either, as I’ve mentioned before – and as several critics argue, such as Peter Wollen in his foundational Fire and Ice essay of 1984. But there is another way of looking at photography and film as entirely different: whereas photography is largely two-dimensional (height and width, occasionally depth when virtual technologies or novel printing strategies are used) film is three-dimensional – to height and width, it adds duration. Film, as an art form, is thus sometimes described as belonging to time-based media. Although this term applies to gallery-oriented art forms, one might equally say that music or literature are time-based: however one plays or hears or reads these art forms, time is always a component of them. And it’s this deep experience of time, speed, pauses which I’ve acquired over years and years of writing fiction, poetry and music. What I’ve never really done, even domestically, is developed a deep understanding of spatial communication. So when it comes to working beyond the creation of individual images, something I’m pretty competent with, I just don’t have the soft skills on which to draw. And it’s my belief, whether or not anyone on the course has studied photography or not, there’s an unvoiced, possibly even unconscious assumption, that you will have acquired those soft skills somewhere or other. I’ve always though it’s curious that the photographs one makes equate to just 20% of the mark on this MA. I think that says an awful lot about where contemporary photography is at, where the gaps in my knowledge are, and just why I’ve found the experience so tough. 

Wollen, P. 1984. Fire and Ice. In Photographies, 4. pp.118-120.

Wellcome Trust live brief: another nail in the coffin

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I’ve really enjoyed working with the team on the Wellcome Trust live brief. The brief was to create, as a group, a series of personal responses to the theme ‘Climate and Health’. As we’re all very different, both as people and as photographers, we chose eco-anxiety as that meant we could keep things personal, manageable (i.e. covid-friendly). I’m happy with the image that I made and, given some team problems and a real lack of time, we did the best with what we had. 

First a word about group dynamics. Our team kept things friendly, co-operative, accepting and non-confrontational. It was always enjoyable working together. I have a temperament which often means it falls to me to become the leader, and as much as there was a team leader, I guess it was me – though Tanya and Jasmine also steered and arranged things. I spotted issues in the way we were approaching the brief, and I also felt we needed to be putting more work into our images, but I didn’t say anything about that. It’s more than likely that other team members were also holding their tongues – including about what I was myself overlooking and misunderstanding. This lack of pushing for what we wanted was picked up by Peta, and that was interesting. My reason for not becoming more of a leader, and speaking my mind more is, purely and simply, because I know so, so much less about photography than anyone in the group and there’d be absolutely no point in being more assertive – only to get things wrong again, and again, and again.

Second, a word about Peta’s feedback, both before and after the pitch. Peta had talked about making things more urgent, more personal, though she didn’t say which images she felt needed to be developed. This cuts right to the heart of why it’s pointless for me to pursue stills photography – if her comment was directed towards my image, which is quite possible, then it echoes Cemre’s feedback that my work lacks criticality – the image does not stand on its own, does not communicate by itself everything that needs communicating. When added to her – and Charlie’s – comment that my introduction was too wordy, this demonstrates that I’m just not understanding what photography – at least contemporary photography – is supposed to do: communicate using a visual language. 

I can go still further with this. It’s wholly possible that there’s one fundamental reason that I struggle with engaging with this course, connecting my practice with the theory that’s been presented, participating in webinars (including having anything whatsoever to say about quite a few peers’ work), and seeing ways that my images might have a home beyond this course and Instagram. It’s the same reason I can’t understand what everyone means when they talk about the narrative of a series and I just can’t see one. It’s simply that I am not, fundamentally, anywhere near as visual a person as I’d thought, and I’m nowhere near as visually literate as, well, everyone else. So my work doesn’t communicate everything I want it to. Fine. I get that. So I don’t know how to use images to do that. OK. Fine. And no-one’s going to teach me or give me the regular support I need to learn, because that’s not how this course is designed. I get that too. I don’t really belong here. That’s obvious. So – where does that leave me? 

