Stillness and movement are mutually exclusive, despite their genealogy
and mutual interest.
That said, sooner or later the comparison of photography and film
always comes around to questions of stillness and movement, confronting
what is at stake in the common assumption that ‘films move and photo-
graphs are still’. Whatisthe movement of film and what is the stillness of
photography? Is it that the film image changes over time while the photo-
graph is fixed? Not exactly. That photographs areaboutstillness and films
aboutmovement? Possibly, but it still misses something. As we saw earlier,
we soon come up against the limits of thinking about the question
outside of subject matter. The film image certainly has duration and thus
movement at a mental level. Yet, when we think of the film image moving,
it is also because it has tended, conventionally, to select subject matter
that moves and can be seen moving. Similarly, the stillness of photography
is given to us most clearly when it arrests or fails to arrest movement,
or when it confirms the immobility of inert things. Of course, we can film
or photograph a moving subject (say, workers leaving a factory) or a still
one (say, a building). The Lumières could have filmed motionless build-
ings without people, but they did not. We had to wait for Andy Warhol to
separate cinematic duration from depicted movement. Muybridge could
have photographed at high speed a sleeping horse or a human figure
reading a book, but he did not. Each chose subject matter appropriate to
their ends, as do all image-makers. And since subject matter has changed
so radically – think of the changes that have taken place across the histories
of these media – our conceptions of photography and film remain perpet-
ually uncertain. This is especially so in the way that we understand their
relation to movement and stillness.
StopsandFlows