A window slammed [begin strikethrough]shut[end strike through] open.(Book review)

Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography

Edited by Karen Beckman and Jean Ma

Duke University Press, 2008

312 pp./$84.95 (hb), $23.95 (sb)

When Tom Gunning took the stage at Princeton University in 2005 to deliver the final talk of the symposium Dark Rooms: Photography and Invisibility, he chose to comment on the previous lectures. Noting the skepticism many had held toward spirit photography by emphasizing the hukster's fakes over the scientist's facts, and how that skepticism had permeated the auditorium, Gunning pointed out that while fairy photographs may be dubious objects, figures like Arthur Conan Doyle investigated them with the utmost seriousness, and we should take that seriousness earnestly. This simple observation rippled through the auditorium, relieving the growing frustration of many, and clearing a receptive mental space for his lecture. Why, many of us wondered, did we have to wait for the final lecture for such a simple and important corrective?

Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, editors of Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, do not make their readers wait. They tap into Gunning's intellectual acuity to equal effect, thankfully, in the opening essay of their collection. Questions of fact and fiction are again Gunning's concern, but in "What's the Point of an Index?" his thoughts turn to the discourse of medium specificity. Gunning reveals paradoxes involved in semiotic explanations of the photographic essence. Analog photography, the photo-chemical process, has long been argued to have truth value resulting from this indexical process--light bouncing off an object in the world being recorded as a chemical index. This is an event Roland Barthes refered to as the that-has-been. Yet, with the advent of digital photography, the argument goes, the truth value of the event has eroded, as has the belief in the photograph as an index of the world, and even the belief in photography itself. Gunning, instead, seeks to open space within the discourse by demonstrating that photography's truth apparatus needs us to speak about them as this allows them the ability to be truthful, but only because they can be deceitful as well. As an index, a photograph is a sign limited to a linguistic process of substitution--it stands in for something, but Gunning argues that it is this substitute for the that-has-been and more. Appealing to Andre Bazin, Gunning claims photography's ongoing fascination is that it also opens onto a vast richness or a presence.

Just as Gunning placed his argument between Barthes and Bazin, still Moving begins to map its trajectories by placing itself between the photographic still and the moving image. In their "Introduction," Beckman and Ma allude to the problem of "posts" in the post-medium, the post-feminist, and a post-photographic, but at the heart of this book is a much larger post, the post-metaphysical, what Italian Philosopher Gianni Vattimo calls pensiero debole (weak thinking). Vattimo argues that in the history of Being we are witnessing a weakening or a dissolution of strong structures, and in this recognition the essence of Being is now an ongoing process of becoming. (1) This becoming is accomplished in Still Moving via the breadth of its essays, which move across and between weakening disciplinary borders. Whether from art historians (George Baker, Louis Kaplan, Ma) or flim historians (Beckman, Timothy Corrigan, Tom Gunning), from artists and filmmakers (Rebecca Baron, Zoe Beloff, .Nancy Davenport. Atom Egoyan, Rita Gonzalez), from academics working in neighboring disciplines Janet Sarbanes, Juan Suarez), or from museum curators (Raymond Bellour), these essays operate between disciplines. In this borderless world, the editors organized the essays into three topic zones: beyond referentiality; nation, memory, history; and working between media.

The interdisciplinary strength of this collection is a possible liability; in crossing disciplinary borders, the writers are not always traveling in the same direction. This often results in noise--a racket the reader must be willing and able to overcome. Although, in part. Still Moving seeks this noise--often literally. Suarez's essay. "Structural Film: Noise," inserts movement into the often visually static film style via its soundtrack, but in doing so, he also opens a fresh discursive approach to structural films. In "Photography's Expanded Field," Baker inserts noise into Rosalind Krauss's canonical essay that attempted to trace a periphery around sculpture's expanding field. (2) Rather than focus on the cardinal directions and the periphery, as Krauss had, Baker's mapping of photography's field is about "open[ing] its multiple logics" (187). Beloff and Corrigan offer relief to the noise with more historical essays. Beloff's "Mental Images: The Dramatization of Psychological Disturbance" traces a history of photography and cinema used as a psychological diagnostic tool to demonstrate the ultimate failure of the camera-apparatus for objective, patient observation. Corrigan's "The Forgotten Image Between Two Shots" is a rich essay that demonstrates the interrelation between the photo-essay and the essay film, arguing that both are forms of critical thinking.

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In its noisy manner, Still Moving has heard the discursive noise, but has not mistaken its roar for a fire that must be suffocated by closing the windows to protect a disciplinary essence, instead it throws the windows open, allowing a tornado's chaotic power to pass through these disciplinary discourses. In "Concerning the Photographic," the book's closing essay, Bellour recognizes that speaking between cinema and photography is to speak of an "aesthetic of confusion" (261), which is a positive notion seeking not specificity in media but the richness found only in their intermingling.

NOTES (1.) See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

(2.) Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

DAMON STANEK teaches Art History at City College and Parsons School of Design in New York City, and is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation is entitled "Seeing the Light: The Projected Image in the Gallery, 1963-Present."

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