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 <[log in to unmask]> ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]