The Figure of Visual Standstill in
R.W. Fassbinder’s Films
Christa Blümlinger
Currently, questions of film theory regarding phenomena of cinematographic
temporalization are discussed in relation to new media. At the same time, how-
ever, these discussions also pick up on earlier theoretical models of the relation-
ship between standstill and motion, the prehistory of the cinema, theories of
photography and the snapshot, as well as the aesthetics of modernism and the
avant-garde.In thes, the classical film theorist and avant-garde filmmaker
Jean Epstein was already describing film in general as a machine that perspecti-
vizes space and time: the ultimate“machine to think time”. Slow motion and
fast-forward as well as the close-up are central figures in his thought. With his
concept of the cinematograph as a“robot brain,”Epstein points out the fact that
the filmic connection of standstill and movement, discontinuity and continuity
represented a profound transformation of perception: Epstein conceives of the
cinema as a paradox–the inorganic,“mineral”production of the living.The
apparent standstill of a film operates precisely on this paradoxical constellation.
It is no coincidence that film theory later worked off the key neorealist works of
modernist cinema, such as the films of Rossellini: the Bazinian description of
film as a“change mummified”also targets the strange nature of movement in
the cinema. Recently, Laura Mulvey has explored once more the contradictory
materialization of life and death in film using the example of Rossellini’sJour-
ney to Italy:cinema’s punctum, according to Mulvey, is precisely realized
where the repression of this contradiction fails, thereby making the spectator
feel uncertain.
When Garrett Stewart defines the figure of the freeze-frame as a repeated,
projected individual image that entails the suspension of succession and the
negation as moving picture, he sees in this form of disruption–with an eye on
the narrative cinema–the potential of“cinematic reflexivity”within a narra-
tion,“that paradoxical case of real motion without real movements that merely
takes the condition of cinema to its limit”.But we should qualify this point: the
dialectics of standstill and movement can only be examined in a concrete filmic
form, and should be considered historically. While the freeze-frame in classical
cinema is quite rare, that is only because classical cinema developed other
modes of stasis and the production of fascination (Mary Ann Doane, for exam-
ple, points out that the close-up also serves to interrupt narrative flow),Serge