The Film Still at the Intersection of Cinema and Photography

University of Westminster

The Film Still at the Intersection of Cinema and Photography

Irina Ildiko Csapo Module Code: 2PHO632 Word Count: 10,728

BA Photographic Arts, January 2012 London, UK 1

Table of Contents

Introduction / 3 Ch.1: Chris Marker – La Jetée. Moving Film Stills / 5 Ch.2: John Stezaker – The Film Still and The Voyeur / 15 Ch.3: Cindy Sherman – Feminine Masquerade in the Untitled Film Stills / 22 Ch.4: Gregory Crewdson – The Cinematic Tableau / 30

Conclusion / 37 Bibliography / 39

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Introduction Some time ago, while I was on a flight back home, in the middle of the sky, I came across Werner Herzog's “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams� (2010), a documentary about mankind's oldest known pictorial creations. At some point while filming in the Chauvet Cave (France) that contains to this day one of the oldest evidence to mankind's creativity (ca. 30,000 B.C.), Herzog notices how some of the bisons depicted on the cave walls have more than just four legs. His assumption was, that the creatures were represented with extra limbs, in faint brush strokes, as to suggest 'movement' or rather the illusion of it. However, these images would only be unravelled to their greatest purpose in the flickering light of the cave. The conclusion was that, the frozen bisons would come to life, free to run in between light and shadow, provided by the fire torches our ancestors used in their caves. The idea of a cavernous proto-cinema was fascinating. I enjoyed the thought that modern cinema has found itself a kind of ancient relevance that so many other art forms enjoy. This newfound bridge, I thought, was perfectly complimenting the relationship between image and movement, between photography and cinema, and ultimately, between shadow and light. Such are the themes that inspired this paper.

The first chapter will address Chris Marker's auter film La JetĂŠe, for its potent dialectical relationship between cinema and photography, stasis and movement. It is a reflective piece that brings further discussions on some of the notions discussed in this paper. Christian Metz in his essay Photography and Fetish (2000) discusses some of the stark differences that separate cinema from photography and Peter Wollen (2007) talks about about their distinctive relation to time; Barthes takes on motion, movement and the 'photogramme', while David Campany suggests a different term: the 'freeze-frame'. All of these and how they relate to Marker's film will be emphasized upon further in the first chapter.

The second chapter aims to define the term 'film still' in the context of John Stezaker's still collages and the film still evolved to the state of art, with a focus analysis on one of his images, The Voyeur (1979). Moreover, the term 'film still' is historically and theoretically analysed in the relationship between cinema and photography; the photograph as fetish, voyeurism and the patriarchal gaze are also relevant topics that will be touched upon in this chapter.

Furthermore, the paper will focus on Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills and her cinematic masquerade that resembles the film still and takes upon the concept of tableaxu vivants, in which Sherman stages her various personas. Moreover, in relation to her work, an analysis of the pose and the feminine masquerade comes to provide understanding to the means of conveying cinematic 3

narrative. A parallel to Dutch genre painting is also made in regard to one of her stills to cast a light upon the symbols that typify Sherman's works.

The last and final chapter revolves around Gregory Crewdson and his cinematic photography. I will be particularly referencing Laura Mulvey and David Green's article on “Photography, cinema and medium as social practice� (2009) as an essential insight to understanding Crewdson's carefully staged cinematic photographs and by what accounts can these be considered cinematic; furthermore, I will consider the concepts of cinematic tableau and peripateia in relation to one of his Twilight (1998-2002) series photographs. Nonetheless, I will refer to his method of employing complex Hollywood film making techniques and the hybridisation of the medium of cinema and photography in his art.

The chapters in their entirety focus on discussions of cinema and photography in relation to the film still, the photograph that draws on the film still, or the still turned into art, may it be in Marker's 'timeless' movie, Stezaker's collages, Sherman's ambiguous narrative Film Stills or Crewdson's technique of merging cinema and photography.

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Chapter One Moving Film Stills La Jetée Ever since it was released in 1964, Chris Marker's science fiction movie, La Jetée (produced in 1962) has given rise to countless discussions about cinema and photography. Composed almost in its entirety, out of brilliantly sequenced still photographs, La Jetée lacks the movement and temporality so dear to popular cinema. Moreover, it does not belong to any genre specifically, the closest being that of the photonovel and despite its very modest means, it is regarded to this day as one of cinema's most complex filmic discourses. It triumphs on combining history, memory, war, trauma, freedom, desire and free will, making the director Chris Marker one of the most original and uncompromising filmmaker of his time. Certainly, la piece de resistance, La Jetée is the director's most famous work and yet most untypical, at the same time (Kear, 2003).

The Pier or The Jetty (in English) lies, without doubt, at the intersection of cinema and photography and has fascinated critics and theorists of film as well as inspired future generations of filmmakers to come (12 Monkeys - 1996 - by Terry Gilliam is such an example). Considered to best represent the “cinema of modernity” (Besmaïa, 1990, p. 139), La Jetée, was thought to be a ground breaking piece of auteur cinema, not only by its style, but also by the political and ideological framework the movie was attached to. In short, La Jetée is a post-war movie that addressed the political consciousness and sensitivities of the time. Moving on from Marker's film, but only for a while, as I will return to his work later in this paper, I would like to introduce the reader to some of the notions, discussions and theories that concern cinema and photography and thus La Jetée, may they be seen antagonistic or as an inseparable and intertwined discipline.

Much has been discussed about the relationship between film and photography and not without reason: they have always shared a long, rich and withstanding connection throughout the

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centuries. Siegfried Kracauer argues in “Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality” (1960) that cinema's historical origins are closely related to photography, both technologically and aesthetically, but nevertheless the two disciplines are ontologically different (Green, 2006). The idea that photography has given birth to cinema has had its assumptions in the belief that Edward Muybridge is “the father of the motion picture” (Penley, 2007 p. 114). Despite this, Thorn Anderson in the film-essay “Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer” (1975) argues that Muybridge had very little to do with the invention of the moving image and on the contrary, he pursued to do the opposite. His interest was to stop motion and to extract the still image out of a flow of movement (Penley, 2007). In this sense, one could say that Muybridge was in fact looking to 'freeze-frame' time, a development that would only take place later in the history of cinema. Furthermore, Kracauer forwards the idea that “film grows out of photography” being “intrinsically photographic” and thus “the nature of photography survives in that of the film” (Penley, 2007, p. 115).

Even so, defining photography and cinema has always brought along comparisons and contrasts. Christian Metz in “Photography and Fetish” (2000) outlines some of the basic differences between film and photography. Although these are very well known, they are important to the theme of this paper and the following chapters, especially how they relate to Chris Marker's La Jetée - a movie of contrasting narrative elements, that dwells at the intersection of cinema and photography.

