47 Her favorite Leonard Cohen song.
The film still freezes time. The objective is three months pregnant with the child in the passport photo.
“Introducing the dimensions of time and movement into the act of watching stills is the foundation for the ethics of the spectator. This ethics is based on a series of assumptions: Photographs do not speak for themselves. Alone, they do not decipher a thing. Identifying what is seen does not excuse the spectator from “watching” the photograph, rather than looking at it, and from caring for its sense. And the sense of the photograph is subject to negotiation that unfailingly takes place vis-à-vis a single, stable, permanent image whose presence persists and demands that the spectators cast anchor in it whenever they seek to sail toward an abstraction that is detached from the visible and that then becomes its cliché.”
– Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography
The film still is a stopped frame, an image stolen from a context in which movement determines significance. Unlike photographs or portraits, film stills derive meaning from their relations with Film studies promoted films with large posters stylized in graphic design and rich representations intended to announce the film’s theme and attract viewers. Film stills, or stopped frames, were rarely used for posters. They weren’t compelling enough.
In 1990, my dad lugged a suitcase of white film reels back to the US. He had a projector. We watched these films by reel, the old way, projected on a blank wall.
Did something happen when he converted these reels to the digital images that permit stills? Was there a way to snap a still from reels?
A film is a roll of images that can be used by a projector to throw moving images on a screen or surface. Wood reminds me that films are “footage” involving movement, and this footage creates a sense of motion in the viewer. “Our relation to film as footage is a part of our relation to film as film,” he writes.
And our relation to film often coincides with the memory of events experienced in our lives.
Jacques Ranciere said every documentary should be asked what sort of fiction it is. “Seeing can’t be controverted, only contextualized, complemented by other stories.” (16) We feel as if we have witnessed something.
The family movie swallows me in its ever-present tense.
Scene: “The Bench Beneath the Tree“
I return to the video scene which takes place on the bench beneath the tree repeatedly, trying to isolate the subjects, or to make sense of each person separately. My mother, her father, and me.
A baby in a stroller, a white blanket at its feet. The woman is saying something to the camera. Or she is speaking to a figure just beyond the camera.
The video pans briefly to the field, then returns to the bench where a shirtless, middle-aged man sits next to the woman. The coffee pot sits between them. The woman is my mother. The bench is located behind her father’s house in Bran, a small mountain village in Transy