David Claerbout
31 Mar - 24 Apr 2010
DAVID CLAERBOUT
31 March - 24 April 2010
In David Claerbout’s large-scale video projection Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, the disintegrating body of a U.S. fighter plane shot down by ‘friendly fire’ is caught suspended above a verdant undulating landscape, the contours of which are made evident by the shadows of clouds that roll gently and endlessly across its surface.
Whilst the fragments of the plane remain frozen in space and time, traceable to the momentary opening of a photographic shutter nearly four decades ago, the landscape against which they are set, filmed more recently, is caught in that state of an unfolding present tense that belongs to the moving image. (1)
To an audience well accustomed to a plethora of visual effects made possible by electronic and digital technologies and widely employed by the various armatures of the culture industry to create virtual worlds, this impossible conjuncture of the different spatio-temporal relationships of the still and moving image fashioned here by Claerbout should hardly come as a surprise. But it does. Even though or perhaps because it is so blatantly unspectacular, Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho is deeply fascinating. It holds our attention, I believe, through our inability to reconcile our understanding and expectations concerning the differences between photography and film, differences which have been thought to lie within the distinct ontologies of the still and moving image. (2)
To approach Claerbout’s work in this way is to summon up ways of thinking about different artistic mediums in terms of their ‘specificity’; about what fundamental characteristics or properties are seen to define a given medium and, at the same time, to distinguish it from other mediums. However, whilst I will use the notion of medium specificity to discuss Claerbout’s work, I want to do so without recourse to a form of essentialism that has undermined its credibility in the domains of both art history and film theory. Rather than asserting that each medium possesses unique features that are intrinsic, immutable and timeless, features that give it a singular identity, the argument presented here assumes that any medium remains open to change effected by varying historical conditions. It seems obvious that a medium can evolve ‘internally’ by virtue of technological developments that directly affect the nature of its material and physical support. But what is equally important is that a medium may be affected by factors external to it: for example, the medium of painting was transformed by the invention of photography. This highlights the fact that not only is a medium defined by historically relative and shifting perceptions of what it ‘is’, the perceptions of the differences between one medium and another may ultimately prove most important.
In the case of Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, what I think needs to be resisted is the temptation to regard such a work as exemplifying the ways in which electronic media and digital imaging have been seen as eroding the boundaries between mediums, leading to a fusion of forms and novel types of hybridity. The effect of the work itself is indeed quite contrary to this. What one actually experiences or indeed what one sees in this work is not the conflation of photography and film but a conjuncture of the two mediums in which neither ever loses its specificity. We are thus faced with a phenomenon in which two different mediums co-exist and seem to simultaneously occupy the same object. The projection screen here provides a point of intersection for the photographic and the filmic image.
The effect is that, far from negating the idea of medium specificity, Claerbout’s work opens it out for further exploration. In particular, what the work allows or perhaps invites the viewer to do is to reflect upon what we understand to be the features that define one medium in terms of the features that define another. In other words, what Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho does is to offer the possibility of critically engaging the photograph through film, and not merely in contradistinction to film. At the same time, the work opens out film to an analysis made available by photography. I think that the possibility of imagining photography through film and vice versa (with all the implications that this brings in its wake) lies at the heart of much of Claerbout’s work to date. But in order to understand what is at stake here, it is necessary to say something about the ways in which – both historically and philosophically – photography and film have been closely intertwined.
If it has often been taken for granted that the historical emergence of film was originally dependent upon the existence of technologies derived directly from photography, the philosophical bonds between the two mediums have assumed no less an orthodoxy in the realms of film theory. Significantly, the very first chapter of André Bazin’s classic text What is Cinema? is entitled ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, and the quest to define film by many other writers since has taken the same starting point. Bazin’s essay eloquently synthesizes a now familiar perspective on photography that privileges its indexical character and its power to summon up the real by virtue of its mechanical nature. Yet photography’s ‘realism’ is one that assumes a particular spatio-temporal character, one which Bazin implies through opening his essay with a reference to the origins of the visual arts in the primitive practice of embalming the dead, arresting the passage of time: ‘the preservation of life by a representation of life’. (3) It was left, of course, to Roland Barthes to draw out the full implications of the radically different kind of temporality that the photograph brings in its wake. (4)
For Barthes the photograph was a unique historical and ontological phenomenon. Its singularity lay with an entirely originary phenomenology of space and time in which the photograph gives rise to the contradictory sense that what is photographed is both spatially proximate yet temporally distant. The peculiar and paradoxical articulation of space and time that Barthes identifies with the photograph was also evident to some of the earliest commentators on the new medium, but it seems possible that it is only with the later advent of film that the discussion of photography comes to be dominated by the concept of time. Moreover, when photography and film come to be compared, something of the spatio-temporal ambivalence that Barthes sees as endemic to the photographic image is lost, and replaced by an almost exclusive preoccupation with the photograph as marking a moment that is firmly and irretrievably located in the past.
Seizing on Barthes’s notion that the photograph can never testify to the presence of its referent but only to the fact of its ‘having been there’, Christian Metz has argued that the prevailing sense with film is ‘There it is.’ Film is able to convince the viewer of the actual presence of something because of its ability to render movement. The reasons for this, according to Metz, are twofold. By presenting us with successive images of objects moving within space, film lends them a greater corporeality, and they therefore appear to us as more ‘real’ than in the photograph. Moreover, the distinction between the material properties of an object and its representation – which is always evident in a photograph – ‘dissolves on the threshold of motion.’ This is because movement can never be represented: it is always actual movement and the viewer always sees it as being present.
