Still moving images: On the affectivity of photographs in film

Photo montage of some of the students and schoolchildren 'disappeared' by the Argentine police, putatively for demanding a reduction in bus fares, on the 'night of the pencils': September 18, 1976

I have published online a pre-print of the following book chapter which touches a lot on issues of affective recognition in film and media:

Catherine Grant, 'Still Moving Images: Photographs of the Disappeared in Film about the "Dirty War" in Argentina', in: Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, eds. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), pp. 63-86

Here's the first of the essay's six sections:

... in the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a specter.[i]

Roland Barthes

While motion pictures are usually composed of a series of photographically-recorded, still images,[ii] very few narrative films choose to foreground their photographic origins. Indeed, critics have maintained in accounts of the “basic”[iii] differences between photography and film that the illusion of movement, created in large part by film’s rapid, successive projection of its still frames, appears to “destroy,” to almost all intents and purposes, the potential power and action as photographs of these frames.[iv] Although theorists such as Barthes, Peter Wollen, Raymond Bellour, and Christian Metz have produced highly suggestive meditations on the ontological differences and similarities between film and photography,[v] I would argue that the spheres these writers circumscribe as “the photograph” and “film” are rendered so abstract in most of their accounts as to be of only limited practical use to examinations of actual films and their relations with photography in particular contexts. To give one example of what I mean by this, the “power” of photographs is not always treated “destructively,” or even irreverently, by films. In fact, the opposite is often the case. In ways that generally go unacknowledged by commentators, photos make regular and salient on-screen appearances: they are important devices in film narration; they are frequently deferred to as the central objects in the frame; and are even “imitated” by films through the use of freeze-frames, and other aesthetic contrivances.[vi]

In this essay, I shall explore some of the practices surrounding the diegetic interpolation of still photographs in narrative films, by examining a case in which both the photographs and the films in question are especially loaded with political and emotional significance. The case is that of the appearance of photographic portraits of Disappeared people (los desaparecidos), primarily in documentaries about acts of political resistance, “melancholic” memorializing, and mourning occurring in the aftermath of Argentina’s so-called “Dirty War,” which took place between 1976-1983. I shall briefly examine aesthetic aspects of this narrative interpolation, such as the ways these portraits are framed by the films; and their connection with forms of linguistic discourse including captioning, dialogue, and voice-over; as well as the relationship between their (apparent) stillness or (emphasized) motion. But, more prominently, I shall consider how the films play, or opt not to play, on the capacity of the photo-images to move us still, after nearly two decades of changing film practice and reception, and of changing narratives of national and international politics. Despite my determinedly situated interest in these particular films at this particular time,[vii] then, this last thread of my discussion will engage with aspects of ontological accounts of the “power and action” of photographs in the narrative medium of film.

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[i] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), 89.

[ii] This is obviously not the case with audio-visual material recorded analogically or digitally on video. Only one of the films I shall go on to consider in my essay was recorded on video rather than on film.

[iii] See for example Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (London: Laurence and Wishart, 1990, 1991), 155.

[iv] “[F]ilm is less a succession of photographs than, to a large extent, a destruction of the photograph, or more exactly of the photograph’s power and action.” Ibid., 159.

[v] See Barthes, Camera Lucida; Peter Wollen, “Fire and Ice,” Photographies 4 (1984); Metz, “Photography and Fetish”; Raymond Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” Camera Obscura 24 (1990).

[vi] Bellour’s article does consider aspects of the freeze-frame at length. In particular, he asks: “what happens to film when the snapshot becomes both the pose and the pause of film?” Ibid., 105.

[vii] This essay is one of a continuing series of mine on Argentine cinema of this period. See also “Camera Solidaria,” Screen 38: 4 (1997): 311-28; “Giving up Ghosts: Eliseo Subiela’s Hombre mirando al sudeste and No te mueras sin decirme a dónde vas,” in Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds, ed. Rob Rix and Roberto Rodríguez-Saona (Leeds: Leeds Iberian Papers, 1997), 89-120; “Gender, Genre and the Social Imaginary in some Films from Argentina’s ‘Cinema of Redemocratization’ (1983-1993),” in Cinema and Ideology, ed. Eamonn Rodgers (Glasgow: Strathclyde Modern Language Studies, 1996), 17-33.

