Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis

Larry Gottheim’s film Fog Line (1970) begins with a still shot of a landscape covered in dense fog. All that can be seen through the fog are the outlines of a few trees intersected by four high-tension wires. The setting is subtly beautiful, and the complete lack of sound creates a space for meditation. Minutes pass. Apart from some slight shaking, the camera does not move, nor do any elements within the mise-en-scène. The trees and telephone wires become easier to make out as the fog lifts, although the fog’s retreat is so gradual that its movement is not perceived by the viewer. After eleven minutes of the same motionless shot, the film abruptly ends (see figure 1.1). During my first viewing of Fog Line, I found the film simultaneously boring and absorbing. I was bored because, on a superficial level, nothing happened. Yet I was fascinated because I had never encountered a film like this before. It was so still, so uneventful, I felt like I was staring at a photograph or a painting for several minutes rather than watching a movie.

When I watched Fog Line a second time, I realized that there was actually more movement than I had initially registered. At one point, several minutes into the film, barely visible grainy shadows (in actuality, horses) slowly wander from one side of the landscape to the other. (Gottheim had intentionally selected this location for his film because of the horses that regularly moved through it.) At another point a small, almost indiscernible, bird quickly flies above the wires. Like most viewers, I had missed these developments in my first careful viewing; it was as if the prolonged inertia had tricked my mind into thinking I was looking at a still. I was unable to easily detect the minimal motion within the shot since, after the first few minutes of stasis, I was no longer expecting movement of any kind. Scott MacDonald describes the spectatorial experience engendered by Fog Line cogently: “For a few moments at the beginning of the film, viewers cannot be sure that the image they’re looking at is a motion picture. Indeed, it is only once the fog has thinned enough for an identification of the image to be possible that we can recognize that something other than the movie projector—the fog itself—is moving.”¹

While Fog Line is a remarkable and unique cinematic experience, it is not without predecessors, nor is it without successors. In fact, it places itself in a rich and variegated tradition that I will call the cinema of stasis. Static films offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion.² In most films an impression of movement is provided either by the motion of the camera or the motion of elements within the mise-en-scène—usually both. In contrast, static films generally feature no camera movement and little or no movement within the frame. Instead, these films foreground stasis and consequently blur the lines between traditional visual art and motion pictures.³

It should be noted that the term movement is polysemous and is sometimes used in a broader sense than what I have in mind here. Gilles Deleuze, for example, suggests that movement can be achieved in film not only through the motion of the camera or elements in the frame but also through montage, which he claims “allows the achievement of a pure mobility extracted from the movements of characters.”⁴ Along similar lines, Christian Metz claims that a filmic transition between one image and another—“even if each image is still”—constitutes an “ideal” movement.⁵ As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, movement can refer to “a change of place or position,” and by this definition any cinematic montage (even a montage of still shots) constitutes movement. But movement can also designate “the action or process of moving,”⁶ and it is this more specific definition that I have in mind. In other words a film that engages in montage can still be considered a static film for my purposes, so long as the elements within the frame are static (as in, say, Chris Marker’s La jetée [1962]). For while the spectator’s point of view is shifting “in place or position,” no “action or process of moving” is directly observed; in cases like these the movement itself takes place off-camera, and the dominant impression is one of stasis.⁷

The tradition of static cinema arguably starts in 1930 with Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (Wochenende) (1930). The film features a rich, evocative sound track of voices, clocks, alarms, and other “found” sounds, but the screen remains blank and motionless for the work’s entire eleven-minute duration. At first, Weekend seemed like little more than a curio, an idiosyncratic experiment designed to test the limits of cinematic expression. But a similar kind of cinematic stasis began to appear again in 1950s France with Situationist films like Gil Wolman’s L’anticoncept (The Anticoncept) (1951) and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952), both of which traffic in immobile visual fields stripped of any imagery. By the 1960s the floodgates had opened. This was an era in which the boundaries separating various media were being challenged more than ever before, and this was reflected in a series of provocative and influential static films such as Marker’s La jetée, Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). These pioneering works would, in subsequent decades, inspire a number of filmmakers, including Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, and Derek Jarman, to continue exploring the aesthetics of stillness.

Although individual static films have been the subject of scholarly attention, the cinema of stasis as a modality has not yet been adequately theorized. I want to remedy this by analyzing several subsets of static cinema—the furniture film, the protracted film, the textual film, and the monochrome film—drawing attention to the diversity and multivalence of cinematic stasis. I also want to attempt to answer several questions that are intrinsically posed by static films: Why take a medium uniquely positioned to create the illusion of movement and use it to create a quasi-photographic stasis? What forms of spectatorship are appropriate in approaching these works? And finally, what are the implications of these experiments for the ontology of film?⁸

Stasis has always played an important role in cinema’s ontology. Even in films that appear to offer constant movement, the ostensible motion is an illusion insofar as it is created by a series of still frames in quick succession.⁹ But beyond this, even the appearance of stasis on the screen would have been familiar to cinema’s early spectators. As Tom Gunning has pointed out, in the Lumière brothers’ early exhibitions “the films were initially presented as frozen unmoving images, projections of still photographs.”¹⁰ After a few moments of stasis the projector would be put in motion and the “photograph” would become animated, much to the delight of the audience. For the Lumières, stasis served as a kind of counterpoint to the startling movement that would soon come. The prolonged dominance of the still created the expectation of a slide show before subverting this expectation and showcasing the new technology of the motion picture. But if some early audiences were tricked into expecting stasis, only to be surprised by movement, later audiences would come to expect movement from a film, only to be surprised by those rare exceptions to the rule: films that returned to the primordial stasis out of which motion pictures evolved.