One of the first differences between the two mediums would be the size of the lexis in space and time, which refers to the way these disciplines are perceived and read. Photography's lexis is the rectangular piece of paper which in contrast to cinema is much smaller. Even if a movie would have two minutes for example, it is still perceived as being enlarged by the addition of soundtrack and movement and would need more time and attention from the viewer to be fully grasped. The photographic lexis however, is deprived of duration and it depends solely on the viewer who is the “master of look” (Metz, 2000, p. 211). Wollen (2007) further suggests that the spectator's “now” is

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unlimited in duration and contrasts with the film where a certain amount of time of looking is imposed (p.108). The second difference between cinema and photography is largely related to their social use. Metz's differentiation of cinema from photography and vice versa, argues more on the way these two are used and credited; while cinema is used for entertainment and social purposes, photography finds itself in another domain of the social, most particularly, in the family and private life, in the form of snapshots and family albums. While Metz recognizes that the two find each other outside the social delimitations he mentions, “nevertheless, the kinship between film and collectivity, photography and privacy, remains alive and strong as a social myth, half true like all myths” (p. 212) Even so, as this argument answers some of the questions, it is still incomplete: “film is not inherently narrative or popular, photography is not inherently domestic or a snapshot” (Campany, 2006, p. 98).

Next, based on the above arguments, it is important to point out that cinema and photography, despite having common historical origins, they do each have a specific relation to time. Peter Wollen (2007) addresses this difference most playfully; he compares the two disciplines with fire and ice: “Film is all light and shadow, incessant motion, transience, flicker, a source of Bachelardian reverie like the flames in the grate. Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay. Fire will melt ice, but then the melted ice will put out the fire”(p. 110). Moreover, he argues that photography is like a dot while cinema is a line, hence the illusion of movement. In this sense, cinema can be referred to as “photography plus movement” (David, 2007, p. 144) and while it is composed of moving images, these are dependent upon photography for their existence (Newhall, 2007); as cinema investigated movement, photography was idled in stillness (Campany, 2007).

Motion in cinema is also an important factor that contributes to the overall differentiation from photography and says Metz, it brings cinema closer to realism: “Because movement is never material but is always visual to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality (…) It is not

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sufficient to say that film is more 'living', more 'animated' than still photography, or even that filmed objects are more 'materialised'. In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of impression, the real presence of motion.” (Green, 2007, p.16). Roland Barthes (1977) in his essay “The Third Meaning” explains how movement does not necessarily refer to “animation, flux, mobility, life, copy” but it represents “the armature of a permutational unfolding”, and thus he implicitly summons the need of a theory regarding the film still (p. 61). Barthes' film still is taken out from inside the fragment “of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment”. It is a quotation and not a sample.

I would like to introduce a further separation of equal importance, this time, between the film still and the moving image, which will shed some light over the notions I will use next in this paper. Firstly, it must be mentioned that the term 'film still' is of an ambiguous nature. On one hand, the film still refers to the pictures taken on the sets of the movie studios to promote and sell the movie, a term which I will later address in Chapter Two. On the other hand, the term refers to extracted film frames, stilled and suspended in the flow of their cinematic movement. They can both resemble each other but they relate differently to stillness, movement and time (Campany, 2007). The film still is an arrested image deprived of motion and time, frozen in its momentousness.

In the essay “Diderot, Barthes, Vertigo” (1986), Victor Burgin speaks about the film still in relation to memory and the forgotten movie, from which only a few selected fragments remain still after the movie has ended: “Having seen a film, all that remains of it in my memory, is an image, or a short sequence of images. The film still, a material entity; the mnemic-image, psychic entity; what they have in common is that they are both fragments abstracted from a whole, but fragments which have nevertheless achieved a sort of representative autonomy” (p. 113). He refers to the stills' capacity to produce poignant moments of reference in relation to the seen movie.

Furthermore, no discussion about the moving image and the film still could be complete without the freeze-frame. The 'photogramme' as Barthes calls it, is a single photographic frame

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repeated 24 times per second to give the illusion of time. It is an image that is particular to cinema as it seldom suspends action in motion and succumbs it to perfect stillness. “Cinema tends to freeze the idealized instant – the pinnacle of the action, the clearest facial expression of the perfect composition” (Campany, 2008, p. 55); wherein lies the fascination of cinema towards photography as freeze-frames tend to mimic still photographs. In some instances even, it is hard to tell them apart. The viewer is thus faced to read them culturally as photographs. In addition, John Stezaker compares them to the readymades of Duchamp as they resemble an arrested fixity within the fluidity of everyday experience (2006). David Green (2006) further mentions the freeze-frame as being one with the stasis. It is not a representation of it, as it interrupts time and filmic narrative and provokes hiatus not only in its “nowness” but also in the illusion of reality that comprises it.

Gilles Deleuze has stated that “the encounter between two disciplines doesn't take place when one begins to reflect on another, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other” (Campany, 2006, p.

10). He refers of course, to the intersection of cinema and photography, often deemed antagonistic.

Chris Marker's La Jetée is evidently a seminal work built on a balancing thin line between the two disciplines, granting us the means to interrogate the similarities of the two, as well as their differences; likewise, it allows us to explore what lies between the two mediums as well as the specificities of the still and moving image (Green, 2006). The movie is similar in genre to the comic-strip, photo-album, fiction film and documentary which brings out the dialectical character of the image. The contrast within the film's antagonistic narrative imagery is also in some ways analogous to the themes played out by the story itself. The conflict between arrest and movement to which photographic stillness is imposed to cinematic motion, resembles that of La Jetée's plot, in which stasis and mobility are interlaced (Orlow, 2006).

La Jetée is a science fiction love story marked by travel through time, history, memory and trauma. It is a story about a man “chosen from amongst a thousand” specifically for his obsession

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with an image from his childhood (Burgin, 2004, p. 99)(fig.1). The image is in fact, the man's own moment of death witnessed as a child and to which he returns back in time doomed to repeat it. He lives the time of a post War World 3 Paris, in which the humanity has been destroyed beyond recognition and in which he is a subterranean camp prisoner subjected to traumatic experiments.

His tormentors have delegated him to travel through time to “summon the past and the future to the aid of the present' (Kear, 2003, p. 220). He is also the only one capable to do so, particularly because of his obsession with the childhood image. Nevertheless, he is also marked by the image of a lost lover, in the form of a pre-post-apocalyptical Gradiva, the character's object of affection to which he holds on to compulsively. Likewise, the love story in the movie also echoes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The hero leaves his underground prison as to travel back in time to find the woman of his obsessions in a world of living ghosts “alive in their own time, dead in his own” (Burgin, 2004, p. 94). The two lovers are separated in time, while Orpheus and Eurydice are separated in space.

