Fiona Tan. Island , 2008. HD video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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LOUISE HORNBY

Fiona Tan’s video installation Island (2008) is a twelve-minute black- and-white film composed of footage taken by Tan while she was staying on the Swedish island of Gotland, the largest island in the Baltic Sea. The visual subject of Island is the natural landscape of Gotland’s peninsula of Närsholmen, and the majority of the film is made up of a series of shifting long takes, which, in their sameness and repetition, get at the barrenness of the stark landscape. 1 Like her other recent installations—including A Lapse of Memory (2007), Rise and Fall (2009), and Disorient (2009)— Island abstracts the more overt postcolonial themes of Tan’s earlier work to focus on broadly conceived questions of provenance, place, and medium. 2 In the opening fixed shot of Island , a few scrubby pine trees and a lighthouse, which is the only sign of human life, punctuate the shore of the peninsula. An expanse of calm water keeps the land at a distance. The atmospheric sound of the film emerges: the lilting noise of lapping water and a slight wind envelops the viewer in the natural poetics of a soundscape that attends the sub - sequent still views of the island. The establishing shot is followed by a closer view of the shore, isolating and pausing on the image and shape of a solitary tree. Then, unhurried, the film cuts to another long, still shot of a group of similar trees gathered at the edge of the water, the silhouettes of their spare trunks intersecting the horizontal striations of the screen where water meets land and land meets sky. Absent of narration, the initial shots of landscape and trees in Island are not only still but untethered by the subsequent narrative voice-over (spoken by Heathcote Williams), which presents the story of an unidentified and unseen woman who has come to the island “to think,” an act of contemplation that is opened up by the stilled space within the images of landscape. The tree is figured as the dominant subject of the multiple still shots, shaped through fragmented and photographic perspectives on the landscape. The filmed images of trees in Island bring cinema to bear upon photography, recalling the history of the photographic view and a distinct lineage of tree photographs that dates to the invention of the medium. That the trees are themselves not photographs but

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 moving landscapes is scarcely detectable, reduced to minimal degrees of motion within the frame. In many of the extended shots, the viewer must seek out the residue of motion—a slight tremble of grass at the base of the screen, a tiny shift of a branch, a whitecap on the water, or the rhythmic action of the waves—within the picture. The images of the filmed landscape, which move between the registers of film and photography, approach stillness but do not fully collapse into the pho - tographic, inviting a consideration of medium as central to the project. In discussing her installations, Tan has lingered over what she calls a “strange twilight zone” between photography and film, acknowledging her interest in blurring the boundaries between media. About Island she said, “much of the film could almost be called anti- cinematic. It is as if the images are not moving but are still images but not actual film stills.” 3 By this circumlocutory formulation, the anticinematic is neither contra-cinema nor simply pro-photographic. Instead, it occupies the suspended area between photography and film: composed of still images but not images that have been stilled completely. The origin of stillness is transferred from photographic technology (the still camera) to filmed subject (the still image). As such, a discussion of medium in Tan’s work is intricately bound with a discussion of its stilled or still moving content, which is a direct evo - cation of place. The static long takes that construct the majority of Tan’s Island , while themselves not photographs, nonetheless occasion a return to the history and theory of photography by way of contemporary film, video, and cinematic projection. Thomas Elsaesser refers to the hybrid form of Tan’s work as the “filmed photograph,” which, he argues, places her at the forefront of a shift in visual arts. 4 Elsaesser writes, Today, as in the days of chronophotography, we are able to rec - ognize that a photograph has always been as much a “stilled” image as a “still” image, setting free the possibilities of an entirely different way of thinking not only about images in the present, or images of the past in the present, but of past images in the past. 5 Tan’s video installations are poised to ask critical questions of photographic stillness, dealing directly with the terms of stillness and still photography that haunt motion, film, and time-based media. 6 The film cultivates the spaces of visual contemplation occasioned by the stilled image. Undercutting notions of medium-specificity, her works establish the possibility of photographic and filmic hybridity, a crossbreeding that has consequences for disciplinary studies, as well as for a productive reconsideration of the relevance of photography for the history of film. 7 In other words, Tan does not set up photography

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 and film as counterpoints of each other but uses each medium both to gain access to and to critique the other. This dialectical methodology finds its critical articulation in the following passage from Philippe Dubois: “[T]o grasp something of photography we must enter through the door of cinema. . . . In short, we must insert ourselves into the fold (in Deleuze’s sense), the intersection that relates these two media so often deemed antagonistic.” 8 Tan’s films allow us to recuperate the meaning and dimension of photographic stillness both before the advent of cinema and following a dramatic shift in film media in the early twenty-first century. Playing on a historical and technological tension between stasis and motion, her work opens onto a particular filmic address of stillness and photographic critique, taking account of photography and its history in order to redefine its relation to cinema and cultivate the proximity of both media within the category of the anticinematic. Tan’s construction of the anticinematic departs from an assertion of essential difference between photography and film and gestures instead toward their similarity as the meaningful nexus. I take Tan’s interest in the similarities between photography and film not simply as a matter of fact but as an occasion for a sustained inquiry within contemporary debates about the relationship between photography and film—debates that ask questions not only of the two media but of the relationship between the disciplines of film studies and art history and of their traditional theoretical paradigms. In classical film studies, such questions are aimed at accounting for the photographic under - pinnings of cinematic representation while at the same time claiming for cinema an essential difference that pivots on its opposition to photographic fixity and pastness. As David Green explains, The fact that photography and film have always been seen as closely intertwined has also proved to be the spur to differentiate between them. That this process of the differentiation of pho - tography and film has revolved around a polarisation between the still and moving image, and the different temporalities asso - ciated with each, should come as no surprise. 