The very existence of terms like movie, moving picture, and motion picture reveals just how central the impression of movement has been in conventional conceptions of cinema.¹¹ Indeed, many film theorists have problematically made movement the sine qua non of cinema. For example, in his 1934 essay “Motion” Rudolf Arnheim claimed that “film is required by aesthetic law to use and interpret motion.”¹² In 1960 Siegfried Kracauer was just as unequivocal: “There is of course no film that would not represent—or, rather, feature—things moving. Movement is the alpha and omega of the medium.”¹³ And more recently, R. L. Rutsky has asserted, “Cinema, by definition, moves.”¹⁴ This presupposition was also prevalent among many early filmmakers, even within the avant-garde (from which the cinema of stasis would eventually arise): Germaine Dulac asserted, “Le cinéma est l’art du mouvement et de la lumière” (cinema is the art of movement and light),¹⁵ and Slavko Vorkapich called movement “the fundamental principle of the cinema art: [cinema’s] language must be, first of all, a language of motions.”¹⁶ Other avant-gardists, however, such as Douglass Crockwell, were more cautious in their theorizations, problematizing the assumed centrality of movement to cinematic practice. For Crockwell, “Visually the motion picture is sequential art…. Motion is but one of the incidental byproducts.”¹⁷ Along similar lines, Peter Kubelka has declared, “Cinema is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills—which means images which do not move—in a very quick rhythm.”¹⁸ These theorizations serve as useful reminders that even in traditional motion pictures, stasis is deeply embedded in the ontology of film. As Laura Mulvey points out, “Cinema’s stillness [is] a projected film’s best-kept secret,” albeit one that can now be exposed during home viewing through the use of the pause button.¹⁹

Such divergent theorizations suggest an aporia at the heart of cinema’s ontology. On the one hand many film theorists have insisted that the motion perceived in cinema is illusory, an optical trick, or, in the memorable formulation of surrealist Jean Goudal, “a conscious hallucination.” For Goudal, “The persistence of images on the retina, which is the physiological basis of cinema, claims to present movement to us with the actual continuity of the real; but in fact we know very well that it’s an illusion, a sensory device which does not completely fool us.”²⁰ On the other hand Christian Metz asserts, “In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of the impression, the real presence of motion.”²¹ Or in the words of Gunning, “I think there is little question that phenomenologically we see movement on the screen, not a ‘portrayal’ of movement.”²²

Ultimately, the apparent disagreement may be primarily a semantic one. Asking whether cinematic movement is “real” is a bit like asking whether dreams are real. The answer is, yes and no. On the one hand the experience itself is certainly real, and it can have tangible physiological effects on the dreamer (or spectator), including fear, excitement, and arousal. On the other hand a chair in a dream is ontologically of a different order than a chair in real life, just as the movement in the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat) (1895) is ontologically distinct from the arrival of an actual train. (Even the earliest cinematic spectators were aware of this distinction, urban legends notwithstanding.) Cinematic movement, unlike movement in the “real” world, is divisible into discrete units, traditionally twenty-four static frames per second. (The fact that actual motion is indivisible has been noted by many philosophers, most notably Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution.)²³ But this does not make the phenomenal perception of movement in motion pictures any less real. J. L. Austin’s interrogation of the word real in Sense and Sensibilia is pertinent here: “When it isn’t a real duck but a hallucination, it may still be a real hallucination—as opposed, for instance, to a passing quirk of a vivid imagination.”²⁴ So if the perception of a duck moving in a film is (as Goudal would have it) hallucinatory, the hallucination itself remains real.²⁵

But whether we conceptualize cinematic movement as real or illusory, the question remains: How do we theorize films that forgo even the impression of movement, films in which stasis predominates? Can a motion picture exist without motion? In his essay “Fire and Ice” Peter Wollen argues convincingly that “movement is not a necessary feature of film” (he references Marker’s La jetée, a work made up almost entirely of photographic stills, to validate this claim).²⁶ Tom Gunning also discusses the possibility of static films: “I think we can certainly conceive of films that exclude motion, made entirely of still images. Interestingly, many films that use still images seem to do so to comment on movement. Clearly, the dialectical relation between stillness and movement provides one of the richest uses of motion in film. But I think it would be an essentialist mistake to assume a film could not avoid cinematic motion, even if the examples of such are very rare and possibly debatable.”²⁷

Unfortunately, Gunning does not elaborate on what examples he has in mind. Nevertheless, the “dialectical relation between stillness and movement” has certainly been a critical element in cinematic praxis, stretching at least as far back as Eadweard Muybridge’s invention of the zoopraxiscope in 1879, and the significance of this dialectic has been theorized perceptively, not only by Gunning himself but by other film scholars as well. For example, Laura Mulvey has explored the pivotal role of stillness in Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia) (1953) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960),²⁸ and Raymond Bellour has analyzed the use of the freeze-frame in films like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959).²⁹ While I find these analyses useful, such scholarship generally focuses on momentary intrusions of stasis in films that otherwise abound with movement. I am more interested, however, in interrogating films in which there is little to no movement, films in which stasis—not motion—is the default.

