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September 1995, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Pip Chodorov <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 9 Sep 1995 07:43:35 -0400
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This is off the genre/gender topic, but...
 
When I saw Thelma & Louise, I was struck by the ending. Not because they
drive off a cliff (oops, sorry if I've ruined for those of you that haven't
seen it yet), but because they do it in slow motion; they are even the
victims of a freeze-frame.
 
The slow motion in film has many purposes, meanings, etc., from the sports
replay, to Jean Epstein's "temporal microscope". But I've been fascinated by
slow motion from the point of view of what's happening to film during a
slomo?
 
To briefly sum up my interpretation of this: movement is created on the
screen by our brain as the phi-phenomenon bridges the gap from frame to
frame. This happens *between* the frames, in the darkness (1/3 of that 90
minutes is spent in the dark remember) just as our brains bridge the days by
dreaming at night -> sorry if I tend to go to far.
 
The movement is non-existant if the frames or too similar (in a freeze-frame
contiguous frames are alike) or too different (for example if I use my movie
camera as a still camera, taking a totally different picture on each frame).
Movement exists in the middle of this scale between fixed image and chaos,
between slow motion and fast motion and between similarity and difference.
 
Now, to take this further (and I will get back to Thelma & Louise, stuck in
space, in a moment), movement in film only became possible when photography
had developed to the point where a picture could be taken in just a fraction
of a second (in the 1850's). Movement was visible in a photo before that
date, because the exposure times were long -- if people didn't stand still,
they were blurry. That blur is movement. Once photos no longer recorded that
movement, once they became fast enough, then cinema came along to record it.
 
When cinema shows us a non-moving picture, either as a filmed photo or as a
freeze-frame, it is *regressing* towards its photographic birth. Movement is
*dying*. For me, then slow motion signifies regression and dying. It is
therefore significant that in "2001", HAL's voice apparently slows down, he
regresses to his premature state as he sings "Daisy", and then is brain dead
(I said "apparently" because his voice does not actually slow down but is
electronically altered: notice that he sings Daisy in the same key all the
way through. This means he is *not* dead and will be revived in 2010!).
Another Kubrickian example is in "Shining" -- Jack in the icy maze starts
losing his vocabulary (like HAL loses his voice) and starts grunting like an
ape, he is then *frozen* and becomes a *photograph*, younger, older and
immortal.
 
For these reasons, for me, the end of Thelma & Louise is significant: they
are slowed down and frozen as they plummet to their death. Their death is
therefore symbolized by cinema's death (the death of movement), and at the
same time that death is rephotographed on every frame more and more alike,
making a freeze-frame. Their death is captured, perpetuated ad infinitum, so
in another sense they can never die. Bimbos in limbo.
 
You may remember this being the main subject of Hollis Frampton's
"Nostalgia", (1971, 30-minutes) in which he films his own photographs burning
on a hot plate, only Frampton takes this idea even further: each burning
photo takes up a 3-minute roll of film, there are ten of these in the
half-hour. Each roll starts with the original picture and ends in a charred
and blackened mess, thereby reproducing the alternance of frames and black
that we experience in the cinema. Furthermore, the photos are being destroyed
and that destruction is captured -- forever -- annhilating their death. In
addition to this, the soundtrack speaks to us in first person of the photo
and its importance in Frampton's life, BUT it is not Frampton speaking but
Michael Snow, AND it is not autobiography but fiction AND the sound is in
advance by three minutes, so we are hearing of the picture to come, and not
the one we are seeing. The photo/image is the past, the fire/consumation is
the present, the sound/text is the future.
 
I am taken with this topic because it is essentially cinematographic in
nature. Much film theory is like literary theory, focusing on plot elements,
representation of stereotypes, history and fiction, even if talking of
narrative space, costume and all the things that make up a movie. But film is
time passing, real time; film is perception.
 
I would be interested in your comments, criticisms and other examples of
slow/fast motion and what they might "mean".
 
-Pip Chodorov
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