(fig.1) Film Still from La Jetée, Chris Marker (1962)

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La Jetée brilliantly succeeds in delivering a cinematic discourse about “memory and time, perception and recognition” being arranged in alternately continuous and discontinuous narrative sequence of photo stills (Kear, 2003, p. 220). These are the raw material from which Marker illustrates the dystopian narrative of time travel. Moreover, the photo stills constitute evocative fragments of the hero's re-imagined past creating a montage in which the associational rhythms refer to the thought processes of memory itself. Along the narrative staged photo stills, the film also includes extracted frames from filmed footage, archival images and documentary photos, in which time is played out on multiple levels: in stuffed animals at the museum, in ruins and damages statues. It is a film that only makes sense through stills. It is not the only movie in the history of cinema that has been made out of stills, but Marker's dystopian narrative is perhaps the only one to have explored the potential of the form in its most unfathomed layers. The still photos in La Jetee are not just simple photographs combined together in a slide show, they are also profoundly cinematic; they are “images-in-sequence bound in a syntagmatic interrelation that projects them from the two-dimensional plane of photography into a cinematic illusion of a four-dimensional space time continuum” (Orlow, 2006, p. 180). Roger Odin refers to the stills that compose the movie as a “duplication (at the rate of 24 times per second) of a single photogram”; consequentially, this makes the photo stills in La Jetée to “operate in the mode of a generalised freeze-frame” (Besmaïa, 1990, p. 139). The movement, asserts Odin, is not reproduced, but rather 'represented' or 'symbolised'. Here must the spectator intervene and imagine movement adding spatial continuity to a sequence of frozen frames, suspended in time and motion, hence the illusion of movement. This is to demonstrate that movement is not necessarily a feature of the film and the impression of movement can be created by effective montage (Wollen, 2007) and “the unfolding of images in time, a time that the spectator cannot control” (Bellour, 2007, p. 122). Moreover, the editing of the film frames with the aid of cross cuts, dissolves and fades to black enables the film frames to connect themselves to the others creating meaning and nevertheless establishing a sense of duration

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and progression (Kear, 2003). The narrator's voice and the compelling soundtrack of the movie come to help the viewer perceive the film at a pace which allows it to unfold by itself. The commentary of the narrator binds the images together and its tone is somewhat more probing rather than authoritative. This effect is linked with long periods of still images where the narrator's voice is absent and the procession of photos continues in silence, occasionally accompanied by sound effects (whispers, bird songs, sounds of a heartbeat). The effect is to connect and disconnect the viewer, creating what Christian Metz calls “instants of non-vision: sequences that dissolve perception” (Kear, 2003, p 223). This creates a form of estrangement that distracts and distances the spectator, throwing him in a pensive state of mind, as Raymond Bellour would put it (2007).

Pensiveness is characterized as a moment of anticipation, a kind of dreamy suspension that takes hold of the spectator (Campany, 2008). Perhaps Marker's movie purposely provokes this state in the spectator subjecting him to a prolonged exposure of pensive stillness.

The movie's suspended movement in the entirety of its photo stills does arrive at a moment where only for a few seconds, the stillness of the photographs is interrupted and 'real time' movement is restored. The image of the woman, the main character's object of affection and main cause of the narration, opens her eyes during a moment of their closest intimacy in the middle of the film. This constitutes the only filmed footage in the movie. Such an insertion in the frozen narrativity of the photograms induces a feeling of arrest or stoppage, affecting the imposed stillness of the images. “Marker offers us the moving image right on the cusp between the stillness of sleep and the stirrings of wakefulness. The woman's blinking eyes mimic the shutter of the camera or the gate of the projector and return our own surprise at the image springing to life” (Campany, 2008, p.

101). Moreover, this 'climax of the eye' in the words of Uriel Orlow (p.183), reiterates the idea of a dialectical image defined both by cinema and photography.

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(fig.2) Film Still from La Jetée, Chris Marker (1962)

Lastly but not least, it is fascinating how La Jetee in its complexity of filmic discourse manages again to rejoice both in cinematography referring to the spiral of time in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) as well as to Capa's famous dying Spanish soldier. I am not sure whether Marker has sought out the latter reference, but the evidence of Vertigo's poignant parallels that slowly build up in La Jetée are stark and self-declared. Like Vertigo, Marker's movie is scattered with imagery of perception and blindness. Dark glasses, blindfolds and strange stereoscopic spectacles are a metaphor to sight impairment due to the damaging darkness of the present's underground prisons.

The main character has to protect his eyes in the bright lights of the past with dark glasses, as a metaphor to his inability to envision the future as well as protection against it. As in the case of Hitchcock's detective Scottie, the main character of Marker's film is blind in the unfolding of events as he is forwarding irreversibly towards his death. “ La Jetée is therefore like an ill-remembered 13

memory of Hitchcock's film” (Kear, 2003, p. 232) in which the latter's plot is subjected to a series of displacements and condensations. The last part of the movie in which the hero returns back in time, unaware that this is going to be his last journey, climaxes in the moment of his death when he is gunned down by a henchman from his own time. His iconically dying suspended pose alludes to Capa's Spain (1936), an image that condenses a whole sequence of action, from its inception, developing and finish. So is the character in Marker's movie frozen in his death, suspended from life but nevertheless iconic in both cinema and photography.

Marker's movie with its reflections on war, trauma of loss, time travel, desire, the play of fantasy and reality proves incessantly that within its collaborative framework of cinema and photography the result is most untypical but nevertheless truly original. After all, film just is a collection of “acts of photography” as Jeff Wall has stated (2003, p. 180) and La Jetée proves that it belongs to both sides, perhaps its place is right in the middle of it all.

(fig.3) Film Still from La Jetée, Chris Marker (1962)

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Chapter Two John Stezaker – The Film Still and The Voyeur

The book, simply entitled “John Stezaker - Film Still� opens with one of the most fascinating and captivating images both in cinema and photography. Its presence in the very first few pages of the book justifies the purpose of introducing the viewer into the art of John Stezaker.

However, it does more than just that. The image is not only an introduction but it functions as a cinematic vehicle that grabs hold of the viewer and carries him into the lost worlds of Hollywood's defunct dreams, in which once upon a time, the film stills played a major role.

Undoubtedly, this image which also happens to be less known in John Stezaker's art, is also perhaps the most central to the artist's impressive body of work. Neither text nor title accompany this image; it stands in complete solitude against the white page of the book. It is a collage but barely has the resemblance of one. The picture is a black and white film still of a woman, maybe an actress, overshadowed by a black silhouette of an anonymous man. The shape of the man is a cutout from a piece of black card that has been strategically placed inside the image, so as not to exceed the inner white borders of the film still but nevertheless left outside enough as to suggest an imposed ambiguity regarding his position in the collage. A title on the juxtaposed page, The Voyeur (1979)(fig.4), comes to shed light on the image, however, it may very well do the opposite (Campany, 2011).

