There is one brief scene in “La Jetée” where the static presence of the still photograph is infiltrated by movement. In a brief instant, the woman from the man’s past addresses the camera and the static image collapses with the movement of her eyes and arm. This embodied intervention disrupts the tension of narrative time and photography. Marker invents the moving still with this gesture.
The moving still is also used as a temporal device in Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner”. In an attempt to authenticate her human existence, the replicant known as Rachel shows the Blade Runner, Rick Dekkard a photograph of a young girl and her mother. Rachel believes the photograph to be an image of herself and her mother sitting on the porch of their home. As the camera zooms in on the photographic evidence, the figures and the light that illuminates them begins to move. The authenticity associated with the photographs access to the past, this-has-been, is nullified by the animated figures in the still photograph. Immediately, the legitimacy of the snapshot that would confirm the cyborgs humanity is destroyed. Rachel discovers that the photograph is a fake, her memories of the past are prosthetic implants and that she is one of the inhuman replicants that Dekkard has been instructed to terminate.
Johnnie Eisen
| “’Sittings’ is a series of video portraits of sixty individuals, set in a situation that echoes an archetypal photo portrait studio setting.To remove the inherent distraction of the photographer’s presence, all subjects were left alone with the camera running. There was no sound recording, and each portrayal runs unedited for ten minutes”. Johnnie Eisen |
Each of the video portraits in Johnnie Eisen’s work “Sittings” exemplifies the simultaneity of subjective experience for both the subject and the audience. Deeply empathetic, these portraits are filled with subtle gestures, eye movements, occasional smiles, repositioning and waiting. The waiting constructs a period of anticipation for both the subject and audience. Each portrait is measured by a precise ten-minute duration, a relatively short period of time that seems to acquire an epic scale in this context.The video portraits have a striking relationship to the portraiture of 19th century photography. Both the video and the historic still are products of endurance and time. For early photographers working with the limitations of slow photographic emulsions, a restraining apparatus was required to hold the subject steady for the long exposure required to render an image. For the subjects in Eisen’s video portraits, the restraints have been detached.
| “An excess of life was actually a bit of a problem for those early photographers trying to make portraits. Due to slow exposure times, even a slight movement of the subject’s head produced an unsightly blur. Some critics complained that the strain of keeping steady made the subject’s face look like a corpse. However, a simple solution was soon available. Those wanting their portraits taken simply had to submit to having their heads placed within a constraining device that ensured a still posture for the necessary seconds. This devise transformed the lived time of the body into the stasis of an embalmed effigy. In other words, photography insisted that if one wanted to appear lifelike in a photograph, one first had to act as if dead”. 12 |
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