age technologies. This collection of articles traces these foldings and implosions
of the moving image theoretically and through examples. If Barthes began his
research into film from the still, this collection of articles commences with mo-
tion. Motion, here, is not considered an illusion based on a series of still images.
Indeed, the collection starts out with motion as a fact within the arts even before
cinema, in the form of philosophical toys. Another common feature among the
contributions is the keen interest in figuring out how forms of motion and
movement variation relate to certain affects and bodily emotions, and, as in
Blümlinger’s, Blom’s and Lundemo’s contributions, in particular, to certain
forms of power.
The book is divided into five sections, each dealing with the topic of stillness
and motion from a specific angle. The first section,“Philosophies of Motion”,
reinvestigates the question of whether images are actually in motion at all. Tom
Gunning’s article,“The Play Between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Cen-
tury‘Philosophical Toys’and their Discourse”explores how the persistence of
vision thesis promoted the idea that perception deals primordially with still
images and represses the phenomenon of moving vision, which persists in the
description of the moving image as an“illusion”. By revisiting the scientific dis-
course on the processes of vision and the historical documents that first set out
to present and promote the new philosophical toys in the nineteenth century
such as the thaumatrope, the stroboscopic disc, the phenakistiscope, the an-
orthoscope and the zoetrope, Gunning proposes a new understanding of mo-
tion informed by phenomenology.
Mark B.N. Hansen continues his investigation into how new media engages
the body in new ways in his essay,“Digital Technics Beyond the‘Last Machine’:
Thinking Digital Media with Hollis Frampton”. In his essay,“For a Metahistory
of Film”, filmmaker Hollis Frampton proposes moving beyond the divide be-
tween photography and cinema. Frampton embraced the wisdom of sculptor
August Rodin who, in reference to Muybridge, argued that“It is photograph
[sic] which is truthful, and the artist who lies, for in reality time does stop”.
What lies behind Frampton’s embrace of Rodin’s position here is, however, not
what we might first think, for in Frampton’s case, what is patently not at issue is
some claim for the superiority of one medium over another, in our case, of
photography over cinema. Rather, what is at stake is a distinction between two
types of time: what Frampton calls historical and ecstatic time, respectively. He
also links temporal ecstasies, and, hence, temporal caesura, to subjectivity.
Frampton is busy thinking of cinema as the“Last Machine”,asan“infinite cin-
ema”, a virtual or conceptual cinema that registers all appearances of the world,
taken from all possible vantage points, regardless of its artifactual embodiment.
According to Hansen, Frampton’s aesthetic is appropriate for a media age that
is constituted on top of digitaltechnics, and more specifically, for a situation in
18 Eivind Røssaak