From its very early developments, the film industry produced an impressive array of images (film stills, production shots, posters) for the purposes of substituting and advertising the movies themselves. Photographs taken on the movie set, the production shots, had an important role to deliver: to contract and condense the action of the movies in stillness. What the actors performed 15

for the director, they had to perform “once more for stills” (Campany, 2007, p. 7). Time and movement had to be stalled as action could not be re-created. Gestures, gazes and body positions had to be frozen and perfectly held in photographic arrest. The fetish for fixity and arrested movement was fully explored by the film still (Campany, 2007). In the 40's and 50's, the cinematic industry together with its panoply of film stills, photoromans (a type of comic book with film still cinematic sequences) and cult for the film star were never more prominent at the heart of the cinematic society of the era. The cinema employed only the finest qualified technicians in the industry, which in return made the filmic image become “a source of beauty, of desire, seduction and spectacle.” (Campany, 2007, p. 8). In this sense, the film still became the answer to an ever ephemeral cinematic experience that gave the film fan the illusion of possession, uniting the fading memory of spectacle with the individual's imagination (Mulvey, 2006). Lessing describes the stillness exercised as an expanded moment in which action and imagination unfold themselves in the mind of the spectator: “The longer we gaze, the more must our imagination adds; and the more our imagination adds, the more we must believe what we see.” (Stezaker, 2006, p. 125). Film stills were the perfect vehicle for a cinematic experience impossible to hold on to and from which the spectator was deprived. They represented 'free samples' (Stezaker, 2006. p.114) that would give the film fan a peak into the cinematic encounter.

Less so, in the 60's and 70's, the economic power of the film studios decreased significantly and the movie industry spent less and less on its production photography (Campany, 2008). Many of the film stills produced previously have been discarded of in large quantities finding their places in second hand markets. They were considered to hold no economic or cultural value. However, with endings come new beginnings. Artists, collectors, historians, cinema aficionados and dealers have recognized a new opportunity in what constituted the newly orphaned film stills, forgotten and deprived of their filmic origins. Such is the like of artist John Stezaker, a London based artist who began collecting them by the hundreds in the 70's. The film still with its never-ending fascination,

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mystery and peculiarity evolved into a new art form, that of the collage to which Stezaker has assigned new meanings and shifting possibilities. “He plucks images from their prior continuities and offers them new ones” (Campany, 2011, p. 11). He offers them a second chance, even better, a second take just as the actors were given one. Stezaker liberates the film stills from their redundant made publicity role and makes them free to perform whatever meaning they possibly can. They are encouraged to play the role of their lifetime, that of the film-still. Even so, not everything in Stezaker's collages is left to chance. It is unknown the manner in which he comes to a decision regarding the montage of his still collages, but perhaps it is not even that important. He is an artistsurgeon of film still plastic surgery that knows how to bring the most poised confidence out of his film stills. “His cuts and joins seem so precise, so surgical, so minimal, as if they are the only ones that could have been made” (Campany, Photoworks, 2007). Granted, his collages become whole (but not finite) after different parts of the stills have been surgically removed only to be joined in together again and assembled to convey different new layers of meaning.

I imagine the film still used in The Voyeur as something no short of an indexical acting symbol arrested in time and movement. Nothing was taken out of the image, but another one was added on top of it. The woman in the still is frozen in what must be a slightly odd pose. Her mouth is open, a moment suspended in the middle of an acting scene. Her head is leaning towards left and her eyes are looking upwards in an interrogatory mimic. What she might have been saying is something of a mystery, however, if one really insisted, her voice could be captioned in endless lines. She is an actress (I assume) caught up in a cinematic close-up judging by the cutting of her middle body in order to frame her head as she is speaking. This creates a sense of proximity and brings focus on the scene, leaving the pensive spectator to gaze at it in its own time and pace. Laura Mulvey (2006) suggests that the close-up in film implies a slowing and delaying of the cinema movement to allow denaturalization of the human body and contemplation of the human face, while Mary Ann Doane asserts that the close-up is central to “photogenie, the ecstatic contemplation of

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cinema in its uniqueness” (2006, p. 153). In The Voyeur, the cinematic close-up of the woman's head which also happens to be bathed in light, is engulfed by the anonymous man's black silhouette which accentuates the close-up and brings more focus on the woman's mimicking face. The human face in cinematic close-ups, concentrates and directs the spectator's eye on star performance. In addition, the close-up fetishises the face and further mixes it with the cinema and photograph fetish.

Christian Metz in his brilliant essay “Photography and Fetish” (2000) compares photography (and implicitly the film still), to a fetish that “has to be kept, mastered, held, like the photograph in the pocket” (p. 217). Furthermore, he declares that film plays with the concept of fetishism and triggers it in the mind of the spectator: “It endlessly mimes the primal displacement of the look between the seen absence and the presence nearby” (p. 217); the photograph thus is suspected more to become a fetish, unlike film which is hard to hold on to. In The Voyeur, the significance of the woman's face coincides with an iconic sexuality and spectatorship as the presence of the female star is indispensable to spectacle, Mulvey asserts. The female's face in the film still is frozen in the flow of action and the close-up is used to gives rise to moments of erotic contemplation (Mulvey, 2006).

The female face as fetish is reiterated in the film still as fetish.

As suggested by the title, The Voyeur invites to reflection on the concept of voyeurism itself and negotiates its place in both the cinematic and photographic society, such is the power of this particular film still. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, Laura Mulvey points out how “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured the film form” (Denzin, 1995, p. 42). In her own words, women are used to fulfil the desires of the male gaze subjected to the pleasures of looking, of scopophilia.

In contrast, women are subjected themselves to exhibitionism as they exist to be looked at and displayed as sexual objects. The voyeur, always a male suggests Mulvey “turns the woman's body into a spectacle of desire” (p. 43). Downright explicit but incomplete, Mulvey's theory of voyeurism is perhaps unfit to treat Stezaker's voyeur in discussion. Denzin argues that her theory is narrow and limited in the conception of looking and doesn't acknowledge alternate models of gazing and

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spectatorship, which often include female identities along with the male ones. I would further like to suggest in addition to Mulvey's theory, an interpretation of the gazing subject that is more responsive to the complexities of the cinematic experience. Merleau-Ponty's voyeur has perhaps the best alignment of the concept with Stezaker's still collage. His voyeur is the classic example of a spectator that sits in the cinema gazing at the screen, just as a painter gazes at a landscape. In opposition to Mulvey's voyeur that punishes, represses and condemns to exhibitionism and erotic pleasure, Merleau-Ponty's gaze is one of “wonderment, creation, action and doubt” (Denzin, 1992, p. 47). This comes in defence to the black silhouette of the man that overshadows the woman in the still collage. It has been suggested that perhaps the man is not necessarily looking at the woman, but he may very well look outside the image, returning our gaze (Campany, 2011). Even so, after careful consideration, I would suggest that the woman's suspended interrogatory mimic directs her gaze upwards, as if demanding a response or feedback, which only makes sense if her gaze is met in return by precisely the other character in the picture, the anonymous voyeur emerging from the shadows (of the cinema, maybe). This alternate interpretation creates a sense of dialogue between the characters in the image and forwards the issue of a gendered exchange of gazes. This particular type of gaze suggested by Denzin (1995) is similarly structured on the laws of patriarchy as Mulvey herself suggested before. For example, the female's face in close-up with her passive gaze is turned into submission to the power of the masochistic and sadistic patriarchal gaze when it is countered with the aggressive and obsessive gaze of the male. The classic example of this is given again by Denzin referring to Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch, in which the gaze of Sandy (played by Laura Dern) is in a traditional feminine investigative position, “she is the object of, or the adjunct to, the male's gaze” (Denzin, 1995, p. 58). This establishes a role for the voyeur in Stezaker's image and may answer the mystery of his existence in the image, which in the end, only becomes natural, given the context of the cinematic and photographic society.

