Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen Beckman is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Film Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, also published by Duke University Press.

Jean Ma is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

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""Still Moving" engages new debate in a field central and crucial to cinema, media, and cultural studies. The collection explores the nature of photography and cinema both before and after the advent of digital media. As a result, some stunning work--on acceleration and simulation, on filming and editing in photographic and electronic media, on the fortunes of memory and oblivion, and on the dialogue and conflict of technologies--emerges from the tension of still and moving images."--Tom Conley, author of "Cartographic Cinema"

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STILL MOVING

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................viiIntroduction Karen Beckman and Jean Ma..................................................................................................11 What's the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs Tom Gunning......................................................................232 "The Forgotten Image between Two Shots": Photos, Photograms, and the Essayistic Timothy Corrigan......................................413 Structural Film: Noise Juan A. Surez.................................................................................................624 An Essay on Calendar Atom Egoyan......................................................................................................935 Photography's Absent Times Jean Ma....................................................................................................986 The Idea of Still Rebecca Baron, interviewed by Janet Sarbanes........................................................................1197 Crash Aesthetics: Amores Perros and the Dream of Cinematic Mobility Karen Beckman.....................................................1348 Surplus Memories: From the Slide Show to the Digital Bulletin Board in Jim Mendiola's Speeder Kills Rita Gonzalez.....................1589 Photography's Expanded Field George Baker.............................................................................................17510 Weekend Campus Nancy Davenport.......................................................................................................18911 Aleph Beat: Wallace Berman between Photography and Film Louis Kaplan.................................................................19612 Mental Images: The Dramatization of Psychological Disturbance Zoe Beloff.............................................................22613 Concerning "the Photographic" Raymond Bellour........................................................................................253References...............................................................................................................................277Contributors.............................................................................................................................293Index....................................................................................................................................297

Chapter One

Tom Gunning

If Freud had subjected one of the West's central ideologies-historical progress-to psychoanalysis, he might have discovered the primary psychic operation of displacement operating behind our constant impetus toward ever-greater perfection. What passes for progress (especially theoretical progress), I am claiming, often simply displaces unresolved problems onto new material.

As a historian of early cinema (and of the even earlier visual and sound technology that preceded the cinema, such as the magic lantern, the phantasmagoria, the panorama, the phonograph, and the devices of instantaneous and chronophotography),I am excited, but also a bit dismayed, by the current discussion of newly emerging media, especially when this discussion provides an account of the older media of cinema and photography. There is no question in my mind that the recent interest in early cinema and its technological antecedents springs partly from the excitement the appearance of such new media generates (and my friend and colleague Erkki Huhtamo has demonstrated this interrelation of old and new most wonderfully).

But, as Norman Mailer is supposed to have once said, ideals of progress often depend on the anesthetization of the past. While I believe that the possibilities and realities of new media invite us to (in fact, demand that we) rethink the history of visual media, I also fear they can produce the opposite: a sort of reification of our view of the older media, an ignoring of the true complexities that photography, cinema, and other visual media capturing light and motion presented, simply displacing their promises and disappointments onto a yet-to-be-achieved digital media utopia. Especially bothering to me is a tendency to cast the older media as bad objects, imbued with a series of (displaced) sins that the good objects of new media will absolve.

Let's tackle one of the largest problems first, the truth claim of traditional photography (and to some extent cinematography), which has become identified with Charles Peirce's term indexicality. Both aspects need investigation: the nature of the truth claim, and the adequacy of indexicality to account for it. This whole issue becomes even more obscure when critics or theorists claim (I hope less frequently as time goes by) that the digital and the indexical are opposed terms.

I will approach this last issue first, both because I think it is rather simple and because others have made the argument as well or better than I can (most recently Phil Rosen in his fine work Change Mummified [2001]). I have some difficulty figuring out how this confusion arose, but I imagine it went something like this: the indexicality of the photograph depends on a physical relation between the object photographed and the image finally created. The image on the photographic negative derives from the transformation of light-sensitive emulsion caused by light reflecting off the object photographed filtered through the lens and diaphragm. In a digital image, however, instead of light-sensitive emulsion affected by the luminous object, the image is formed through data about light that is encoded in a matrix of numbers.

But what problem does this change present and how does it challenge indexicality? Clearly a digital camera records through its numerical data the same intensities of light that a nondigital camera records: hence the similarity of their images. The difference between the digital and the film-based camera has to do with the way the information is captured-which does have strong implications for the way the images can be stored, transferred, and indeed manipulated. But storage in terms of numerical data does not eliminate indexicality (which is why digital images can serve as passport photographs and the other sorts of legal evidence or documents, which ordinary photographs supply).

Further, it would be foolish to identify the indexical with the photographic; most indexical information is not recorded by photography. Long before digital media were introduced, medical instruments and other instruments of measurement, indexical instruments par excellence-such as devices for reading pulse rate, temperature, heart rate, and the like, or speedometers, wind gauges, and barometers-all converted their information into numbers. (Think, for instance, of that household item, the thermometer, in either its analogical or digital form.)

Although a photograph combines both types of signs, the indexical quality of a photograph must not be confused with its iconicity. The fact that rows of numbers do not resemble a photograph, or what the photograph is supposed to represent, does not undermine any indexical...