The video installation works of Belgian artist David Claerbout explore the “pensive image” since they confront the viewer with photographs, whose mode of stillness guides her towards the contemplation of them. According to Jacque Rancière, the word “pensive” primarily refers to “someone who is … ‘full of thoughts’,” but this mental state is interlocked with a specific mode of the image that arouses them, an image characterized by “a certain passivity.”[1] The concept of “pensiveness” which Rancière discusses primarily relates to Roland Barthes’s reflection on the temporal ontology of the photographic image and on the viewer’s perceptual sensitiveness to it, which leads to his affective contemplation of its pastness. Barthes’ concept of pensiveness is based on photography’s capturing of a past in the fixed form—namely, its “stasis of arrest”[2] that allows the photograph’s unexpected detail to emerge. For him, film’s irreversible flow of linear time, which asserts film narrative and its temporality, absorbs the photographic motionlessness that guarantees a contemplative consciousness.[3] Thus Barthes considers the stilled image, including film stills, as opening up the space for scrutinizing the photographic index’s complex relation to time, in which an oscillation between past and present is not assimilated into the illusion of movement in the cinema: filmic time is not free insofar as its image “cannot go faster or slower without losing its perceptual figure.”[4]

Bellour expands on Barthes’ concept of pensiveness but gives a fresh twist to it by reflecting on the moment in which the filmic image “goes slower without losing its perceptual figure.” By decelerating or interrupting the flow of film, such techniques as the freeze frame, the suspension of movement, and the rephotographing and enlargement of the still photo in a sequence serve not simply to reveal the hidden presence of the photogram in the cinema, but also to offer the film viewer an opportunity to resist the “unfolding of images in time, a time the spectator cannot control.”[5] Bellour then argues that the moment of stillness offered by those techniques creates a “pensive spectator,” a spectator who is capable of distancing himself from the irreversible flow of the filmic image. At the moment of stillness in the cinema the “pensive spectator” is confronted with a merger of two temporalities, the time of the photographic referent and the time of the moving image: “In the frozen film (or photogram), the presence of the photograph bursts out … between it and the film from which it emerges, two kinds of time blend together,” continues Bellour.[6] In this way, the frozen or slowed image in the cinema underscores a moment in which its time is coupled with the same temporality as Barthes sees in photography—the ambivalence of “having-been-there” (the past) and “being-there” (the presence of the past).

Laura Mulvey places Bellour’s concept of the “pensive spectator” within the context of today’s viewing devices (such as VHS and the DVD) to pause, decelerate, and rewind the film image, arguing that they “bring to the cinema the resonance of the still photograph, the association with death usually concealed by the film’s movement, its particularly strong inscription of the index.”[7] The “aesthetics of delay” enabled by the new technologies, Mulvey continues, can yield a form of moving image in which the relation between “film time” (the time when an image was inscribed onto the filmstrip) and “cinema time” (the time shaped by cinema’s illusion of movement) becomes more uncertain than before: the electronic or digital freeze frame, for instance, is not the actual film frame as found in celluloid, but it restores to the moving image the uncanny presence of a past – and, by extension, the past’s evocation of mortality and death, which Barthes and Bellour associate with the still photograph. In my view, Mulvey’s observation of this freeze frame testifies to the extent to which the post-filmic adoption of the techniques for the delay of film is double-edged: the digitally rendered freeze frame or slow motion makes it clear that the temporal conundrum of analogue media, the ambiguous coupling of past and present, does not exhaust itself in the post-filmic technologies; at the same time, this revivification and repositioning of filmic and photographic temporalities with respect to stillness and movement via the technologies entails the inscription of their properties unavailable in the two media. Claerbout’s corpus of digital video stands out in terms of the tension between the two edges, as its images present varying degrees of the “dual articulation”[8] of photography and film.