9 In many accounts of the relationship between photograph and film, the struggle to articulate difference against technological affinity reflects a deep allegiance to medium-specificity in both photography and film studies. Consider, for instance, how Siegfried Kracauer begins Theory of Film : “This study rests upon the assumption that each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of commu - nications while obstructing others.” 10 Although film and its attendant claims to realism emerge from its proximity to the photographic in Kracauer’s account, the initial claim to essential difference narrates a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 modernist story of rupture in which the cinema marks a definitive break from photographic reproduction. Kracauer suggests that film, although it shares photography’s “realistic tendency,” quickly moves beyond photographic limitation, representing “reality as it evolves in time” and drawing closer to “the flow of life.” 11 The absolute differ - ence between the two media, he claims, has to do with temporal scale, with film occupying a larger position with respect to presence, motion, and continuity (privileged categories of modernity). Photography, on the other hand, is limited to a minimal and fixed representation of the past. Medium-specificity is also at stake in André Bazin’s essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Like Kracauer, Bazin begins his theory of film with photography, isolating the properties of the fixed image. Photography’s great achievement lies in its “essentially objec - tive character,” which derives from its automaticity, its formation not through “the creative intervention of man” but rather “the instrumen - tality of a non-living agent.” 12 Subjectivity adheres to the selection of the photographed object, and thus, by extension, the selective framing of the object. However, for Bazin, the taking of the photograph and its nonhuman conditions of production shore up the terms of objectivity and indubitability and guarantee the credibility of the object repro - duced. According to Bazin, film emerges from photography as a kind of broader representational solution—in other words, it is like pho - tography but capable of so much more. Indeed, it is capable of rescu - ing life from death: Film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mum - mified as it were. 13 The filmic archive allows for the duration of the image, for it to unfold in time and change, while photographic fixity freezes and hesitates at the moment of preservation itself and forecloses on the future. Bazin’s teleology is one of defiance, with cinema representing a final triumph over time and death as it unfolds in the present tense. The rhetoric of the triumph of one medium over the other is echoed in Christian Metz’s “Photography and Fetish,” when he writes that “film is less a succession of photographs than, to a large extent, a destruction of the photograph, or more exactly of the photograph’s power and action.” 14 Film—an ephemeral projection—unfolds in the present tense, occupying a shared temporality with the spectator; it thus trumps the “power” of the photograph, which apprehends only

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 finitude, immobility, and death. As these authors separately conclude, the temporal distinction between photography and film is predicated on a difference that emerges in the context of the ontological opposition of stillness and motion. In other words, these properties adhere fast to their media, particularly in the context of juxtaposition. Gilles Deleuze writes, “At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it.” 15 The con - frontation of photography by film is often theoretical or rhetorical, as with Kracauer’s and Bazin’s prefacing of their theories of film with a discussion of photography. So, too, Roland Barthes begins Camera Lucida by stating, I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it. This question grew insistent. I was overcome by an “ontological” desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was “in itself,” by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images. 16 Barthes’s essential claims for photography and its particular tem - porality are formulated with respect to and in the context of film, marking Barthes’s self-described failure to separate them. Commenting on this aspect of Barthes’s writing, Green remarks that “it is only in the comparative distinction with the moving image that photography finds its inimitable identity.” 17 The two media distinguish themselves temporally through “radical opposition”; that is, a mutually rein - forced articulation of being what the other is not. 18 For Barthes, the site of this opposition materializes in the film still, the freeze-frame, the tableau vivant, or even the face of Greta Garbo captured in extreme close-up at the end of Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina (1933)— moments that draw from the register of photography in order to claim something for film. 19 These cases of stillness are cinematic stoppages that interrupt the narrative continuity of the film and reference a tem - porality that exists beyond the diegesis. As Barthes writes in the “The Third Meaning,” “the still throws off the constraint of filmic time.” 20 This formulation deviates, then, from Kracauer’s and Bazin’s under - standing of filmic time as less constrained than photographic time. Barthes suggests, instead, that the still expands time beyond its mere filmic presence and invites the spectator to engage in a kind of visual scrutiny and attentiveness that is not subject to the technological and narrative “logico-temporal order” of film. 21 Rather, the attention is on time’s passage—on the image’s deferral and pastness. Considering the role of still photographs in film along similar lines to Barthes, Raymond Bellour discusses the shift of attention from

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 narrative time to “a second, different time.” He writes that still pho - tographs in film “freeze for one instant the time of the film, and uprooting us from the film’s unfolding, situate us in relation to it.” 22 The temporal manipulation of film fundamentally alters both the spectator’s relationship with the filmed image as well as the relation - ship between image and screen. Bellour is particularly interested in films that take the photograph as their subject; for instance, Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), and Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)—films in which the “cinema is seized by photogra - phy.” 23 The taking of cinema by the photograph reverses a teleological approach to the two media, and reminds us, as Laura Mulvey points out in Death 24x a Second , that still images have always been accessi - ble to and visible in cinema, finding their realization early on in a freeze-frame (her example: Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera [1929]). Later, with the advent of video and subsequent technologies, the still image in film emerges as part of a strategy of temporal manip - ulation inherited from the avant-garde that allows any viewer to freeze or pause a film at any given point. 