Because movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality. In truth, one cannot even ‘reproduce’ a movement: one can only re-produce it in a second production belonging to the same order of reality, for the spectator, as the first. It is not sufficient to say that film is more ‘living’, more ‘animated’ than still photography, or even that filmed objects are more ‘materialized’. In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of impression, the real presence of motion. (5)
The distinctions between film and photography thus appear as stark and absolute: on the one hand we have movement that not only is present but also endows the image with ‘presence’, and, on the other hand, we have a moment frozen in time and an immobility that is lodged within an ever-receding past that can only testify to an absence. It would seem foolish to argue against this perspective (although I will later have cause to question its rigidity). Indeed, some of Claerbout’s video installations would appear to juxtapose film and photography precisely with attention to these distinctions. In addition to Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, works such as Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, 1932 and Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910 all make use of archival photographs in which a historical past is summoned up not only through the image itself but also through the title of the work. It would be difficult to deny that these works are permeated by the sense of loss that the photograph inevitably brings in its wake and are suffused with a certain melancholia. Whilst in one work an image taken from a postcard made in the early twentieth century presents a rural landscape that is itself lodged in the past, recalling as it does a time before the onset of modernity, the other, a scene of a group of children in the playground of a nursery school, evokes an innocence made all the more poignant by our knowledge of events yet to come. Both, it would seem, lend themselves to a reading in the light of Barthes’s formulation of the particular temporal character of the photograph that he draws from looking at the portrait of a young man awaiting execution: ‘I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe an anterior future of which death is at stake . . . I shudder over a catastrophe that has already occurred.’ (6)
Barthes’s sporadic writings on photography always struggled to find a suitable way of linguistically expressing the intractable nature of the photograph’s temporality, whether through terms of what he described as ‘an illogical conjuncture of here-now and the there-then’ or in the paradoxical, grammatical notion of an ‘anterior future’. Ultimately, however, the difficulties that gave rise to such terminological ambiguity would be surrendered, by many who have followed Barthes, to an overriding sense and interpretation of the photograph as bound to an instantaneous moment in time that inevitably and inexorably recedes into the past. Yet if the works of David Claerbout might seem at first to lend weight to such an understanding of the photograph, they must, I think, be read – at the very least – as bringing it into question.
An ‘illogical conjuncture of here-now and the there-then’ might be a suitable way to begin describing a work such as Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho with its visible intersection of filmic and photographic temporalities; with the appearance of motion in the large oak tree or the small saplings blown by the wind amidst the encompassing stillness of the images in Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910 and Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, 1932. However, the works themselves undo any simple dichotomies between the filmic and the photographic, between present and past, between movement and stasis. The physical and imaginary homogeneity of both sides of the equation unravels within a single, undifferentiated and unified space that each literally, simultaneously and inextricably occupy. Yet despite this imperceptible interweaving of the photographic and the filmic within the unified surface of the image, we cannot say that either medium forfeits its specific identity. The work, we might say, would seem to belong to both film and photography but, then again, it would appear to be neither strictly a film nor simply a photograph.
As a means of approaching what might be involved in this intimate juxtaposition of film and photography, of movement and stillness, we can turn to Raymond Bellour’s analysis of what happens when we are confronted by the occurrence of the image of the photograph in certain examples of classical narrative cinema. Whilst Bellour grants that photographs represented as objects within a film are used to advance a story, and that they are therefore caught up in the time of an unfolding narrative, their appearance nonetheless is problematic for the film’s diegesis. In the examples he gives, the photograph is used as an emblematic motif around which the plot of the film might hinge (often at points in the narrative in which the passage of time is being marked through acts of remembrance), yet at precisely this moment the temporal flow of the film is arrested, its narrative momentum suspended, albeit briefly. At this point, at which ‘the film seems to freeze, to suspend itself’, the viewer is made aware of two kinds of temporality: that which belongs to the film and the intrinsic forward movement of the narrative, and that which is the time of viewing the film and which carries the phenomenological force of the here and now. Paradoxically, it is the photograph caught on film that directs our attention to the present – even as it functions within the narrative of the film in accordance with its predominant cultural forms to symbolize the past.
The presence of the photograph, diverse, diffuse, ambiguous, thus has the effect of uncoupling the spectator 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 ordinary imaginary of the cinema . . . The photo becomes a stop within a stop, a freeze-frame within a freeze-frame; between it and the film from which it emerges, two kinds of time blend together, always and inextricable, but without becoming confused. (7)
Extending this argument, Garrett Stewart notes that Bellour’s analysis is constrained by the cinematic phenomena he uses. (8) The placing of a photograph as an identifiable object within the illusory 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, ultimately leaves it in place. What Stewart contrasts with this phenomenon of an image-within-an-image is the instance of the true freeze-frame, where ‘the difference in question is between imaged motionlessness and the “motionless” image.’ It is only in the case of the latter, when the elemental unit of film itself – a single photogram – is isolated and then multiplied and projected, that the ‘the ordinary imaginary of the cinema’ is truly critically interrogated. Since the freeze-frame is actual stasis, and not merely its representation, its appearance on the screen marks a hiatus, not only in the temporal momentum of the film’s narrative but also, potentially, in the illusion of reality to which it is bound. The freeze-frame, argues Stewart, allows the possibility of cinematic reflexivity, although interestingly this is achieved through something that might be deemed not to belong to the medium of film and that may take us outside of the film. With the freeze-frame the film images itself: ‘The film has become, so to speak, transparent to itself, but only in the moment, and at the price, of its cancelled succession, its negation as a moving picture.’ (9)
It is necessary here to draw together the notion of the effects of the stilling of the moving image in the freeze-frame – theorized by Garrett Stewart as a potential moment of filmic reflexivity – with the idea of the film’s ‘presentness’. The idea that film reveals to us actions or events that we take to be immediately present has been, as I noted earlier, a founding principle in discussions of the medium. Yet what does it mean when it is claimed, as it was by Robbe-Grillet, that ‘the essential characteristic of the [film] image is its presentness’, and that ‘by its very nature what we see on the screen is in the act of happening, we are given the gesture itself, not an account of it’? Obviously, such a claim does not mean that we cannot comprehend or recognize distinctions between ‘past’ and ‘present’ or indeed ‘future’ as these are signified within the codes and conventions of narrative film. To this extent narrative film shares with literature (albeit in a more restricted way) the ability to articulate different tenses. We need, therefore, to distinguish between ‘presentness’, as in the sense of the present tense, and that which we experience as being present in real-life time. Whereas the present tense is a property of (filmic) language, the latter belongs to our encounter with the perceptual phenomena of the film’s presentation in the here and now. It is, of course, in the foregrounding of an experiential ‘here and now’, in the convergence of real time with screen time, that film is able to achieve a ‘presence’ that is, in Stewart’s terms, ‘reflexive’.
