now argue that the pastness of these moments is experienced as inscribed into
the historical and existential time of the audience. Allow me a short detour via
photography.
“The date belongs to the photograph,”Barthes declares inLa Chambre Claire:
not because it denotes a style (this does not concern me), but because it makes me lift
my head, allows me to compute life, death, the inexorable extinction of the genera-
tions.... I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my aston-
ishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive
here and now?In principal, the photographic still isdatable: it is possible toassign a dateto the
moment of photographic exposure. The point here is not whether or not the
imageisgiven a date. Neither is it a practical matter (a question of whether or
not we areableto ascertain the production date of a particular photograph, or
any other object for that matter). The question is whether or not the datability of
the image makes it part of a social and cultural history of human beings. Many
photographs are considered culturally important and, as such, are included in
our common cultural heritage. However, photographs are normally included in
the public conception of culture and history in a more fundamental way,
through the temporality of the photographic trace. No matter what is depicted
in an actual photograph, the temporality of the photographic trace is inscribed
in our socially constituted calendars, the calendars of our social and political
histories, the calendars we relate to in our everyday life, the calendars of birth-
days and anniversaries.
I will suggest that the photographic trace is experienced as a technical effect
which via its historicity (that is, its character of datability in a socially and cultu-
rally constituted world of real objects) is also given an existential dimension.
Further, I will argue that the social and cultural reality of the photographic trace
is important if we are to understand the temporalities of the narrative slide-mo-
tion film, even if the still is a freeze-frame in a film, and even if the narrative is
fictional like inAño Uña,La Jetée, andPhoto-Romans. No matter what the
image depicts, and independent of the status of the depiction as fiction or fact,
the single frame seems to incite the experience of the photographic stills as hold-
ing back or withdrawing the photographic moment from the otherwise unfold-
ing of an event and to inscribe this sequence of moments into the (historical and
existential) time of the viewer.
In narrative fiction films likeAño Uña,La Jetée, and thePhoto-Romans
series, the voice-overs support the impression of pastness evoked by the static
frames (even if this varies among the different examples). As sound, on the
other hand, the voice-over also seems to have all the various sounds and the
succession of images as its ally. There is, in other words, a tension between past-
102 Liv Hausken