24 Not only does the continued and assertive presence of the photograph and stillness in cinema reject a narrative of the triumph of movement over stasis, life over death, duration over the instant; it also troubles an understanding of photog - raphy that would suggest that from its inception, photography has “itched to become film.” 25 The images that construct Island provide access to an understanding of photography and stillness within (rather than against) the context of film, undoing the terms of opposition and difference that have structured the relationship between the media. Tan’s images, which are pointed meditations on place, are most often of trees, accompa - nied by shrubs and grass. The pine trees, exposed in the midsummer sun, struggle to fill the space of the stretched-out screen. They are abandoned against the negative space of the sky and the water and speak to the isolation experienced by the unnamed woman on the island. The natural objects that make up the landscape of Island are at once incidental yet necessary: subject to the weight of serial repeti - tion, the many trees are replaceable, each as good as the next, yet once filmed and fixed, each tree could not be otherwise, defined and made meaningful by photography’s appeal to indubitability and singularity. The images of trees in Island make an essential claim to their object. They make relevant for film moments in the history of photography that speak to a particular relationship between the medium and natural objects, when photography was used as a way to get closer to the things and places of the world. One thinks, specifically, of the photographs of William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the early inventers

Fiona Tan. Island , 2008. HD video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 of photographic processes, who used the medium to designate and reproduce objects from the natural world and to construct a discourse of natural history and place. Talbot’s early photographs are self- consciously framed as studies of the world of things—attempts to get at the fact and place of an object through visual evidence—and inau - gurated a photographic tradition of observation, photographic real - ism, and epistemology. Kracauer explains that in the early stages of photography (here, he is explicitly referring to the daguerreotype) the medium’s properties were “unanimously identified as the camera’s unique ability to record as well as reveal visible, or potentially visible, physical reality.” 26 The stakes of getting at the object in Talbot’s photographs can be under - stood against a backdrop of nineteenth-century positivism and the archival, ordering impulse of taxonomy. A member of the Linnaean Society (so named for the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus), Talbot was deeply interested in the specimens of natural history, as his letters attest, but his photographs themselves do not reveal a strict allegiance to fully realized categorization or instrumental principles of order and arrangement. 27 In lieu of taxonomy, Talbot’s photographs speak to singularity without forsaking the epistemological project of natural science to study the natural world. That is, the singularity and mate - riality of the represented object become evidentiary. In this context, Talbot’s photographs of trees from the early 1840s, which he con - ceived as a series of studies, turn the botanical impulse away from cat - egorization toward a visual epistemology of object and place. Talbot’s formal concern in his photographs is driven by their chemistry, by which the external shape and materiality of an object develops through the collaboration of light on a sensitive ground. For instance, the images in Talbot’s early photo-book The Pencil of Nature seek the textures of a stone building, the line of a long-handled rake or shovel, the knotted vines of honeysuckle, the hard spokes of a wooden wheel, and the sculptural silhouette of a leafless oak tree in winter. However, self-referential formalism, which ties itself to photographic process,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 does not act as an end in and of itself. Instead, Talbot’s photographic focus on the world of objects, a world that is almost always absent of people, creates an argument about photography’s evidentiary status and its particular relationship to objects and place. In An Oak Tree in Winter , which Talbot probably took near Lacock Abbey, his home in Wiltshire, a massive old tree fills the foreground of the photograph, its branches extending almost to the edges. Other trees are hazy in the distance, their spindly trunks and branches offer - ing dimension and subscribing to conventions of perspective. In choosing to photograph old British trees, Talbot is revealing not just the wintery leafless existence of an oak tree but also an idea of England and English country life that was commensurate with the position of a literate landowner. In a letter to his friend John Herschel dated March 18, 1841, describing the countryside of Kent, where Herschel lived, Talbot wrote, “lakes and old oak trees are very much to my taste,” demonstrating his preference for a particular kind of English landscape and a nineteenth-century romantic sensibility. 28 Photography attaches not just to the tree but to a rhetoric of private property evinced by the number of images Talbot took of and around Lacock Abbey, many of which are included in The Pencil of Nature .29 The accrual of meaning within the photograph, however, depends upon the fact of the tree—upon the visual evidence that is rooted in place—and pivots upon a notion of photography as capable of deliv - ering presence. This photograph was one of the first images to be fixed with a hyposulfite solution (developed by Herschel), which stabilized the printed image. Not only does this achievement mark a critical point in the history of photography, it elaborates upon the photo - graphic desire for fixity and stillness, for an image to remain perma - nent. The fixity of the image is addressed, too, by the permanence and solidity of its object, rooted to the earth. Leafless and silhouetted, the tree is stripped to its bones, enduring as a prehistoric cyclical element in the British landscape and existing outside of time and linear change. The claim to fixity, then, is chemical as well as thematic and renders both photograph and tree as immitigable evidence of presence, delivering the promise of photographic directness later theorized in the writings on photography by Kracauer, Bazin, and Barthes. Talbot’s tree—its claims on the natural world—aligns with the opening tree shots in Tan’s Island , which confirm the visual presence and particular temporality of the film and take seriously the photo - graphic task of the establishing shot in a repeated sequence. Trees are a common photographic subject (consider the well-known images by Eugène Atget, Ansel Adams, or Edward Weston, as well as more recent work by Zoe Leonard and Robert Adams), but something about

