distance, depending on the subject. One could perhaps say that Marey develops
the fixed-plate chronophotography into a registration of movementsin time,
each image separated by equidistant intervals, while using a single fixed lens.
Muybridge develops the style into a registration of movements from different
placesin space.In striking ways, Muybridge’s style is taken up again in later
digital capturing techniques such as the bullet-time effect inThe Matrix().
This research into pre-cinema and early cinema has instigated new ways of
looking into the relationship between stillness and motion.Tom Gunning’s,
Mark B.N. Hansen’s and Trond Lundemo’s articles in the present collection re-
late to this research. If Mulvey could be placed within the turn toward the in-
between, I would place Mary Ann Doane’s study of cinematic time and Linda
Williams’study of stilled and moving bodies in the turn toward history. Even if
Williams addresses many of the concerns that Mulvey raises, the difference be-
tween them lies most obviously in Williams’keen awareness of how both film
theory (such as psychoanalysis)andcinematic techniques from Muybridge’s pe-
riod to those employed today are“historically determined–and determining–
mechanisms of power and pleasure.”
The turn toward the algorithm is the last paradigm that I will consider in this
reconfiguration of the still/moving field. New technologies and new artistic stra-
tegies produce a new interrogation of the image. The turn toward the algorithm
could, as Laura Marks and others would argue, as easily be called a turn toward
information, code, the digital, the interface or the software.Researchers are
not yet in agreement with regard to exactly where the key change is to be found,
but what all these terms have in common is a critique of the image, in the sense
that much of critical attention has been directed toward the instability and mal-
leability of the image. The image is no longer a given, but an instantiation of
code to be algorithmically manipulated, processed and disseminated in endless
new ways. D.N. Rodowick argues in his workThe Virtual Life of Film, that the
reason for this, is that while the relationship between input and output is con-
tinuous with regard to the analogue image, the relationship is discontinuous
with regard to the digital image. While Eivind Røssaak starts his discussion in
this volume at this juxtaposition, Mark B.N. Hansen focuses on the role of the
interface in contradistinction to a strong contemporary tradition. Jay David Bol-
ter and Richard Grusin stated in their now classic workRemediationthat new
media tend to remediate older media like the page, the book, film or photogra-
phy, and Lev Manovich argued in hisThe Language of New Mediathat with the
computer“cinema is now becomingthecultural interface, a toolbox for all cul-
tural communication, overtaking the printed word.”This line of argument
tends to lose what is singular, different, and, indeed,“new”with new media,
according to Hansen; new media develop a visual interface onto new ways of
engaging with the world, with what he calls“movement variations.”Hansen
16 Eivind Røssaak