Paul Schrader is one of the only writers who has directly acknowledged the existence of the cinema of stasis (what he calls “stasis films”). In his well-known 1972 book, Transcendental Style in Film, Schrader discusses works like Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Bruce Baillie’s Still Life (1966), and Stan Brakhage’s Song 27, My Mountain (1968), films that feature only minimal movement. Schrader also gives attention to the early films of Andy Warhol, such as Sleep (1963), Eat (1964), and Empire. (I would classify all of the above as part of the cinema of stasis.) While I am thankful that Schrader draws attention to this modality, his analysis of static films is necessarily cursory, since his overriding concern is with “transcendental” films, works that progress from a state of movement to a state of stasis in order to evoke a sense of the spiritual (e.g., the films of Yasujirō Ozu and Robert Bresson). As Schrader himself notes, “stasis films” are not merely “an extension of transcendental style” but “a different breed of film altogether.”³⁰

A more thorough theorization of stasis in cinema has been provided by the philosopher Noël Carroll. In his critique of Gregory Currie’s Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Carroll argues that films can exist without offering the impression of movement. He provides several useful examples of films that withhold movement, including Nagisa Oshima’s Band of Ninja (1967), Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice (1972), and Michael Snow’s One Second in Montreal (1969). For Carroll “these are all films in the sense that they were constructed and disseminated by means of standard film apparatuses. They command a significant place in film history where the question of ‘What is film?’ is part of an ongoing conversation internal to the filmworld—one addressed by filmmakers and theorists alike.” Carroll continues by offering a distinction between static films and works in other media that might involve a succession of stills (e.g., slide shows): “[Static] films use stasis as a stylistic choice. It is the fact that they are films that makes their stillness a pertinent, if not the pertinent, feature of the works in question. Had these films been slides, one would not remark upon their stillness. Movement is not a stylistic option with slides. But since these works are films, one is prompted to ask why there is no movement in them. What is the point? Any interpretation of these works has to offer an explanation of why the filmmakers under consideration have eschewed the possibility of movement.”³¹ To illustrate this point, consider Oshima’s Band of Ninja, a work composed entirely of static comic-book-style sketches in black and white. Until Band of Ninja is over, it is conceivable that one of the sketched ninjas will become animated and begin to run from one end of the screen to the other. But it would be absurd to wonder if a drawing of Superman in an actual comic book might begin to fly from one frame to another, or to think that the image of Fred Astaire in a photograph might begin dancing.³²

What, then, are the implications of such works for conceptualizing film? As Carroll astutely suggests, traditional definitions of cinema that foreground movement may represent a “de facto disenfranchisement of much of the history of avant-garde film.” For Carroll, what is critical is not that the perception of movement is actually created in any given work but only that “the relevant imagery be produced in a medium with the capacity to deliver movement,”³³ that “the possibility of movement is always technically available.”³⁴ Since potential movement is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, Carroll suggests that the label “moving picture” might be more useful than “film.”³⁵ On this particular point I find Carroll’s argument puzzling. While I have no serious reservations with calling, say, Snow’s One Second in Montreal a moving picture or a motion picture simply for ease of expression, strictly speaking, these would be misnomers, since Snow does not create any impression of movement in this work. Granted, it would be rather cumbersome to replace the term moving picture with picture in which the potential for movement is immanent. But it is misguided to suggest that only potential movement is implied by the traditional nomenclature. It seems rather like calling Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1964) a talkie, reasoning that, although the film is completely silent, the potential for sound and speech are always technically present. Such an appellation would be more than a little misleading. Consequently, I will refer to individual works within the cinema of stasis as films (static films, to be more precise) rather than movies, motion pictures, or moving pictures.³⁶

But there is a far more serious problem with Carroll’s argument about cinematic movement. For Carroll, in order to qualify as a film, something must necessarily belong to “the class of things from which the impression of movement is technically possible.”³⁷ Carroll’s definition usefully takes account of the existence of static films, since his emphasis is only on potential movement, regardless of whether this potential is actualized. But as Robert Yanal points out, Carroll’s definition needs further refinement. To illustrate his concern, Yanal borrows an idea from fellow philosopher Bruce Russell for a film called Spot, which only “projects a motionless spot of light, nothing more.” According to Yanal, “It is of course logically possible that Spot can, without any mechanical intervention, morph into Citizen Kane and thus begin to move. But is it technically possible that Spot—as it really is—can project motion? Not given real world conditions and laws. Carroll might respond that we don’t know that nothing moves in Spot until the end. True, but late knowledge is still knowledge, and this epistemic accident does not bear on the actual technical possibilities of Spot.”³⁸ In other words Yanal seems to suggest that motion—even potential motion—should not be considered a necessary condition of the cinema. To put it succinctly, “images move in most but not all films.”³⁹ Granted, motion is normative in cinematic praxis—and this is precisely what gives static films their aesthetic force—but motion is no more a necessary condition of cinema than sound or color are.

To further illustrate this critical point, let us move out of the realm of the hypothetical and into the realm of the actual. In 1970 Michael Snow arranged the first screenings of a conceptual work called A Casing Shelved, which was hailed by Jonas Mekas as “one of the great moments of cinema.”⁴⁰ In this work a slide of a bookcase (the same one that appears in Wavelength) is displayed, while Snow’s recorded voice is heard describing the objects that appear on it. As the voice describes an item, the viewer scans the bookcase to find it, so that, as Carroll points out, “the only movement” in this work is “the movement of our eyes.”⁴¹ Snow considers A Casing Shelved to be a film, even if it intentionally stretches our predefined notions of what “counts” as cinema, but Carroll takes issue with this designation: “I would argue that this ‘film’ is not a film at all; to be a film, properly so called, requires the literal possibility of movement.”⁴² The problem here (to echo Yanal’s perspicacious rebuttal of Carroll’s claim) is that there is no “literal possibility of movement” in many films. If I have already seen Oshima’s Band of Ninja (or if I have read a detailed description of the film from a trusted source), then for all intents and purposes, I know there is no possibility of a ninja becoming animated and moving across the screen. It seems that what Carroll is ultimately suggesting is this: for a work to be considered a film, it must be delivered by a medium that offers the potential for movement, whether or not that potential is actualized in any particular work. But this seems like a dubious distinction. After all, if I choose to post a video of A Casing Shelved online (on YouTube, for example), would the slide show suddenly become a film in Carroll’s view, since the medium now has the potential for movement? What if I were to show the work to a crowd who did not know whether I was displaying a slide, a film of a slide, or simply a film of a static bookcase? Would not the experience be essentially cinematic (albeit quite unorthodox), regardless of the answer to this question?

