Between Still and Moving Images

Description

Of the multiple unexpected consequences of the shift to digital technologies, the sudden convergence of the categories of still images and moving images is without a doubt one of the deepest. The convergence is primarily technical: the same machine may produce one and the other, the same computer screen can display either one of them, and a single key will control the progression from a state to the other, speeding up or slowing down the run of images. It is as though still images have become but a subcategory of animation, a transitional situation whose inevitable transformation is a click away. The repercussions of this new technological state of affairs are palpable in every domain, from amateur practices to the information sector. Their impact on artistic production is felt more acutely, as the two forms of images now share the same exhibition spaces and may be assumed by the same author, with no hierarchy in their respective statuses.
The collection is organized in five chapters, which follow a chronological and thematic order and each have their own introduction. The first goes back over the philosophical, psychological, or aesthetic debates that enrolled photography and cinema at the turn of the twentieth century, and the way the two media simultaneously modeled conceptions of movement, duration, and the moment. The second chapter examines the many ways in which photography and cinema concretely crossed in the practices of some cameramen and resulted in mixed media forms, some of which no longer exist. The third looks more specifically at how print media brought together cinema and photography, especially during the interwar period. The fourth chapter is devoted to the decades following World War II and explores the multiple uses of the freeze frame in cinema, in particular its relation – individual as well as collective – to memory, history, and trauma. Finally, the closing chapter deals with the many forms assumed by the sequence in the visual culture of the last decades of the century

Contents

Laurent Guido, Olivier Lugon (University of Lausanne), Introduction

1. Founding Debates

Laurent Guido, Introduction. The Paradoxical Fits and Starts of the New “Optical Unconscious”; Tom Gunning (University of Chicago), The “Arrested” Instant: Between Stillness and Motion; Maria Tortajada (University of Lausanne), Photography/Cinema: Complementary Paradigms in the Early 20th Century; Mireille Berton (University of Lausanne), « A Subjectivity Torn between Stasis and Movement: Still Image and Moving Image in Medical Discourse at the Turn of the 20th Century; Samantha Lackey (University of Manchester), ‘A Series of Fragments’: Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison (1923)

2. Crossings between Media

Olivier Lugon, Introduction. Between the Photograph and the Film Frame; Clément Chéroux (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), The Great Trade of Tricks: On Some Relations Between Conjuring Tricks, Photography, and Cinematography; Kim Timby (Musée Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône), “Cinema in a Single Photo”: the Animated Screen Portrait of the 1910s; Valérie Vignaux (Université François-Rabelais, Tours), The Pathéorama Still Film (1921): Isolated Phenomenon or Paradigm?; Christel Taillibert (Université Nice Sophia-Antipolis), The Mixed Use of Still and Moving Images in Education during the Interwar Period

3. Cinema and the Printed Page

Olivier Lugon, Introduction. Cinema Flipped Through: Film in the Press and in Illustrated Books; Thierry Gervais (Ryerson University, Toronto), “The Little Paper Cinema”: the Transformations of Illustration in Belle Epoque Periodicals; Myriam Chermette (Université de Versailles, Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines), From Illustrated Narratives to Narratives in Images: Influences of the Moving Image on the French Daily Press in the Interwar Period; Michel Frizot (EHESS/CNRS, Paris), On a Cinema Imaginary of Photography (1928–1930); François Albera (University of Lausanne), From the Cinematic Book to the Film-Book

4. Freeze Frames

Laurent Guido, Introduction. Between Deadly Trace and Memorial Scansion: The Frozen Image in Film; David Forgacs (University College London), Photography and the Denarrativization of Cinematic Practice in Italy, 1935–55; Diane Arnaud (Université Paris 7), After La Jetée: Cine-Photo Albums of the Disaster; Christa Blümlinger (Université Paris 3), « Postcards in Agnès Varda’s Cinema; Patricia Kruth (Université de Lille), « Freeze Frame, Photograph, and Re-animation in Martin Scorsese’s Films; André Habib (Université de Montréal), Viva Paci (Université du Québec à Montréal), Photo Browse and Film Browse: Between Images that Move and Images that Remain (in Chris Marker’s Work)

5. Contemporary Sequences

Olivier Lugon, Laurent Guido, Introduction. Sequencing, Looping; Guillaume Le Gall (Université Paris 4), The Suspended Time of Movement: Muybridge, a Model for Conceptual Art; Wolfgang Brückle (University of Essex), Chronophotography of Another Order: Nan Goldin’s Life Told in Her Slide Shows; Barbara Le Maître (Université Paris 3), Pensive Hybrids: On some of Raymond Depardon’s Filmo-photographic Setups; Alain Boillat (University of Lausanne), The Paradoxical Status of the Referent of Stillness in Comics

Biographical Notes on the Contributors/ Index

Biography

Olivier Lugon is an art historian, and professor at Lausanne University (film history department). His research has focused on German and American photography of the inter-wars years, documentary photography, exhibition design, the relationships of photography and architecture, and automotive vision. His publications include La Photographie en Allemagne : Anthologie de textes, 1919–1939 (1997), August Sander Landschaften (1999), Le Style documentaire: D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945 (2002), Le Pont transbordeur de Marseille (2012, with Philippe Simay and François Bon). He was Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. He currently directs the Swiss National Science Foundation research project “The modern exhibition of photography, 1920–1970”.

Laurent Guido is Professor and Chair of the Department of Film History and Aesthetics, University of Lausanne. He was a visiting Professor at the University of Montreal; and Paris X Nanterre. He has collaborated with many institutions (Musée Olympique, Musée Rath, Louvre, Cité de la Musique, Giornate del Cinema Muto). His work addresses the relations between cinema, music and dance, as well as film historiography. Most recent books and edited volumes include L’Age du Rythme (Payot, 2007); Aux sources du burlesque (AFRHC/Giornate del Cinema muto, 2010, with L. Le Forestier); Fixe/Animé (L’Age d’Homme, 2010, with Olivier Lugon); Rythmer/Rhythmize (Intermédialités 18, Fall 2010, with M. Cowan). He is currently completing a book about dance in early cinema.