Motion(less) pictures: the cinema of stasis

Abstract

Film theorists have offered wildly divergent frameworks for understanding the role of motion in cinema’s ontology. For many, such as Rudolf Arnheim, motion is the sine qua non of cinema (Arnheim has claimed that “film is required by aesthetic law to use and interpret motion”). Others, however, have been more cautious in their formulations. For instance, Roland Barthes has asserted that while the movement of images is often seen as “cinema’s sacred essence,” in fact, motion is not as central to cinema’s ontology as duration, an experiential “unfolding.” (Barthes’ theorization has many affinities with Henri Bergson’s musings on the phenomenology of time in Creative Evolution .) A useful way of interrogating these theoretical divides can be found in what I call the cinema of stasis , a series of avant-garde films which challenge fundamental cinematic assumptions by offering little or no on-screen movement. Examples include Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), Chieko Shiomi’s Disappearing Music for Face (1966), Hollis Frampton’s Lemon (1969), and Larry Gottheim’s Fogline (1970). While individual static films have been the subject of scholarly attention, the cinema of stasis as a modality has not yet been investigated in any detailed or systematic way. I want to explore several questions that are intrinsically posed by static films: Why take a medium uniquely positioned to create the illusion of movement and instead use it to create a quasi-photographic stasis? What are the aesthetic and affective valences of static films? And finally, what are the implications of these experiments for the ontology of film?