The event of self: cinematic and photographic expression on the frame.
First half of twentieth century was shape profoundly by the modern idea of speed. It has delivered the ida of the reactive, instantaneous and fastness. Sense of switches in tempo.
Fastness and Slowness in avant-garde cinema motivated by speed and produced dynamic culture, we are started seeing on the screen which is not representation of human eye, rather it is a new “filmic eye”. After Second world war, ideology of main stream cinema and Television dominated Life style culture, saturation advertising and mass distraction. Against and to be against on mass culture, new movement followed to “Slow”
Wim Wenders put when people think they’ve seen enough of something but that something is not moving or change of shot, then they react curiously livid way. Slowness embedded in cinema is different movement in photography. Photography turning image its event or duration into arrestedness exploit stillness. Still is pause in the flow whether freeze frame or filmed photograph. It released from momentum of movement but restructed by other means. Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin understood cinema as inescapably rooted in the real by way of the indexical status of the photographic image as a trace of its referent in the world. David Campany wrote moving image when it projected, structed by convention of narrative, caption and sound then ‘behave’ correctly. For Barthes cinema is a domestication of the wildness, surfeit of open meaning of photography.
Photograph is trace of the light, cinema image is the movement of the light.
Cinematic image cannot escape from indexical status, until it deconstructs its momentum of time into durative and punctual movement, and I believe certainly it is the difference between photography and cinema image. First of all, to talk about the cinema duration, we should talk about it against indexical time. Images on the cinema screen overthrow trace of the image, and construct into its moment. Peter Wollen makes reference Bernard Comrie’s book ‘Aspect’, ring the ‘aspect’ of the movement rather then ‘tense’. He brought semantic categories to explain its functioning. Event themselves can be broken down between durative and punctual events.

For example, “news photographs tend to have additional information, captioned with the non-progressive present since reference is to past time. Art photographs are usually captioned with noun-phrases, lacking verb-forms altogether (Wollen, 1984).” Evidently these choices of verb-form correspond to different intuitions about the subjects or signifieds of the various types of photography. News photographs are perceived as signifying events. Art photographs and most documentary photographs signify states. Some documentary photographs and Muybridge’s series in particular are seen as signifying processes (Wollen, 1984).
This three type of narrative; events, states, processes, art used in Lumiere’s L’Arrosseur arrose. Wollen uses example of three different scene in L’Arrosseur arrose, and argues that still photography and moving images shares same or similar semantic structure, which imply different question: what’s going to happen (process)? What was happened (event)? How it happened (states). Photograph image signifies state and its own signified. Paradoxically, in Warhol, Straub-Huille’s Film, it is the moving picture of the motionless subject. Chris Marker demonstrated in La Jetée: the film made entirely of still images, movement created by jump-cutting of still images, given a dependence on a soundtrack. Diegetic cinema time carried out blink of the apparatus. Although photography and film lacks any structure of tense, but demarcate time. Wollen put “Imperfective aspect” of the still and moving image. The Moment is ongoing states or processes seen, which is similar expression in Japanese -te i- (Shirai, 1998). As Marker demonstrated in his movie, moving image is not only carrying past, process, and ongoing, but also creating one virtual point in time. The ending: a ‘punctual situation’, in Comrie’s terms. In -te i- in Japanese, it express and depict the subject in 3rd person point of view, even if that is myself and became an observer in accordance with the aspectual change of perspective.
Now, movement of the cinema could be paused, started, forwarded, reversed, and repeated as will. Many of the movement on the screen is generated by users, recently it has became more directly connected body of users. Follows the movement of the fingers it bounds the subject and object together. As clever animals like elephants, dolphins, and chimpanzees can recognise themselves in the mirror. Trying to see their body part which never seen before. On the mirror, connection and disconnection is constantly happening by being a observing myself. Traditionally, this way in which the spectator thrown in and out of the image and placed the spectator within or without a narrative, is explained with of identificaion, distanciation, and other dramatic devices. Although few philosophers ( add more ) describe computer frame with the window, which can show the place and time from outside. On the other hand, “the mirror’s opacity, reflected light, and inverse image suggest a visual system quite opposed to that of the window’s transparency, transmitted light, and seemingly unmediated image (Friedberg, 2006).”
The question is what is happening when ourselves distorted and constructed by myself? What is the mirror effect? I personally fascinated by image communication without interruption of the text. However, it is fact that text’s impact permanently changed our aspect of the time and space. What we are seeing is not reference of the present but also with past, which is making the changes of the future. It is impossible to discourse as ‘pure image communication’, since it is not exist.
Further readings ( non-alphabetical )
Wenders, W., 1992. The Logic of Images, Faber & Faber.
Flaxman, G., 2000. The Brain is the Screen, University of Minnesota Press.
Chris Marker. (2018). Marker Direct: An Interview with Chris Marker | Chris Marker. [online] Available at: https://chrismarker.org/the-chris-marker-interview/.
Mca.com.au. (2018). Jeff Wall: Photographs. [online] Available at: https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/619-jeff-wall-photographs/ [Accessed 2 Sep. 2018].
FRANÇOIS LARUELLE / “New Forms of Realism in Contemporary Philosophy” (Second Lecture). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR9kerHHxBs [Accessed 2 Sep. 2018].
Deleuze, G., & McMuhan, M. (1998). The Brain Is the Screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on “The Time-Image”. Discourse,20(3), 47–55. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389498
Afterall.org. (2018). Lis Rhodes: Grammars of Looking and Grammars of Language • Online • Afterall. [online] Available at: https://www.afterall.org/online/lis-rhodes-grammars-of-looking-and-grammars-of-language#cite6790 [Accessed 2 Sep. 2018].
Peter Wollen. “Fire and Ice’, in Photographies, no. 4 (Paris, April 1984) 118–20.
La Jetée (1962) [english subtitles]. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLfXCkFQtXw [Accessed 2 Sep. 2018].
Shirai, Y., 1998. Where the progressive and the resultative meet. Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language,” 22(3), pp.661–692.
Friedberg, A., 2006. The Virtual Window, Mit Press.
Baudry, J.L. & Williams, A., 1974. Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus. Film Quarterly, 28(2), pp.39–47.