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 Talbot’s tree in particular, attended by the wonder of early photo - graphic discovery and botany, sheds new light on Tan’s project, which can be broadly construed as the search for an essential visual element of place. Talbot’s tree, like Tan’s images, resists abstraction as well as detail. We are not confronted with a close-up image of roots or trunks made meaningful because of pattern and form (as, perhaps, in a Weston photograph). Talbot’s calotype process was, in fact, unable to render the kinds of details that were possible with the technology of the daguerreotype and were later the subject of modernist pho - tographs. Rather, Talbot’s tree makes an assertion for materiality and place that resists the strictures of formalism. The transparency that Talbot claims for his early photographs is critical for understanding Tan’s own images of trees in Island as definite markers of object and place against an unstable experiencing subject. The landscape views in Island are devoid of people and attest to the impermeability and imperviousness of the natural world. The sense of being out of histor - ical time is articulated by the first spoken lines of the film, when the narrator begins, “At dawn the light arrives swiftly, pulling open the day,” setting up a temporality of cyclical repetition rather than linear - ity. Like Talbot’s photograph of the old oak tree, which attaches to place, Tan’s still shots of trees do not adhere to any particular histori - cal moment but ruminate on landscape. The trees seem to exist on the other side of history, occupying a register of permanence that emerges in the white light of the morning’s photographic exposure. The dura - tion of the long shots in Island underscores the presence and dominance of the objects on the screen, etching them in shades of light and dark cast by the northern midsummer sun. Like the trees, the shots themselves endure as unchanging forms that nonetheless move, recov - ering a sense of photographic stillness as stilled image and bringing photography closer to film. In their negotiation of pho - tography and film, the still moving landscapes in Island relate to some of Tan’s earlier work, which informs her con - struction of the category of the anticinematic. Consider, for

William Henry Fox Talbot. An Oak Tree In Winter , probably 1842 –1843. Salted paper print from paper negative print. 19.4 x 16.6 cm. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 instance, Tu areg (1999), a piece that speaks to her experiments with intermediality and the project of finding photography within film. In Tu areg , Tan projects footage of an early documentary from 1930 on a translucent screen, allowing for the thirty-second looped video to be seen from both sides. The archival film takes as its subject twelve Tuareg children from Saharan Berber clans. The children are posing for the camera as though for a photographic portrait, standing still and looking straight at the camera. The formal photographic poses of the children are both anachronistic and meaningful in light of the newer technology of film. Similarly, in her video Facing Forw ard (1999), composed of archival fragments from early Dutch ethnographic, colo - nial, and tourist films featuring images of people from Africa and Asia, Tan isolates those particular moments in which the subjects turn and face the film camera, as though preparing to have their photograph taken. In so doing, she positions as the thematic center of these works the moment at which necessary divisions between film and photogra - phy collapse. In an interview with Mark Godfrey, Tan discusses the use of the frontal pose in Tu areg , suggesting “it is almost like the film crew doesn’t realize yet that they are working with moving images.” 30 Tan exploits this apparent technological misrecognition in her instal - lation of the film, which traffics in the relationship between still and moving images by returning to an early cinematic idiom of the hap - hazard and amateur. The shift from an original technological misrecognition to a neces - sary acknowledgment of the moving image is bound up in Tu areg ’s stilling and animating of the archival film. The installation begins by projecting a still photograph of the group of children, recalling the techniques of the earliest films by figures such as the Lumière broth - ers, who generated their motion pictures from an initial projection of an opening still photograph. 31 As in the Lumière brothers’ “actuali - ties,” the suspended photographic tableau in Tan’s piece gives way to the filmic after a few seconds, and the children move: they break rank, play, squirm, and squab - ble. The two tallest boys at the back hit each other on the head, jostling and upsetting the smaller ones in the front; the girl kisses and cuddles the baby she holds; the littlest child, the only one not dressed in regulatory white, shut - tles back and forth across the bottom of the frame,

Fiona Tan. Tu areg , 1999. Video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 unsure where to stand; and a shadowy figure moves about in the back - ground. Then, in a slow dissolve, the film recovers the image of the original still establishing shot, and the movement fades into the back - ground while the formal pose resumes. The return to fixity reminds us that the first shot of the children is not, in fact, a still image in the archival film itself but an image of stillness. Tan’s reworking of the film elaborates on the relationship between medium and subject and the proximity of photography and film. The still image hesitates on the screen, registering temporal delay, before the exchange of stillness and motion recommences when the video starts again from the beginning. Tu areg is thus essentially structured by repetition, both within the film, which repeats the initial still image and loops indefinitely, and in its projection on a transparent screen, which situates repetition in the space of the gallery and the spectator’s position therein. Each side of the installation has its own unique sound-track—a spatial disloca - tion that underscores the striking differences between a projection and its reverse. The spectator, unmoored from the fixed viewing posi - tion of cinema in the space of the gallery, encounters the film twice. This repetitive interplay between front and back, stopping and starting, calm and violence, suspension and play, not only explores the rela - tionship between the still and moving image but puts this relationship in a colonial context, asking that the ontological and essential cate - gories of the photographic and the filmic be read within a politics of early ethnographic practices and disciplinary regimes that establish the terms of visual order and spectatorship. Tan’s work articulates the representational and historical terms of photography and film as archival media suited to reproduction and repetition and subject to reinterpretation. The limits of each medium open up the possibility of their collaboration. The intermedial structure of Tan’s work mines photography and film as recording media and clearly emerges in later works. The instal - lations Countenance (2002) and Correction (2004) are constructed of a series of filmed portraits. Countenance , which consciously echoes August Sander’s earlier modernist taxonomy, Citizens of the Twentieth Century , consists of filmed portraits of hundreds of Berlin residents projected on four screens in two rooms. Each portrait—either of an individual or a group of people—was filmed for a minute, during which the subjects stood as still as possible while looking straight at the lens. The resulting images are projected for a shorter duration than the take—by a few seconds, just long enough for the fact of film to reg - ister against the still image. Correction , filmed in prisons in Illinois and California, presents 300 video portraits of prisoners and guards, installed and projected on six screens arranged in a circle and seen from both sides. The portraits, which suggest the monotony of prison

