time order linked back to its textuality and its materiality, a form of reflexivity
can emerge. Such an analytical gesture applied to the relationship between
standstill and movement draws the filmic itself into consideration, a system
consisting of mutually determining categories of the visible and the invisible.
The film in projection, based on a celluloid strip, usually conceals its material
basis from the consciousness of the spectators, achieving what film theory terms
the“reality effect.”Thearrêt-sur-imagesor freeze-frame may point to the materi-
ality of film, the celluloid strip, which is usually denied by what Thierry Kunt-
zel calls the“projection film”.
As far as the historical dimension of the phenomenon is concerned, Serge
Daney has proposed one of the most interesting theories of the freeze-frame or
arrêt-sur-image.In a series of writings,Daney shows, with the freezing of the
last shot in Truffaut’sLes quatre cents coups, how a figure enters the film
body that he terms a“hallucinated form”,a figure that represents a modern
form of transgression. According to Daney, this figure eventually transforms
over the years, often as the final shot in a film, becoming a clichéd, symptomatic
standstill that, unlike Truffaut’s film, is no longer part of the (cinema) image, but
rather, the so-called“visual”(i.e. advertising, logos, or television series). In Da-
ney’s terms, I would like to propose that in Fassbinder, the freeze-frame can
indeed be placed on the side of the image (that is, the cinema), but paradoxi-
cally, it is actually produced in the interest of a critique that aims at certain di-
mensions of the so-called“visual”.
Various stylistic figures observed in Fassbinder’s films–the framings that
allow for a theatricalization of scenes, objects cut off in the visual foreground
that have the function of a scenic ramp, or shifts in focus that accentuate various
points of view–have caused critics to place the work, despite the seriality of
some productions, in the category of modern auteur cinema. However, the fig-
ure of the standstill in Fassbinder’s work has seldom been noted until recently,
probably because it often appears marginally in a literal sense: in Fassbinder’s
films, the freeze-frame as a specific form of visual standstill can be found as a
figure of pause or sudden interruption usually at the beginning or end of his
films.
As I would like to demonstrate in this chapter, in Fassbinder’s work, this form
of standstill in light of its complexity and variability does not solely represent a
kind of banalized repetition of a modern stylistic figure in the wake of the Nou-
velle Vague, but rather is tied to a specific idea about film and a kind of media
theory. Furthermore, it implies a certain critique of the consensus of the contem-
porary society, which sometimes even assumes a utopian dimension. In so
doing, it is located within a literary modernism, where the sense of the moment
is bound to reflection, becoming an interface for relating past and present.
Moreover, this form of interruption surfaces in Fassbinder’s films as a closing
The Figure of Visual Standstill in R.W. Fassbinder’s Films 77