A number of Claerbout’s video pieces take as a point of departure a found single photograph, which he edits in a minimal but significant way by means of digital manipulation. This leads to a coexistence of stillness and movement in the same photo frame: while most of the picture’s objects and grounds remain frozen in the past, a small part of its details are set in light motion in the present. Firstly this movement is focused on the foliage of the tree (Boom (1996), Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910 (1997), Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, 1932 (1998)), so that it reminds the viewer of the passage of time as a natural progression of the physical world. Yet in his later works the movement gets more minute as they bring to life the faces of schoolboys and their teacher coming from an anonymous photograph (Retrospection (2000)), or the sun and clouds surrounding an aircraft shot down by friendly fire in the Vietnam war (Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho (2001)). As David Green observes, all these pieces are characterized by the “undecidability” of whether Claerbout’s image is film or photography: “[Claerbout’s work] faces us with … the possibility of a photograph that unfolds in time (but is not a film) and a film that is stilled in time (but is not a photograph).”[9] Claerbout’s technique of “unfreezing a photograph” plays a crucial role in this undecidability because it is in a sense an inverted application of freezing the linear progression of cinematic time, which Bellour and Mulvey have seen as the condition of “pensive” spectator. As he acknowledges, “When the one-directional language of film is suspended then the spectator himself must seek a new position.”[10] Considering this way, it might be possible to regard his found material not simply as photography per se, but as part of an imagined film, a freeze-frame of a film whose unfolding of images was not achieved but eternally delayed, underlining their details as the inscription of the irrevocable past.

Digital video lies at the heart of the intermixture between the two media, while simultaneously infusing the original image with its own temporal figuration. It reconstitutes on the same picture plane the different levels of time each coming from photography and from film, that is, the living trace of the past and the flow of time as the present, by combining the manipulation of the electronic signal with the retouching of the plane pixel by pixel.[11] As seen in the trembling of the leaves on the tree, for instance, the surface micromanipulation of the encoded picture is embedded within the temporal manipulation of the interlaced scan line, made visible by its continual vibration.[12] With the advent of digital technologies, this temporal simultaneity is elevated to the configuration of what Timothy Murray has called, to draw on Deleuze’s reinterpretation of Bergson and Leibniz, “digital incompossibility,” in which different modalities of the world, for instance, its actual and virtual faces, are folded and unfolded in a temporal continuum of becoming, affecting each other while maintaining their own singularity.[13] “Rather than either converging or remaining impossible for each other, rather than being either included or excluded, they stand in paradoxical relation to one another as divergent and coexistent.”[14] It is the in-between of the actual and the virtual, of representation and simulation, and of past and present, that makes Claerbout’s works confusing yet poignant. And if this concept implies, as Murray states, a challenge to “prior modernist assumptions about art, aesthetics, and identity,”[15] Claerbout’s “dual articulation” of cinematic and photographic forms encapsulates the ways in which digital technologies cause the two to confront one another within their limits yet liberated them from their material substrate. In this way, his strategy of partial animation gives rise to the threshold between the verification and the dissolution of each medium’s specificities. What lies at the threshold is an artificial temporality, a temporality whose length of duration and direction are up to the material and technical determination of the electronic flow rather than to the measurement of humanized time. This is obvious in the fact that the duration of the animated objects, the wind over the trees, the spectrum of shadow and light, cannot solely be grasped in terms of their natural changes. For in the works there is nothing that would function as the chronological marker of those changes. For instance, the intermittent reflection of sunlight on a window (Reflecting Sunset (2003)) or a jungle of concrete pillars at a construction site (The Stack (2002)) occurs during 38 minutes or 36 minutes respectively, but neither of these time spans guarantee that the path of the setting sun matches its natural progression: that is, they might be derived from the dilation or compression of the electronic signal in which the physical traces of the phenomena are inscribed.

At stake for Claerbout is, then, how this electronic and digital temporality serves for the “visible intersection of filmic and photographic temporalities,” undoing any “simple dichotomies between past and present, between movement and stasis.”[16] In Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, the photograph is placed within the screen as an identifiable object, which is severed between the unperformed movement of the aircraft at the moment of the camera’s fixture and its unavoidable destiny to fall on the ground in the continuing flow of life. The movements of the natural phenomena, the shadows of clouds on the hillside and the changes in the brightness of sunlight on the plain, mirror this split. At the phenomenal level, the image is one that acquires filmic duration and slowly moves. Because the actual transition from one state to another in those movements is extremely subtle, however, the slow motion at first sight appears to be the freeze-frame image or the projected slide of the snapshot. The arrested aircraft, then, functions as a fulcrum to maintain this seemingly contradictory visual impression. In this way, the digital reanimation effect indistinguishable from the changes in the natural phenomena, as Mulvey supposes, brings the cinematic image back to the time it was filmed. Then the changes marked by the micromovement are contrasted with the aircraft, thereby highlighting that the snapshot’s attempt to portray the aircraft’s movement results in its fossilization. In this sense, this contrast attenuates what Thierry de Duve has called the “traumatic effect” of the snapshot, an effect less due to its visual content (scenes of violence or obscenity, for example) than its structural limit—due to its splitting between “too-late” (“too late to witness [an event’s] happening in reality”) and “too-soon” (“too early to see the event occur”).[17] What this splitting arouses to the viewer of the snapshot is that its event or object takes on the irrevocable past due to its failure to convey movement in time, which causes the “sudden vanishing of the present tense.”[18] The micromovement, then, is also seen as a key device to dramatize how the traumatic past caught in the snapshot returns to the viewer’s present.[19] It is in this way that the moving image challenges the ontology of the photographic – because the micromovement dissolves the complete fixation of a moment – yet simultaneously affirms it.