Carroll is concerned that categorizing A Casing Shelved as a film would necessarily “turn family albums into cineplexes,”⁴³ since neither Snow’s work nor photographs in family albums have the capacity for motion. But there is a crucial difference: A Casing Shelved is forty-five minutes long, whereas a family album has no duration, no inherent temporal dimension. Thus, if one is intent on establishing necessary conditions for the cinema (and I will argue in chapter 4 that there is no reason to do so), motion—even the potential for motion—should not be on the list. If cinema has any indispensable component, it would appear to be duration. Whether one is considering Gérard Courant’s 187-hour Cinématon (1978–2014) or Thomas Edison’s five-second Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894), all films have a running time; there is no such thing as an atemporal film. Thus, while Mary Ann Doane (and many other film theorists, including Christian Metz) claims that “the ability to represent movement” is “what distinguishes film from photography,” I would argue that the more fundamental distinction between cinema and photography (as well as other traditional visual arts) is not movement but duration.⁴⁴ As Maya Deren has noted, “the motion picture, though composed of spatial images, is primarily a time form.”⁴⁵

Carroll’s emphasis on potential movement as a sine qua non of cinema is further problematized by works in which the spectator is simply unaware of whether this potential is present. Consider, for instance, James Coleman’s film La tache aveugle (The blind spot) (1978–90). Coleman borrows a very small amount of footage (less than a second) from James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) and stretches each individual frame out for about twenty minutes (the work as a whole lasts eight hours). The process is achieved through the use of two slide projectors that are computer driven. Is the potential for movement present here or not? Normally slide shows do not permit the perception of movement, but is it not feasible that the technology running the slides could still invest them with movement? Again, the answers to such questions seem irrelevant. It is not at all clear why La tache aveugle’s status as a film (or a slide show, or whatever other classification one might suggest) should depend on the technology that happens to be used to project it.

This description is suggestive, since witnessing “time go by” implies a kind of movement in spite of the stasis on the screen. Even though Empire (like many static films) seems immutable, the experience of viewing such films involves constant flux. Raymond Bellour has noted this “paradoxical truth” of cinematic stasis—the way a static image in a film is “both fixed (in space) and moving (in time).”⁴⁷ But perhaps the most penetrating theorization of this paradox is provided by Henri Bergson. While it is true that Bergson is more interested in the philosophical implications of the cinematographic apparatus than in film as an art form, he nevertheless provides a description of duration that is apposite to our understanding of the cinema of stasis:

There is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow. Let us take the most stable of internal states, the visual perception of a motionless external object. The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing—rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow.⁴⁸

In other words, for Bergson, an experience of absolute stasis is impossible. Even if the object of my attention does not move (as is the case with static films), my subjective apprehension of the object is constantly evolving. This is a necessary consequence of the duration of experience. The spectator of a film like Empire witnesses movement: not the movement of the building on the screen but the movement of time itself.⁴⁹ This sense of the inevitability of perpetual motion prompts Bergson to make the Heraclitean assertion that “consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they will find him at a new moment in his history. Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing.”⁵⁰ Although Warhol’s Empire State Building is essentially immutable, my conscious experience of it is not. During just one minute or so of the film, the following questions begin to come to my mind: Is this a productive use of my time? Am I falling for some kind of Warholian prank by watching all eight hours? Would I get the gist of the film if I just watched ten minutes? Or is that precisely missing the point? Is Warhol’s goal to counter the capitalistic equation “Time equals money” by offering a space in which time can be observed, felt, and reflected upon rather than hurriedly “spent”? And, of course, similar questions surface and subside throughout the film’s duration. By foregrounding stasis, films like Empire actually make the spectator more aware of the movement of time and consciousness, neither of which can be apprehended in the same way when one is absorbed in the movement of a cinematic image.

Roland Barthes makes a similar argument in his classic 1970 essay “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Several Eisenstein Stills.” While his object of investigation is the film still (that is, a frame extracted from a motion picture) rather than the still film, his formulations remain useful. Barthes is interested in interrogating “the filmic,” which he defines as “what, in the film, cannot be described … the representation that cannot be represented. The filmic begins only where language and articulated metalanguage cease.” But paradoxically, Barthes argues that “to a certain extent,” the filmic “cannot be grasped in the projected film, the film ‘in movement,’ ‘au naturel,’” but only in the still. Consequently, “the ‘movement’ which is taken for the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, ‘life,’ copy, but merely the armature of a permutational unfolding.” Challenging conventional theorizations that see the movement of images as “cinema’s sacred essence,”⁵¹ Barthes instead astutely asserts that an experiential “unfolding” is the sine qua non of film, a conceptualization that evokes Bergson’s snowball.

In fact, Barthes’s argument mirrors Bergson’s in another respect: for both, only that which is still can be conceptually grasped. As Bergson puts it, “Of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea.” Even when one tries to imagine motion, Bergson perceptively argues, one invariably does so “by constructing movement out of immobilities put together.”⁵² (Raymond Bellour makes a similar observation when he attempts to visualize in his mind’s eye the movement of boats on the Bosporus Strait: “If I shut my eyes and try to follow a vision turning in my memory, one boat passing another for example, a jerky succession of progressive flashes appears.”)⁵³ This may explain Barthes’s claims that a motion picture must be stilled before its cinematic qualities can be cognitively grasped. And this is precisely what the cinema of stasis accomplishes: by halting the constant movement generally associated with motion pictures, the static film permits a more substantive understanding of cinema, foregrounding its temporal dimensions and the stillness that is pivotal to its ontology.

