Motion(less) Pictures

The Cinema of Stasis

Justin Remes

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231538909
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Conducting the first comprehensive study of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work Disappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature.

Analyzing four categories of static film--furniture films, designed to be viewed partially or distractedly; protracted films, which use extremely slow motion to impress stasis; textual films, which foreground the static display of letters and written words; and monochrome films, which display a field of monochrome color as their image--Remes maps the interrelations between movement, stillness, and duration and their complication of cinema's conventional function and effects. Arguing all films unfold in time, he suggests duration is more fundamental to cinema than motion, initiating fresh inquiries into film's manipulation of temporality, from rigidly structured works to those with more ambiguous and open-ended frameworks. Remes's discussion integrates the writings of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Tom Gunning, Rudolf Arnheim, Raymond Bellour, and Noel Carroll and will appeal to students of film theory, experimental cinema, intermedia studies, and aesthetics.

1

INTRODUCTION

The Filmic

The more we consume moving images, the more the single still image rises above the rest, substituting itself for our reality.

—GISÈLE FREUND

There is nothing in the structural logic of the cinema filmstrip that precludes sequestering any single image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.

—HOLLIS FRAMPTON

Larry Gottheim’s film Fog Line (1970) begins with a still shot of a landscape covered in dense fog. All that can be seen through the fog are the outlines of a few trees intersected by four high-tension wires. The setting is subtly beautiful, and the complete lack of sound creates a space for meditation. Minutes pass. Apart from some slight shaking, the camera does not move, nor do any elements within the mise-en-scène. The trees and telephone wires become easier to make out as the fog lifts, although the fog’s retreat is so gradual that its movement is not perceived by the viewer. After eleven minutes of the same motionless shot, the film abruptly ends (see figure 1.1). During my first viewing of Fog Line, I found the film simultaneously boring and absorbing. I was bored because, on a superficial level, nothing happened. Yet I was fascinated because I had never encountered a film like this before. It was so still, so uneventful, I felt like I was staring at a photograph or a painting for several minutes rather than watching a movie.

FIGURE 1.1 Larry Gottheim, Fog Line (1970).

When I watched Fog Line a second time, I realized that there was actually more movement than I had initially registered. At one point, several minutes into the film, barely visible grainy shadows (in actuality, horses) slowly wander from one side of the landscape to the other. (Gottheim had intentionally selected this location for his film because of the horses that regularly moved through it.) At another point a small, almost indiscernible, bird quickly flies above the wires. Like most viewers, I had missed these developments in my first careful viewing; it was as if the prolonged inertia had tricked my mind into thinking I was looking at a still. I was unable to easily detect the minimal motion within the shot since, after the first few minutes of stasis, I was no longer expecting movement of any kind. Scott MacDonald describes the spectatorial experience engendered by Fog Line cogently: “For a few moments at the beginning of the film, viewers cannot be sure that the image they’re looking at is a motion picture. Indeed, it is only once the fog has thinned enough for an identification of the image to be possible that we can recognize that something other than the movie projector—the fog itself—is moving.”¹

While Fog Line is a remarkable and unique cinematic experience, it is not without predecessors, nor is it without successors. In fact, it places itself in a rich and variegated tradition that I will call the cinema of stasis. Static films offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion.² In most films an impression of movement is provided either by the motion of the camera or the motion of elements within the mise-en-scène—usually both. In contrast, static films generally feature no camera movement and little or no movement within the frame. Instead, these films foreground stasis and consequently blur the lines between traditional visual art and motion pictures.³

It should be noted that the term movement is polysemous and is sometimes used in a broader sense than what I have in mind here. Gilles Deleuze, for example, suggests that movement can be achieved in film not only through the motion of the camera or elements in the frame but also through montage, which he claims “allows the achievement of a pure mobility extracted from the movements of characters.”⁴ Along similar lines, Christian Metz claims that a filmic transition between one image and another—“even if each image is still”—constitutes an “ideal” movement.⁵ As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, movement can refer to “a change of place or position,” and by this definition any cinematic montage (even a montage of still shots) constitutes movement. But movement can also designate “the action or process of moving,”⁶ and it is this more specific definition that I have in mind. In other words a film that engages in montage can still be considered a static film for my purposes, so long as the elements within the frame are static (as in, say, Chris Marker’s La jetée [1962]). For while the spectator’s point of view is shifting “in place or position,” no “action or process of moving” is directly observed; in cases like these the movement itself takes place off-camera, and the dominant impression is one of stasis.⁷