Two points interest me here. Firstly, reflexivity. The notion of reflexivity, whether one is concerned with film or photography or painting or whatever, has been central to theories of medium specificity. Indeed, we can observe that it is only through reflexivity – or as Clement Greenberg called it, a process of self criticism – that it has been thought possible to identify those properties and characteristics that are peculiar and unique to a given medium, in other words, to define its ‘essence’. Yet it would seem from Stewart’s example of the freeze-frame that reflexivity in film is best, or perhaps only, possible through the deployment of a device that does not ‘belong’ to film, one that runs counter to common assumptions about the medium and the centrality of movement to it. Stasis or virtual stasis in various guises, ranging from the lack of movement of the camera to the fixity of objects placed before it, has always been regarded as uncinematic. But the sudden appearance of the freeze-frame is, according to Stewart, such a fundamental rupture in the filmic text that it creates a kind of acinema. I am tempted to call such an acinematic form photography.
Secondly, at this moment of reflexivity, a point where the film folds back upon itself, it paradoxically surrenders its autonomy. Precisely when we might expect a kind of closure the film reveals – we could say discloses – itself. It is being watched. In its suspension of the momentum of the narrative, the stilled image flows out into the here and now of the time of viewing This is when Bellour’s ‘pensive spectator’ begins to think.
Neither Bellour’s nor Stewart’s line of thought carries as much critical edge if transposed from the domain of narrative cinema to that of contemporary art practice, where ‘reflexivity’ has been an avant-garde gambit – particularly as regards the deconstruction of the medium of film – for some time now. Yet I think they offer useful insights into what might be involved in the intimate juxtaposition of the moving and still image in the work of David Claerbout. The main point that I want to develop here is that his work stages a radical conjuncture of photography and film through which each is exposed to the other, each is made open in terms of a reading through the other. An entry point to such an analysis is possibly through a consideration of the time of, and within, the image.
In the works of Claerbout that I have already mentioned, the passage of time is gauged by subtle movements in natural phenomena, such as the shadows of clouds cast on a hillside or the swaying of the branches and leaves of a tree blown in the wind. However, the actual movement we observe is minimal: not much ‘happens’. Whatever movement occurs is endlessly repeated, and since the transition point within the cycle or repetition is imperceptible, the viewer experiences an unbounded duration. The evident absence of any transformation from one state to another leaves the impression of time standing still. If not actual stasis, the effect comes close to it. If film, in this instance, drifts towards the photographic, a movement in the opposite direction seems also to be possible. To explore this further we can turn to Claerbout’s photographic work.
Alongside his large-scale video installations, Claerbout has continually made still photographic work. Most of this has taken the form of series of moderately large lightbox transparencies. Views of Venice or landscape scenes, shot in the twilight at either dawn or dusk, required lengthy exposure times after which the image was still barely registered on the light-sensitized surface of the photographic film. As a result, even when installed in conditions of total darkness, the image contained within the illuminated photographic transparency is imperceptible to the viewer on first entering the space. Only after a considerable time – during which the viewer’s eyes adjust to the negligible levels of illumination – does the image become slowly visible. The viewer’s experience of these works is thus analogous to the actual process of manufacturing a photographic print in a darkroom, where the developing image gradually emerges. Temporal duration therefore is an integral component of these works, the time of their production mirroring the time of their reception. Curiously, Claerbout’s use of pre-digital optical and chemical technologies in his still photographic work resuscitates a qualitative feature of the medium in its infancy. Walter Benjamin once noted that part of the fascination of some of the earliest photographic portraits lay with their particular relationship to the passage of time, resulting from the low light sensitivity of photographic plates requiring prolonged exposures. ‘The procedure itself’, he says, ‘caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying past it; during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject as it were grew into the picture, in the sharpest contrast with appearances in the snapshot...’. (10)
Whilst later technical developments enabled the instantaneity of the photograph, violently severing the individual moment from the passage of time, in these early images Benjamin perceived time as leaking into the image through a process of duration.
Contrary to assertions that photography leads to the atomization and fragmentation of our sense of time, rendering reality as a collection of isolated and discreet moments, Claerbout’s work reinvests the photographic image with time, lending to it an objective durational presence. And whilst this is more clearly evident in the photographic works, it also helps explain the effect of the video installations. Within the differentiated surface of these images, on which the static and moving image coexist, there may not be any actual convergence of the photographic and the filmic, but there is nonetheless an exchange that takes place between them. It is as if the parts of the image that remain still stole something from those that move, giving credence to Claerbout’s desire to ‘unfreeze the photograph’. This is a material and not merely a mental incidence.
It can hardly have escaped notice that the discussion of the still photograph in Claerbout’s work has so far failed to draw explicit attention to the fact that none of these images have the physical form that the photograph has most commonly taken. None of them are made to be seen as photographic prints, as images transferred onto a piece of paper, and their appearance in the present publication in such a form, as documentation, belies a fundamental aspect of the viewer’s direct experience of them.
