which media forms are outputs that, in a crucial sense, are technically discontin-
uous from technical materiality. Hansen proposes exploring the aesthetic poten-
tialities of digital technics in the wake of Frampton’s conception of infinite cin-
ema.
While the previous section addresses the inherent ability of images to take on
various types of motion, the next section,“The Use of Freeze and Slide Motion”,
highlights film’s affinity with arrest and the still image. Christa Blümlinger in-
vestigates the use of freeze-frame, or the visual standstill, in R.W. Fassbinder’s
films. When Garrett Stewart defined the figure of the freeze-frame as a repro-
duced, projected individual image that entails the suspension of the sequence
and the negation of the filmic image, he considers this form of interruption–
with an eye on the narrative cinema–as having the potential of a critical in-
quiry and the possibility of‘filmic reflexivity’within a narration. To Blümlinger,
this cannot always be taken for granted. Each case has to be analyzed concre-
tely. While the freeze-frame in the classical cinema is quite rare, it’s only because
the classical cinema developed other modes of stasis and fascination. Serge Da-
ney argues that advertising, video clips, and the films based on these forms to-
day mobilize an excess of visual standstills that become a form of exchange
between visual regimes. Blümlinger shows how various stylistic figures found
in Fassbinder’s films have, despite the seriality of some productions, led some
critics to place his work in modern auteurist cinema. But the figure of the stand-
still in Fassbinder’s work has seldom been noted until now, probably because it
often appears marginally–in a literal sense. For Fassbinder, the freeze-frame
was a specific form of visual standstill that can be found as a figure of brief
cessation or sudden interruption usually at the beginning or end of his films. To
Blümlinger, Fassbinder’s standstill by no means just represents a kind of bana-
lized repetition of a modern stylistic figure in the wake of the New Wave, but
rather is tied to a certain idea of film and a kind of media theory.
Liv Hausken’s“The Temporality of the Narrative Slide-Motion Film”elabo-
rates some of the challenges posed when one explores a slide-motion film. Vi-
sually, a slide-motion film likeAño Uñaconsists of photographic stills, mainly
sequences of freeze-frames. Auditively, it is like any live action film, with music,
diegetic sound, sound effects, and, unlike Chris Marker’s well-knownLa jetée,
Año Uñaeven contains dialogue. The tension between the past and the pre-
sent, the absent and the arriving, is, nevertheless, quite different from the film
expression ofLa jetée, not least because of the architecture of the diegetic
space. Through an analysis of the spatiotemporal complexity of the narrative
slide-motion film, Hausken tries to show how these films seem to demonstrate
the materiality of the moving image as well as question nearly all of the basic
film analytic terms.
The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction 19