Film aesthetics, ethics, and politics in Missing (1982)

On Tuesday I gave a talk on my work on contemporary auteurism as part of the Screen Medias and Cultures Research seminars at the University of Cambridge. It was a very enjoyable occasion for me: many thanks to those present and especially to David Trotter, Matilda Mroz, and Piotr Cieplak, the series organisers, and Emma Wilson who chaired the seminar.

There is some very interesting and important Screen Studies research going on in this Cambridge grouping. I was particularly interested to hear of that by the aforementioned Piotr Cieplak who is currently working on 'Image, memory and trauma: photographic and filmic representations of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its aftermath'.

Discussion with Piotr Cieplak about this important topic has prompted me to publish online a related research paper of mine which deals with a cinematic representation of trauma and violence made (like some of the most prominent representations of the events in Rwanda) by those who didn't suffer this violence 'first-hand'; such repesentations prompt particular questions about the ethics of recognition. My paper (available HERE) is entitled ‘Questions of National and Transnational Film Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Costa Gavras’s Missing (1982)’. Here's the abstract:

In the field of Latin American film studies, there has been a great deal of prescriptive criticism about how ‘dominant’ forms of cinema, sometimes even in the name of solidarity and raising political awareness, have crushed, deformed, or simply replaced the attempts of certain, more 'beleaguered', national cinemas to tell ‘their own’ stories about traumatic, political events. Rather than simply joining in with that criticism, it is important to set out to examine, analyse and account for what has actually happened with these ‘internationalised’ film stories during the last thirty years.

Films are never just ‘national’ (and therefore ‘good objects’) or 'international / transnational’ (and therefore ‘bad objects’): they are always made somewhere, by people who always come from somewhere, and although they may or may not be seen in lots of different places, they are obviously always seen in specific places and in specific circumstances. It is important, therefore, to study the unequal exchanges involved in such transactions, rather than simply to make assertions about iniquitousness at the outset.

The material I discuss in this paper draws on research for a project on the international fiction and documentary cinema about South American dictatorships and their aftermath, from September 11, 1973 to the present, and concerns one of the most obvious films to include in such a project: the Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras’s 1982 film Missing for the North American production company Universal (on the recently released DVD of this film, the cover trumpets the movie as ‘The first American film by Costa-Gavras’ [not on the new Criterion Collection DVD version!]). This 'US film' about a hugely significant Latin American 'event', made by a non-US/non-Latin American filmmaker, has been vehemently criticised, over the years, on the political, ethical and aesthetic grounds of cultural and ethnic imperialism, and dominant-cinema ‘manipulation’.

How might a methodological narrative negotiate the minefield posed by these critical discourses? What I hope to show in my illustrated talk about Missing is that any study of cinema in a national (or 'transnational') and historical context can only be well served by paying close attention to the important political and ethical questions raised by how films aesthetically organise their multiple audiences’ access to knowledge and affect.

I have given this research paper as a talk a few times (see the PowerPoint slides which have accompanied it above), most recently on November 17, 2007 at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London as part of a study day on 'The National/Transnational in Hispanic and Latin American Film and the Telenovela' (alongside a great paper by Paul Julian Smith: 'Transnational telenovela: from Mexico to Spain').

It's been really interesting to revisit the paper this week as tomorrow I am acting as a respondent at a 'World Cinemas: in theory/on screen' study day organised by Jacqueline Maingard in the Department of Drama at the University of Bristol which will deal with related issues of cinematic representation, recognition and theory (Friday 5th December, 2-5 pm, Lecture Room, Dept of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, Cantocks Close, Bristol). The titles of the Study Day papers are as follows:

• Jacqueline Maingard (Bristol), 'African Cinema and Bamako: notes for screen theory'
• Augusto de Oliveira (Bristol ), 'Marking time: Afro-Brazilian cinema and the quest for recognition'
• Will Higbee (Exeter), 'Diaspora, intercultural exchange and the myth of return: recent journey film by Maghrebi-French directors'
• Derek Duncan (Bristol), 'Princesa: transgender/transmedial/transnational'