Ernie Gehr’s minimalist film Serene Velocity (1970) serves as a striking verification of Barthes’s contention that the filmic can only be grasped when cinematic motion is somehow stilled. The “object” being filmed is an empty corridor in a university. Here is how P. Adams Sitney describes Serene Velocity in his book Visionary Film: “The filmmaker positioned his tripod within the corridor and then proceeded to alter his zoom lens every four frames. At first the shifts are not dramatic. He alternates four frames at 50 mm with four at 55 mm. After a considerable period the differential increases: 45 mm to 60 mm. Thus, the film proceeds with ever increasing optical shocks. In this system the zoom never ‘moves.’ The illusion of movement comes about from the adjustment of the eye from one sixth of a second of a distant image to one sixth of a second of a nearer one.”⁵⁴

As Serene Velocity proceeds, it slowly evolves from a motion picture to a static film. That is, since there is initially little distance between the repeatedly alternating shots of the corridor (one appearing a bit closer than the other), the film creates the impression of quickly moving forward and backward in the corridor, as if one were on some kind of perversely disorienting amusement park ride. Even though Gehr did not actually move his camera to create the experience (all of the changes in perception are created with his zoom lens), the spectator feels like a camera that is being incessantly “thrust” into the corridor, an experience with inescapable sexual undertones. As time goes on, however, the distance between the two repeating shots slowly starts to increase. At first, the mind tries to maintain its impression of movement on the screen, even if it is choppy, almost stroboscopic. But eventually, the distance is too great for the perception of movement to be maintained, and the remainder of the film can only be processed as a perpetual succession of static shots. Only when the film has finally progressed from apparent motion to apparent stasis can the Barthesian “filmic” be grasped. That is, the spectator becomes increasingly aware that the entire film is composed of alternating static shots and that the impression of movement engendered from the earlier stills is an illusion stemming from their close proximity to each other. Watching the film is like seeing a magician reveal how a trick is done by performing the trick again and again and drawing attention to how the deception occurs. The “trick” of cinematic motion has never been easier to understand on an affective level than it is in Serene Velocity.

Given Noël Carroll’s interest in motion and stasis in cinema, it should come as no surprise that he has devoted an entire essay to Gehr’s magnum opus. In it, Carroll argues that films can do more than simply parrot preexisting philosophical views; they can also “do” philosophy by using the cinematic medium “to articulate some original conceptual point.”⁵⁵ For Carroll, Serene Velocity is just such a film. While I have no serious qualms with these assertions, Carroll seems to draw precisely the wrong philosophical point from Gehr’s film. He claims that “Gehr proposes movement as an essential feature of cinema, one that has special pride of place for the philosophical definition insofar as it signals the very species to which films belong—motion pictures or, as I prefer to say, moving images.”⁵⁶ But if anything, Serene Velocity insists on challenging definitions of cinema that privilege movement. After all, the impression of movement that Gehr creates eventually deteriorates, laying bare the static nature of every shot in the film (and, by extension, the stasis at the heart of all cinema).⁵⁷

In many ways, in fact, Serene Velocity feels more like a succession of still photographs than a film. Of course, in a sense cinema really is nothing more than a succession of photographs (or other stills). But while this fact is carefully concealed in traditional motion pictures, static films often foreground this dimension of cinema’s ontology. The cinema of stasis has profound affinities with traditional visual art, and consequently, an interrogation of static films necessitates an exploration of the dialectical tension between stasis and movement that has subtended visual art even prior to cinema’s emergence.

Even though a painting, sculpture, or photograph cannot produce the perception of motion, there is often an implied motion in traditional visual art that is central to its aesthetic. As Gotthold Ephraim Lessing points out, though paintings are “motionless,” a painter can nevertheless “suggest motion.”⁵⁸ Goethe, too, insists that static artworks (like the classic sculpture Laocoön and His Sons) can be constructed so as to appear “always animated.”⁵⁹ Arthur C. Danto gives the useful example of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture David (1623–24), which is designed to suggest that David is in the process of slinging a stone at Goliath. The sculpture itself is obviously still, yet the work is necessarily participatory—the assumption is that the viewer will cognitively vivify the work by imagining the completion of the movement and the launching of the stone. As Danto puts it, “In describing our experience with David, we might say that we see he is in movement, but we don’t see him move.”⁶⁰

Another useful example of implied motion is Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), a work that was likely inspired, in part, by the chronophotographs of Étienne-Jules Marey. With its succession of abstract shapes at different points along a staircase, the painting suggests a body in constant motion. Again, the viewer must actively carry out Duchamp’s intention by visualizing the nude body moving from one end of the canvas to the other. As with Bernini’s David, the spectator is prompted to imagine movement, but no actual phenomenon of movement occurs. Still, the inherent motion of works like Duchamp’s serves as a verification of Giorgio Agamben’s claim that “paintings are not immobile images, but stills charged with movement, stills from a film that is missing.”⁶¹

