Introduction – From still to moving image…

“Photography is truth.

The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second”

(Jean-Luc Godard)

This acknowledgement by director Jean-Luc Godard member of French ‘Nouvelle Vague’ during the 60’, carries the ironic pretentiousness that goes well with the character. To make his point, Mr Godard skipped on purpose to place the ‘truth’ in Photography as a supposition. Therefore the new equation would be: (If) Photography is truth (then) the cinema is truth twenty-four times per second! Photography as well as Cinema can’t be the absolute truth for the simple reason that image by essence is selective due to the edge of its format. It would then be more accurate to place photography as an ‘illusion of truth’.

In the first paragraph of this essay we will compare the use of the photography with moving image. The second paragraph will be looking the experiment 24 Hour Psycho by contemporary artist Douglas Gordon. The final and third paragraph will focus on the last fashionable and apparent modern technique to make moving image from a frozen action in films.

1 – The Power of the Single Image.

The extraordinary invention with still photography was to be able to freeze one moment in time exactly as it happens when captured. This was the absolute way to reproduce vision and a huge step to reproduce life beyond painting. The very first photography by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 was exposed for about 8 hours that, for obvious reasons, made the capture of movements impossible.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

"View from the Window at Le Gras" at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving photograph (circa 1826).

After some attempt to photograph sequences of the human and animal movement – thanks to the evolution of the reel’s sensitivity – the invention of Cinema by Lumière Brothers in 1895 made achievable to capture a motion sequence and then to show it on a screen.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory by Lumière brothers (1895)
This reel was the first known movie scene made outside the Lumière Factory.

The moving image as we know it through the Cinema and today through the Digital Image can be considered as a continuity of the Photography. A moving image in film is by essence 24 times made of still images (in TV it is 25 or 30, depends on countries) therefore moving image is a natural extension of still image.

Now is moving image more relevant than Photography? In the book Pictures On A Page (Pimlico first ed. 1978, p 5) Harold Evans explains that the single image usually prints better in the human memory than a moving image sequence.

[…] The still news picture, isolating a moment of time, has affinity with the way we remember. It is easier for us, most of the time, to recall an event or a person by summoning up a single image. In our mind’s eye we can concentrate on a single image more easily than a sequence of images. And the single image can be reach in meaning because it is a trigger image of all the emotions aroused by the subject. If you think of major news events, the likelihood is that you will visualise not a cine-sequence but a single scene from a single still news photograph which has been absorbed in the mind.

In the following example, let’s have a look at the same event reported by both media, film and photograph. This short clip and the terror it might generate to us has been seen from two different perspectives and reported trough two different media: the assassination of a Vietcong officer during the Vietnam War in a busy street of Saigon.

On one hand, a TV reporter is filming an execution while a G.I is passing by when the gunshot happens. This is live death. On the other hand and at the same moment a photograph reporter, Eddie Adams is pointing at his camera a second before the gunshot happens. By comparing the tow points of view, the TV footage gives us to show a crude and cold assassination. The actions happens so quickly that when the body is falling, the sequence has been slowed down as if its real speed did not give us enough time to integrate the choc of what is going on. Also the clip itself might not have been consistent enough for the voice over to be completed.

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shoots a Vietcong prisoner. Saigon (1st of February, 1968) Frames grabbed from the TV footage of the execution.

Actual TV footage of the assassination

On the other hand one single image of the very same event give us to see an horrific moment in time that generates an endless tension from which our visual imagination has plenty of time to speculate on. This fraction of second that freeze the killing action becomes eternal. From there it includes enough tension and strength to raise the event itself on a more symbolic level comparing to the moving sequence.

Eddie Adams of the Associated Press says: “I made the picture by instinct”. The police chief gave no indication he was going to shoot the prisoner until he did it. “Has his hand came up with the revolver, so did my camera, but I still didn’t expect him to shoot”. Tom Hopkinson (Editor of British magazine Picture Post) uses that same picture to demonstrate: “The still image which made the biggest impact in recent years would have been lost on a television film. It was precisely its ‘stillness’ (a moment frozen in time) that made its impact.

While Photography has been adopted to take portraits, moving image, soon after its invention has been used to tell stories and to entertain by giving image sequences an order and a structure that produce meaning. Narrative makes it look like life so we can forget about the background technical process.

Eddie Adams for Associated Press

2 – From Death 24 Time a Second

Douglas Gordon experimented a slow-motioned screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho projecting it at a speed of two images per seconds. It introduces many of the important themes in Gordon‘s work: recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light. He is a Scottish artist using video, photography and sculpture. Through his work, Gordon addresses and explores universal dualities: life and death, good and evil.

By processing a huge slow down of the speed of Psycho, reaching the point of none motion, almost similar as a slide show, the artist gives us to see and appreciate the aesthetic work of Hitchcock on this film and relate the narration far away in the background. Also assuming the sound participates of the understanding of the story, this would be a total new way of interpreting the film. Seeing details in the image we can actually contemplate.

