Larry Gottheim’s film Fog Line (1970) begins with a still shot of a landscape covered in dense fog. All that can be seen through the fog are the outlines of a few trees intersected by four high-tension wires. The setting is subtly beautiful, and the complete lack of sound creates a space for meditation. Minutes pass. Apart from some slight shaking, the camera does not move, nor do any elements within the mise-en-scène. The trees and telephone wires become easier to make out as the fog lifts, although the fog’s retreat is so gradual that its movement is not perceived by the viewer. After eleven minutes of the same motionless shot, the film abruptly ends. During my first viewing of Fog Line, I found the film simultaneously boring and absorbing. I was bored because, on a superficial level, nothing happened. Yet I was fascinated because I had never encountered a film like this before. It was so still, so uneventful, I felt like I was staring at a photograph or a painting for several minutes rather than watching a movie.
When I watched Fog Line a second time, I realized that there was actually more movement than I had initially registered. At one point, several minutes into the film, barely visible grainy shadows (in actuality, horses) slowly wander from one side of the landscape to the other. (Gottheim had intentionally selected this location for his film because of the horses that regularly moved through it.) At another point a small, almost indiscernible, bird quickly flies above the wires. Like most viewers, I had missed these developments in my first careful viewing; it was as if the prolonged inertia had tricked my mind into thinking I was looking at a still. I was unable to easily detect the minimal motion within the shot since, after the first few minutes of stasis, I was no longer expecting movement of any kind. Scott MacDonald describes the spectatorial experience engendered by Fog Line cogently: “For a few moments at the beginning of the film, viewers cannot be sure that the image they’re looking at is a motion picture. Indeed, it is only once the fog has thinned enough for an identification of the image to be possible that we can recognize that something other than the movie projector—the fog itself—is moving.”
While Fog Line is a remarkable and unique cinematic experience, it is not without predecessors, nor is it without successors. In fact, it places itself in a rich and variegated tradition that I will call the cinema of stasis. Static films offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion. In most films an impression of movement is provided either by the motion of the camera or the motion of elements within the mise-en-scène—usually both. In contrast, static films generally feature no camera movement and little or no movement within the frame. Instead, these films foreground stasis and consequently blur the lines between traditional visual art and motion pictures.
It should be noted that the term movement is polysemous and is sometimes used in a broader sense than what I have in mind here. Gilles Deleuze, for example, suggests that movement can be achieved in film not only through the motion of the camera or elements in the frame but also through montage, which he claims “allows the achievement of a pure mobility extracted from the movements of characters.” Along similar lines, Christian Metz claims that a filmic transition between one image and another—“even if each image is still”—constitutes an “ideal” movement. As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, movement can refer to “a change of place or position,” and by this definition any cinematic montage (even a montage of still shots) constitutes movement. But movement can also designate “the action or process of moving,” and it is this more specific definition that I have in mind. In other words a film that engages in montage can still be considered a static film for my purposes, so long as the elements within the frame are static (as in, say, Chris Marker’s La jetée [1962]). For while the spectator’s point of view is shifting “in place or position,” no “action or process of moving” is directly observed; in cases like these the movement itself takes place off-camera, and the dominant impression is one of stasis.
The tradition of static cinema arguably starts in 1930 with Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (Wochenende) (1930). The film features a rich, evocative sound track of voices, clocks, alarms, and other “found” sounds, but the screen remains blank and motionless for the work’s entire eleven-minute duration. At first, Weekend seemed like little more than a curio, an idiosyncratic experiment designed to test the limits of cinematic expression. But a similar kind of cinematic stasis began to appear again in 1950s France with Situationist films like Gil Wolman’s L’anticoncept (The Anticoncept) (1951) and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952), both of which traffic in immobile visual fields stripped of any imagery. By the 1960s the floodgates had opened. This was an era in which the boundaries separating various media were being challenged more than ever before, and this was reflected in a series of provocative and influential static films such as Marker’s La jetée, Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). These pioneering works would, in subsequent decades, inspire a number of filmmakers, including Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, and Derek Jarman, to continue exploring the aesthetics of stillness.
Although individual static films have been the subject of scholarly attention, the cinema of stasis as a modality has not yet been adequately theorized. I want to remedy this by analyzing several subsets of static cinema—the furniture film, the protracted film, the textual film, and the monochrome film—drawing attention to the diversity and multivalence of cinematic stasis. I also want to attempt to answer several questions that are intrinsically posed by static films: Why take a medium uniquely positioned to create the illusion of movement and use it to create a quasi-photographic stasis? What forms of spectatorship are appropriate in approaching these works? And finally, what are the implications of these experiments for the ontology of film?
~~Motion[less] Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis -by- Justin Remes
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