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 time, are projected for longer than Countenance , and each screen changes at its own pace. In both works, the subjects stare out at the camera, forcing a communion between viewer and viewed in an intense exchange of gazes. These portraits rely on cinematic conven - tions of framing and scale. Most are shot in plan américain , a medium- long shot from the knees or thighs up, which resists the hyperbolic scale of the cinematic close-up but nonetheless positions the subject as the central feature. In contrast to the cinematic framing of the bod - ies, the frontal pose in these pieces is decidedly photographic: Barthes notes in Camera Lucida that in conventional films it is forbidden for the subject to look out beyond the flatness of the screen and meet the eye of the spectator, which would break the hermetic world of a diegesis. 32 In both Countenance and Correction , the outward gaze pro - duces a heightened self-consciousness. As Elsaesser has remarked, these portraits ask the spectator to confront “what it means to have a face-to-face encounter with a cinematic image.” 33 The video portraits stage a photographic encounter with a cinematic image. Barthes writes, “For the Photograph has this power—which it is increasingly losing, the frontal pose being most often considered archaic now- adays—of looking me straight in the eye .” 34 In a photograph, the gaze initiates communication between viewer and viewed, which is sus - tained within the video portrait, pushing up against the discomfort of the pointedly silent address. The prolonged encounter deals with a distended register of time, elaborating on both the awkwardness of the stare and of the stilled pose. The people in Tan’s portraits must concentrate on not moving, forc - ing an acute awareness of the body. However, stillness in both Countenance and Correction is an approximation: the subjects of the portraits, while told to be as still as possible, nonetheless do move during the duration of the take. On the role of stillness in Countenance , Godfrey argues, “Tan makes film inhabit photography’s old clothes, and the confusion it causes shows up in the fidgets.” 35 So, too, Joel Snyder comments on Correction : “Constrained by the need to stand still for what must feel like an unbearable length of time, her subjects strain to suppress all movement, all signs of life—and because they are human, they fail.” 36 Both Godfrey and Snyder point to the intermingling of stillness and film as a kind of failed mimesis: as Godfrey sees it, a game of dress up; for Snyder what emerges is an impossible masking of the human. For these authors, film’s imitation of photography is considered excessive; it cannot but produce move - ment as its unintended residue, which then elaborates on the differ - ence between photography and film. Can stillness, though, be a filmic project that is not bound to photographic mimicry or failure? In Countenance and Correction the viewer may assume an image is a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 photograph, only to be confronted with a moment of recognition that it is not. The point in these portraits, however, does not seem to rely on the sudden or shocking realization that the photograph moves or that the image was actually film all along. The stakes have less to do with difference than with similarity. Captured using a fixed camera (an example of mechanical, inhuman stillness), the portraits magnify and elaborate upon the subjects’ slight movements, which accrue as evidence that we are not looking at a still photograph. Instead, what becomes clear is that we are encountering a film of a still person whose very breathing and blinking destabilizes the difference between photography and film and calls attention to the images’ intermedial - ity. As in Tu areg , the encounter between photography and film is not staged to reveal dissimulation at the heart of mechanical reproduc - tion. Instead, Tan draws the media closer together, revealing that they are not necessarily at odds; the one does not simply bear the burden of false imitation of the other. Rather, the mimetic failure of film to be photography is precisely the locus of meaning in these portraits, because it carves out an interstitial space of stillness that apprehends the similarities (not sameness) between photography and film. As Godfrey points out, the use of stilled bodies in Tan’s portraits evokes Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests , a collection of hundreds of short moving-image portraits from the mid-1960s that, alongside Sander’s photographic taxonomy, provides another possible source for Countenance and Correction .37 Warhol’s films, which he called “stillies” on account of their appropriation of stillness within filmic duration, are each about three minutes long. The subjects were instructed to remain motionless during the shoot. Warhol shot the films at sound speed (twenty-four frames per second) but projected them at silent speed (sixteen frames per second). They thus take longer to screen than they did to shoot, elaborating on a schism of cinematic technology that further protracts the slowed temporality of the images’ stillness. Both Warhol’s and Tan’s filmed portraits recall an earlier moment in the history of photography and photographic portraiture, in the mid- nineteenth century, when the long exposure times of the daguerreotype required the sitter to be as still as possible for prolonged amounts of time. According to Jonathan Friday, before the invention of high-speed film in the 1890s, “photographs were often called ‘stills’ in part because photographers were prone to shout “Still!” to alert their subject that the shutter was about to be opened and that they were to hold their pose without moving.” 38 Of these early photographs, Walter Benjamin writes, “The procedure itself caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on 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 a snapshot.” 39 Unlike the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 snapshot, which is conditioned by the sudden temporal economy of an arrest, the daguerreotype engaged with a sustained duration, expe - rienced by the sitter, who had to hold the pose for up to two minutes, and witnessed by the viewer of the image, who seeks evidence of the difficulty of maintaining the posture. The bodily discipline required to keep still for the daguerreotype engendered a heightened sense of subjectivity and an altered sense of time that brackets history in favor of what Joanna Lowry calls “the temporality of the pose itself.” 