FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION Between Stillness and Motion FILM, PHOTOGRAPHY, ALGORITHMS EDITED BY EIVIND RØSSAAK Amsterdam University Press Between Stillness and Motion Between Stillness and Motion Film,Photography,Algorithms Edited by Eivind Røssaak The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council. Front cover illustration: Tobias Rehberger, On Otto, film still (Kim Basinger watching The Lady from Shanghai), . Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan Back cover illustration: Still from Gregg Biermann’s Spherical Coordinates () Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn (paperback) isbn (hardcover) e-isbn nur © E. Røssaak / Amsterdam University Press, All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Contents Acknowledgements Introduction The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction Eivind Røssaak Philosophies of Motion The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century “Philosophical Toys” and Their Discourse Tom Gunning Digital Technics Beyond the “Last Machine”: Thinking Digital Media with Hollis Frampton Mark B.N. Hansen The Use of Freeze and Slide Motion The Figure of Visual Standstill in R.W. Fassbinder’sFilms Christa Blümlinger TheTemporalitiesoftheNarrativeSlideMotionFilm Liv Hausken The Cinematic Turn in the Arts Stop/Motion Thomas Elsaesser After “Photography’sExpandedField” George Baker On O O:MovingImagesandtheNewCollectivity Ina Blom 6 Between Stillness and Motion The Algorithmic Turn Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video: An Aesthetic of Post-Production Arild Fetveit Algorithmic Culture: Beyond the Photo/Film Divide Eivind Røssaak Archives in Between “The Archives of the Planet” and Montage: The Movement of the Crowd and “the Rhythm of Life” Trond Lundemo General Bibliography Contributors Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the help of many generous colleagues and supportive institutions. My sincere thanks go to my former col- legues in the cross-disciplinary research project Media Aesthetics at the Univer- sity of Oslo and the University of Copenhagen: Liv Hausken, Ina Blom, Arild Fetveit, and Susanne Østby Sæther. The idea for this book was born and devel- oped during this project. This research project was financed by the Norwegian Research Council and generously hosted by the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. Thanks also to the National Library of Norway for support in the book’s final stages. Most importantly, thanks to the contributors for taking part in the joint book seminar at Lysebu Conference Center overlooking the woods of Oslo in , where these ideas were consoli- dated and developed during lectures, presentations, conversations and idle talks into the night. Thank you also to the Society of Cinema and Media Studies for hosting several of the papers at their conferences over the past decade. Talks and conversations with colleagues and students at these conferences and at our respective universities and institutions also helped foster these ideas. Thanks also to Christian Refsum, Nevena Ivanova, Jihoon Felix Kim, Jon Inge Faldalen, D.N. Rodowick, W.J.T. Mitchell, Mary Ann Doane and Alexander Galloway for inspiration and idle talks, and finally, to Thomas Elsaesser for making this pub- lishing project possible. Thanks also to our tireless copy editor, wordsmith Kier- sten Leigh Johnson. Eivind Røssaak Oslo, Berlin and New York, March/April Introduction The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction Eivind Røssaak This collection of essays seeks to introduce an affirmative critique of and fasci- nation for the different uses of stillness and motion in a wide variety of expres- sions – pre-cinematic, cinematic, post-cinematic and new media. The debate on stillness and motion is as old as art history, but within cinema studies, it became the subject of widespread debate during the s. At its root, it was informed by apparatus theory and the idea of negating movement through enlighten- ment. Its axiom was that cinematic movement is an illusion, that movement is an “ideological effect of the cinematic apparatus.” Any artistic deconstruction of motion through ruptures or the revelation of a series of stills was rapidly integrated into this critical program. The still image was the hidden or even repressed basis behind the industrial illusion of cinematic motion. Today, we are experiencing a broad range of cinematic turns within the art scene as well as a technological revolution through the use of computer-gener- ated imagery, which means that the entire critical program, based as it was on the materiality of celluloid, has lost some of its initial urgency. The use of the interplay between stillness and motion must be recontextualized. Fresh con- cepts are needed to see these works in a broader, more complex media aesthetic environment. We want to investigate the possibility of a thicker description, which allows contributors to discover and open up the field through close ana- lysis of specific works and media practices. Contemporary media rely on a com- plex connection between the forces and intensities of time and speed relations, which affect the body of the spectator or user. The body is not just the carrier of a personal history, but a storage site and an intensified receptive surface in a media-saturated society. Thus, the body belongs to a history of media and med- iations. A crucial part of this embodied media history involves the encounters with audiovisual material such as in Tobias Rehberger’s work On Otto, dis- cussed in Ina Blom’s article. Mediations and bodies participate in a larger collec- tive and technical environment, which instantiates and re-imagines the history of media and affects. 12 Eivind Røssaak From Optical Toys to Computer Imaging In a strange way, the history of images between the still and the moving returns to the very origins of cinema; in fact, even earlier. The viewing pleasure of pre- cinematic optical toys such as the thaumatrope, the stroboscopic disc and the phenakistiscope stems from the paradoxical difference between what they look like before and after the toy is activated. It is a mind-blowing ride from stasis to kinesis and back. Early film exhibitors also addressed this experience. They were concerned with demonstrating the abilities of the new medium of the ciné- matographe, as the Lumière Brothers called their multipurpose machine. Time and again, they would astonish their audiences with their special presentation technique. Initially, the brothers Lumière presented the moving image as a pro- jected still, before the projectionist brought the image to life by cranking up the machine. One hundred years later, one of the most striking features in contemporary cinematic practices in movie theaters, art galleries, and new media platforms is the frequent use of slow motion and other techniques of delay. It is as if the moving image has become increasingly refashioned in the direction of demon- strating its abilities to remain motionless, or to move in ways that are barely visible. Several moving image artworks, particularly the ones in galleries and museums, seem to excel in featuring indiscernible differences between motion and stillness, in stops, still frames, freeze effects, slow-motion effects, and even stuttering. According to art historian Boris Groys, the contemporary cinema of delay and slow motion – from The Matrix to Hour Psycho – negotiates with its other – immobility – as a way of understanding its relationship to both earlier forms of representation and to the mediascape of the contemporary con- sumer. As Groys writes, In the course of its long history of antagonism between the media, film has earned the right to act as the icon of secularizing modernism. Inversely, by being transferred into the traditional realms of art, film itself has, in turn, increasingly become the subject of iconoclastic gestures: by means of new technology such as video, computer, and DVD, the motion of film has been halted midstream and dissected. In this way, cinema comes to reflect upon its destiny in a new media environ- ment. The contemporary examples are many: from Bill Viola to Douglas Gor- don, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sharon Lockhart and others. While some artists prefer the latest media techniques like digital artist Jim Campbell, others hark back to earlier techniques or combine new and old techniques like in the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ most recent works. The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction 13 We have also seen a growing awareness and conscious reflexivity regarding mediation and new technology in pop videos as well as in commercial cinema. Directors like Michel Gondry operate in both fields. The fame of a blockbuster movie like The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, ) rests to a large ex- tent on its striking use of special effects such as the so-called bullet-time effect. This was a new, never-before-seen combination of slow motion and frozen movement effects that was immediately copied in countless other cinematic practices around the turn of the st century. These experiments are now often mimicked in vernacular video and disseminated on platforms like YouTube. The Spanish artist