past decade such as:Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image; Be-
tween Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis; Deathx a Second: Stillness
and the Moving Image; Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography; Le cinéma de
l’immobilité, L’Entre-Image; Le temps exposé: Le Cinéma de la salle au musée; Freeze
Frames: Zum Verhältnis von Fotografie und Film; The Still/Moving Image: Cinema
and the Arts; Viva Fotofilm: Bewegt/Unbewegt, Cinema before Film; The Cinematic
andStillness in a Mobile World,bear witness to the emergence of a still/moving
field.
For the sake of a tentative overview, I would argue that we can organize the
still/moving field in three partially chronological phases of mutually dependent
questioning: a turn to thein-between, a turn to history, and a turn to algorithms.
The turn to the in-between was, not surprisingly, first taken up in France. It
stems from Raymond Bellour’s long engagement with what he calls“l’entre-
images”, an ambiguous French neologism with multiple meanings: the be-
tween-the-images, the in-between-images, or the images in between, and it
deals, in many ways, with the aesthetic and ontological tensions and passages
between photography and film, stillness and motion.A key reference point in
the debate is Roland Barthes’sCamera Lucida: Note sur la photographie(),
where he radically distinguishes between photography and cinema. In one es-
say, Barthes even comes close to asserting that the essence of cinema is found in
the still.A few years later, Gilles Deleuze wrote his seminal philosophical
studyCinéma I-II(and), in which he opposes the semiological gaze
(Christian Metz’theory in particular) and anything that tends to immobilize
film, like calling film a language or asserting that cinematic movement is the
result of an illusion, etc. To him, movement and time become the all-determin-
ing factors for understanding cinema. Raymond Bellour’s position is important
for understanding the genesis of this field. In one of his most important articles
on the still/moving image, he places himself between Barthes and Deleuze, and
between Freud and Bergson; ultimately, between the still and the moving, to
explore the blind spots of these two positions. Bellour writes that
There is one category of time not considered by Gilles Deleuze in his dynamic taxon-
omy of images: the interruption of movement, the often unique, fugitive, yet perhaps
decisive instant when cinema seems to be fighting against its very principle, if this is
the movement-image. [...] what kinds of instants does the interruption of movement
imply?To Bellour, the interruption of movement emphasizes the fact that a film“can-
not be reduced to the overly natural time of illusion, indexing a time-space at
the juncture of the visible and the invisible”.Ultimately, immobility may pro-
duce amovementof emotion or the intellect not available in the movement-im-
14 Eivind Røssaak