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Regarding Stezaker's particular collage The Voyeur, one finds out from the book “Film Still” (2011) that the image was lost and its presence in the book is in fact a scanned and reprinted image of the original photograph. The image is in fact a reduplication of an original film still to which a second take was given. I did not know of its existence until I have first opened the book. I felt sorry I had not known about it until that moment and I wondered what it would be like to see it 'alive' returning my gaze from a gallery wall. Perhaps, all is not lost. Looking at The Voyeur on the white page of the book seems to make more sense as it appears endlessly mirrored within its production and re-production – it is a frame within a frame within a frame reduplicated on the book page.

Stezaker refers to this quality of cinematic still fragments to mirror themselves and finds it “unsettling because of its sense of the double. They are resemblances of a process of resemblance; there is something second order about them (…) The strangeness of the film still frame seems to offer some kind of prospect on resemblance itself: the double or mirror image” (Campany, 2011, p.

19). The Voyeur is a reproduced mirror turned on itself and at us, as well. It echoes our gaze and thoughts which return back to us in the shape of the Other on the mirror stage. In fact, Stezaker's reproduced collage could be regarded as a film still en abyme. The term is used to describe “any fragment of a text that reproduces in miniature the structure of the text in its entirety” (Owens, 1992, p. 75). The Voyeur tells us in a film still what a film still is.

Lastly, it is impossible to look at the image or Stezaker's art in general and not notice the dream quality that his art possesses. The collected film stills have had their origins in the dream factory of old Hollywood, which assigns Stezaker the role of a 're-dreamer' (Campany, 2011, p. 12).

His voyeur stems out of the long forgotten dreamy sets of the movie industry and makes his debut in art as a carefully balanced fragment fused out of cinema and photography.

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(Fig.4) JOHN STEZAKER The Voyeur, 1979 Collage 20.6 x 36.4 cm | 8.1 x 14.3 in

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Chapter Three Feminine Masquerade in the Untitled Film Stills

In the previous chapters, I have focused my discourse on photographic film stills that have more or less evolved directly from cinema and filmic movement, as was the case of Chris Marker's La JetĂŠe (1962) or John Stezaker's The Voyeur (1979) with his film stills brought to the state of artistic collages. I would like to further elaborate on the photography's quality of imitating cinema as particularly conceived stills that are not related directly to cinema but do borrow its cinematic conventions. Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) are not film stills in their exact definition but have been composed and brought to resemble them down to their last detail. The Stills are a series of small-scale (8x10 inches) black and white photographs taken by family, friends and the artist, in which Sherman takes on the style, attire and format of B-movie stills from the 1950's and 1960's (Knight, 2004).

As previously stated, the term film still bears two important meanings. Firstly, the term refers to film set photography in which the actors do not act, but pose a second time for the photographer, the aim of which is to produce cinema contrived fragments to 'sum up' the movie and sell it to the public. Secondly, the term film still refers to the extracted film frame from the narrative movement of filmic motion, or the freeze-frame, which suspends the action from movement. Cindy Sherman's collection of film stills have neither of the inherent qualities mentioned above. They are photographic pieces in their entirety that impersonate the aesthetic conventions of the photographic publicity film still. However, Sherman's stills succeed in revolving around both the publicity film still and the extracted frame. Sometimes they resemble one or the other, or are even a combination of the two (Campany, 2008). Regarding her being a photographer, Sherman has stated herself that she is merely an artist that uses the medium of photography, just as a painter uses his brushes. She is 22

not a photographer occupied with technical details such as the opening of the shutter; the concept of the still only provided a framework to her art, in which her artistic impulses could be expressed (Danto, 1990).

Sherman's Untitled film stills mimic the iconography of cinema, where she stages herself in diverse masquerades of femininity from popular cinema to art house movies. She has stated that she prefers the look of European film noir cinema from the 40's and 50's rather than its American counterpart, as the European film stills from that period are more elusive and harder to decipher (Sherman, 2003). Herself, as a subject (in the context of her film stills and not as self-portraits) enacts ambiguous poses that remind her of actresses of European film stills.

It is important to remind the viewer how the film stills, fragments, abstracted from a movie, offered a prohibited experience, a peak into the film, but without participating into it. “The still is seductive, enticing, and meretricious, and the taker of stills must therefore be an astute psychologist of the narrative appetite (…) as a visual tease, the still is especially important for the B-movie with its cast of minor actors” (Danto, 1990, p. 9). These particular samples of cinematic narrative were offered to the spectator, however they were always confronted with a sense of disappointment towards them as they never actually appeared in the movie (Stezaker, 2006). Sherman's film stills do the opposite; they offer samples of cinematic narrative to a film that has never been recorded, hence there exists here as well, an illusion of disappointment. The stills however, offer a narrative within their staging as they are open ended in their meaning and to which the spectator is the only one who can offer them continuity. Sherman herself refuses to even offer a title to her “Untitled Film Stills” as she feels it would “spoil the ambiguity” (Sherman, 2003, p. 6) The quality of the film still as a 'second take' often meant that the actors had to 'over-act' for the still camera. Therefore acting was transformed into posing, in which the imposition of stillness required a rigidity on the world they represented. Consequentially, this aspect approaches the matter of still photography to that of 'tableaux vivants' (Stezaker, 2006). The tableau is a particularly

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artificial structure; it is a constructed form with the purpose to displace, condense and distill moments into a stilled image. The tableau is given mostly to the viewer as a pictorial whole to roam free around the image and gather meanings (Campany, 2006). The concept of tableau, “the representative fragment”, underlies its existence from theatre which Barthes (1985) defines as “that practice which calculates the observed place of things” (p. 89). Sherman's film stills addresses the concept through a theatrical approach to representation, particularly for her use of costume, props and staging. Taking his inspiration from Aristotle's Poetics, Victor Burgin in Diderot, Barthes Vertigo (1986) further asserts that the highest calling of any art is to represent human action in its most exemplary form, the human body. Thus the painter of tableaux had to depict a climax which took time to reveal. In this sense, Sherman's stills are tableaux vivants that depict the body of her models.

