Moving Stills (The Ken Burns Effect)

While the early hybrid forms between moving and unmoving image have, with an increasing historical distance, come to be considered worthy of study, the growing presence of digitally mobilized photographic images in the present visual culture has hardly been taken seriously as an object of research thus far – not only on the basis of its currency and its suspicious proximity to popular culture, but also because its medial, and hence academic classification, is unclear. However, the matter-of-factness with which photo-, video- and computer-graphical recording and representation media are combined today shows that the 'expanded field of photography' (Baker 2005) requires an expanded concept of 'the photographic' (a term originally coined by Rosalind Krauss), beyond the analogue and digital, print and projection, still and moving divide. The building of this new concept first supposes to deconstruct the old photographic medium. Except that we hardly need to deconstruct, but instead to show that this construction is a simple trompe-l'oeil: that projection is the underlying production and reproduction process of both photography and film (Frizot 1997), that photography and film are synthetic 'image states' (Bellour 2008) that involve aspects of both stasis and movement, and that with the digital animation technique known as the Ken Burns Effect, the images on our screen are 'no longer immobile' (Benjamin 2008).

Between Hand and Spoon

A curious passage appears in Walter Benjamin's, 'Little History of Photography' (1931):

While it is common that, for example, an individual is able to offer an account of the human gait (if only in general terms), that same individual has no knowledge at all of human posture during the fraction of a second when a person begins to take a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals this posture to him.

(2008: 278)

Remarkable in this passage is the media-archaeological slip that Benjamin makes: Slow motion is generally considered part of the filmic process and not part of the photographic process. When Benjamin then goes on to define photography as making the 'optical unconscious' (ibid.) visible, he conceives of it implicitly as a dynamic, temporalized medium – an attitude apparently so emphatic that it makes its way into the French translation. Here, we find: 'La photographie, avec ces auxiliaires que sont les ralentis, les agrandissements, montre ce qui se passe.' In the phrase 'montre ce qui se passe', the significance of the representation of movement in image is reinforced – photography not only shows what is, but rather what happens.

A comparison with the essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', which was written a few years later and contains an altered version of this passage, makes clear the indifference to technical and historical accuracy that generally permeates Benjamin's writings on media. Here, the object of reflection is film, not photography, but the argument is quite the same (although he gives a more detailed list of the camera 'resources' than in the 'Little History of Photography', in which he only mentions slow motion and enlargement):

Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here, the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.

(1992: 230)

In another passage in the essay on the work of art, Benjamin explicitly addresses medial hybrids and views them as representatives of an intermediate phase, late forms of the old medium technology and early forms of the new. In a footnote, he affirms and relativizes his technological -deterministic view of media. According to Benjamin, every cultivated art form stands at the intersection of three lines of development. In the case of film, these are: (1) the technology geared towards a certain art form (flip books, moving-image automats); (2) the traditional art forms that worked intensely on producing effects later achieved unfettered by the new art forms (Dadaism) and (3) the social transformation that works towards changes in reception that first benefitted the new art form (the Kaiserpanorama): 'Before the movie had begun to create its public, pictures that were no longer immobile captivated an assembled audience in the so-called Kaiserpanorama' (Benjamin 1992: 242, our emphasis)2 (see Figure 1.1).

This transmedial, media-teleological approach, which considers the flip book, moving-image automats, Dadaism and the Kaiserpanorama as early forms of the film with respect to technology development, art development and social change, disregarding the historical fact that film was already institutionalized around 1910 (hence before the Dadaist Manifesto of 1916 mentioned by Benjamin), illustrates the course this chapter will trace. Our thesis is that the convergence of moving and unmoving images in digital media (on the level of post-production as well as on the level of display) is already laid out in the media history of photographic and filmic images and their hybrid forms. This convergence is media-theoretically apparent in the difficulty (not unique to Benjamin) that arises in the attempt to clearly distinguish between photography and film. Its concrete expression can be found in productions and practices located in the border areas of the two medial forms. Their historical paths can be traced all the way back to the pre- and early history of photographic and filmic images – to the magic lantern and the various optical toys of the nineteenth century such as the wheel of life, the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope, the daedalum, the praxinoscope, the mutoscope, etc., all of which availed themselves of the physiology and psychology of visual perception for the creation of moving images (Füsslin 1993; von Dewitz and Nekes 2002; Rossell 2008). While different from today's film technology, these optical toys all depended on some kind of setting into motion of still images via a manual or mechanical apparatus to generate the impression that the images depict movement. The passage from stillness to movement was often an important part of the attraction, and with this, optical toys share common ground with early film technology and practice, starting with the coming-to-life of the film itself, as in the Lumiere Brothers' famous presentation of A Train Arriving at La Ciotat in the...