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Fiona Tan. Island , 2008. HD video installation. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. 48 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00008 by guest on 01 October 2021 Stillness and the Anticinematic in the Work of Fiona Tan 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 Grey Room 41, Fall 2010, pp. 48–71. © 2010 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 49 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 50 Grey Room 41 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 Hornby | Stillness and the Anticinematic in the Work of Fiona Tan 51 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.

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