In Wells’ book I have looked at an essay by Peter Wollen, in which he describes film and photography as “fire and ice” (p76) the fire is constantly flickering and moving, while the ice is frozen still. Time dominates the way in which we view photographs, as we view camera’s as “devices for stopping time”. (p76) In a still image we can capture a single moment and display it back in another place and time, as the camera saw it while the shutter was opened. To the reader, time appears stopped. Film however differs in comparison; we read film as a number of still frames played back at a fixed rate, this gives us “the illusion of movement” (p76). In film the action does not move, only the still frames which are played back to us, traditionally in cinema at 24fps, even if we look at highly advanced modern techniques, there is still a number of fixed frames, which will be played back at a fixed rate of time, to simulate movement. We become absorbed in this illusion, when the camera moves through a jungle, we feel that we are moving with it, however we are not moving, and neither is the screen which we watch. This level of absorption is something the single image cannot demand as easily as film, the dimensions of time and space “place the spectator within.. a narrative.” (p80)
In a photograph conversely, the viewer becomes the champion of time, this is a theory of Barthes’ which keeps coming up. It is highly significant that the reader of a photograph has much more control of the reading than the reader of film, where time forces us onward in a linear fashion. While we can hold onto the moment of a photograph, in film each moment passes and is irretrievable in under normal viewing. We have the chance to re-evaluate the photography, while with film we must view what is presented, in the timeframe of the presentation.
A film will often follow a narrative, as it takes us through its representation of time, photographs however, “cannot be seen as narratives themselves, but elements of narrative”. (p78) By combining photographs or using other media to support them we can suggest or build a narrative, but we cannot create one which is true or complete. While it is suggested that film is somehow more advanced in this way, I contest this. Film is no more than a collection of photographs, accompanied by sound, it is a construct of a narrative. In theatre, the narrative is constructed by actors, directors and scripts, filming this to display as cinema is a construct of a construct, the narrative itself cannot exist in a pure form when it is recorded in this way. The experience of watching a performance, compared to watching a recording of the same performance in a cinema is noticeably different, and the camera’s intervention in space and time play a part in this, whether or not we realise it.
“There is no such thing as an instantaneous photograph.”(p101) A photograph represents the time the shutter was open, however short or long this time, it is a measurable amount of time. Photographs exist in the present, show us the past and can be viewed in the future. Older images were limited by technology, so the passage of time was more obvious with blur of movement. Some artists are effected by this accidentally, while others deliberately manipulate it. Photography allows us not to stop time, but examine small slices of it, which are invisible to the naked eye. There is “a beauty in this fragmenting of time” which shows us a “momentary patterning of lines and shapes which has previously been concealed within the flux of movement.” (p102)