Cinematography’s Blind Spots
- Artistic Exploitations of the Film Frame
Author
Publisher, Location, Date
Edinburgh University Press , Edinburgh, Schottland, Vereinigtes Königreich, 2021
Keywords
film frame, experimental film, Photography , Cinematography, Installation, Photogram
Text
This article discusses filmic and photographic works that focus on isolated film frames, whether extracted from the continuum of a film strip, as in Slide Movie (Gebhard Sengmüller, 2007) and Und ich blieb stehen. (Thames, London) (Susanne Miggitsch, 2017), or captured photographically from a book or a viewing table, as in Motion Picture (La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon) (Peter Tscherkassky, 1984/2008) and Précis de decomposition (Éric Rondepierre, 1993–1999). Usually rendered invisible during projection, a single frame represents the “blind spot” of cinematography. An explicitly ideological perspective was offered in 1971 by French film critic Sylvie Pierre Ulmann, who distinguished between the use of extracted frames (or “photograms”) and idealized still photographs produced on a film set. These “parasitic photographs” no longer bear traces of the material state of a given film copy; they look flawless and perfectly meet ideological requirements of “legibility” and “beauty.” The examples presented here bypass ideological claims, because, on the one hand, their dissected frames belong to the same order as the film they are taken from, and, on the other, they result in varying forms of “illegibility.”
Volume/Issue, Pages
136–149
Language, Format, Material, Edition
English
Activity List
-
- Kim Knowles, Marion Schmid: Cinematic Intermediality. Theory and Practice. . 2021 -
-