14/02/2016

Fire and Ice, Peter Wollen

Notes:
- photograph - discussion about concept of time
It appears like a device for stopping time and preserving fragments of past, like flies in amber
Photograph is like a point, film is like a line
Photograph: Zero duration: spectator's now has no fixed duration, fascination as long as curiosity returns. Film: sequence of stills presented to spectator in fixed time

Change, perspective, duration      ::       States, processes and events


Language: perfective/imperfective form, progressive/non-progressive, in the present tense as well in the past.
New photographs: non-progressive present, narrative present since the reference is to the past time.
Art photographs: noun-phrasen, lacking verb-form. Same documentary photograph where we can find progressive present.

Imperfective form: Susan Meiselas' book Nicaragua. Muybridge's series photographs in participle form.

News photographs are percieved as signifying events. Art and most documentary p. states. Some documentary and Muybridge's as processes.

Ideal minimal story form: process - event - state     ::     Documentary - news - art















Film is like fire, photography is like ice.

Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay.

.... we sense something paradoxical about the photograph which signifies an event, like a frozen tongue of fire.

In a film, on the contrary, it is the still image (Warhol, Straub-Huillet) which seems paradoxical in the opposite sense: the moving picture of the motionless subject.

Hence the integral relationship between the still photograph and the pose. The subject freezes for the instantaneous exposure to produce a frozen image, state results in state.
Wiliam Klein https://www.artsy.net/article/phillips-william-kleins-may-day-parade-gorki-street
Koen Wessing (http://leicaphilia.com/koen-wessing-duality-as-photographic-puntum/)

.............. there is an eerie similarity between mourners and corpses ........
James var der Zee Book of death, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Van_Der_Zee)

Robert Capa http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/283315

Chris Marker, Film and stills, https://vimeo.com/46620661
La Jetée shows that still photographs, strung, together in a chain, can carry a narrative as efficiently as moving pictures, given a shared dependence on a soundtrack.



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