* omslag Between Stillness PB:DEF

show, he dies, quietly in his sleep, unaware that he has completed his task...where-

upon my friend wakens abruptly, to discover himself alive, at home, in his own bed.

A perfect counterpoint to this tale of cinematic equivalence–let us call it the
principle of photographic compression–the second story involves the intimate ex-
perience of a massive temporal disjunction:

Several years ago, a man by the astonishing name of Breedlove became, for the sec-

ond time in his life, the holder of the world land speed record....For two runs over a

marked course one mile long...this Breedlove averaged a little overmiles per

hour....Had the ride been uneventful, we may expect that he would have had nothing

at all to say about it; the efficient driving of an automobile at any speed neither re-

quires nor permits much in the way of conscious deliberation. But, as it turned out,

something did happen. At the end of his second run, at a speed of aboutmiles per

hour, as he was attempting to slow down, a brake mechanism exploded, and in the

space of about one-and-one-half miles both drogue chutes failed to operate, and the

car went entirely out of control, sheared off a number of handy telephone poles,

topped a small rise, turned upside down, flew through the air, and landed in a salt

pond. Incredibly, Breedlove was unhurt. He was interviewed immediately after the

wreck. I have heard the tape. It lasts an hour andminutes, during which time

Breedlove delivers a connected account of what he thought and did during a period

of some.seconds. His narrative amounts to about,words.... In the course of

the interview, Breedlove everywhere gives evidence of condensing, of curtailing; not

wishing to bore anyone, he is doing his polite best to make a long story short. Com-

pared to the historic interval he refers to, his ecstatic utterance represents, according

to my calculation, a temporal expansion in the ratio of someto one.

Let us treat these two anecdotes as two poles of a temporal continuum, or more
exactly, of a continuum between two models for technically artifactualizing
time. At one pole stands cinema in its traditional image, where the time of cin-
ema (if not indeed the time of life) rigorously corresponds to the time of con-
sciousness in a one-to-one manner. At the other pole stands photography, fol-
lowing the cliché that a picture is worth, in this case,,words (roughly a
thousand words per second), and where the infinitesimal microtemporality of
photography condenses the time of experience by unimaginable–and abso-
lutely imperceptible–factors.
The juxtaposition and resulting interpenetration of these two models–and of
these two allegorical anecdotes–establishes (at least) two things:) that cinema
need not, and typically does not, fulfill the principle of cinematic equivalence;
rather, to the extent it is constituted on the basis of techniques for disjoining
event time and spectatorial time, cinema can be said to converge with photogra-
phy, to introject or subsume the latter’s power of temporal contraction and dila-

Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 59