For Retrospection, Claerbout deals with the class photograph in such a way that every person in the group can be recognized as an individual whose expression functions as though the punctum, a detail or “partial object” as an “accident which pricks” the viewer.[20] A series of zoom-ins isolate and reframe certain members of the group one by one, thereby magnifying each of their faces. Therein occurs a minimal, barely perceptible passage from stasis to motion, bringing to the picture’s surface an array of minute changes on the face, such as the mouth’s twitching, the eye’s quivering, the lip’s small smiling, etc. For generating these subtle animation effects, Claerbout brushes the picture’s pixels and turns their changes into the oscillation of video signal. While directly related to the painterly manipulation in digital photography, for Claerbout this treatment fits into his conception of photography as “a skin that can be touched.”[21] In the first place, it is of little doubt that his technique, namely, the combination of magnification and retouching, is at odds with a couple of key arguments for the concept of Barthesian punctum: the chemical fixation of the referent on a photosensitive material, which is assumed to guarantee the irrefutable indexicality of the analogue photograph,[22] is eroded; more significantly, Claerbout’s manipulative attitude towards the found photograph contradicts the pervasive idea of the punctum as being shown outside the intention of the photographer.[23] Nevertheless, it is too undeniable that Claerbout drags out from the original photograph what is equivalent to the punctum, the details – in this case, the facial expressions of the students: for they are not subjugated to the control of the unknown photographer who took the picture, and thus viewed as “accidentally” inscribed in it. How can, then, we explain this contradictory coincidence of the intentional and the accidental?

The movement of the faces in Retrospection, however tranquilized, dismantles the pose and makes their expression ephemeral: that is, the pose becomes something that will disappear as the moment of magnification ends. At the same time, however, it should be noted that this movement is not purely cinematic since it does not deliver the continuous series of images that would lead to efface the faces on the screen. Rather, it functions to amplify the spectral force of the punctum as it draws the viewer’s attention to the paradoxical coincidence of absence and presence, of life and death, lingering on the faces. That is, the coming-to-life of their expressions attenuates, in Barthesian sense, that the students are already dead, i.e., they are those who were there and then and were destined to die. Here the movement, rather than the sheer manifestation of cinematic medium specificity, is a way of giving a visible form to the uncanny presence of the expressions in the viewer’s present in exchange of their inherent immobility. Claerbout makes this point as follows: “My behavior became that of a nurse: it would bring these images back to life and let them float in an environment that would not treat them as passé.”[24] In this sense, the changes in the expressions are seen as the result of animating what animates the viewer in the photograph. This also suggests that the movement stresses the sense of loss inherent in the photograph (in the case of the class photo, the loss of the students’ souls) and simultaneously incorporates the viewer’s perceptual and affective engagement with that which arouses the loss by “pricking” him—the punctum.

Recently Claerbout has produced three works entitled Sections of a Happy Moment (2007, hereafter abbreviated Sections), Arena (2007), “The Algiers” Sections of a Happy Moment (2008, hereafter abbreviated as “The Algiers”), all of which are comprised of a succession of black-and-white or color still photos taken at a single moment. Each work depicts a group of figures placed around a specific object or scene: for Sections, several members of a Chinese family staring at a ball hanging in midair, and for “The Algiers”, about a dozen of children and adults at a vacant lot of an underdeveloped apartment, whose gazes are fixed upon a flock of low-flying seagulls controlled by a man. The moments as such become a decisive moment, a term coined by Henri-Cartier Bresson to describe the intuitive fraction of a second wherein the significance of an event matches “the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.”[25] As in the two “Happy Moment” pieces, Arena underlines the decisive moment by displaying hundreds of pictures in sequence, which capture people at a basketball game – players, referees, and audiences – who are suspended at the very instant before a point will be scored. Multiple cameras circularly positioned around each of their places photograph all the decisive moments simultaneously. For this reason, each of the moments is dissected into a multiplicity of still images, each adopting a different point of view and angle. Some photographs sometimes share the same focus object, for instance, the ball in Sections and Arena, but even in this case, they have a different spatial composition with each other, thus attenuating the sense of fragmentation and circularity. Now that the photographs repeat the single moment for more than twenty minutes, it appears to be extended ad infinitum, thereby acquiring a false impression that there would be the passage of time between them.

