#le jetee

Photography at the Cinema, Fire and Ice, Peter Wollen, 1984, pgs. 108-113 (1)

Photographs appear as devices for stopping time and preserving fragments of the past.

Photography is like a point, film like a line.

According to Barthes, photography appeared as a spatial rather than temporal art, vertical rather than horizontal and one which allowed the spectator time to veer away on a train of thought, circle back, traverse and criss-cross the image.

Time should be a prerogative of the reader/spectator: a free rewriting time rather than an imposed reading time.

Is the signified of a photographic image to be seen as a state, a process or an event? Is it stable, unchanging, or, if it is a changing, dynamic situation, is it seen from outside as conceptually complete, or from inside, as ongoing?

The fact that images may themselves appear as punctual, virtually without duration, does not mean that the situations that they represent lack any quality of duration or other qualities related to time.

News photographs are perceived as signifying events. Art photographs and most documentary photographs signify states. Some documentary photographs are seen as signifying processes.

Different genres of photography imply different perspectives within durative situations and sequences of situations.

The subject freezes for the instantaneous exposure to produce a frozen image, state results in state.

From the moment they are published, images are contextualized and, frequently, if they become famous, they go through a whole history of republication and recontextualization. Far more is involved than the simple doubling of the encounter of photographer with object and spectator with image.

Still photography, like film, lacks any structure of tense, though it can order and demarcate time.

Aspect is a dimension of the semantics of time common to both the still and the moving picture and used in both to place the spectator within or without a narrative.

La jetée is a film by Chris Marker and is the exemplar of a fascinating combination of film and still: the film is made entirely of stills. 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. I have watched La jetée before and I was fascinated by the length of the film which they had managed to create simply by just stringing images together and writing a narrative.

La jetée by Chris Marker - Source: http://www.janusfilms.com/films/1049 (2)

Photography and time: decoding the decisive moment, Rich Cutler, 2012 (3)

The ‘decisive moment’ is a phrase that is associated with the photographer Henri Cartier‐Bresson and his style of image‐making, after the title of his 1952 book The Decisive Moment.

Barthes coined the ‘hieroglyph’ – a picture with imbued meaning. It is a moment chosen so that ‘what has already taken place, and what is about to follow, can be most easily gathered’, and we can see ‘the present, the past, and the future’.

Cartier-Bresson articulated the decisive moment as ‘the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.’

The photograph is a dichotomous object – a reflection of the past in the present. The photograph is a truthful representation of an object in the past, and thus, unlike other media, we are presented with what Barthes terms the ‘having‐been‐there’ of the object. He then stated that all representations of an object evoke its presence.

Thierry de Duve acknowledges a notion that a photograph can be perceived in either of two ways – ‘event‐like’ or ‘picture‐like’. If we see the photograph as ‘event‐like’, it is a frozen moment that cannot reveal the entirety of the event. If the photograph is perceived as ‘picture‐like’, it is then an image that no longer has any connection with the event – simply a picture that is evidence of the past.

When we look at a snapshot, we experience time suddenly splitting into the past and future – always too late to witness the event or too early.

The time exposure depicts a state, not an event and, as there is no past or future time to spool off the image, we relate to the image temporally in the present, now. Its reality is also static and thus associated with space, not time locating it there in the past.

Photographs of the decisive moment depict an event. They thus fall within de Duve’s snapshot category. Photographs of the decisive moment are defined by their very deliberate pictorial composition. Equivalency between being ‘event‐like’ and ‘picture‐like’ allows photographs of the decisive moment to oscillate readily between de Duve’s time exposure and snapshot categories.

The unease we feel looking at Ha Phan, Vietnam is partly, of course, because we are aware of impending violence and death in this example, but this feeling is innate to de Duve’s snapshot, which depicts a real object frozen in a seemingly impossible position. The narrative element is an event so the interest lies not primarily in the situation itself but in how it starts and ends, implying questions such as: Why did the plane fall? What is going to happen?

Ha Phan, Vietnam by H. Mine (1967)

Hand written notes:

Bibliography

Wollen, P. (1984). Photography at the Cinema, Fire and Ice.

La Jetée. (n.d.). Retrieved from Janus Films: http://www.janusfilms.com/films/1049

The Syfy channel is making a TV series based on the GREAT film 12 Monkeys (which was, in turn, inspired by Le Jetee, the 1962 short film by Chris Marker, whose video installation Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men is currently on at the Wellington City Gallery btw). 

Here is the trailer!