Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (Film and Culture Series)
Justin Remes
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0231169639
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Conducting the first comprehensive study of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work Disappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature.
Analyzing four categories of static film--furniture films, designed to be viewed partially or distractedly; protracted films, which use extremely slow motion to impress stasis; textual films, which foreground the static display of letters and written words; and monochrome films, which display a field of monochrome color as their image--Remes maps the interrelations between movement, stillness, and duration and their complication of cinema's conventional function and effects. Arguing all films unfold in time, he suggests duration is more fundamental to cinema than motion, initiating fresh inquiries into film's manipulation of temporality, from rigidly structured works to those with more ambiguous and open-ended frameworks. Remes's discussion integrates the writings of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Tom Gunning, Rudolf Arnheim, Raymond Bellour, and Noel Carroll and will appeal to students of film theory, experimental cinema, intermedia studies, and aesthetics.
How To Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond
In a Lonely Place (BFI Film Classics)
mentioned, words that appear for prolonged durations lose their meaning and begin to become abstract shapes. (Recall Warhol’s maxim: “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away.”)34 And since small words like of and is are in very large typeface, the pictorial qualities of each individual letter become foregrounded. This was one of Snow’s goals: “The hope was that the changes in scale from word to word will help the spectator to see each word as an individual shape,
sentences all make an appearance—assertion (“This / is / communal / reading!”), question (“Is / there / anybody / reading / this / right / now?”), and command (“Just / think / of / this / as / entertainment.”)—there are also playful uses of words that represent apparently novel language games. Consider an unusual passage near the end of the film, where Snow announces that he will provide “ten / solo / words” (before going on to provide twenty-five): “And / Now; / ten / solo / words: / Coffee /
an hour each, and they are given the names of famous works of literature, such as Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Waiting for Godot, etc. (In one case the title of a classic is perversely altered to Oresteia in the Bambiland Having Ultimate Fisting.) The titles still show up on Amazon, although they are no longer available for purchase, presumably because of a swarm of angry one-star reviews from consumers who expected film versions of the titular literary works. Most reviewers angrily assert
(Currie), 9 Imitation of Christ (film), 96 immobility, 16, 50, 52, 63, 67, 69, 73, 122, 130, 168n78 implied motion, 18, 19 indexicality, 25, 96, 134, 142 Indiana, Robert, 43, 139 In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We Turn in the Night, Consumed by Fire) (film), 186–87n46 intermedia: defined, 61; experiments in, 87; Fluxus and, 61–64; hybrids of, 109 intermediality, 62, 63, 76 International Klein Blue (IKB), 111, 116, 118 intertitles, 87, 97 The Invisible Man (film), 12, 83 Isou,
passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (film), 186–87n46 surrealism, 6, 25, 43, 45, 86, 126 Symphonie diagonale (film), 85 Taubin, Amy, 40 television: theorization of distinctions between film and, 44–45; Warhol’s filmmaking compared to, 43–44 Television Delivers People (film), 177n9 temporality, 41, 63, 78, 89, 92, 136, 143. See also alternate temporalities; filmic temporality temporal