As cinema inherited behavioural conventions from the theatre, so did the acting. It is important to mention the fruitful binary between acting and posing. The former suggests activity based on time and movement as is cinema or theatre, while the latter approaches an imposed stillness. Peter Wollen (2007) mentions the relationship between the pose and the still photograph: “The subject freezes for the instantaneous exposure to produce a frozen image, state results in state”(p. 98). In this sense, still photography with its theatricalised conventions transforms the world into “a world performed or posed”, so is perhaps the nature of Sherman's stills. It is unknown whether she acts as if posing or poses as if acting, quite possibly both (Campany, 2006, p. 107).

Moreover, Barthes states his aesthetic pleasure for the pose: “What founds the nature of Photography is the pose.” (Mulvey, 2006, p. 152) This gives time to cinema to denaturalise the human body and negotiates the place of the human figure both in cinema and photography. It is often fetishized and becomes the very essence in fetishistic spectatorship. Similarly, Sherman's characters concentrate their pose (or acting) on sexualised feminine icons from the 40's and 50's cinema. However, Owens asserts that posing is nevertheless, a form of mimicry (1992). To pose is

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often regarded as a repeated and carefully sought action which gives the actors a sense of automatons: ”to become automatic is to commit blank mimicry” (Campany, 2008, p. 139). So does Sherman in her stills surrendering to mimicked performance. It has been argued that her face and especially her expression remains the same throughout the entirety of her series; even when she appears to be crying. Her expression gives little away and the effect surrenders to blankness and automaton (Campany, 2006). In fact, it is to no surprise that her immobile expression is somewhat a characteristic of her imagery. She is hidden deep under a masquerade composed of a multitude of feminine characters. She does not have to give anything away of herself; her characters she portrays manage to do that exclusively.

Cindy Sherman enjoys the pleasure of imitating iconic and glamorous female stars that control the gaze and the narrative. In Untitled Film Stills she takes upon herself a great deal of guises and poses to produce playful, iconic and ironic masquerades of female stereotypes in cinema (Liu, 2010). The masquerade in most of her series turns out to resemble the standard erotic images of female stars. One can say that she assumes a mask of femininity in order to become the subject, or rather the object of photography. Craig Owens (1992) makes an interesting assumption: “Femininity is not a mask; rather the mask is feminine” (p. 212); furthermore, Lacan suggests that femininity should be defined as masquerade, not as simulation and seduction, but as a mask that conceals nonidentity. This alludes to the camouflage of Sherman's identity in her film stills in which the viewer can neither identify the woman she is disguised as, nor Sherman herself who remains hidden beneath all her guises: “it is impossible to identify or identify with the actress” (Durand, 2007, p. 154). Nonetheless, the artist is in control of the picture, portraying the woman's destiny and her art (Knight, 2004). Furthermore, we are reminded that the film stills cannot be read as self portraits, as there is a stark difference between the model and the sitter. Sherman only borrows her modelling skills to the sitter, that in its turn models itself on the various stereotypical masks of femininity. In this sense, none of the images are of Cindy Sherman herself; “They are The Girl for

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whom Cindy Sherman posed” (Danto, 1990, p. 10). Sherman herself has confirmed: “The women are being lifelike; they're acting. There are so many levels of artifice. I liked that whole jumble of ambiguity” (Sherman, 2003 p. 8).

Most theorists, especially Cheryl Knight (2004), has remarked a stark affinity of Sherman's Untitled Film Stills with Dutch genre painting. She makes meaningful connections between the Dutch artists' narrative painting with Sherman's cinematic narrative photography, in terms of theatrical presentation and visual presence; both have ambiguous narrative structures that leave interpretations open-ended.

I would like to further emphasize upon one of Sherman's most iconic images, the girl in the bathroom, Untitled Film Still #2 in relation to Frans van Mieris' Young Woman Standing before a Mirror. Before proceeding I would like to underline both of the artists' love of visual description in which still life elements have been purposely arranged, like props on a stage, alluding the reader once again to the concept of tableaux vivants, where actors and things have been carefully staged and repeated to achieve narrative deliverance.

In Untitled Film Still #2 (fig.5), Sherman is disguised as a young woman wearing a blond wig and wrapped in a towel. Her reflection in the mirror hints towards feminine masquerade gestures. She inspects herself playfully suggestive of the fact that she is being watched from outside of the bathroom (and the image) while in typical female erotic pose, she acknowledges the voyeur.

Her gestures are blatantly seductive as she is touching her throat and her mouth is open. The wrapped towel around her is indicative of the same erotic game she's playing, subjecting her body to an object of male voyeuristic desire (Liu, 2010). It also has been noted that the narrative structure of this image involves an intruding gaze. 'A door jamb to the left of the frame places the viewer outside this room. But what is far more significant is that the viewer is constructed as a hidden watcher by means of the signifier that reads as graininess, a diffusion of the image that constructs the signified – the concept of distance” (Krauss, 1993, p. 56). I am being reminded of Hitchcock's

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Psycho or Rear Window (1954), where the voyeur is again placed at a distance. Likewise, the presence of the mirror in the image brings important significant connections to make. For one, Craig Owens (1978) asserts that the mirror image doubles the subject which describes the photography process itself. Sherman's particular image thus becomes an image en abyme, which reflects the subject and the photograph itself. Moreover, the mirror alludes towards Lacan's mirror stage, a concept of identity, which describes the experience of encountering oneself in the mirror as a total stranger (Stosch, 2005). The mirror in this case, intermediates the “I� through The Other, Sherman to herself and ourselves back to Sherman.

(fig.5) CINDY SHERMAN Untitled Film Still #2, 1977 Black and white photograph 10x8 inches

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Similarly, in Mieris' work (fig.6) the young woman meets herself in the mirror, but her reflected gaze is avoiding ours. The mirror works as a symbol of vanitas, in both the artists' works.

However, the elements in the painting allude towards eroticism, further suggesting the “unchastity of woman” (Knight, 2004, p. 281). Dressed in the finest satin, her pose illustrated by the artist suggest that this woman is living in luxury and extravagance, and not of piety and restraint. Such moral bearings have been sought out by the artist specifically to insinuate a function of memento mori, a reminder of death, to which neither the women can escape. Sherman (or rather her character) is caught up in a world of appearances, as she makes seductive gestures for her admirers.

In this sense, both works make us, voyeurs to intimate episodes before the mirror, glancing in behind the curtains or entering the intimate space of the bathroom. For this reason, Cindy Sherman's film still, seems to contrive an entire plot like a painting does. It gives us only a fragment of the story, yet the viewer is left with an open-ending possibility. “The still dis-stills. It does not so much give us a frozen moment of a continuous action (like a freeze frame) as it condenses an entire drama” (Danto, 1990, p. 13).