The word, both spoken and written, has remained throughout of paramount importance to me. It’s a huge strength, a huge area of expertise, adeptness and I’m passionate about the word. I want it to be part of my practice – not just an addition, or an adornment, a stylisation, or a feature – but an indivisible part. It HAS to be there in my practice – not to embrace that is perverse, like cutting off a limb. And through the spoken word, video has the completely different potential of including both word and image in a unified experience – image and written word, even when it’s a subtitled video, creates a break as the eye moves between the two. I’ve embraced that. I’m good at that. And I’m not letting go – for THAT is where my criticality lies, THAT is where the communication occurs that the image alone cannot deliver.

This week, there’s all kinds of great stuff going on with my film work. I’m going to stay with this. It connects me to the world, it’s something the world wants, and best of all, it comes completely naturally to me. For the first time, I’m considering that, most likely, my stills photography really is never going to have a life beyond Instagram. This being the case, I’ll be pushing as hard as I need to deliver a film for my FMP. 

Friday shoot at Diamond Plantation

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After a lot of shoots that felt like tests, partly technical, but also philosophical, Friday’s shoot felt like one I could run with beyond the test. Why? It was the first time I shot decidedly at Diamond Plantation for starters, knowing that the materials for creating whatever this project becomes are right there. It was also the first time I’ve gone knowing the kinds of shots I’m looking for – making loads of use of shallow depth of field. It was also the other side of a lot of reading on slow cinema and long takes, so finally happy just to let the camera record for 40 seconds or longer. And it was also the other side of a load of great feedback on my work for Devon Wildlife Trust – a real affirmation of my competence and value as a filmmaker. 

There’s always unexpected take-homes. First, was how great it was shooting with almost no wind – much of the shoot appears to be stills, especially where a tree is the focal point of the shot, so the tension between still and moving image is really heightened, something I want to play with. Second, shooting with the cloudy white balance setting, which has given everything a slightly antique, orange hue – a step away from wanting to capture ‘the way things really are’ (which is impossible as there’s not such thing nor any device which could do so if it were). The hue helps me say what I want to say about Diamond Plantation and helps me feel about it in a certain way. 

I had a great chat with Karen Brett from Falmouth, who’s a fair amount of experience with video art. She’s very much an independent thinker who, like me, despairs of much video art, which was a relief. It’s good to know that narration CAN exist in video art (if that’s what I’m making) and she’s given me some useful leads to follow. 

The big questions to consider are where the real learning on the module is going to come from:

  1. How topographic is this work going to be? To what extent is it going to ‘show’ and to what extent ‘tell’ about this place? 
  2. What role is narration going to play? Is it going to follow previous work, or is it going to work differently?
  3. How am I going to work with duration? Are there going to be less shots of longer duration? 
  4. What is the format of this project? Installation? Projection? Film festival/ online? This decision will have profound implications to the other points. 

A matter of resources

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Any successful creative endeavour, whether in the fields of the arts, business, science, whatever, is dependent on a practitioner having an understanding of how to get the most from available resources. Resources are diverse, and include materials such as machinery, inks, paper, screens, physical spaces and buildings, human resources such participants, collaborators, enablers, advisors and audiences, and knowledge in the form of contextual understanding, practical and thinking skills.

My resources as a photographer are very limited. My technical skills are basic and limited to the use of a digital camera in a digital environment. I do not have access to studios, printers, other cameras or camera kit, and I do not have a local network of people I can work with. I have no experience of galleries or understanding of exhibitions, no connection with people who work in them, and no idea about approaching them. I had hoped that I would begin to learn these things on this MA, but that does not appear to be on offer. An input session on ‘working with galleries’ would have been useful, but it seems to be taken for granted that I know these things already. As with so much else.

Video art, installation art, these are complex technical forms that rely on galleries and belong to the world of fine art. It would be pointless, I believe, to pursue this line of research further. Were I on an MA which, for example, provided a module in installation art, or in video art, and gave me the training and contextual and philosophical understanding of these things, then there would be a basis for learning and experimentation. But I cannot meaningfully learn about these things from books; I need discussion and input and guidance, and I am unable to find these things from peers or tutors on this MA. The resources which I would need to create video or installation art are thus out of reach, and pursuing them would be a fruitless distraction. To create a meaningful work, I must examine the resources that are available to me, work with those, and somehow bring to bear the learning that I’ve achieved over the past year. Quite where that leaves me, I have no idea, but that’s not such a bad place to be.