Obviously, the impression of movement in motion pictures is phenomenologically distinct from mere implied motion. As Danto points out, “With the movies, we do not just see that they move, we see them moving.”⁶² But just as sculptures and paintings can produce a kind of illusion of movement while remaining perfectly still, so films can produce an illusion of stasis, even though this stasis is the result of the constant movement of the film stock (at least in traditional cinematic praxis). As Mulvey puts it, stasis in film is produced by “a series of identical frames repeated in order to create an illusion of stillness to replace the illusion of movement.”⁶³ (Of course, this conception is becoming increasingly problematized by new methods of watching films, such as streaming videos online, which do not rely on the movement of film stock but on the transfer of digital information. I will explore the theoretical ramifications of this development in my concluding chapter.)⁶⁴

Cinema and traditional visual art clearly engage with movement in different ways, but many see another vital difference between the two traditions. For example, in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin offers the following observation: “The painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it, he can give himself up to his train of associations. Before a film image, he cannot do so. No sooner has he seen it than it has already changed. It cannot be fixed on.” Benjamin proceeds to quote the French writer Georges Duhamel: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” Although Benjamin admits, by way of a caveat, that Duhamel “detests the cinema and knows nothing of its significance,” he nonetheless agrees with Duhamel on this point, asserting that “the train of associations in the person contemplating these images is immediately interrupted by new images.”⁶⁵ Barthes stakes out a similar position in his monograph on photography, Camera Lucida. For Barthes, photographs create an opportunity for reflection: one can lose oneself in the memories, fantasies, and reveries engendered by the photographic image. Films, however, foreclose this option: “In front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness; whence the interest, for me, of the photogram.”⁶⁶

While Benjamin and Barthes are right to suggest that the constant fluctuations of traditional motion pictures often preclude a contemplative stance vis-à-vis the images on the screen, this view is radically challenged by films that do arrest images for prolonged periods of time, films that often change very little—if at all. In fact, one could argue that static films are even more insistent on spectatorial contemplation than is traditional visual art. After all, it is possible for an individual to visit a museum and glance at Salvador Dalí’s painting Sleep (1937) for a few seconds before moving on to look at other works. The spectator could then honestly tell others, “I saw Dalí’s Sleep.” But compare this to Andy Warhol’s film Sleep, which shows the poet John Giorno sleeping (and moving very little) for more than five hours. One could certainly watch just a few seconds of the film, but could one then say, “I saw Warhol’s Sleep”? Given the temporal dimensions of film, which do not permit the cursory perception of an entire work in a single moment, this would seem to be a problematic assertion.⁶⁷

Of course, artists and sculptors often hope that spectators will immerse themselves in their works, staring at them and reflecting on them for extended periods of time. (Lessing puts it this way: “The works of both painter and sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated—contemplated repeatedly and at length.”)⁶⁸ And in some cases this desire is made explicit, as in Marcel Duchamp’s To Be Looked At (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918). The work consists of (accidentally) shattered glass, a strip of metal, various geometric shapes, and a convex lens. The title is somewhat humorous, since it is hard to imagine that many visitors to a museum will actually stare at a single work for an hour (especially if this involves being close to the work, thus blocking the gazes of other spectators). Still, the title represents Duchamp’s attempt to inject duration (and, by extension, engagement and reflection) into traditional visual art. Given Duchamp’s explicit instructions, could one still claim to have seen this work after glancing at it for just a moment?

In any case the fixed gaze at the fixed object (which Duchamp is clearly interested in engendering) is also a paramount concern in static cinema. The Benjaminian “shock effect,” a critical element in most motion pictures, is usually bypassed in static films. Unlike “the cinema of attraction” so perceptively theorized by Tom Gunning (and, before him, by Eisenstein), the cinema of stasis generally aims to engender introspection, not shock.⁶⁹ If there is a shock, it is merely the subtle shock of subverted expectations. To borrow Gunning’s terminology, static films are generally interested neither in the startling “confrontation” of early cinema (or of the avant-garde films of Luis Buñuel or Jack Smith) nor in the “diegetic absorption” of mainstream cinema.⁷⁰

The fact that there are exceptions to this rule is unsurprising, given the diversity of static cinema. For instance, James Broughton and Joel Singer’s Hermes Bird (1979) features a penis becoming erect in extreme slow motion for eleven minutes, a gesture that, in its violation of taboo, seems closely allied with the exhibitionistic and confrontational “cinema of attractions” theorized by Gunning.⁷¹ (Interestingly, however, the prolonged exposure to the male member in this work makes it less shocking than the fleeting, split-second shots of penises in films like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona [1966] and David Fincher’s Fight Club [1999].) Furthermore, in terms of “diegetic absorption,” not all static films forgo narrativity; for example, Oshima’s Band of Ninja features a salient plot. Still, very few static films are interested in overt shock or narrativity. Instead, the majority of works within the cinema of stasis aim to create a space for meditation, for immersion in an image, for sober reflections on the nature of movement and stasis, time and space, cinema and art.

While Campany seems to be thinking primarily of directors of “slow” feature-length films, such as Vittorio De Sica, Robert Bresson, and Chantal Akerman, he also acknowledges that a “resistance to speed” was central to the aesthetics of avant-garde filmmakers like Warhol, Snow, and Frampton—pivotal figures in the cinema of stasis.⁷³ (Campany’s suggestion that slow—and by extension, static—films were a counterpoint to the “mass distraction” of advertising and popular culture seems especially plausible when one remembers that some of the earliest static films were created by Situationists, who were openly engaged in a struggle against “the society of the spectacle.”)

Deleuze provides a similar chronology in Cinema 2: The Time Image. Again, he focuses primarily on art cinema (neorealism, the New Wave, etc.) rather than the avant-garde; nevertheless, he correctly notes a general trend in post-WWII cinema wherein “movement can tend to zero [and] the character, or the shot itself, remain immobile.” In contrast to the constant permutations of early cinema, there arose in this era “a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent [de voyant, non plus d’actant].” For Deleuze, these new filmmakers sought to represent time directly (rather than indirectly through the medium of movement).⁷⁴ I would argue that the cinema of stasis represents one form of the Deleuzian time-image. That is, static filmmakers simply took this “cinema of the seer” to its logical extreme, removing agency and movement from its privileged position to engage more immediately with time itself.

