Daney argues that advertising, video clips, and the films based on these forms
today mobilize an excess of visual standstills that becomes a form of exchange
between visual regimes.
As Gilles Deleuze points out, what we directly perceive as a moving image in
the cinema is an“intermediate image as immediate given,”created from single
frames. The individual frame of the filmstrip cannot be perceived as an image in
the projection unless it is frozen, and thus becomes a visible“freeze-frame”.
From the perspective of the spectator, Roland Barthes writes about the possibi-
lity of the virtual selection of an individual frame that was selected not in rela-
tion to a suggested meaning, but in light of the filmstrip. The choice would be
made not according to criteria of the moments privileged in the course of the
film–or in any narrative–but, as it were, a random card would be taken from
the deck in search of an additional significance, one that is at a distance from the
realistic authority of the running image, what Roland Barthes calls the“obtuse
meaning”in the individual photogram. This meaning emerges fragmentarily
and unpredictably, as a kind of utopian virtuality. Deleuze also seems to define
the cinema as a system that reproduces movement in relation to a random mo-
ment, the“any-instant-whatever,”but as a function of“equidistant instants se-
lected so as to create an impression of continuity.”Raymond Bellour, com-
menting on Barthes’s and Deleuze’s conceptions of the relationship between the
instant and duration, raises the question of the nature of theinterruptionof film-
ic movement: Should it be seen as one privileged instant among many“any-
instant-whatever,”or rather as a privileged instant that appears singular and
unique?Bellour points out that the answer cannot be of a general or formal
nature, but that the question needs to be explored historically or singularly in
relation to a particular oeuvre or film.
The question that Bellour poses in his consideration of the filmic instant in
modern cinema’s forms of interruption is that of the snapshot, when it becomes
both“the pose and the pause of film”,that is, the more general question of the
figure of the“photographic”in film (and not just the individual stilled image,
the“photogrammatic”). A similar argument for conceiving standstill and move-
ment via the relationship between photography and film can be found in Phi-
lippe Dubois, who locates the possibility of conceptualizing photography as it
inheres in film at the point of intersection between the two media. He describes
the filmic individual image as a“dialectic image, that points to an object that is
neither (truly) film, nor (simply) it is a bit more than a photograph (it is its be-
yond) and a bit less than film (it is its this world),”furthermore as the“embodi-
ment of the idea of an intermediate member of the chain, the fold between
photograph and film, the exact point (punctum) of passage between the two”.
Individual images are only perceptible if we slow down or stop the film. If
the film is not run according to its realistic running time, but in a new space-
76 Christa Blümlinger