I know I can make an excellent film for this module’s Work In Progress Portfolio. I have everything I need to do this – I have much greater faith in myself as a filmmaker than as a photographer. I have no doubt that I can make a film which would get a good grade. But what I don’t want to do is ‘just’ make a film. I want to make a film that’s somehow relevant to my time on this course, that’s in conversation with the ongoing struggle I have with placing myself in the context of contemporary photography. I don’t need to do this, and in many ways I don’t want the hassle, but neither do I want to feel like I’ve passed up the opportunity to rethink my filmmaking in a possibly radical and productive way.

Susan Trangmar: Unfound

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In 2016, Trangmar was commissioned to create a film in commemoration of the Battle of The Somme. To do so, she visited the area, both the landscape, the war graves and the everyday places in Somme.

Unfound (2016) is not a film that has me convinced, and lacks coherence – markedly different to A Play in Time (2008). Trangmar has described the difficulty of creating a work about which so much has already been said, and that the film did not capture her entire response, something which she has set right in a later article (2098).

I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t a voiceover. Unfound seems to demand verbalising, as if Trangmar has decided to keep her thoughts muted. This would have been fine if her thinking were more explicit, through the development of a more strident range of symbols, or carefully placed events, but Unfound seems like a slide show. There is thinking happening, quite clearly – juxtapositions of industry and commemoration, agricultural routine and leisure – but it’s hard to penetrate. A Varda, or a Keiller would have quipped, mused, questioned. And I wonder if this reluctance to narrate is one of the features of video art as a moving image genre. If so, and there most definitely are works which don’t require narration – A Play in Time for starters , then it’s a decision which should arise from the work and its demands. To refuse one of the most powerful facilities of the moving image – to be able to have words and images in a single experience – seems deliberately obstinate. Perverse, in fact.

Trangmar, S. 2019. Passages of Inscription. Photographies 12. pp. 63-80.

David Campany: Motion and Stillness.

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I love the way David Campany writes. It’s for the same reason I love the way Geoffrey Batchen writes: it’s lucid, personally felt, rigorously thought-through and informed, and with a general readership in mind. You don’t need to knee-deep in postmodern theory, or catapulted from your private fine art niche to hear what he has to say. 

I’ve read Photography and Cinema (2008) before, when I was studying for a Masters in Film & TV at the University of Bristol.  Back then, I was thinking about looking at documentaries about photographers for my dissertation project (I didn’t, in the end). But having read Campany, I could see he not only had a profound grasp of film, but also knew how to talk to those working in film. In fact, until beginning a Masters in Photography, I hadn’t appreciated that photography was his point of departure. 

What particularly impressed me about Photography and Cinema was Campany’s grasp and elucidation of the qualities, limitations and overlaps between the still and moving image. As a practitioner in both, and as one whose practice as a filmmaker, using fixed frames and long takes, was deeply inflected with the working methods of stills photography, I’m acutely aware of and curious about what makes a still image quite so still, and what makes a moving image truly moving, aside from technological differences. After all, the movement in Warhols’ Empire, is barely perceptible, while the blurred figure of Cartier-Bresson’s celebrated Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a trace of movement; to this extent, Warhol’s is more the still image, Cartier-Bresson’s more the moving one. 

I’ve heard it said that such permeable boundaries between the two types of photography render the boundary arbitrary, yet another rigid binary for the all-conquering postmodern army to demolish. Permeable and arbitrary, sure, but to deny difference is to deny their qualities and usefulness. As Campany argues, this tension, this constant struggle over territory, is as old as the medium itself and practitioners in both fields, often using this site of conflict in their practice, are to be found ever since the inception of the moving photographic image, the younger of the two technologies. 