While the category of static cinema is a useful one, the boundaries delineating this modality are by no means clear-cut; in fact, many individual works reside in the interstices between traditional motion pictures and static films. Consider, for instance, Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965), which consists only of static black and clear frames. There is no onscreen movement in any conventional sense (e.g., a person or even an abstract shape moving from one end of the screen to the other), yet the carefully constructed rhythm of the alternating frames creates an almost hallucinatory sense of pulsation (as well as the illusion of kinetic phosphenes, at least in my viewing of the film). While the dividing line between traditional motion pictures and static films is clearly porous, creating rough distinctions between the two remains useful. There is a continuum of motion in cinema, from films that are essentially motionless (like Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line and Andy Warhol’s Empire) to films that are replete with movement (like René Clair’s hyperkinetic Entr’acte and the majority of Hollywood films). My aim is to interrogate those films that fall somewhere on the “still” end of this continuum.

In 1924, the same year he directed Entr’acte, René Clair asserted, “If there is an aesthetics of the cinema … it can be summarized in one word: ‘movement.’”⁷⁵ This claim is problematic for two reasons. First, as I will argue throughout this book, films do not need to move to produce satisfying aesthetic experiences. Second, an aesthetics of cinema cannot be summarized in one word. Like the eponymous creature of Max Ernst’s 1929 collage novel La femme 100 têtes, cinema simultaneously has a hundred heads and no head. That is, there is no single essence of cinema, no overriding aesthetic that encompasses the medium as a whole. But this is precisely what makes cinema so multifarious and multifaceted. The aesthetic experiences provided by film can involve movement, stasis, color, sound, time, performance, or narrative, to name just a few possibilities. But to reduce cinema to just one of these properties is to divest it of its rich ambiguity.⁷⁶ Instead, I will argue for an aesthetics of multiplicity.

The desire to distill the nature of cinema into a single essence has been remarkably common in film theory. Take, for example, Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality from 1960. Kracauer argues that any medium, including cinema, should exploit those specific qualities that separate it from other artistic media.⁷⁷ What makes cinema distinctive and powerful, in Kracauer’s view, is indexicality, the capturing of the corporeal world.⁷⁸ Like photography, film is “intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomena from which its emotional and intellectual contents emerge.”⁷⁹ This means that “films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality,” when they “penetrate the world before our eyes.” But this theoretical stance results in a broad array of films being dismissed or marginalized as insufficiently “cinematic.” For example, animation is ignored because it is a “less essential” variety of cinema, one that has produced few, if any, “important cinematic statements.”⁸⁰ Abstract experimental films “neglect the basic properties of the medium” and thus do not really count as cinema; they are instead “an extension of contemporary art into the dimension of movement and time.” Surrealist films are little more than “stagy” fantasies that are ultimately too “literary” to be cinematic.⁸¹ And these are just a few of the varieties of cinema that Kracauer disenfranchises.

None of this is to deny the value of Kracauer’s project. Theory of Film is, in many ways, a provocative and perceptive text, one that can refine our intuitions about cinema’s relationship to other art forms. Tom Gunning’s comments on cinematic “essentialism” are particularly apropos here: “An attempt to isolate a single essence of cinema remains not only an elusive task but possibly a reactionary project, yet most earlier attempts by theorists to define the essence of cinema can also be seen as attempts to elucidate the specific possibilities of cinema within a media environment that threatens to obscure or dismiss the particular powers that film holds.”⁸² This sentiment captures perfectly my own thoughts about the work of Kracauer and other proponents of medium specificity. There is certainly nothing wrong with drawing attention to cinema’s unique capabilities or even encouraging filmmakers to capitalize on these distinctive features of the medium. But a problem arises when these observations become rigid codifications, a list of commandments carved in stone that ultimately restrict film’s aesthetic potentialities.

So how might a more expansive and malleable aesthetics of cinema be formulated? To begin, such an aesthetics must focus on the encounter, not solely on the medium itself (much less a specific property of the medium). The German philosopher Juliane Rebentisch provides a useful framework for conceptualizing the encounter in her book Aesthetics of Installation Art. Rebentisch argues that aesthetic experiences arise at the intersection between a subject and an object: “Aesthetic experience … exists only in relation to an aesthetic object; conversely this object becomes aesthetic only by virtue of the processes of aesthetic experience.”⁸³ To translate this argument into explicitly cinematic terms, this implies that the aesthetics of cinema resides neither in the film nor in the spectator but in the relationship between the two. Further, since artwork and observer represent two sides of the same aesthetic coin, Rebentisch insists that their relationship is one of “equiprimordiality”: “we will speak neither of a primacy of the subject over the object, nor inversely of a superiority of the object over the subject, but of an event between subject and object.” And this event cannot be codified; it is “an open space of possibilities” characterized by infinitude and experiential “inexhaustibility.”⁸⁴