It has often been argued that the literal and palpable existence of the photograph as an actual physical object serves to underline a particular modality of vision that is marked by photography’s sense of ‘possession’ of the material object that it pictures. The ‘realism’ of photography, and the evidential testimony to the existence of things, converges with the existence of the photograph as a thing in itself. Moreover, there is also a sense in which photography’s atomization of time, its freezing of a singular moment isolated and abstracted from the temporal flow, finds concrete form in a thing that can be held in the hand, literally grasped. Thus it could be argued that Barthes’ influential dualistic model of a phenomenology of photography, split between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘there and then’, is premised upon a single, if the most common, physical manifestation of the photograph. My argument here is that the act of continually shuffling between the dichotomies of absence and presence, past and present, proximity and distance, begins and ends with the palpable existence of the photographic print itself. As Philippe Dubois has noted:
This separation within the representation is what actually informs the effect of looking at a photograph, inducing perpetual movement on the part of the spectator-subject: we pass continually from the object’s here-and-now to its elsewhere-in-the-past when looking at the image . . . The photograph acts as an instrument of travel in time and memory. To see something that existed, somewhere, sometime, something that is much more present in our imagination now that we know it has actually disappeared – to see it and not be able to touch, pick up, or manipulate it – is to be frustrated by a metonymic substitute for the thing that is gone forever, now a simple trace on a piece of paper instead of a single palpable memory. The frustration is all the stronger for the indexical substitute signifies the absence of the referent, offering itself, qua representation, as a concrete object endowed with real, physical substance. (11)
If this is the case, what is the effect of those material and objective forms that the photograph can take that would seem to go some way to ‘dematerializing’ the photographic image? A photographic transparency – whether enlarged and illuminated from behind (as with Claerbout’s lightboxes) or projected onto a screen – is stripped of the palpable material support of the image that defines the phenomenological status of the photographic print. We might argue that as a consequence of this, the projected photographic image also has a very different relationship to time. If the tactile and physical existence of the photographic print ‘functions to fix a being-that-has been (a presence in the present that is always past)’, could it be that the projected still photograph ‘functions as a coming into being (a presence always presently constituting itself)’? (12)
The projected image is in a continual process of being reconstituted. Dependent upon the continuous supply of artificial illumination, it is always ‘live’. We might say that our experience of the projected image’s existence in time – as taking time – is more akin to watching a film than looking at a photographic print. Certainly it shares with the film the same conditions of viewing: the projection of a luminous image in a darkened space. Such forms of convergence might suggest that the distinction between the photographic and filmic is less secure than is usually assumed.
Others, however, would contend that the distinction between the projected photograph and film has been and remains absolute. Even when we are dealing with the freeze-frame of a film or a projected still photograph (which might be perceptually indistinguishable), if ‘you know that what you are watching is a film, even a film of what appears to be a photograph, it is always justifiable to expect that the image might move.’ (13)
Certainly there is something to this. The knowledge that what we are watching is a film predisposes us to anticipate the possibility of movement and expect it, at some time, to occur. This is what happens, of course, in Chris Marker’s La Jetée. It also explains the tension that accompanies David Claerbout’s video projection Four Persons Standing, where our expectation is not met and our anticipation is thwarted since movement never occurs. Yet is this argument not, traceable as it is to the idea of fundamental distinctions that can be made between mediums on the basis of their differing technologies, untenable in the face of what electronic and digital technologies are capable of? And have these new technologies, in erasing the empirical boundaries between the old technologies of film and photography, not simultaneously undermined any obvious distinction that we might wish to make between the moving and the still image?
The progression of my argument has led to questions that would seem to run counter to my earlier assertion that the concept of the medium remains important and useful. Yet, to repeat myself, mediums are technologies but they are never reducible to technology. A medium is always constituted within a particular social and discursive matrix. As a technology that is always socially and discursively positioned, a medium is a historical phenomenon. And if photography and film are not immutable entities, it is not only because of any transformations in their technological foundations, but also because what they ‘mean’ is always historically fluid. However, it seems possible that, whilst technological developments have certainly eroded any simple distinctions between the moving and the still image, the categories of ‘photography’ and ‘film’ remain the only ways in which we can talk about such things. The concept of the medium is indispensable, it seems, even in ‘the age of the post-medium condition’.
One final point. As I suggested earlier, if a particular medium is defined in terms of its distinction from other mediums, it is, logically, ‘unthinkable’ in its own terms. The pursuit of a medium’s essential properties by means of a kind of auto-reflexivity is an impossibility inasmuch as the medium is continually caught in a process of being defined by what it is not rather than (or, more precisely, simultaneously as) by what it is. Therefore what is deemed as lying ‘outside’ of a particular medium will always be present and effective in defining what it is. When Greenberg wrote about how one defined the specificity of a medium, he saw this as a process whereby one discovered its ‘limiting conditions’. Such a process was necessary in order to ‘entrench’ the medium ‘more firmly in its area of competence’. Yet perhaps the more interesting and productive area (for artists and critics) has been at this limit point: an area of ‘undecidability’. And maybe this is what David Claerbout’s work faces us with, in the possibility of a photograph that unfolds in time (but is not a film) and a film that is stilled in time (but is not a photograph).
David Green
Notes
(1) This work was based on a photograph taken by the Japanese photographer Hiromichi Mine a year before he died. David Claerbout returned in 2000 to the place where the original photograph was taken. Positioning himself as close as possible to the point from which Mine’s image was taken, he proceeded to take at regular intervals numerous digital photographs. These have been morphed by a computer programme to produce a ‘moving image’. The full title of the work is Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho (reconstruction after Hiromichi Mine ‘Friendly Fire’).
(2) It may seem strange in an essay that argues medium specificity that I use the term ‘film’ to refer to works by David Claerbout that are either video-based or use digital technology to produce animated, moving images. Whilst I recognize the necessity to distinguish these various ways of producing the ‘moving image’ that is my primary concern here, the nomenclature of film is adopted for reasons of convenience and convention.
(3) See André Bazin ‘The Ontology of Photography’, in The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography, ed. by Peninah R. Petruch, vol. 2 (New York: Dutton Paperback, n.d.).
(4) The key early essay by Barthes is 'The Rhetoric of the Image' in Image, Music, Text, a collection of essays by Roland Barthes selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). In the same volume in two other essays, 'The Third Meaning' and 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein', Barthes discusses issues relating to the cinematic 'still' and writes suggestively of fundamental distinctions to be made between film and photography.
(5) Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 9.
(6) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 96.
(7) Raymond Bellour, ‘The Pensive Spectator’, Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987), p. 10.
(8) See Garrett Stewart, ‘Photo-gravure: Death, Photography and Film Narrative’, Wide Angle 9, no. 6 (1987), pp. 11–40. Stewart expanded the issues first raised in this essay in his later book Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
(9) Stewart 1987 (see note 8), p. 19
(10) Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, trans. by Stanley Mitchell, Screen, no. 13 (1972), pp. 5–27.
(11) Philippe Dubois, ‘Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses’, trans. by Lynne Kirby, in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. by Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 167.
(12) The phraseology here (emphasis added) is taken from Vivian Sobchack ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic Presence’, in Materialities of Communication, ed. by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 83–106.
(13) Noel Carroll, ‘Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image’, in Philosophy and Film, ed. by Cynthia A. Freeland and Thomas E. Wartenburg (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 73.