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills remain timeless in the history of photography, producing most advanced speculations on Post-Modernism; the series is thus another body of work that lies at the intersecting point of cinema and photography, in a way that has been nurtured by theatre and its narrative tableaux. While production film stills taken on set are limited in their narrative discourse and are rather disappointing in what they offer, Sherman's stills never had the pretence to offer more than they are. In fact, I sense a kind of modesty in their purpose, yet they succeed in proposing to the viewer so much more. Not only does she speculate on the feminine condition, dismantling various types of feminine stereotypes, but addresses our common humanity, by initiating a cultural identification with oneself, in the performed guise of The Other.

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(fig.6) FRANS VAN MIERIS Young Woman Standing Before a Mirror, c. 1670, Netherlands Oil on wood 16 7/8 x12 3/8 inches | 42.9 x 31.6 cm

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Chapter Four Gregory Crewdson – The Cinematic Tableau In my previous chapters, I have talked about the relationship between cinema and photography as a dichotomic entity that has both similarities and differences. The film still, may it be an extract from a whole or simply, a freeze-frame suspended in time or a photograph in which time itself is stilled, has had its application in film, art and photography. My focus in this chapter will now turn to Gregory Crewdson, as a photographer that mostly borrows from the cinematic medium to a large extent in terms of a complex craft industry and narrative visual style. His series Twilight (1998-2002) is probably his best known body of work, in which intricately staged suburban images are not necessarily set at the hour of daylight turning into night, but rather “at the hour of therapy in upstate New York” (Anderson, 2003). In this paper, I will focus on one of Crewdson's most iconic images (fig.x).

His carefully constructed cinematic tableaux share a stark deep affinity to the American society, for obvious reasons. Not only is Gregory Crewdson American but his cinematic photography has been largely inspired by the cult of Hollywood B-movies, the birthplace of dreams, suburban hysteria and of course, extraterrestrials; I will not lead much further discussion on the subject of the latter as that is not specifically my focus, however I feel compelled to at the least mention it. Spielberg and Coppola are well known Hollywood directors that have inspired Gregory Crewdson in his art, and ultimately the subversive “aliens-coming-to-suburbia” references, nurtured

by Hollywood and adopted by Crewdson as such, are only a surface that hides much deeper complexities, perhaps ones that belong exclusively to the American society. “A considerable part of this work is being American. I wouldn't say of what it means to be American, but I've always felt my work had a particularly American sensibility” (British Journal of Photography, 2005, p. 20).

Before I return to my discourse into Gregory Crewdson's work and cinematic style, I would 30

like to focus first on some of the issues that underline important economical, social and technological shifts that have come to shape the face of fine art photography,more so in the last decade. Moreover, I would like to emphasize upon the technicalities that give Crewdson's photographs the 'cinematic' look. In this sense, it is important to mention that Crewdson's 'cinematic photography' has adopted complex forms of technical production, with the aid of skilled labour and professional expertise, coupled with large amounts of financial resources, of which are typical of the film industry.

Firstly, to say that Crewdson's photography looks 'cinematic', just because it mimics and references cinema is not enough. It is neither a film still in its essence, as it is not abstracted from a movie sequence, nor a freeze frame for that matter. However, the photograph is a still, one that appears to have condensed cinematic time into it along with its suspension of frozen scenes and poses that must be held for the camera to capture. “Stasis is here a property of the thing photographed rather than the photograph” (Green and Mulvey, 2009, p. 135). In this sense, one must note that Crewdson's cinematic tableau is inherently artificial and constructed. Although, his photographs borrow cinematic references, they are blatantly separated from the medium of cinema, for their lack of narrative time and space. The tableau thus becomes unable to represent unfolding narrative, related to cinema. Nevertheless, the concept of peripateia, “that instant in the course of an action when all hangs in the balance ”(Burgin, 1986, p. 114), becomes a vehicle in which the past, the present and the future are reunited in a transcendental form of narrativity. The photographic tableau succeeds to deliver an imaginary type of cinema, one that uses the stylistic and conventional means derived from the pictorial tableau.

Furthermore, the idea that the tableau photograph takes after cinema, suggests the existence of two separate mediums that give rise to questions about the medium itself. Green and Mulvey (2009) argue that the concept of a 'medium' is indispensable towards understanding the nature of cultural forms, more specifically, the nature of aesthetic genres. It should be noted that the concept

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is subjugated to a specific practice that depends upon organisation, technical skills and specific knowledge within certain economic and social conditions. In addition, the nature of a medium is often exposed to technological developments that may very well change its nature, as well as the ways in which it relates and forms social and economic relations. Green and Mulvey (2009), further assert that the recent social and economic forms of 'late capitalism' have brought certain changes in the relationship between photography and authorship.

Crewdson's Twilight photograph (2008) (fig.7) to which I will turn to for the moment, reminds me invariably of many iconic stereotypical-extraterrestrial clichés, that have composed Hollywood cinema for decades and to which inevitably, I have been exposed to in my childhood.

This particular piece of image seems to have come at a standstill right at the climax of a hallucinogenic twilight, frozen at 'the present', right before 'might happen' and 'just happened'. It is within itself a peripateia, balanced in its narrativity by the only human figure in the tableau, a man, suspended in a pensive and hypnotised gaze towards the light. The position (or pose) of the man comes to suggest, to my mind, the exact moment between past and future, more specifically the fleeting present of 'what is happening?', an interrogatory state in which one reflects upon himself, delivering a 'presence of mind': I think, therefore I am, and never 'have been' or 'will be'.

Moreover, the man 'behaving like automata' attracted towards the light and starring awry into it, is suggestive of an automatic pose that produces “blank mimicry” (Campany, 2006, p. 103).

Certainly the theme of the pose in Crewdson's photographs has been argued much before and it is unknown whether they bear any specific meanings in his tableaux: “a sort of exhausted standing around, slump-shouldered with the vacant face of a dreamer” (Campany, 2006, p. 111). Even so, I can not help but notice an allegory between this blank-staring-into-the-light pose and photographs of hysteria sufferers from the 19th century. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), a French neurologist employed the medium of photography in his clinical experiments on hysteria and epilepsy patients.

He used powerful flashes which were triggered in the patient's face, as to induce catatonic catalepsy

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a sort of immobilising hypnotism which would throw the patient into a blank-awry state of mind (Baer, 2002)(fig.8). In this sense, Crewdson's character(s) and Charcot's patients have an undeniable affinity towards automata, however, I am unable to say that Crewdson is looking for it specifically.

Perhaps, it might bring a fresh insight and (more) light on his characters' psychological states of being. And yet, Crewdson is like always, uninterested in answering his mysteries, which gives the viewer no choice than to add his own interpretation.

Crewdson's cinematic tableaux are carefully constructed structures and it does not represent the point of a view of a movie. In this sense, neither has Cindy Sherman in her Untitled Film Stills.