Since the development of home screening technology, this has given us the opportunity to scrutinize and dissect, what we did not see in first place or what remain visually unconscious in the moving shots. With fast motion films or video clips, our temptation is sometimes to slow down the reel and watch it frame by frame to give the scene a better understanding of its technical or aesthetical making. A kind of fetishism?

“Video had transformed the ways in which film could be watched, introducing the spectator to a new king of control of the image and its flow”. This work creates a dialogue between the film and the technology to discover something that is not therein the original as screened but can be revealed within it. Douglas Gordon: “What have I done” (Guardian Arts website)

We should bear in mind before video technology, projectors would very likely burn the celluloid frozen frame on the reel. Therefore, it has been impossible to enable what we casually do today to pause a scene; slow down, fast forward or backward a film was impossible unless you had access to its reel to magnify its images!

24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Grodon, 1993

24 Hour Psycho,1993, Kunstmuseum, Wolsburg

By slowing down the speed of a film, Douglas Gordon is actually killing the Persistence of Vision and showing on purpose an ‘anti-motion’ version of Psycho, a “succession of stills”. As an autopsy he is dismantling each scenes in slice and showing it one after another in a relative slow pace. Everyone with an appetite for images is tempted to dissect a scene in a film, especially when it’s fast. The great power of motion image Video control can also be used to gather intelligence and identify. Contemplating the aesthetic value of the film frame by frame without following the story or the characters. We become await of the intermittency of the film image and the fragility of the illusion of real time in motion pictures. Aesthetic (framing / light) is something our brain analyses unconsciously on an emotional level in real time movie.

Unfortunately 24 Hour Psycho is not available to watch and be appreciated. Though a short home made clip that mimic the experiment, but on 24 seconds, is available on line.

24 Second Psycho appropriates the entire Alfred Hitchcock movie “Psycho” and condenses it into twenty-four seconds.

3 – Freeze time in space or the ‘bullet time’ effect.

With the evolution of the digital image and advanced visual effects techniques, it would be worth mentioning another interesting approach that enable to freeze an image and move around its space as a kind of metaphysical dimension. This technique known as ‘Bullet Time Effect’ is unlikely to be reproduced in real life. In moving image this is basically an image caption technique that enables, after processing, to virtually move around a still (or highly slow motioned) subject in order to show in a 3D space an action that would happen too quick to be captured in real life.

Wachowski’s brothers in the Matrix trilogies have successfully applied and mastered this fairly recent spectacular technique. It is important to note the use of this effect has relevance with the meaning of the subject. The Bullet Time effect gives a visually outstanding and surrealistic impression of displacement in space at a speed that no human action could think of.

Matrix Trilogy – The Bullet Time’ green screen (1999)

In fact, the first basic use of this technique has been tested by Muybridge to capture the gallop of a horse. To do so, the inventors placed several camera chambers along the run of the horse and triggered it sequentially. It was then easy to show this same sequence of printed pictures and let the public to reconstruct mentally the movement. This is where Muybridge had the idea to invent the Zoetrope, ancestor of the moving image projector to recreate the sensation of movement of a single image. This attempt to reproduce the illusion of movement taken from the still captures has given birth to the Cinematograph later on developed by the Lumière Brothers.

Sequence of a horse jumping by Eadweard Muybridge (1904)

A recent outstanding application of the freeze movement effect has been used and pushed further for a Phillips ad, ‘Carousel’. Another example of the fascinating cross between still and moving image.

Created for Tribal DDB Amsterdam agency, by director Adam Berg to promote Phillips’ latest entrant into the television market. It won the ‘Cannes Lions 2009 Film Grand Prix’.

Conclusion

Cinema may be an illusion of truth 24 times per second though photography, in its cinematic stillness, has a beautiful power that no moving sequences can excel.

However there is no supremacy of moving image on still image, or the other way round, each media working distinctively for what it is and delivering its own message. While moving image can’t exist without still image, the sequences composed from it must tell something more than the images itself. So if a sequence of stills makes a shot then this shot has to deliver a wider message beyond its visual representation.

The formidable invention of cinema based on a succession of photographs 24 time per seconds must engage filmmakers to take care of their images as they would do to make a single image using a still camera. Every single frames of a Hitchcock movie like Psycho keep their aesthetic power.

The still image is so powerful and fascinating to contemplate any action movement that artists managed with specific techniques to enable a metaphysic spatial travel inside the still image. This might be an elegant manner for moving image to pay tribute to the still image.

“This is the point, essentially located in the single frame, where the cinema meets the still photograph, both registering a moment of time frozen and thus fossilized”!

Laura Mulvey, from Death 24 Time a Second (p101-103)

Ice Age series by Blue Sky Studio for 20th Century Fox Studio

The End !