Campany argues that what defines each, moving beyond photochemical or digital processes, is not what they are but what they are for. There is nothing inherent in such processes that determines their utility – moving image as popular entertainment, still image as scientific record, for example: rather, that lies in the domain of the cultural. The phenomenology of each is also defining: the still implies a past moment recorded, whereas the moving image provides an illusory presentness, and relate to the previous two examples which I have plucked at random: moving image as voyeurism, still as symbol, as fetish. To phrase it in terms of environmental psychology: the still and moving recorded photographic image offer different affordances. 

Campany notes that the still and moving image are phrased differently depending on context. To be confronted with a still image – even if it’s actually a sequence of 25 frames per second – in which nothing appears to move accentuates its stillness, anticipates motion to an almost unbearable degree, and invites scrutiny: which is this? Still or moving? To come across a moving image where one would expect a still – such as a flat LED screen on a gallery wall – frustrates the idea of stillness, accentuates the perception that a movie screen is a window rather than a terminal surface. And yet, paradoxically, the still image implies duration in a way that the moving image does not: through accentuating its extraction from a continuous present, the moments bracketing it, stretching out infinitely, are implicated. This does not happen in the moving image: the illusory presentness of film implies an immediacy unavailable in the still, and one is trapped inside the moment of the film in a way that does not happen in the still. These paradoxes, especially when still and moving images are set against one another, liberate extraordinary, profound and distinctive effects. 

This divergence deeply inflects the way narrative operates in each medium. At its most basic level, the moving image is a medium of narrative, even if that narrative is no more complex than ‘the blade of grass waved back and forth’. The still image, on the other hand, as with the painting, requires the imaginative engagement of the viewer to construct the narrative. Even when the images, moving or otherwise, are connected through editing or montage, the demand on imaginative engagement remains higher: it is, to the uninitiated, more effortful to ‘read’ a photobook than a short film, and this should not be seen as a difference in effectiveness but a difference in qualities. As Campany argues, ‘photojournalism requires journalism, because facts, however ‘powerful’, cannot speak for themselves’ (p.28); this cannot be said for video-journalism (should such a word exist), which has a wider range of communicative strategies and a more visually literature ‘readership’ (at least for the past several decades). 

I’ve mentioned that my fondness – partly born from necessity – of fixed-frame long takes makes my filmmaking more ‘photographic’. Operationally, this makes my work more akin to the large-format landscape photographer than my rapidly-moving landscape still photographic practice, chasing light and change. It also taps into a rich tradition of avant-garde filmmaking which eschews the rapid-fire editing of commercial film, allowing the viewer to ‘dwell’ in an image in a way similar to how they might view an image on a gallery wall. This problematises filmmaking, calling attention to the event of recording and implying the present of the filmmaker to a greater extent than if the viewer were carried along on an endless stream of montage. Crucially undermining the perceived function of filmmaking, it drains image of narrative: the longer a shot persists, by and large, the more the uneventfulness of daily life is implied, narrative being an artificial imposition on its random, meaningless flow. It also opens up space for the viewer to exert agency, to gaze around an image of their own volution. The fixed-frame long-take is a cinema of surplus, and many of my favourite directors – Michaelangelo Antonioni, Kelly Reichardt, Gideon Koppel – grasp this. There is much I have yet to understand and articulate on what is known in some circles – already rejected by many filmmakers – as ‘slow cinema’. This post is not the place to engage with this matter fully, but will be the focus of my research in the coming weeks. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

Returning to video

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It’s time to reflect on what’s happening with my practice since I – essentially – stopped shooting stills and moved on to video. It needs to be said, this hasn’t happened exactly like this – I’ve always shot stills alongside video, but video has always been project-based, not the casual shooting of stills. That’s changed – if I’m currently going out shooting, then it’s going to be video. 

I’ve learned lots. One of the first things is practical: if I’m looking at an image, whether still or moving, then I want to be able to look at it for a while. Hence, I need to make sure each take is around 30 seconds and – crucially – that I don’t mess around with ND filters, exposure comp, depth of field or any of that. I just need to set the shot up and let it run. The only thing I’m happy with changing is focus, to move that to where my attention goes, or where things are happening. 