However, unlike Sherman with her modest means to produce her stills, Crewdson's tableaux confront the viewer with their 'constructedness' and lets him know about their artificiality. Even so, regardless of how much the visual style tries to convey a cinematic narrative, the viewer is distanced from this by the conscious efforts of perfect control over the elements that construct the images (Green and Mulvey, 2009). All of his carefully planned details that compose his narrative cinema correspond ultimately, to the concept of mise-en-scène; Green and Mulvey further enhance the idea that the concept was used by film critics to emphasize less on the screenplay and narrative development and more on the visual style which was subjected itself to delivering meaning.

Crewdson's mise-en-scène is closely related to that of suburban American melodrama ever present in his images by the psychological tensions evoked in the 'aesthetics of the domestic' (Green and Mulvey, 2009, p. 136) Indeed, the mise-en-scène becomes “an intensified symbolisation of everyday actions, the heightening of the ordinary gesture and a use of setting and décor so as to reflect the character's fetishist fixations” (Elsaesser, 1972, p.10). Moreover, the mise-en-scène refers to the placement of anything that appears within the constructed images.

Furthermore, it is important to mention another aspect of Crewdson's repertoire of assembling narrative style into his photographs. Firstly, he employs an incredible array of human resources, from actors, light technicians, art directors to production managers and so on. Every one

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of them has a specific task in the process of tableau making. Every image employs a crew of up to fifty people and takes about four to six months to make. This elaborate process to which Crewdson introduces cinematic narrative in his photographs, derives directly from the forms of production in cinema itself. The cinematic conventions applied to photography, brings out their differences and separates them as mediums. However, Crewdson's hybridisation of the medium results in a closer look towards photography which becomes clearer at the point to which it references cinema, but also, in the same way it articulates its differences in the stillness of the photographic tableau. “Crewdson takes the full paraphernalia of Hollywood film-making in the form of the constitutive elements of mise-en-scene and grafts them into photography� (Green and Mulvey, 2009, p. 141).

On the whole, Gregory Crewdson's 'cinematic' photography does not constitute its means simply on mimicking cinematic conventions, but rather uses them to full extent, which merges the social mediums of both cinema and photography into a hybrid entity of social practice.

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(fig.7) GREGORY CREWDSON Untitled (from the Twilight Series),1998 Digital c-print 135.5 x 166 cm (53 3/8 x 65 3/8 in)

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(fig.8) Jean-Martin Charcot “B...”Catalepsy. Provoked by a Strong Light.

Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 1876-1880.

Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library

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Conclusion

On the whole, the concepts analysed within this paper as well as the artists that express them best within their work have efficiently demonstrated that the meeting of two disciplines is not necessarily built on separation and differentiation, but rather on a dialectical approach that includes both their similarities and differences. The film still at the intersection of cinema and photography remains thus a negotiating factor between the two. Sometimes enemies or best friends, the question is not about how different or similar they are from one another, but rather more what can they do for each other.

So is the case of Marker's movie La Jetee, that has efficiently showed us how the quality of movement is not an imperious element in the cinematic narrative cinema. This may very well be conveyed by the frames within their stillness, with a carefully conceived edit and montage that bear meanings and connections to each other, all while allowing the spectator to collect the bits and pieces he most prefers.

The film still as art, is perhaps the best illustrated by artist John Stezaker, a “re-dreamer� of old Hollywood still films, their saviour and most devout follower. The film still transformed into art, liberated from its purpose of advertising, is now more wilder than ever. No more text, film or context is attached to them, but Stezaker knows how to deal with their untamed nature: by enhancing it even more.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills recycles her guises, each time with new flavours and masks as to dismantle with irony the evident female erotic tendencies in the film still from the 40's and 50's. Her feminine playful masquerades construct the Other in which we, as viewers reflect and connect ourselves to a larger cultural whole.

The 'cinematic' photograph was never more different, seducing, alluring and ambiguous than in Gregory Crewdson's art. It is not sufficient to call his stills cinematic just because they mimic 37

cinema. Indeed, his extravagant ways of creating them does offer the viewer a cinematic impression but this becomes true only in the sense in which he uses the medium to deliver this effect.

Crewdson's photographs look like they have been applied a thick layer of cinematic on, which dries out with time and the newly emerged cracks expose the underneath superficiality of it all.

The film still thus becomes at times a hybrid entity which borrows itself to photography as well as cinema. Whether we may see it in the white spaces of galleries or the dark hallways of the theatre hall, the film still remains rich and fascinating. It becomes alive and moving at the interplay of light and shadow, of cinema and photography, or as Peter Wollen would put it, of “fire and ice�.

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Journals: A Different Story, (2005). The British Journal Of Photography, v.152, May 11th 2005, 20-25.

Bensmaïa, R., (September 1990). From the Photogram to the Pictogram: On Chris Marker's La Jetée. Camera Obscura. 24 (1), 139-161.

Green, D. and Lowry J., (2009). Photography, cinema and medium as social practice. Visual Studies. September (24) No. 2, 132-142.

Knight, C., K., (2004). Just Another Day: Dutch Genre Themes in Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills. Visual Resources. 20:4, 275-286.

Krauss, R., (1993). Cindy Sherman. Untitled. In: Cindy Sherman, 1975-1993. Rizzoli: New York.

Liu, J., C., (2010). Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills.

History of Photography. 34 (1), pp.79-89.

Wall, J., (September 2003). Frames of Reference. Artforum. 42 (1), pp.188-92.

Anderson, P.A., (2003). About the Light: The Uncomfortable Worlds of Gregory Crewdson and Raymond Pettibon. Art Papers. July/August, 12-13.

Elsaesser, T., (1972). Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the family Melodrama. Monogram.

4: 2-15 Green, D. and Lowry J., (2009). Photography, cinema and medium as social practice. Visual Studies. September (24) No. 2, 132.

Articles: Campany, D., (2007). John Stezaker. Recent Work. Photoworks. Spring/Summer/May/October. 1218. (journal) Campany, D., (2008). Re-viewing Rear Window. Aperture, 192 . pp. 52-55.

Images Figures 1, 2, 3, including cover photo: Marker, C., (1992). La Jetée. Ciné-Roman. New York: Urzone Inc. Figure 4: Campany, D., (2011). John Stezaker, Film Still. London: Ridinghouse Figure 5: Sherman, C., (1990). Untitled Film Stills. Munich: Schimmer Art Books. Plate 1 Untitled Film Still # 2, 1977

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Figure 6: ALL ART CLASSIC (c.1670). Mieris, van Frans., Young Woman Looking in the Mirror. [Online image] Available from: http://www.allartclassic.com/pictures_zoom.php?p_number=216&p=&number=MIF013 [Accessed 25/01/2012] Figure: 7 Crewdson, G. and Moody, R., (2002). Twilight. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Plate 5.

Figure 8: Baer, U., (2002). Spectral Evidence. The Photography of Trauma. USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. pp.36-37.

Total Word Count: 10,728.

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