Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography Guy Westwell Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Pp. xix + 293. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper). This edited collection of essays explores the complex relationship between photography and cinema. Or, as the editors eloquently put it, Still Moving invites readers to "… follow the lines of flight that spin out of this generative and irresolvable encounter between stasis and motion" (9). At the outset the editors are at pains to stress the contingent and diffcult relationship between moving and still images, whether examined in relation to their entangled histories or within the contemporary moment of the digital turn. They have also cast a wide net for contributors and the collection includes a range of voices—film scholars, art historians, artists, filmmakers, curators—that certainly provide the reader with a wide range of styles and perspectives. Practitioners include Rebecca Baron, Zoe Beloff, Nancy Davenport and Atom Egoyan. The interview with Baron and Beloff's essay on the film and photographic documentation of mental illness in the early twentieth century are particularly illuminating in their corroboration and exploration of the themes and issues that appear in the more scholarly articles. The book is organised into three sections. The first section contains articles that are explicitly or implicitly engaged with the question of referentiality. Tom Gunning's article is excellent and Tim Corrigan provides a useful potted history of the essay film, with a particular focus on Chris Marker's, The Koreans (1959) and Letters from Siberia (1958). Corrigan makes a convincing case that Marker, and this particular moment in Marker's career, is a key moment in the history of both film and photography and that his experiments with the essay film format chart an "… essential modern territory between images where the fading spaces and black time lines ask the film viewer to become a thinker" (58–9). Indeed, many of the essays in the collection gravitate towards this historical period, as a formative moment in which the interpenetration of the two media was actively explored. For example, Juan A. Suarez provides a detailed account of the [End Page 266] interrelationship between experimental sound/music (and in particular, the concept of "noise") and 1960s structural film. By lending structural film an ear, as Suarez says, this essay certainly helps the editors deliver on their promise to complicate their object of study and the article is thought-provoking and frustrating in equal measure in its capacity to problematize the relationship between still and moving image and its caginess about engaging this central issue directly. The second section focuses more directly on politics through a focus on questions of nation, memory and history. Jean Ma's article on the Taiwanese film, A City of Sadness (1989) is indicative in its use of the collection's recurring theoretical reference points (namely, André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes). Activated by a line of inquiry related to Taiwan's relationship with political repression, Ma successfully deploys and deconstructs these theorists in her examination of how photography is central to the film's "… confrontation with the real casualties of history, its endeavour to represent an occluded past from the perspective of the victims of state violence and political terror" (102). In an in-depth analysis, Karen Beckman teases out themes of stasis and movement, and vertical and horizontal organisation in Amores Perros (2000) while Rita Gonzalez's essay focuses on trends within contemporary Chicano, or rasquache, cinema, and details a vibrant, new and potentially utopian synthesis of photography, film and much else. Gonzalez argues that filmmaker Jim Mendiola's "… far-reaching inventory of all things 'pop' and radical conveys a retrospective discursive framing of Chicano film that places experimentation and community building at center stage" (171). The third section, titled "Working Between Media," is focused more specifically on the central question of how the two media interact. George Baker focuses on "expanded photography" and what appears at the outset to be an unclear distinction between "still film" and "film still." Any confusion is soon dispelled through the deployment of a nicely handled and fruitfully developed...