Demet Adiguzel - Annotation: Stillness in the Moving Image: Ways of Visualising Time and Its Passing, Laura Mulvey

In her essay “Stillness in the Moving Image: Ways of Visualising Time and Its Passing”, Laura Mulvey focuses on “how new technologies have given a new visibility to stillness as a property of celluloid”.

She starts with three points of departure: spectatorship, indexical sign and narrative. She suggests that spectatorship theories should be reconfigured because of the radical changes in the material in the cinema. In addition due to the cinema can be imitated digitally, technology has given the viewer a freedom. Therefore it gives significance to the indexical sign and the narrative becomes more nonlinear since it may not be dependent on cause and effect and on closure.

To address the paradox, she first approaches to the relationship between still and moving images in the cinema. Annotating Roland Barthes, she compares moving images to stills. Barthes suggests that the photographic image immortalize a moment in time with also immortalizing a halted life so eventually when the actual time passes, it becomes “an image of life after death”; denying that it can happen for the cinema because of its movement. He defines cinema’s vision as oneiric, not ecmnesic. Mulvey talks about two factors here: the movement and storytelling. She suggests that even there used to be an obsession with movement dominating cinema – excluding the avant-garde movements – it is starting to get blurred since new technologies give access to “an illusion of its inherent stillness”.

She, then, describes film fiction’s “double temporality”, stating a duality in narrative cinema: first, the moment of the registration which gives the cinematic sign its indexical aspect, “there-and-then-ness” as it is in common with the still photograph. Second, this “then-ness” becomes “here-and-now-ness” with the illusion of movement of narrative. She annotates Bellour, for the question “what happens if the spectator of the film is confronted with a photograph?” Bellour suggests that in that case the photo becomes a stop within a stop.

Mulvey turns to the effects of the arrival of the new technologies, suggesting that the stillness in cinema can be accessed by as easily as pushing a button nowadays, so that there becomes a shift in the spectatorship. In addition, by stilling or slowing movie images, the temporality changes. “The nowness of the story time gives way to the then-ness of the movie’s own moment in history.” She also points out that this stilling and slowing down of the moving images opens up new areas of fascination for the “fetishistic” spectator: “Certain privileges moments can become fetishised moments for endless and obsessive repetition while looks or gestures can suddenly acquire a further dimension of fascination once freed from subordination to narrative.”