sharon
(sharon)
#1
photographs.Technically speaking, they are, of course, single photo-
graphic frames repeated to give the illusion of time at a standstill, but
we tend to read themculturallyas photographs too. The moment we
register that the image is a freeze we have in place a number of possible
ways to read it photographically: as a poignant snapshot, a telling news
image, a family album photo or a mythic emblem. Indeed, it is difficult
to imagine a freeze frame resistant to a photographic reading.
As early as the 1920 s filmmakers made a virtue of this. InPeople
on Sunday(Robert Siodmak and Edward Ulmer, 1927 ), we see a photo-
grapher shooting informal portraits in a park with his camera and
tripod. As his sitters gaze into his lens we see their faces in direct
address. Shuffling and smiling awkwardly, they either strike poses or
let themselves be snapped by the photographer (to pose is to turn one-
self into a photograph and pre-empt its unpredictable arrest). As the
frame freezes each face in turn we read the halts as clicks of the photo-
grapher’s shutter, the stilled frames doubling as his still photographs.
The sequence then switches to a series of frozen faces with no move-
ment, then to moving shots that leave the viewer to imagine the freeze,
and finally to a series of typical nineteenth-century Salon portraits,
as if it were not clear enough already that the itinerant photographer
was replacing the formal studio.^33
Stanley Donen’s fashion satireFunny Face( 1957 ) exploits relentlessly
the freeze-as-photograph. Fred Astaire plays the glamorous photographer
Dick Avery (based on Richard Avedon, who was the film’s visual adviser).
Audrey Hepburn plays an intellectual bookseller bribed into being a
model. The entire film is geared around a sequence of location fashion
shoots, each culminating in a freeze-frame that corresponds to the snap
of the photographer’s shutter. In the first, Hepburn is gauche, the photo-
grapher grabbing the moment he needs from her uncertainty. By the last
she can anticipate him, freezing herself in pre-packaged ‘spontaneity’.
TheyearFunny FacewasreleasedtheculturalcriticRolandBarthes
contrastedthefacesofGarboandHepburn.Emergingfromsilentcinemaas
theembodimentofacollectivewishfortimelessandplatonicbeauty,Garbo’s
immobilevisagewas‘anidea’;Hepburn’s,withitsendlessexpressions,was
54 ‘anevent’.^34 Eachwasfilmedinwaysthatconfirmedthis.Thestaringlensof
