untenable for the specific reason that it does violenceto the temporal dynamism
specific to photography, and not just to the primacy of the movement constitutive
of cinema. When the photograph (or still image) is taken, as it typically has been
by post classical film theorists and historians, as the elementary unit out of
which cinema is constructed, it undergoes a fundamental reification: specifi-
cally, it is wrested from the processual context from out of which it emerges in
order to be objectified as a static and purely empirical entity, a fixed, fully actua-
lized building block for the something else that is cinema. What is lost in the
process is the capacity that photography affords–a capacity virtually“con-
tained”in every photograph–to modulate movement (movement-images) at
temporal scales that are both extra-perceptual and extra-cinematic. It is pre-
cisely this capacity, I would also like to suggest, that informs the theoretical
concept of the time-image and that differentiates a Frampton-inspired rethink-
ing of this latter from its Deleuzian“original.”Thus, rather than arising in the
spacebetween-twoimages (where the images areper forcetreated as static and
fully actualized), the direct power of time animates the photograph itself, and
indeed, the photographas itself a movement-image, a framing of movement-varia-
tion at a micro-temporal scale that is beneath the threshold of both humanand
cinematic perception. The rather counterintuitive conclusion here is that the
photograph, no less than cinemaand in its own right, is a movement-image, and
also, that whatever opportunity we might get to“perceive”time directly, to
perceive“time-images”, involves some interface with infinitesimal movement-
variation, which is to say, with the sub-perceptual micro-temporal domain–
and virtuality–proper to photography.
Precisely such an introjection of photographic micro-temporality into cinema
seems to inform Frampton’s theoretical ruminations on movement and stillness
as well as much of his cinematic practice. Immediately after defining cinema, in
“Incision in History/Segments of Eternity”,as“an art that is to be fully and
radically isomorphic with the kinesis and stasis–...with the dynamic‘struc-
ture’–of consciousness”, Frampton presents anoemaof photography diametri-
cally opposed to Barthes’s famous“ça a été:
On the other hand, if still photography has seemed, since its beginnings, vastly preg-
nant with the imminence of a revelation that never quite transpires, and if it has never
coherently defined a task for itself, we might make free to infer that it mimes, as does
cinema, its own condition: we might imagine, in a word, that photography is“about”
precisely those recognitions, formations, percipiences, suspensions, persistences, hes-
itations within the mind that precede, if they do not utterly foreshadow, that discov-
ery, andperipeteiaand springing-into-motion, and inspiration that is articulate con-
sciousness.Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 61