31 March - 24 April 2010
In David Claerbout’s large-scale video projection Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, the disintegrating body of a U.S. fighter plane shot down by ‘friendly fire’ is caught suspended above a verdant undulating landscape, the contours of which are made evident by the shadows of clouds that roll gently and endlessly across its surface.
Whilst the fragments of the plane remain frozen in space and time, traceable to the momentary opening of a photographic shutter nearly four decades ago, the landscape against which they are set, filmed more recently, is caught in that state of an unfolding present tense that belongs to the moving image. (1)
To an audience well accustomed to a plethora of visual effects made possible by electronic and digital technologies and widely employed by the various armatures of the culture industry to create virtual worlds, this impossible conjuncture of the different spatio-temporal relationships of the still and moving image fashioned here by Claerbout should hardly come as a surprise. But it does. Even though or perhaps because it is so blatantly unspectacular, Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho is deeply fascinating. It holds our attention, I believe, through our inability to reconcile our understanding and expectations concerning the differences between photography and film, differences which have been thought to lie within the distinct ontologies of the still and moving image. (2)
To approach Claerbout’s work in this way is to summon up ways of thinking about different artistic mediums in terms of their ‘specificity’; about what fundamental characteristics or properties are seen to define a given medium and, at the same time, to distinguish it from other mediums. However, whilst I will use the notion of medium specificity to discuss Claerbout’s work, I want to do so without recourse to a form of essentialism that has undermined its credibility in the domains of both art history and film theory. Rather than asserting that each medium possesses unique features that are intrinsic, immutable and timeless, features that give it a singular identity, the argument presented here assumes that any medium remains open to change effected by varying historical conditions. It seems obvious that a medium can evolve ‘internally’ by virtue of technological developments that directly affect the nature of its material and physical support. But what is equally important is that a medium may be affected by factors external to it: for example, the medium of painting was transformed by the invention of photography. This highlights the fact that not only is a medium defined by historically relative and shifting perceptions of what it ‘is’, the perceptions of the differences between one medium and another may ultimately prove most important.
In the case of Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, what I think needs to be resisted is the temptation to regard such a work as exemplifying the ways in which electronic media and digital imaging have been seen as eroding the boundaries between mediums, leading to a fusion of forms and novel types of hybridity. The effect of the work itself is indeed quite contrary to this. What one actually experiences or indeed what one sees in this work is not the conflation of photography and film but a conjuncture of the two mediums in which neither ever loses its specificity. We are thus faced with a phenomenon in which two different mediums co-exist and seem to simultaneously occupy the same object. The projection screen here provides a point of intersection for the photographic and the filmic image.
The effect is that, far from negating the idea of medium specificity, Claerbout’s work opens it out for further exploration. In particular, what the work allows or perhaps invites the viewer to do is to reflect upon what we understand to be the features that define one medium in terms of the features that define another. In other words, what Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho does is to offer the possibility of critically engaging the photograph through film, and not merely in contradistinction to film. At the same time, the work opens out film to an analysis made available by photography. I think that the possibility of imagining photography through film and vice versa (with all the implications that this brings in its wake) lies at the heart of much of Claerbout’s work to date. But in order to understand what is at stake here, it is necessary to say something about the ways in which – both historically and philosophically – photography and film have been closely intertwined.
If it has often been taken for granted that the historical emergence of film was originally dependent upon the existence of technologies derived directly from photography, the philosophical bonds between the two mediums have assumed no less an orthodoxy in the realms of film theory. Significantly, the very first chapter of André Bazin’s classic text What is Cinema? is entitled ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, and the quest to define film by many other writers since has taken the same starting point. Bazin’s essay eloquently synthesizes a now familiar perspective on photography that privileges its indexical character and its power to summon up the real by virtue of its mechanical nature. Yet photography’s ‘realism’ is one that assumes a particular spatio-temporal character, one which Bazin implies through opening his essay with a reference to the origins of the visual arts in the primitive practice of embalming the dead, arresting the passage of time: ‘the preservation of life by a representation of life’. (3) It was left, of course, to Roland Barthes to draw out the full implications of the radically different kind of temporality that the photograph brings in its wake. (4)
For Barthes the photograph was a unique historical and ontological phenomenon. Its singularity lay with an entirely originary phenomenology of space and time in which the photograph gives rise to the contradictory sense that what is photographed is both spatially proximate yet temporally distant. The peculiar and paradoxical articulation of space and time that Barthes identifies with the photograph was also evident to some of the earliest commentators on the new medium, but it seems possible that it is only with the later advent of film that the discussion of photography comes to be dominated by the concept of time. Moreover, when photography and film come to be compared, something of the spatio-temporal ambivalence that Barthes sees as endemic to the photographic image is lost, and replaced by an almost exclusive preoccupation with the photograph as marking a moment that is firmly and irretrievably located in the past.
Seizing on Barthes’s notion that the photograph can never testify to the presence of its referent but only to the fact of its ‘having been there’, Christian Metz has argued that the prevailing sense with film is ‘There it is.’ Film is able to convince the viewer of the actual presence of something because of its ability to render movement. The reasons for this, according to Metz, are twofold. By presenting us with successive images of objects moving within space, film lends them a greater corporeality, and they therefore appear to us as more ‘real’ than in the photograph. Moreover, the distinction between the material properties of an object and its representation – which is always evident in a photograph – ‘dissolves on the threshold of motion.’ This is because movement can never be represented: it is always actual movement and the viewer always sees it as being present.