40 The pose, according to Barthes, “founds the nature of photography.” Revealing his commitment to medium specificity and his privileging of the photograph over film, he continues: The physical duration of this pose is of little consequence . . . looking at a photograph I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing hap - pened to be motionless in front of the eye. I project the present photograph’s immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose. This explains why the Photograph’s noeme deteriorates when this photograph is animated and becomes cinema: in the photograph something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the con - tinuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology, and therefore a different art which begins here, though derived from the first one. 41 Barthes claims that the duration of the pose is not at stake, focusing, instead, on the material duration or immobility of the photograph itself. He overlooks the differences within types of photographs and types of poses, making the pose the function of technology rather than of stillness that exists beyond the camera’s “tiny hole.” Tan’s video portraits elaborate upon the temporality of the daguerreotype’s particular kind of photographic pose. They do so not by reproducing its technological conditions but by recuperating dura - tion and the stilled photographic pose within film. Her portraits refuse to sweep away the pose and in fact use the “continuous series of images” that constitutes cinema to reinforce its significance. The filmic project of stillness in Countenance and Correction engages in a process of slowing things down to the point of suspension—to the point of scrutiny that Barthes identifies with photography. Both the subjects in the portraits and the viewer, staring at each other for pro - longed periods of time, open up a space for concentration and atten - tiveness, as well as monotony and boredom. The stilled portrait, in other words, produces a staring contest that asks for an enormous

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 amount of visual concentration on the part of the viewer and the viewed and takes place in the temporality of delay, suspension, and hesitation. While Barthes’s desire for photographic stillness does not rest on duration, the desire for stillness in Tan’s work—in her video portraits as well as the stilled landscapes of Island —pivots on the idea of stillness as something that endures. Eschewing the trope of inter - ruption that so readily attaches to photographic temporality, Tan’s films explore the expanded and delayed moment of photographic stillness within the image by engaging a particular spectatorial con - sciousness that loses track both of narrative and of lived time. 42 The absence of narrative and sequential logic is central to Island . Toward the beginning of the film, the male narrator announces in an unhurried, steady tone, “Land’s end. She did not come here all that long ago, but already she’s lost track of time.” His minimal narration turns on suspended time, hesitation, and ellipsis, pairing with the visual form of the film and unpinning diegesis from visual event and temporal logic. As Mulvey points out, there are two kinds of narrative delay: one where delay conditions the desire for an ending or inevitable conclusion; and one that displaces the desire for an end - ing. 43 Here, delay is evacuated of narrative suspense—nothing is sus - pended but the cinematic image itself—and the desire for an ending is cast adrift in the context of lost time. Rather than follow a sequence of events, the narrator follows the unseen woman’s wanderings through the terrain of solitude and memory. The narrator continues, slowly, describing her thoughts: As if dozing off while watching, she remembers the scenes only vaguely. It had a lost, timeless feeling. Disconsolate, desolate and weighted with unspeakable melancholy. It was a film like a dream; too heavy and slipping under, something her memory could not hold onto. Slowly memories surface from time spent on another island. Strolling barefoot down the beach with Zero, the dog, and show - ing the boys hermit crabs in rock pools. Sleeping naked under mosquito nets. Lazing on the pleasant side of boredom. The gardener greets her (and practices his English): “Good morning, ma’am. How are you? Are you alright? Where are you from? Is it cold there or hot?” Dreams are supposed to be in black and white. Indeed hers look monochrome. Why is it, she wonders, that dreams so often have a film-like quality. Or is it the other way round? She once heard of a theory that dreams are not dreamt, but are created upon the very instant of recall. There is some truth in this notion, she thinks: we do not remember dreams, we recon - struct them. 44

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 The interest here is with the instability of memory, cast as it is against the fixity of the landscape and the solubility of film (“it was a film like a dream”). The main character slowly recalls memories of another island—exotic, tropical, peopled—that is the opposite of the island in the film. The articulation of this memory, voiced in the clear and pol - ished English accent of the narrator, bears with it the unspoken residue of a colonial encounter, of a direct encounter with otherness, which is otherwise missing in Island . Here, on Gotland, the unsettling encounter is with the self, mem - ory, and the image, which is framed and figured by stilled film. Reconstructed in the grayscale of film, the black-and-white images of dreams/films are as much products of memory—of the past—as they are of the present of imagination and reconstruction, occupying a shared temporality special to the hybrid form of Tan’s film. The memories of the main character, which are compared to the monochromatic medium of film, are “weighty with melancholy,” and under this weight of melancholic repetition the still register of Island finally gives way. The character pursues memory, and is, in turn, pursued by film in the critical dramatic sequence of the piece. Toward the end of the film, following the prolonged series of still landscapes, five shots, each last - ing only a couple of seconds, are projected in sequence, pushing up against animation in spite of their still subjects. Embodied and fren - zied motion finally breaks through in a dynamic shift from a series of unoccupied still images of the landscape to a jagged point-of-view shot. The previously fixed camera now moves rapidly through grasses and stalky, small, white flowers, following the quickened pace of an unsettled and uneasy stride pushing through the undergrowth. The sound—a strange amplification of the noise of water, possibly accompa - nied by jumbled voices—intensifies the panicked sensation of the strides and their sudden iteration of motion. Taking up the point of view Below and opposite: of the restless character as its own, the camera, tilted down, loses the Fiona Tan. Island , 2008. horizon and the trees along with the previously established conventions HD video installation. of long-shot perspective and can register only the passage of the body Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. across space and the disorder of the mind. The narrator explains,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 Today she can find no peace of mind. Despair puckers at the smooth surface of her days. Feeling very small, feeling very useless. She paces in circles. She will not wait any longer. This place cannot contain her. This place cannot contain her unease. If she walks fast enough, perhaps she can overtake herself. She feels restless - ness swelling up relentlessly, leaving her defenseless. 