Given this paradox between stasis and duration, and their common structure of projecting the succession of still images in the manner of the photo slide, the three works evoke the complex paring of photography and film in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Claerbout, like Marker, considers each photograph to be tantamount to a snapshot as the interruption of movement, or, to use Deleuze’s concept, the “immobile section” that is an essential material of cinema but not reduced to its automated, “given” movement. More than unveiling the smallest unit of film, however, both La Jetée and Claerbout’s works position each photograph as bearing the time liberated from the internal movement, a moment of the past that invites the viewer to the construction of a memory – of a man who struggles to reassemble the fragmented layers of his life during his engagement with the “time-travel” experiment for the former, and about the places marked by their own event that is absent in the present for the latter. In La Jetée the overlap of those moments creates a continual arresting of the cinematic movements associated with physical actions, while at the same time rendering those moments as “discontinuous spaces, divided into blocks of time linked in a probabilistic manner: the park, the museum, the quay at Orly.”[26] Given that each block maintains its own duration stimulating the viewer’s keen contemplation, La Jetée is viewed as a film that exemplifies the extent to which the presence of the photographic stillness is able to function as the time-image, as a direct presentation of time no longer subordinated to the representation of movement. At the same time, the devices for the linkage between each photograph in Marker’s film, i.e., the dissolve and the fade-out, in turn, shapes a temporal passage. Uriel Orlow’s succinct summary about La Jetée, “the photograph-as-film incorporate both the flow of time as a present which always passes (cinema), as well as a past which is being preserved (photography),”[27] is applied to Claerbout’s sequential projection of snapshots. The two techniques in his three works link bodies and objects in the snapshots, each of which has its own duration, creating the passage of time derived from the association between them. They do so by sometimes punctuating a shift of the object of focus – and of the point of view – between two successive photos: for instance, the transition from the members of the family who play with the ball to the middle-aged man with the bag in Sections, and the alternation between the series of the photos capturing the basketball players and those capturing the audiences in Arena. Now that this shift in the three works entails the change in the camera framing and angle, the intervals between the snapshots creates an imaginary camera movement – that is, they in a sense appear as if filmed by the repetitive moving of a single camera from one position to another that filmed them. Yet because this impression of continuity does not ultimately lead to the passage from one phase of duration to another, each snapshot, however long it lasts on the screen, maintains its frozenness, the suspension of movement. This generates the ambiguous coexistence of the past and the present by rendering the snapshots’ temporality to be the myriad aspects of a singular past.

Despite their common unsettling of the binary opposition between film and photography, Claerbout differs from Marker as to what medium each of their works is closer to in relation to the other. As with La Jetée, it is undeniable that its overall structure is more inclined to film than photography. The still photographs center on a narrative of the man. Unlike Marker, Claerbout’s still photo projections are devoid of any narrative. Thus the transition between two successive snapshots, which marks the passage of time, does not lead to the full achievement of the “cinematic time” in Barthes’ and Mulvey’s sense. Rather, Claerbout’s three works, in my view, produces what Victor Burgin has conceptualized as the “sequence-image.” Burgin refers to the term, in contrast to the term “image sequence,” as a sequence of the images that the viewer’s perception and recollection of films creates: that is, “mental images derived from films” as the form of “involuntary associations.”[28] He sees the “sequence-image” as questioning and blurring the difference between “simultaneity” (assigned to the still image) and “succession” (to the moving image) because it belongs to the “subjective register of durée rather than to the mechanical abstraction of the “instant” in which the image was recorded on film.”[29] Although the three works by Claerbout are grounded in the mechanical capturing of a moment in the past with multiple cameras, the resulting images do not end up with the abstract accumulation of the recorded fragments of it. Rather the succession of the snapshots are commingled with the nearly unlimited simultaneity of the past moment in space, so that they enact the various ways in which the moment is remembered—from different viewpoints, angles, scales, and distances.