While the nature of this aesthetic event can vary wildly, it is always an affective encounter.⁸⁵ And as Steven Shaviro has argued, films, music videos, and other media works are nothing if not “machines for generating affect.”⁸⁶ My body always responds in some way to a cinematic experience, and this response can vary even for a single film, depending on my mood, the audience I see it with, the number of times I have seen it before, and a host of other factors. To illustrate this principle of affective multiplicity, permit me to briefly describe a few of my encounters with an Andy Warhol film called Screen Test: Ann Buchanan (1964). Between 1964 and 1966 Warhol created hundreds of silent “screen tests” or “stillies,” portrait films in which an individual is filmed for several minutes, often doing nothing in particular. In Screen Test: Ann Buchanan the eponymous woman—a friend of the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady—stares directly at the camera without moving or blinking for approximately four minutes. (It is worth noting that Warhol also filmed another more playful screen test in which Ann Buchanan gradually crosses her eyes.) Because of the lights on her face and her refusal to blink, after the first two minutes, a tear falls from Buchanan’s left eye. More tears follow, even though her face remains remarkably stoic. As Callie Angell notes, “This performance is uncanny to watch, like staring at a religious icon that has miraculously begun to weep.”⁸⁷

I regularly show Screen Test: Ann Buchanan in my Introduction to Film classes, and as a result I have seen the film more than a dozen times. What is striking is just how variegated these experiences have been. When I first saw the film, I was by myself. I had just purchased the DVD 13 Most Beautiful … Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests (2009), in which the Ann Buchanan screen test appears before twelve others. (Although the DVD has an optional music sound track, I decided to watch it in silence.) During my first viewing I was deeply moved. The experience of witnessing Buchanan’s blank face becoming wet with tears reminded me of attempts that I had made to remain impassive while in the grip of psychological pain. The film seemed to be a visual representation of inner demons and the way these demons can manifest themselves without our permission. When I started screening the film in my classes, however, a number of radically different experiences began to surface. In one viewing I simply became unnerved by the eyes looking directly at me. I began to try to match Buchanan’s unblinking stare without looking away, but I found that she was winning. My eyes would dart offscreen momentarily for relief. I became uncomfortable, tense, restless. In another viewing the film became a comedy. (This was likely the result of hearing a few surprised laughs from my students, laughs with a clear subtext: “What the hell is he making us watch?”) The film now seemed to be a practical joke that Warhol was playing on the audience, a mischievous subversion of spectatorial expectations.

These disparate encounters serve as illustrations of Rebentisch’s notion of the “inexhaustibility” of aesthetic experience. Cinematic stasis does not produce a single coherent effect but rather an unstable and unpredictable series of effects. This is critical. Throughout this book, when I refer to the effect or experience of a given static film, I am not foreclosing alternative encounters, nor am I positing some idealized universal subject. I am simply referring to a specific aesthetic encounter made possible by the film. Furthermore, I am not trying to construct some grand overarching theory or philosophy of static cinema. In part this is because these films do not form any kind of unified genre, school, or movement. Since it is exceedingly difficult to make coherent generalizations about static cinema, one of the aims of this book will be to emphasize the richness and range of this tradition. Static films are occasionally designed to serve as the backdrop for other activities (as in many of Warhol’s early films), but they can also be immersive, encouraging a meditative gaze (this is the case, I will argue, in many Fluxus films). Static films can exploit the medium’s unique ability to structure time (as in Michael Snow’s So Is This [1982]); they can also foreground frequently overlooked elements of cinema—such as color, sound, and embodied perception (as in Derek Jarman’s Blue [1993]). In other words cinematic stasis is just as malleable and multivalent as cinematic movement. In spite of this heterogeneity, however, all static films inherently challenge widespread essentialist conceptions of cinema and broaden our conception of what a film can be or do.

In chapter 2 I will analyze several early films by Andy Warhol. Films such as Sleep and Empire are often conceptualized as experiments in boredom. I will suggest, however, that these films are not designed to be viewed in silence from beginning to end (an experience that would likely bore even the most ardent fan of Warhol’s cinema) but are best understood as furniture films, works designed to be viewed partially and distractedly. By repudiating movement, Warhol creates films that do not demand close attention, so these works can be enjoyed in conjunction with other activities, such as conversing, eating, drinking, and dancing. I will argue that in Warhol’s cinema the rigid and predetermined temporality of traditional motion pictures gives way to one that is open-ended and amorphous.

Chapter 3 will engage with protracted films—works that use extreme slow motion to create the impression of stasis—giving especially close attention to Disappearing Music for Face (1966), a Fluxus film by George Maciunas and Mieko Shiomi. Films like Disappearing Music for Face can be profitably theorized as interrogations of microtime, since they foreground interstitial moments that are generally below the threshold of perception. I will argue that protracted films reveal cinema’s unique capacity to offer affective access to alternate temporalities. I will further connect these films with musical experiments by artists like Yves Klein and La Monte Young, which also use extended duration as an aesthetic strategy.

In chapter 4 I will examine textual films, works that forgo conventional cinematic imagery in favor of letters, words, numbers, and other forms of handwritten or typographical text. Giving close attention to Michael Snow’s So Is This (a film consisting entirely of individual words, displayed one at a time) this chapter explores the implications of remediating written text in film. I claim that, by drawing attention to the differences between cinematic reading and more conventional forms of reading, textual films foreground the unique ability of cinema to structure duration. I also contend that a consideration of textual films should persuade us to replace orthodox ontologies of film that rely on necessary conditions with a Wittgensteinian approach to cinema, one based on “family resemblances.”

Chapter 5 gives consideration to the monochrome film. In these works a single static color dominates the screen for long periods of time. I will engage in a close reading of the most well-known monochrome film—Jarman’s Blue—a work in which all that is visible is a striking blue color field. I will also try to address the following questions: What is the relationship between these films and monochrome paintings (such as the works of Kazimir Malevich, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yves Klein)? What role is played by the sound track (often, though not always, present in monochrome films), especially since there is no person or image on the screen to complement what is heard? Finally, how can these films be understood within the context of philosophical debates regarding absence and “the void”?