Because movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality. In truth, one cannot even ‘reproduce’ a movement: one can only re-produce it in a second production belonging to the same order of reality, for the spectator, as the first. It is not sufficient to say that film is more ‘living’, more ‘animated’ than still photography, or even that filmed objects are more ‘materialized’. In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of impression, the real presence of motion. (5)
The distinctions between film and photography thus appear as stark and absolute: on the one hand we have movement that not only is present but also endows the image with ‘presence’, and, on the other hand, we have a moment frozen in time and an immobility that is lodged within an ever-receding past that can only testify to an absence. It would seem foolish to argue against this perspective (although I will later have cause to question its rigidity). Indeed, some of Claerbout’s video installations would appear to juxtapose film and photography precisely with attention to these distinctions. In addition to Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, works such as Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, 1932 and Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910 all make use of archival photographs in which a historical past is summoned up not only through the image itself but also through the title of the work. It would be difficult to deny that these works are permeated by the sense of loss that the photograph inevitably brings in its wake and are suffused with a certain melancholia. Whilst in one work an image taken from a postcard made in the early twentieth century presents a rural landscape that is itself lodged in the past, recalling as it does a time before the onset of modernity, the other, a scene of a group of children in the playground of a nursery school, evokes an innocence made all the more poignant by our knowledge of events yet to come. Both, it would seem, lend themselves to a reading in the light of Barthes’s formulation of the particular temporal character of the photograph that he draws from looking at the portrait of a young man awaiting execution: ‘I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe an anterior future of which death is at stake . . . I shudder over a catastrophe that has already occurred.’ (6)
Barthes’s sporadic writings on photography always struggled to find a suitable way of linguistically expressing the intractable nature of the photograph’s temporality, whether through terms of what he described as ‘an illogical conjuncture of here-now and the there-then’ or in the paradoxical, grammatical notion of an ‘anterior future’. Ultimately, however, the difficulties that gave rise to such terminological ambiguity would be surrendered, by many who have followed Barthes, to an overriding sense and interpretation of the photograph as bound to an instantaneous moment in time that inevitably and inexorably recedes into the past. Yet if the works of David Claerbout might seem at first to lend weight to such an understanding of the photograph, they must, I think, be read – at the very least – as bringing it into question.
An ‘illogical conjuncture of here-now and the there-then’ might be a suitable way to begin describing a work such as Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho with its visible intersection of filmic and photographic temporalities; with the appearance of motion in the large oak tree or the small saplings blown by the wind amidst the encompassing stillness of the images in Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910 and Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, 1932. However, the works themselves undo any simple dichotomies between the filmic and the photographic, between present and past, between movement and stasis. The physical and imaginary homogeneity of both sides of the equation unravels within a single, undifferentiated and unified space that each literally, simultaneously and inextricably occupy. Yet despite this imperceptible interweaving of the photographic and the filmic within the unified surface of the image, we cannot say that either medium forfeits its specific identity. The work, we might say, would seem to belong to both film and photography but, then again, it would appear to be neither strictly a film nor simply a photograph.
As a means of approaching what might be involved in this intimate juxtaposition of film and photography, of movement and stillness, we can turn to Raymond Bellour’s analysis of what happens when we are confronted by the occurrence of the image of the photograph in certain examples of classical narrative cinema. Whilst Bellour grants that photographs represented as objects within a film are used to advance a story, and that they are therefore caught up in the time of an unfolding narrative, their appearance nonetheless is problematic for the film’s diegesis. In the examples he gives, the photograph is used as an emblematic motif around which the plot of the film might hinge (often at points in the narrative in which the passage of time is being marked through acts of remembrance), yet at precisely this moment the temporal flow of the film is arrested, its narrative momentum suspended, albeit briefly. At this point, at which ‘the film seems to freeze, to suspend itself’, the viewer is made aware of two kinds of temporality: that which belongs to the film and the intrinsic forward movement of the narrative, and that which is the time of viewing the film and which carries the phenomenological force of the here and now. Paradoxically, it is the photograph caught on film that directs our attention to the present – even as it functions within the narrative of the film in accordance with its predominant cultural forms to symbolize the past.
The presence of the photograph, diverse, diffuse, ambiguous, thus has the effect of uncoupling the spectator 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 ordinary imaginary of the cinema . . . The photo becomes a stop within a stop, a freeze-frame within a freeze-frame; between it and the film from which it emerges, two kinds of time blend together, always and inextricable, but without becoming confused. (7)
Extending this argument, Garrett Stewart notes that Bellour’s analysis is constrained by the cinematic phenomena he uses. (8) The placing of a photograph as an identifiable object within the illusory 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, ultimately leaves it in place. What Stewart contrasts with this phenomenon of an image-within-an-image is the instance of the true freeze-frame, where ‘the difference in question is between imaged motionlessness and the “motionless” image.’ It is only in the case of the latter, when the elemental unit of film itself – a single photogram – is isolated and then multiplied and projected, that the ‘the ordinary imaginary of the cinema’ is truly critically interrogated. Since the freeze-frame is actual stasis, and not merely its representation, its appearance on the screen marks a hiatus, not only in the temporal momentum of the film’s narrative but also, potentially, in the illusion of reality to which it is bound. The freeze-frame, argues Stewart, allows the possibility of cinematic reflexivity, although interestingly this is achieved through something that might be deemed not to belong to the medium of film and that may take us outside of the film. With the freeze-frame the film images itself: ‘The film has become, so to speak, transparent to itself, but only in the moment, and at the price, of its cancelled succession, its negation as a moving picture.’ (9)
It is necessary here to draw together the notion of the effects of the stilling of the moving image in the freeze-frame – theorized by Garrett Stewart as a potential moment of filmic reflexivity – with the idea of the film’s ‘presentness’. The idea that film reveals to us actions or events that we take to be immediately present has been, as I noted earlier, a founding principle in discussions of the medium. Yet what does it mean when it is claimed, as it was by Robbe-Grillet, that ‘the essential characteristic of the [film] image is its presentness’, and that ‘by its very nature what we see on the screen is in the act of happening, we are given the gesture itself, not an account of it’? Obviously, such a claim does not mean that we cannot comprehend or recognize distinctions between ‘past’ and ‘present’ or indeed ‘future’ as these are signified within the codes and conventions of narrative film. To this extent narrative film shares with literature (albeit in a more restricted way) the ability to articulate different tenses. We need, therefore, to distinguish between ‘presentness’, as in the sense of the present tense, and that which we experience as being present in real-life time. Whereas the present tense is a property of (filmic) language, the latter belongs to our encounter with the perceptual phenomena of the film’s presentation in the here and now. It is, of course, in the foregrounding of an experiential ‘here and now’, in the convergence of real time with screen time, that film is able to achieve a ‘presence’ that is, in Stewart’s terms, ‘reflexive’.