This is instructive. It reminds me that there’s a pleasure in looking, whether the image is still or moving. There’s an ontological sameness, gazing, focussing on different parts of the image, weighing up, making sense, appraising. That’s probably because I’m looking at the image on a screen, the framing of an app reminding me of a certain parity. But that curiosity, and that meeting of inquiry with stimulus, is identical. 

But there’s a distinct difference in duration: to a certain extent, movement divorced from narrative, movement that’s reactive and reflexive, can appear abstract, ghostly. There is no hand making this movement: it’s not the movement of a car or a pan or a couple kissing. It’s movement not put on for the camera, but captured by it. It has agency beyond the frame. The world is revealed – or at least foregrounded – as alive and with its own agenda. 

It’s these kinds of movements that I seek out, have always sought out. Reeds waving in the wind. The play of patches of sun on concrete. A butterfly shooting across the frame. Clouds moving across the sky. Even the slightest wave of a dead twig suggests a continuity, foreshadows greater movement. 

Such movement, for me, jars against a too restrained, too formally literal composition. Composition that’s too neat, too obvious – this is the ground, this is the sky – imposed an order on the world that the movement demonstrates to be completely artificial. The shots I’m happiest with are ones you have to work at – using shallow depth of field to keep the moving trees blurred, having only the treetops against the sky, not having the banks of the river, looking up at the tree without roots or tips, avoiding horizontals. In the field I shot on Friday, there’s no structure to fix things, anchor things, like the motorway bridge. There’s no information. There’s just sense. I think, for this project, I’m moving towards the impressionistic. 

I’ve taken one or two shots that repeat the tree close-ups of ivy and weird shapes. These have fascinated me, for superficially, they are repetitions, but the slight movement provides a sense of the spatial completely different to the stills. In those, the tree is everything, and the background is scenery, whereas with moving image, the background has its own life, its own agency. It invites the viewer to look longer and more carefully. 

These are just tentative thoughts. I need to go back over David Campany’s Photography and Cinema (2008) to flesh this all out a bit. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

A video artist can be a filmmaker and a filmmaker can be a video artist but video art is not film and film is not video

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Not coming from a background in fine art, I’ve struggled with the fine art focus of much contemporary photography, much of which leaves me completely cold. I’ve also struggled to address this with tutors and peers, who have of occasion been quite definite that fine art isn’t such an integral part of contemporary photography as I think. And yet, on deciding for the current module to return to shooting video, it’s been indicative that I’ve been pointed in the direction of video art by everyone I’ve spoken with. 

If I’ve had any contact with video art, it’s generally been by accident or because there’s a crossover of some kind with a filmmaker. Every once in a while, I’ve come across video art in gallery spaces and the only one that has left any impression was a ridiculous black and wide film of a naked man bouncing on a trampoline from the 1960s, memorable only for its absurdity. I went to Mark Leckey’s retrospective at Tate Britain essentially because it was built around a motorway bridge, and I enjoyed it as an installation – less sure what I’d have made of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcoreif I’d come across it in isolation. Much of Agnes Varda’s installation work is an extension and reconfiguration of her films. Hassan Hajjaj’s recent exhibition at the Arnolfini included a brilliant film which was basically an extension of his portraits of musicians and performers, but playing with the juxtaposition so that the separate portraits appeared to be aware of one another. I’d had Tacita Dean recommended to me and went to her exhibition last year at the RA – and I’m afraid walked out after 10 minutes as I just didn’t get what on earth was supposed to be going on (without such knowledge, the whole thing was an ugly mess). 

It’s worth recalling the reasons for my return to video. First, with my new Sony, I’m now able to shoot video that looks the way I want it to look. Second, my background is in film and narrative form, primarily the novel. Third, I’m curious to learn just how video occurs in the context of the discipline of stills photography – I’ve heard repeatedly that working in video is something photographers do, but nothing about how that works and why it’s done. Last, I’m keen to bring what I’ve learned over the past year into the way I shoot the moving image and see what happens. 