45 The restlessness of the character asserts itself as the excess motion uncontained by the still images. She wishes, we are told, “to overtake herself”; that is, to get to the other side of this frantic filmic motion. At first, the attempt seems to be to overcome motion with motion, to stamp out stillness and containment, to assert filmic movement and speed over photographic stillness. But, in fact, the desire is to stop: “with any luck she would trip herself up and leave the trains of thought which have been trodden bare.” 46 The longed-for stumble of contingency that ruptures habitual thought occurs at the end of Island as a gradual return to stillness. The frantic walk ceases, and the camera tilts upward, away from the shifting ground, looking up at the waving grasses, which fill the screen in close-up. This point-of-view shot is followed by a long take of the sky and then by a return of the horizon in a long shot of the trees and barely moving, quietly whis - pering grass. From here, the film folds back on itself, repeating the kinds of still images with which it began. In this film about repetition, stillness, and image, these last shots recall the first, a sort of delayed double exposure. Tan suggests in an interview about Island that “both film and memories can transport you to a different place, a different time. The experience is then like a double projection, of being in two places at once.” 47 In the film’s enact - ment of memory through repetition and echo, the viewer is at the beginning and the end of the film at the same time (similar to Tu areg ). The narrator concludes, “Now the air feels cooler and she thinks that perhaps this place is becoming her home. This island is like a magni - fying glass: No matter how far she retreats the world at large feels tan - gibly close. She did not come here to get away.” 48 The proximity of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 world is registered by the restored stilled views and the images of trees, which allow for the familiarity of home to creep into the edges of the subject’s experience and guarantee the impervious presence of the outside world. At the same time, these images that bind the pho - tographic and the filmic underscore an understanding of home that is conditioned by hybridity. The end of the narrative evokes the return of the stilled image: “When she leaves she will fold up this place and put it in her pocket for safekeeping.” 49 The island becomes miniatur - ized—small enough to fold up like a photograph—removed from the large scale of film and motion. The end of the film concentrates on the terms it establishes at the beginning— medium , provenance , and place —terms that adhere to the unique exchange between film and photography. Tan recuperates the deeply personal experience of a dis - placed subject—a woman who has traveled to the island as a kind of retreat—against the rooted solidity of the images of trees, which, like Talbot’s tree at Lacock Abbey, suggest a kind of timelessness, of being removed from the sequential temporality of the everyday. Tan describes both the island and Island as figures of refuge: The way I see it, Island attempts to address this idea of retreat, of withdrawal from the normal hassles and hectic of daily life and also the installation itself attempts to function as a temporary retreat, a place out of time and removed from normal everyday life. Not as a place to turn one’s back on the world but as a place to rethink one’s relation to and position within it. 50 The retreat in Island is an ethical engagement (rather than escape) that asks us to attend to the hybridity of place and placement by way of the stilled image. The penultimate shot of the film is a view from the island looking out across the sea, which is followed by a 180-degree reverse shot gazing back at the shore and reestablishing the initial shot of the film. This shot lingers for a number of seconds, before it freezes, holding the photographic image fast in the frame. This final freeze-frame, in which the image of stillness asserts itself beyond the context of repe - tition and movement, alters the temporality of the film, which is trans - muted from cinematic present to photographic and archived past. The shot draws from a cinematic tradition of concluding with a freeze- frame, marking the point of narrative closure by means of the still pho - tograph. 51 According to Garrett Stewart, the freeze-frame is an “affront to the movie,” formally asserting the terms of photographic death, and highlighting the death within the plot that motivates the frozen image. 52 The stasis that marks the freeze-frame interrupts the cine - matic sequence, foreclosing upon any possible continuity in the drive for an ending. Mulvey makes clear, however, that the association of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 freeze-frame with the narrative death drive represents one of two possible directions that the ending points to. She reminds us that the freeze frame is a series of identical frames repeated in order to create an illusion of stillness to replace the illusion of movement. Beyond its presence as a “photograph,” a single image outside the continuum of film, there is the continuous flow of the film - strip and its individual frames, closing the gap between the film in the projector and the image on the screen. While the freeze frame brings finality to narrative, the sequence of individual frames can, as suggested by the system of pattern and repetition in the flicker film, lead to infinity. One direction finds a form to express “the end” through metaphor. The other direction represents the aspiration to stories without end, a ceaseless metonymy. 53 The freeze-frame at the end of Island seems to blend the two direc - tions; it is a double articulation of stillness, superimposing the tech - nologically stilled image over the still image that it contains and laying bare the devices of stillness, both photographic and filmic. The frozen gesture away from narrative does not insert the terms of stasis into movement in the form of an interruption. Rather, the freeze-frame reiterates what has already been established by the long takes that con - struct the rest of the film: the incorporation of stasis into film is a matter of duration and repetition rather than arrest. In Island , the freeze- frame presents an image that will underlie the memory of the place, both still and moving. Alongside Island , Tan mounted an exhibition of photographs called Närsholmen I–VI , a series of black-and-white prints of Gotland. These photographs were included in the installation when the film was first shown in Stockholm and Paris. The display seems signifi - cant: a film that recovers stillness through motion—that gets at fix - ity by means of a filmic gesture toward the history of photogra - phy—is accompanied by its pho - tographic equivalent. The six photographs are similar in subject to the film, focusing on the land - scape with trees in the foreground