The tradition of static cinema arguably starts in 1930 with Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (Wochenende) (1930). The film features a rich, evocative sound track of voices, clocks, alarms, and other “found” sounds, but the screen remains blank and motionless for the work’s entire eleven-minute duration. At first, Weekend seemed like little more than a curio, an idiosyncratic experiment designed to test the limits of cinematic expression. But a similar kind of cinematic stasis began to appear again in 1950s France with Situationist films like Gil Wolman’s L’anticoncept (The Anticoncept) (1951) and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952), both of which traffic in immobile visual fields stripped of any imagery. By the 1960s the floodgates had opened. This was an era in which the boundaries separating various media were being challenged more than ever before, and this was reflected in a series of provocative and influential static films such as Marker’s La jetée, Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). These pioneering works would, in subsequent decades, inspire a number of filmmakers, including Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, and Derek Jarman, to continue exploring the aesthetics of stillness.

Although individual static films have been the subject of scholarly attention, the cinema of stasis as a modality has not yet been adequately theorized. I want to remedy this by analyzing several subsets of static cinema—the furniture film, the protracted film, the textual film, and the monochrome film—drawing attention to the diversity and multivalence of cinematic stasis. I also want to attempt to answer several questions that are intrinsically posed by static films: Why take a medium uniquely positioned to create the illusion of movement and use it to create a quasi-photographic stasis? What forms of spectatorship are appropriate in approaching these works? And finally, what are the implications of these experiments for the ontology of film?⁸

MOVEMENT AND STASIS IN FILM THEORY

Cinema and photography are like a brother and sister who are enemies … after incest.

—AGNÈS VARDA

Stasis has always played an important role in cinema’s ontology. Even in films that appear to offer constant movement, the ostensible motion is an illusion insofar as it is created by a series of still frames in quick succession.⁹ But beyond this, even the appearance of stasis on the screen would have been familiar to cinema’s early spectators. As Tom Gunning has pointed out, in the Lumière brothers’ early exhibitions “the films were initially presented as frozen unmoving images, projections of still photographs.”¹⁰ After a few moments of stasis the projector would be put in motion and the “photograph” would become animated, much to the delight of the audience. For the Lumières, stasis served as a kind of counterpoint to the startling movement that would soon come. The prolonged dominance of the still created the expectation of a slide show before subverting this expectation and showcasing the new technology of the motion picture. But if some early audiences were tricked into expecting stasis, only to be surprised by movement, later audiences would come to expect movement from a film, only to be surprised by those rare exceptions to the rule: films that returned to the primordial stasis out of which motion pictures evolved.

The very existence of terms like movie, moving picture, and motion picture reveals just how central the impression of movement has been in conventional conceptions of cinema.¹¹ Indeed, many film theorists have problematically made movement the sine qua non of cinema. For example, in his 1934 essay “Motion” Rudolf Arnheim claimed that “film is required by aesthetic law to use and interpret motion.”¹² In 1960 Siegfried Kracauer was just as unequivocal: “There is of course no film that would not represent—or, rather, feature—things moving. Movement is the alpha and omega of the medium.”¹³ And more recently, R. L. Rutsky has asserted, “Cinema, by definition, moves.”¹⁴ This presupposition was also prevalent among many early filmmakers, even within the avant-garde (from which the cinema of stasis would eventually arise): Germaine Dulac asserted, “Le cinéma est l’art du mouvement et de la lumière” (cinema is the art of movement and light),¹⁵ and Slavko Vorkapich called movement “the fundamental principle of the cinema art: [cinema’s] language must be, first of all, a language of motions.”¹⁶ Other avant-gardists, however, such as Douglass Crockwell, were more cautious in their theorizations, problematizing the assumed centrality of movement to cinematic practice. For Crockwell, “Visually the motion picture is sequential art…. Motion is but one of the incidental byproducts.”¹⁷ Along similar lines, Peter Kubelka has declared, “Cinema is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills—which means images which do not move—in a very quick rhythm.”¹⁸ These theorizations serve as useful reminders that even in traditional motion pictures, stasis is deeply embedded in the ontology of film. As Laura Mulvey points out, “Cinema’s stillness [is] a projected film’s best-kept secret,” albeit one that can now be exposed during home viewing through the use of the pause button.¹⁹

