age. Thesemovementsof immobility are explored further by George Baker,
Christa Blümlinger and Liv Hausken in the present collection.
I would also place important contributions by Serge Daney and Laura Mul-
vey in this turn to the in-between. Their contributions are of a more political
character. They investigated how the still or uses of stillness in cinema also ad-
dress issues of psycho-social management and control. Laura Mulvey, in her
germinal article on“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”(), asks why
the representation of women in cinema very often involves moments of stillness
and pause in the narrative. Women become an indispensable element of specta-
cle;“her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line,
to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.”The woman as
an“alien presence”has no other value than“to-be-looked-at-ness,”Mulvey ar-
gues. Daney was also concerned with how cinema organizes the visual
through the freeze. As the language of modernist films was appropriated by
television, he observed that techniques of delay and the freeze-framing of an
object would rapidly become the visual language of commercials and consumer
industries.Now, a new generation of Hollywood directors like the Wachow-
ski Brothers (The Matrix,), McG (Charlie’s Angels,) and Baz Luhr-
mann would soon reappropriate the language of advertising back into cinema
to create a new kind of cinematic reflexivity on visual culture through rapid
changes and cuts between fixity and movement.
The turn toward the in-between opened up an important aesthetic and politi-
cal line of questioning with regard to the moving image, but it didn’t produce
much new knowledge as far as early film history is concerned. Philosophers
such as Gilles Deleuze viewed early cinema simply as a primitive cinema, un-
able to create the complexities of modern time-images. This would change with
the emergence of what has been called the New Film Historians. During the
s ands, New Film Historians such as Noël Burch, Tom Gunning, An-
dré Gaudreault, Thomas Elsaesser, Charles Musser and filmmakers like Ken Ja-
cobs would discover the riches of early film in multiple ways, and Kemp Niver’s
work to make available the large paper print collection at the Library of Con-
gress would instigate much new research. Burch and Gunning have concluded
that early film must be regarded as a system that functions according to a dif-
ferent logic of presentation than the modes and rules arriving later with the so-
called classical narrative cinema.The turn toward history also led to impor-
tant new research into the complexities of pre-cinema. Today, the work of Ead-
weard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey is no longer simply viewed as pri-
mitive photography leading up to cinema, but as two complex and distinct
approaches to the analysis of motion. While Marey produced most of his se-
quential images on a single plate using a photographic gun, Muybridge used a
battery of cameras, each of which was separated from its neighbor by a variable
The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction 15