Claerbout’s achievement vis-à-vis Burgin’s concept lies in the fact that his “sequence-images” do not stem from any preexisting film. They stand in the space between photography and film while at the same time pointing out a liminal point in which both converge and differentiate from each other. Claerbout’s digital editing opens up this space, thereby substantiating that the new technologies have possibilities for drawing on and metamorphosing the photographic image (or the filmic moving image that discloses its photographic past) which stimulates the viewer’s careful and time-consuming reflection. The resulting image is, to Rancière’s words once again, “not about to stop being pensive.”[30]

Endnotes

[1] Jacques Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York and London: Verso, 2009), p. 108.
[2] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 91.
[3]Barthes clarifies this idea on the difference between film and photography in temporality and spectatorship as follows: “Film can no longer be seen as animated photographs: the having-been-there [of photography] gives way before a being-there of the thing [in film]” (Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 45.)
[4] Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” Image Music Text, pp. 67-68.
[5] Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” Wide Angle, vol. 9, no. 1 (1984), p. 9. He elaborates on the uses of these techniques in his essay entitled “The Film Stilled,” in which he claims that they add up to the cinema that includes the form of image marked by the intermedial encounter between film and photography, a type of the moving image permeated with the “trance of the negative and the specter of photography” (Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” Camera Obscura 24 (September 1990), p. 120).
[6] Ibid., p. 10.
[7] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 186.
[8] I borrow the term “dual articulation” from art critic George Baker, for whom it means that two media, for instance, photography and film, interpenetrate in their “radical sharing of forms” (Baker, “Reanimations (I),” October, No. 104 (Spring 2003), p. 35). He provides as a key example of this a detailed analysis of Coleman’s slide projection of celluloid filmstrip, in which photography takes on movement at the same time cinema is frozen.
[9] David Green, “The Visibility of Time,” Visible Time: The Work of David Claerbout, ed. David Green (Brighton, UK: Photoworks, 2004), p. 38.
[10] David Claerbout and Lynne Cooke, “Conversations,” David Claerbout: Video Works, Photographic Installations, Sound installations, Drawings 1996-2002, exhibition catalogue (Kunstverein Hannover, Aug. 24-Sept. 29, 2002), Brussel: A Prior, 2002, p. 53.
[11] Claerbout explains how he had come up with this combination: “I have noticed two different approaches to : one considers its roots as video signal, and the other attributes monumental/architectural qualities to the surface of the projection. As the older form of the video-as-signal shifts to that of the pixel artists like myself think of digital projection in terms of square centimeters and no longer solely as video/television signal” (David Claerbout and Christine Van Assche, “Interview,” David Claerbout: The Shape of Time, ed. Christine Van Assche (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2008), p. 13).
[12] As François Parfait points out, the spatial layering of this temporal simultaneity dates back to Peter Campus’s image processing works and Thierry Kuntzel’s videos that pioneered the exploration of the relation between photography and film. See Parfait, “Cloudy, Becoming Mostly Sunny by Late Afternoon,” David Claerbout: The Shape of Time, p. 27.
[13] Deleuze elucidates his concept of “incompossibility” in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and his essay “The Actual and the Virtual” (published in Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Barbara Habberjam, Janis Tomlinson, and Eliot Albert, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 148-152).
[14] Timothy Murray, “Digital Incompossibility: Cruising the Aesthetic Haze of the New Media,” CTheory, January 13, 2000, online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=121#note21, accessed on July 14, 2010.
[15] Ibid.,
[16] Green, “The Visibility of Time,” p. 32.
[17] Thierry De Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” October, No. 5 (Summer 1978), p. 117.
[18] Ibid., p. 121.
[19] Here I agree with Damian Sutton’s view that this work explores “how the traumatic exists in the everyday details also picked up by the camera” (Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 224.)
[20] Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 27.
[21] Claerbout and Cooke, “Conversations,” p. 42.
[22] Barthes himself has called this medium specific view of photography as “the chemical revelation of the object” (Camera Lucida, p. 10).
[23] Barthes himself suggests this unintentionality in his emphasis upon the private nature of the viewer’s encounter with the punctum: “Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent” (Camera Lucida, p. 98). For the strongest case of highlighting the photographer’s unintentionality as integral to the concept of punctum, see Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring 2005), p. 546.
[24] Claerbout and Cooke, “Conversations,” p. 53.
[25] Henri-Cartier Bresson, quoted from James Baron Hall and Barry Ulanov, Modern Culture and the Arts, second edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972), p. 473.
[26] D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 4.
[27] Uriel Orlow, “Photography as Cinema: La Jetée and the Redemptive Powers of the Image,”The Cinematic, p. 182.
[28] Victor Burgin, “Possessive, Pensive, and Possessed,” The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 202.
[29] Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 25.
[30] Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” The Emancipated Spectator, p. 132.

Created on: Sunday, 7 November 2010