Fiona Tan. Närsholmen I –VI , 2008. Photographs. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 and background. Studies in depth of field and disembodied perspec - tive, the photographs are not extracted from the film but form their own group of film stills that do not appear on screen. Corresponding to the film in terms of framing and composition, the black-and-white photographs seem as if they could have been part of the film but were put aside instead. Their scale, 100 x 120 centimeters and 40 x 60 cen - timeters, is vastly reduced from the large screen of the film, which takes up almost an entire wall of gallery space. The photographic economy of size, its spatiotemporal smallness, marks what Metz, in “Photography and Fetish,” identifies as the first basic difference between film and photography. Yet this basic difference is, in part, what Tan seeks to traverse in her pursuit of filmic stillness. The lin - gering long takes of Island allow for the spectator to bracket narrative time in favor of duration, opening up the possibility of attentiveness and contemplation.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 Notes 1. The peninsula of Närsholmen was also the site for Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice (1986), which acts as a possible point of comparison for the long takes and lingering images of Tan’s film. 2. Tan’s most recent video installations, Island among them, are part of a solo exhi - bition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery (on display May–September 2010), which travels to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian in fall 2010. Tan was the representative from the Netherlands for the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), where she displayed Disorient (2009), which she filmed on location in the Dutch pavilion specifically for the biennale. Provenance (2008) and Rise and Fall (2009) were also included in the biennale. 3. Fiona Tan, interview by Magdalena Malm, September 2008, in Project Archive, Mobile Art Production (MAP), http://www.mobileartproduction.se/pdf/Intervju_ Fiona_EN.pdf. Island was first shown at the MAP Birger Jarlsgaten in Stockholm, Sweden. The film was screened at the Contemporary Art Center as part of Prospect.1, a large-scale biennial in New Orleans that ran from November 1, 2008 to January 18, 2009. 4. Thomas Elsaesser, “Fiona Tan: Place after Place,” in Fiona Tan: Disorient , exh. cat. (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2009), 2.24. 5. Elsaesser, “Fiona Tan,” 2.24. 6. Tan’s Island , considered here as a cross-hatching of film and photography, might be effectively differentiated from cinematic investigations of stillness that stage encounters with painting (for example, the films and videos of Eve Sussmann or Bill Viola). Tan has drawn from painting in past works, particularly in Provenance (2008), six filmed portraits commissioned by the Rijksmuseum, which take as their source the museum’s collection of seventeenth-century portraits. Hung on the gallery wall at eye level, the portraits are shown simultaneously on small screens. The portraits neither reimagine nor remediate painting through film but use the earlier portraits and con - ventions of spectatorship as a staging ground for asking a set of questions of identity, origin, and spectatorship within film and filmic negotiations of stillness. 7. The notion of hybrid media is productively explored in Karen Beckman and Jean Ma’s introduction to Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography , a recent collection of essays on the subject of film and photography. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–19. 8. Philippe Dubois, “Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses,” trans. Lynne Kirby, in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video , ed. Patrice Pedro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 152–153. 9. David Green, “Making Time: Photography, Film and Temporalities of the Image,” in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image , ed. David Green and Joanna Lowry (Brighton, UK: Photoforum, 2006), 11. 10. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3. 11. Kracauer, 41. 12. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Volume 1 , trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 13. 13. Bazin, 14–15. 14. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in The Cinematic , ed. David Campany (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 128. 15. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 17. 16. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 3. 17. Green, “Making Time,” 15. 18. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 45. 19. See Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” in Image-Music-Text, 52–68; and Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” in The Cinematic , ed. Campany, 48. 20. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 67. 21. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 67. 22. Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” in The Cinematic , ed. Campany, 120. 23. Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” 122. 24. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 22. 25. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 322. 26. Kracauer, 4. 27. In The Pencil of Nature , which contains an account of his process as well as twenty-four calotypes, Talbot groups his photographic objects according to the clas - sifications “Sculpture, Architecture, Landscape, Insects, Plants, Facsimiles, Lace, Cotton, Prints, Microscopia.” These categories do little more than suggest possible general uses to which photographic representation might be put, rather than pre - senting complete studies themselves. 28. William Henry Fox Talbot to John Frederick William Herschel, 18 March 1841, doc. no. 4218, The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, University of Glasgow and De Montfort University, http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/letters.html. 29. See Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 167–172. 30. “Fiona Tan: Artist’s Talk,” Tate Channel, http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/ 26601058001. 31. See Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film , ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 118. 32. Barthes, Camera Lucida , 111. 33. Elsaesser, 2.21. 34. Barthes, Camera Lucida , 111. 35. Mark Godfrey, “Fiona Tan’s Countenance ,” in Suzanne Cotter and Mark Godfrey, Fiona Tan: Countenance , exh. cat. (Oxford, UK: Modern Art Oxford, 2005), 76. 36. Joel Snyder, “Setting the Record Straight: Fiona Tan’s Correction ,” in Fiona Tan: Correction , exh. cat., ed. Francesco Bonami (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 28. 37. In his essay on Countenance , Godfrey identifies moving-image portraits as a subgenre of portraiture originating in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964–1966) and including a diverse corpus of recent work from James Coleman, Gillian Waring, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth, Catherine Yass, Tacita Dean, and Sam Taylor-Wood. Godfrey, “Fiona Tan’s Countenance ,” 74. 38. Jonathan Friday, “Stillness Becoming: Reflections on Bazin, Barthes and Photographic Stillness,” in Stillness and Time , ed. Green and Lowry, 39.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 39. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in 1927–1934 , vol. 2 of Selected Writings , ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 514. 40. Joanna Lowry, “Portraits, Still Video Portraits and the Account of the Soul,” in Stillness and Time , ed. Green and Lowry, 68. 41. Barthes, Camera Lucida , 78. 42. As Laura Mulvey persuasively argues, the act of cinematic delay interrupts the focus on narrative drama, dissolving “the fiction so that the time of registration can come to the fore,” Mulvey, 184. 43. Mulvey, 144. 44. Fiona Tan, “ Island —voice-over,” Fiona Tan, http://www.fionatan.nl/works/8. 45. Tan, “ Island —voice-over.” 46. Tan, “ Island —voice-over.” 47. Tan, interview. 48. Tan, “ Island —voice-over.” 49. Tan, “ Island —voice-over.” 50. Tan, interview. 51. See Mulvey, 80; and Stewart, 41. 52. Stewart, 41. Discussing Stewart, Mulvey mentions famous freeze-frames of the death-drive ending: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Thelma and Louise (1991). 53. Mulvey, 81.

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