Two points interest me here. Firstly, reflexivity. The notion of reflexivity, whether one is concerned with film or photography or painting or whatever, has been central to theories of medium specificity. Indeed, we can observe that it is only through reflexivity – or as Clement Greenberg called it, a process of self criticism – that it has been thought possible to identify those properties and characteristics that are peculiar and unique to a given medium, in other words, to define its ‘essence’. Yet it would seem from Stewart’s example of the freeze-frame that reflexivity in film is best, or perhaps only, possible through the deployment of a device that does not ‘belong’ to film, one that runs counter to common assumptions about the medium and the centrality of movement to it. Stasis or virtual stasis in various guises, ranging from the lack of movement of the camera to the fixity of objects placed before it, has always been regarded as uncinematic. But the sudden appearance of the freeze-frame is, according to Stewart, such a fundamental rupture in the filmic text that it creates a kind of acinema. I am tempted to call such an acinematic form photography.
Secondly, at this moment of reflexivity, a point where the film folds back upon itself, it paradoxically surrenders its autonomy. Precisely when we might expect a kind of closure the film reveals – we could say discloses – itself. It is being watched. In its suspension of the momentum of the narrative, the stilled image flows out into the here and now of the time of viewing This is when Bellour’s ‘pensive spectator’ begins to think.
Neither Bellour’s nor Stewart’s line of thought carries as much critical edge if transposed from the domain of narrative cinema to that of contemporary art practice, where ‘reflexivity’ has been an avant-garde gambit – particularly as regards the deconstruction of the medium of film – for some time now. Yet I think they offer useful insights into what might be involved in the intimate juxtaposition of the moving and still image in the work of David Claerbout. The main point that I want to develop here is that his work stages a radical conjuncture of photography and film through which each is exposed to the other, each is made open in terms of a reading through the other. An entry point to such an analysis is possibly through a consideration of the time of, and within, the image.
In the works of Claerbout that I have already mentioned, the passage of time is gauged by subtle movements in natural phenomena, such as the shadows of clouds cast on a hillside or the swaying of the branches and leaves of a tree blown in the wind. However, the actual movement we observe is minimal: not much ‘happens’. Whatever movement occurs is endlessly repeated, and since the transition point within the cycle or repetition is imperceptible, the viewer experiences an unbounded duration. The evident absence of any transformation from one state to another leaves the impression of time standing still. If not actual stasis, the effect comes close to it. If film, in this instance, drifts towards the photographic, a movement in the opposite direction seems also to be possible. To explore this further we can turn to Claerbout’s photographic work.
Alongside his large-scale video installations, Claerbout has continually made still photographic work. Most of this has taken the form of series of moderately large lightbox transparencies. Views of Venice or landscape scenes, shot in the twilight at either dawn or dusk, required lengthy exposure times after which the image was still barely registered on the light-sensitized surface of the photographic film. As a result, even when installed in conditions of total darkness, the image contained within the illuminated photographic transparency is imperceptible to the viewer on first entering the space. Only after a considerable time – during which the viewer’s eyes adjust to the negligible levels of illumination – does the image become slowly visible. The viewer’s experience of these works is thus analogous to the actual process of manufacturing a photographic print in a darkroom, where the developing image gradually emerges. Temporal duration therefore is an integral component of these works, the time of their production mirroring the time of their reception. Curiously, Claerbout’s use of pre-digital optical and chemical technologies in his still photographic work resuscitates a qualitative feature of the medium in its infancy. Walter Benjamin once noted that part of the fascination of some of the earliest photographic portraits lay with their particular relationship to the passage of time, resulting from the low light sensitivity of photographic plates requiring prolonged exposures. ‘The procedure itself’, he says, ‘caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying past it; during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject as it were grew into the picture, in the sharpest contrast with appearances in the snapshot...’. (10)
Whilst later technical developments enabled the instantaneity of the photograph, violently severing the individual moment from the passage of time, in these early images Benjamin perceived time as leaking into the image through a process of duration.
Contrary to assertions that photography leads to the atomization and fragmentation of our sense of time, rendering reality as a collection of isolated and discreet moments, Claerbout’s work reinvests the photographic image with time, lending to it an objective durational presence. And whilst this is more clearly evident in the photographic works, it also helps explain the effect of the video installations. Within the differentiated surface of these images, on which the static and moving image coexist, there may not be any actual convergence of the photographic and the filmic, but there is nonetheless an exchange that takes place between them. It is as if the parts of the image that remain still stole something from those that move, giving credence to Claerbout’s desire to ‘unfreeze the photograph’. This is a material and not merely a mental incidence.
It can hardly have escaped notice that the discussion of the still photograph in Claerbout’s work has so far failed to draw explicit attention to the fact that none of these images have the physical form that the photograph has most commonly taken. None of them are made to be seen as photographic prints, as images transferred onto a piece of paper, and their appearance in the present publication in such a form, as documentation, belies a fundamental aspect of the viewer’s direct experience of them.
