cally appearing black-and-white still pictures. These are mainly sequences of
freeze-frames, sometimes combined with photographs mediated by a moving
film or video camera zooming in or tracking across the surface of the picture.
Sound-wise, they are like most live action films: they include music, diegetic
sound, sound effects, voice-over and even dialogue–less common in slide-mo-
tion films, but present inAño Uña.
Confronted with this series of short films, the first thing that struck me was
the impression of the character’s vague presence, or non-presence, but the im-
pression ofhaving beenthere. Unlike mainstream fictional entertainment films
where we get an impression of a character’s being presence during the unfold-
ing of an event, these short films never create the impression of characters actu-
ally being present. It is as if the images present the character’s presence in the
past tense. It has often been claimed that film“has no past or future tense, only
the present”,and that“The linguistic equivalent for cinematic presentation of
the past is:‘Thisishow it was’; and for the future:‘Thisishow it will be’.”
Photo-Romans, however, seems to present past events in their pastness.
The impression of past events being presented in their pastness inPhoto-Ro-
manscan be explained as a result of the combination of several factors, the most
important being that they are all classic narratives of singular events and that
most of them also have a voice-over with all of the three above-mentioned char-
acteristics: The pastness invoked by the filmic expression as such (the slide mo-
tion film) is strengthened by the pastness produced by the voice-over. But it also
seems important that the events referred to are singular. Let me explain this by
comparing it to the short filmOne Day.
The Narrative Present ofOD: The Reportage
One Day()isa-minute documentary in color (which is quite unusual for
slide-motion films) that presents a-year-old boy from Kenya who lived on the
streets until he was adopted in the slums of Korogocho outside Nairobi. It
opensin medias resat an urban garbage dump where several youngsters are
talking in Keswahili.There is no music in this pre-credit sequence, but, even-
tually, an English male voice-over appears as we see a boy with a clean shirt
singled out of the small crowd. The voice-over is an autodiegetic narrator
speaking in a past tense, describing how he used to live in the streets. There-
after, the image shifts to a different place, a slum. There is more extradiegetic
music, an establishing shot, super titles that indicate place, date and year: Kor-
ogocho, Kenya,th of May,. We hear a cock crow, and the film’s titles
appear before we actually see a close-up of the same boy looking straight into
The Temporalities of the Narrative Slide Motion Film 97