The Future Perfect: Genealogies of the Film-still

Robert Bean

Cinematic time emerges from the temporality of the still photograph. The exhibition “Future Perfect” features the work of three Canadian video artists who explore the subject of photographic time through the use of video. In each work, the artist posits an enigmatic relation between real time and the temporal discontinuity of the still photograph. This is an exhibition of moving stills.

The video works in this exhibition are engaged with the ambiguous interval that resides between the still photograph and the moving image. “Future Perfect” is premised on an experience of duration and image. In a world where time seems to continually fragment into diminutive parcels of experience, the qualities of duration, memory and image appear as questions of embodiment and perception.

Governed by media, technoscience, and the speed of light (what Paul Virilio has termed the Third Interval of real-time), our re-entry into conscious duration can have both calming and unsettling consequences. Through the use of static framing, montage and extended portraiture, each artist in the exhibition “Future Perfect” explores an experience of image and duration. This engagement with the viewer in a space of continuous and discontinuous time is achieved without the excessive use of temporal techniques from cinema. Narrative, jump cuts and action cutting are exchanged for the most basic configuration of motion and image. We may be startled by the manifest experience of time that is present in the works of Stan Denniston, Johnnie Eisen and Kelly Richardson.

Photographing Time

At the end of the nineteenth century, the time-motion photographs of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge revealed intervals of movement that surpassed the physiological limits of human vision. These imperceptible instants of time anticipated the technology of film and also had a profound impact on the emerging Modernist art and culture of the twentieth century. Edgar Degas, an avid photographer in his own right, incorporated the use of cinematic progression into his studies of dancers as early as 1895. By 1912, Marey’s chronophotography had formed a significant influence on the avant-garde painting, sculpture and photography of Futurist artists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Perhaps the most notorious appropriation of this photographic trope was Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2”, 1912. Stylistically bridging Symbolism and the temporal investigations of Cubism with the scientific world of the machine, Duchamp introduced the art world to the androgynous mechanomorphic automaton of twentieth century industry and culture. Borrowing an analogy from psychoanalytic theory, Walter Benjamin referred to this constellation of technology, vision and culture that appeared in the mechanistic representations of film and photography as the “optical unconscious”.2 The discursive implications of photography and film were observable through art, philosophy, science and the disciplinary technologies of surveillance.