It has often been argued that the literal and palpable existence of the photograph as an actual physical object serves to underline a particular modality of vision that is marked by photography’s sense of ‘possession’ of the material object that it pictures. The ‘realism’ of photography, and the evidential testimony to the existence of things, converges with the existence of the photograph as a thing in itself. Moreover, there is also a sense in which photography’s atomization of time, its freezing of a singular moment isolated and abstracted from the temporal flow, finds concrete form in a thing that can be held in the hand, literally grasped. Thus it could be argued that Barthes’ influential dualistic model of a phenomenology of photography, split between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘there and then’, is premised upon a single, if the most common, physical manifestation of the photograph. My argument here is that the act of continually shuffling between the dichotomies of absence and presence, past and present, proximity and distance, begins and ends with the palpable existence of the photographic print itself. As Philippe Dubois has noted:
This separation within the representation is what actually informs the effect of looking at a photograph, inducing perpetual movement on the part of the spectator-subject: we pass continually from the object’s here-and-now to its elsewhere-in-the-past when looking at the image . . . The photograph acts as an instrument of travel in time and memory. To see something that existed, somewhere, sometime, something that is much more present in our imagination now that we know it has actually disappeared – to see it and not be able to touch, pick up, or manipulate it – is to be frustrated by a metonymic substitute for the thing that is gone forever, now a simple trace on a piece of paper instead of a single palpable memory. The frustration is all the stronger for the indexical substitute signifies the absence of the referent, offering itself, qua representation, as a concrete object endowed with real, physical substance. (11)
If this is the case, what is the effect of those material and objective forms that the photograph can take that would seem to go some way to ‘dematerializing’ the photographic image? A photographic transparency – whether enlarged and illuminated from behind (as with Claerbout’s lightboxes) or projected onto a screen – is stripped of the palpable material support of the image that defines the phenomenological status of the photographic print. We might argue that as a consequence of this, the projected photographic image also has a very different relationship to time. If the tactile and physical existence of the photographic print ‘functions to fix a being-that-has been (a presence in the present that is always past)’, could it be that the projected still photograph ‘functions as a coming into being (a presence always presently constituting itself)’? (12)
The projected image is in a continual process of being reconstituted. Dependent upon the continuous supply of artificial illumination, it is always ‘live’. We might say that our experience of the projected image’s existence in time – as taking time – is more akin to watching a film than looking at a photographic print. Certainly it shares with the film the same conditions of viewing: the projection of a luminous image in a darkened space. Such forms of convergence might suggest that the distinction between the photographic and filmic is less secure than is usually assumed.
Others, however, would contend that the distinction between the projected photograph and film has been and remains absolute. Even when we are dealing with the freeze-frame of a film or a projected still photograph (which might be perceptually indistinguishable), if ‘you know that what you are watching is a film, even a film of what appears to be a photograph, it is always justifiable to expect that the image might move.’ (13)
Certainly there is something to this. The knowledge that what we are watching is a film predisposes us to anticipate the possibility of movement and expect it, at some time, to occur. This is what happens, of course, in Chris Marker’s La Jetée. It also explains the tension that accompanies David Claerbout’s video projection Four Persons Standing, where our expectation is not met and our anticipation is thwarted since movement never occurs. Yet is this argument not, traceable as it is to the idea of fundamental distinctions that can be made between mediums on the basis of their differing technologies, untenable in the face of what electronic and digital technologies are capable of? And have these new technologies, in erasing the empirical boundaries between the old technologies of film and photography, not simultaneously undermined any obvious distinction that we might wish to make between the moving and the still image?
The progression of my argument has led to questions that would seem to run counter to my earlier assertion that the concept of the medium remains important and useful. Yet, to repeat myself, mediums are technologies but they are never reducible to technology. A medium is always constituted within a particular social and discursive matrix. As a technology that is always socially and discursively positioned, a medium is a historical phenomenon. And if photography and film are not immutable entities, it is not only because of any transformations in their technological foundations, but also because what they ‘mean’ is always historically fluid. However, it seems possible that, whilst technological developments have certainly eroded any simple distinctions between the moving and the still image, the categories of ‘photography’ and ‘film’ remain the only ways in which we can talk about such things. The concept of the medium is indispensable, it seems, even in ‘the age of the post-medium condition’.
One final point. As I suggested earlier, if a particular medium is defined in terms of its distinction from other mediums, it is, logically, ‘unthinkable’ in its own terms. The pursuit of a medium’s essential properties by means of a kind of auto-reflexivity is an impossibility inasmuch as the medium is continually caught in a process of being defined by what it is not rather than (or, more precisely, simultaneously as) by what it is. Therefore what is deemed as lying ‘outside’ of a particular medium will always be present and effective in defining what it is. When Greenberg wrote about how one defined the specificity of a medium, he saw this as a process whereby one discovered its ‘limiting conditions’. Such a process was necessary in order to ‘entrench’ the medium ‘more firmly in its area of competence’. Yet perhaps the more interesting and productive area (for artists and critics) has been at this limit point: an area of ‘undecidability’. And maybe this is what David Claerbout’s work faces us with, in the possibility of a photograph that unfolds in time (but is not a film) and a film that is stilled in time (but is not a photograph).
David Green
Notes
(1) This work was based on a photograph taken by the Japanese photographer Hiromichi Mine a year before he died. David Claerbout returned in 2000 to the place where the original photograph was taken. Positioning himself as close as possible to the point from which Mine’s image was taken, he proceeded to take at regular intervals numerous digital photographs. These have been morphed by a computer programme to produce a ‘moving image’. The full title of the work is Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho (reconstruction after Hiromichi Mine ‘Friendly Fire’).
(2) It may seem strange in an essay that argues medium specificity that I use the term ‘film’ to refer to works by David Claerbout that are either video-based or use digital technology to produce animated, moving images. Whilst I recognize the necessity to distinguish these various ways of producing the ‘moving image’ that is my primary concern here, the nomenclature of film is adopted for reasons of convenience and convention.
(3) See André Bazin ‘The Ontology of Photography’, in The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography, ed. by Peninah R. Petruch, vol. 2 (New York: Dutton Paperback, n.d.).
(4) The key early essay by Barthes is 'The Rhetoric of the Image' in Image, Music, Text, a collection of essays by Roland Barthes selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). In the same volume in two other essays, 'The Third Meaning' and 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein', Barthes discusses issues relating to the cinematic 'still' and writes suggestively of fundamental distinctions to be made between film and photography.
(5) Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 9.
(6) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 96.
(7) Raymond Bellour, ‘The Pensive Spectator’, Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987), p. 10.
(8) See Garrett Stewart, ‘Photo-gravure: Death, Photography and Film Narrative’, Wide Angle 9, no. 6 (1987), pp. 11–40. Stewart expanded the issues first raised in this essay in his later book Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
(9) Stewart 1987 (see note 8), p. 19
(10) Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, trans. by Stanley Mitchell, Screen, no. 13 (1972), pp. 5–27.
(11) Philippe Dubois, ‘Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses’, trans. by Lynne Kirby, in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. by Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 167.
(12) The phraseology here (emphasis added) is taken from Vivian Sobchack ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic Presence’, in Materialities of Communication, ed. by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 83–106.
(13) Noel Carroll, ‘Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image’, in Philosophy and Film, ed. by Cynthia A. Freeland and Thomas E. Wartenburg (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 73.