Photography and Cinema

mass medium, eclipsing still photography in the process. With atvin the

home, never again would people have to stare out of a window to satisfy

their curiosity (television promised to be ‘a window on the world’). In this

sense,Rear Windowis, among other things, an early farewell to life with-

out the small screen and an equally prescient farewell to the sidelining of

cinema and photojournalism.

Antonioni’sBlow-up( 1966 ) was famously critical of the fashion

industry, but it was made at a moment, perhaps the last moment, when

such criticism could bite. By the end of the 1960 s fashion photography,

like the visual culture of capitalism in general, had developed a carapace

of irony and self-parody that seemed to head off or absorb any critique.^20

Christopher Nolan’sMemento( 2000 ), a story told backwards about a

man with no long-term memory who is trying to solve a murder, makes

compulsive use of Polaroid photos. The hero takes shots of significant faces

and places and relies on them to tell him who is and what he must do next.

Attractive to filmmakers since the 1970 s, the Polaroid has been in some

respects cinema’s ideal other. The whole process from shooting the image

to holding it in the hand and watching it develop can be filmed in one place

in real time.^21 For cinema, the Polaroid seems authoritative and tangible,

utterly tied to its time and place.^22 YetMementowas made just as the

expensive and wasteful technology was being replaced by cheap and acces-

sible digital cameras, moving the photograph from object to pure image.

Indeed, the Polaroid company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001.

In a similar vein Mark Romanek’sOne Hour Photo( 2002 ) is the story

of a sinister technician at a shopping mall photo lab. He runs off his own

copies of snaps of an ideal family in order to insinuate himself into their

lives, first in his fantasies, then in reality. Digital cameras were already

cutting out the lab technician at the turn of the millennium.One Hour

Photowas made at that last point when a contemporary film could linger

legitimately over celluloid negatives, sprocket holes, gurgling chemicals

and all the rest of the production process. It is not just the photographic

image that cinema has found attractive. It is the highly visual system

that goes with it, from the red light of darkrooms with images slowly

appearing in liquid baths to the mechanics of the manual camera and

112 the dust of the archive.^23 As these disappear either cinema’s romance