Such divergent theorizations suggest an aporia at the heart of cinema’s ontology. On the one hand many film theorists have insisted that the motion perceived in cinema is illusory, an optical trick, or, in the memorable formulation of surrealist Jean Goudal, “a conscious hallucination.” For Goudal, “The persistence of images on the retina, which is the physiological basis of cinema, claims to present movement to us with the actual continuity of the real; but in fact we know very well that it’s an illusion, a sensory device which does not completely fool us.”²⁰ On the other hand Christian Metz asserts, “In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of the impression, the real presence of motion.”²¹ Or in the words of Gunning, “I think there is little question that phenomenologically we see movement on the screen, not a ‘portrayal’ of movement.”²²

Ultimately, the apparent disagreement may be primarily a semantic one. Asking whether cinematic movement is “real” is a bit like asking whether dreams are real. The answer is, yes and no. On the one hand the experience itself is certainly real, and it can have tangible physiological effects on the dreamer (or spectator), including fear, excitement, and arousal. On the other hand a chair in a dream is ontologically of a different order than a chair in real life, just as the movement in the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat) (1895) is ontologically distinct from the arrival of an actual train. (Even the earliest cinematic spectators were aware of this distinction, urban legends notwithstanding.) Cinematic movement, unlike movement in the “real” world, is divisible into discrete units, traditionally twenty-four static frames per second. (The fact that actual motion is indivisible has been noted by many philosophers, most notably Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution.)²³ But this does not make the phenomenal perception of movement in motion pictures any less real. J. L. Austin’s interrogation of the word real in Sense and Sensibilia is pertinent here: “When it isn’t a real duck but a hallucination, it may still be a real hallucination—as opposed, for instance, to a passing quirk of a vivid imagination.”²⁴ So if the perception of a duck moving in a film is (as Goudal would have it) hallucinatory, the hallucination itself remains real.²⁵

But whether we conceptualize cinematic movement as real or illusory, the question remains: How do we theorize films that forgo even the impression of movement, films in which stasis predominates? Can a motion picture exist without motion? In his essay “Fire and Ice” Peter Wollen argues convincingly that “movement is not a necessary feature of film” (he references Marker’s La jetée, a work made up almost entirely of photographic stills, to validate this claim).²⁶ Tom Gunning also discusses the possibility of static films: “I think we can certainly conceive of films that exclude motion, made entirely of still images. Interestingly, many films that use still images seem to do so to comment on movement. Clearly, the dialectical relation between stillness and movement provides one of the richest uses of motion in film. But I think it would be an essentialist mistake to assume a film could not avoid cinematic motion, even if the examples of such are very rare and possibly debatable.”²⁷

Unfortunately, Gunning does not elaborate on what examples he has in mind. Nevertheless, the “dialectical relation between stillness and movement” has certainly been a critical element in cinematic praxis, stretching at least as far back as Eadweard Muybridge’s invention of the zoopraxiscope in 1879, and the significance of this dialectic has been theorized perceptively, not only by Gunning himself but by other film scholars as well. For example, Laura Mulvey has explored the pivotal role of stillness in Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia) (1953) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960),²⁸ and Raymond Bellour has analyzed the use of the freeze-frame in films like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959).²⁹ While I find these analyses useful, such scholarship generally focuses on momentary intrusions of stasis in films that otherwise abound with movement. I am more interested, however, in interrogating films in which there is little to no movement, films in which stasis—not motion—is the default.

Paul Schrader is one of the only writers who has directly acknowledged the existence of the cinema of stasis (what he calls “stasis films”). In his well-known 1972 book, Transcendental Style in Film, Schrader discusses works like Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Bruce Baillie’s Still Life (1966), and Stan Brakhage’s Song 27, My Mountain (1968), films that feature only minimal movement. Schrader also gives attention to the early films of Andy Warhol, such as Sleep (1963), Eat (1964), and Empire. (I would classify all of the above as part of the cinema of stasis.) While I am thankful that Schrader d...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Filmic
• 2. Serious Immobilities: Andy Warhol, Erik Satie, and the Furniture Film
• 3. Stasis in Fluxus: Disappearing Music for Face and Protracted Cinema
• 4. Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film
• 5. Colored Blindness: Derek Jarman’s Blue and the Monochrome Film
• 6. Conclusion: Static Cinema in the Digital Age
• Appendix 1. The Cinema of Stasis
• Appendix 2. Films Relevant to Understanding the Cinema of Stasis
• Notes
• Index
• Series List