Between stillness and movement.

THE CINEMATIC

EDITED BY DAVID CAMPANY

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: MIT PRESS, 2007

208 PP./$22.95 (SB)

The title of this anthology of writings on photography and film, The Cinematic, is evocative. More an adjective than a noun, it invites the reader to think of the contents under investigation as something other than an object. The "cinematic" is therefore not a thing, such as in "the cinema," but rather a descriptive term that points to a condition of similarity or likeness to the cinema. Intelligently edited by artist and writer David Campany and produced by London's Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press as the latest edition in their Documents of Contemporary Art series, this volume combines foundational and contemporary writing by diverse theorists and artists on the topic of "the cinematic" the complex relationship between the still image and the moving image.

Campany points to the dialogic relation between the two art forms in his introduction when he foregrounds experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Straub/Huillet, "all of whom took cinema into direct dialogue with the stillness of the photographic image" (11). Later he reverses this equation and writes of contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, whose work takes "its cue from cinema's frames and film stills" (14). Through scholarship, speculation, and dialogue, this volume examines the medium specificity of both photography and cinema as well as their ongoing superimpositions thereby demonstrating the possibilities of imagery constructed around the vicissitudes of stillness and movement.

One topic that threads through many of the essays is the question of photographic and cinematic ontology. Cited by a number of authors (including Christian Metz, Uriel Orlow, and Constance Penley), Andre Bazin and Charles Sanders Peirce are two key figures who influence many arguments in this anthology. Peirce's concept of the "indexical" sign, defined as one that shares an organic link between the original object and its representation, bears out in much of the discussion, as does Bazin's idea of the photograph as existentially (thus indexically) linked to its original referent like that of a death mask or fingerprint.

The ontological status of the photograph as existentially linked to its original referent is transferred, by default, onto the cinema; for as Metz tells us, while photography "remains closer to the pure index" it is also true that "film 'includes' photography" (125). As Beaumont Newhall eloquently writes in one of the more historic essays, "Moving pictures depend on photography for their existence" (104). In a more contemporary essay, Laura Mulvey describes the same connection between cinema and its photographic roots: beneath all the other cinematic elements, she writes, lies "the simple photographic time when its images were registered.... Even in a Hollywood movie, beyond the story is the indexical imprint of the pro-filmic scene ..." (137-8).

But while photography and cinema may share this imprint of the original, they are nevertheless more profoundly different. Much of the difference between photography and film can be summed up in one word: movement. Because there is movement to film (albeit an illusion), the cinema functions in the present tense. With the addition of movement, Orlow explains how cinema gives us "the illusion of the same duration of our experience ... [and] ... reproduces the vitality of the present" (179).

Movement provides a separation of temporalities and sensibilities: cinematic movement gives us the appearance of the present while photographic stasis gives us the appearance of the past. In cinema we encounter the passage of time. It unfolds and, as in real time, it vanishes as it unravels, thus appearing alive. In contrast, the photograph presents time as arrested, stopped. It fixes events, objects, and people, thus signifying a kind of death.

But many of the essays take issue with this clear division. Peter Wollen reminds us "that the relationship of photography to time is more complex than is usually allowed" (108). This occurs through its relation to narrative, which itself incorporates time into its structure. Photographs are not "narratives in themselves," Wollen writes, but "elements of narrative ... [taken] ... within durative situations" (110). Temporality as "embedded" within a photograph echoes Henri Cartier-Bresson's description of the situational nature of photographic reportage whose goal it is "to depict the content of some event which is in the process of unfolding, and to communicate impressions" (43).

The complex uses of temporality, stillness, and movement in both photography and film is nowhere better articulated than in Chris Marker's perfect and beautiful film, La Jetee (1962), and it is perhaps why this film is referenced across a number of essays in this illuminating anthology. Constructed entirely out of photographic stills except for a few seconds of fluttering movement, Marker's film retains its status as both film and photography and thereby demonstrates the complex dynamic between these two art forms.

TINA WASSERMAN is a faculty member in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University.