The first book I tried engaging with, Still Moving(2008), is a collection of essays. It is, I swiftly discovered, an exercise in interrogating the medium, a solipsistic analysis of the technological, economic and ideological contexts of the making of still and moving images. The focus is here on the act, as often in academic works on photography, and rarely moves beyond that. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not interested in these conversations, at least not right now; what interests me is what I can learn and draw from my environment, physical and cultural, through the act of photographing. I have other means of doing this at my disposal – writing, walking, discussing, researching, looking, listening. When I listen to the world, what interests me is what I can hear and through experimentation, getting the most out of hearing; I’m much less interested in HOW I can hear, and it’s the same for me with photography. After a skim through of introductory paragraphs, Still Moving is consigned back to the shelf. 

The second, Moving Image(2015), is a collection of interviews, articles, reviews and the like, investigating the subject of video art. There is here, too, an overwhelming emphasis on interrogating the medium, a fascination with scratches on celluloid, repurposing tv adverts, the technologies of utopias and a telling discussion which attacks narrative cinema for being toxically ideological (I think there are better ways to destabilise ideologies than making difficult art which is only readable by your peer group). It is telling that Bill Viola, who I’d never heard of until beginning this investigation (such is the invisibility of video art beyond itself), and who makes work that is accessible and exquisitely crafted but philosophically astute (my personal definition of what makes for great art), has explicitly stated his gradual rejection of these obsessively abstract, obfuscating means of practice. 

In amongst this is the concept of ‘expanded cinema’, which envisions video art as a development of, not a reaction against, narrative film. Expanded cinema reconsiders the context in which the moving image can be experienced, whether in an art gallery, projected onto derelict buildings, through water, or whatever. I think this is useful as a defining concept that draws a line, however tentative, between the cinema-based film, in all its forms, I have come to develop considerable knowledge of, and video art. It – literally – expands cinema, suggesting novel opportunities and creative forms. In an era when the moving image is now nearly always experienced on a personal digital screen, this strikes me as crucially important. Other discussions comment on the relationship between film and context as a central part of the art – such that a work of video art can only be exhibited, indeed will only make sense, if the artist’s instructions for exhibition are followed. 

One of the great frustrations of video art – and one I suspect that keeps it from being better known – is its inaccessibility, which is a perhaps inevitable outcome of all the above. With non-time-based media, like photography, painting, sculpture, it’s easy to encounter this work second hand, through print and digital media. Even with time-based media such as cinema or theatre, it’s possible to encounter through DVD, scripts, streaming services, Youtube and so on. But video art appears difficult to experience remotely. There doesn’t seem to be a platform which lets you view video art: the majority of films being talked about aren’t available and so – and this is surely a bitter irony – the only way of accessing them is through the words of someone who isn’t the artists. There ARE platforms, but aimed at exhibitors and at a discouragingly high price tag. And whereas you can experience excerpts from a photobook online, there is not the complete caesura in experience as that between a still from a work of video art – which is an art of movement – and the video art itself. 

Anyway, the upshot of all this investigation is this: being a video artist and a filmmaker are not the same thing, though a filmmaker can also be a video artist (such as Agnes Varda, who is exemplary at both), and a video artist can also be a filmmaker (such as Steve McQueen, who likewise is exemplary at both). And the defining element, to me, is not to be found in interrogating the medium (which film has been doing anyway right from the outset – the Lumiere brothers played with still and moving images after all), but in the contexts in which video art is encountered. It is the markedly different possibilities and limitations of ‘expanded cinema’ which I will now need to investigate to see how my photography can be reconfigured as video art, rather than narrative film. Or whether I will continue to work as a filmmaker, but draw on the experience and knowledge acquired through the practice of photography. 

Beckman, K., & Ma, J. (eds.) 2008. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Kholeif, O. (ed.) 2015.Moving Image. London: Whitechapel Gallery.