Slide-Motion Film
In his dictionary with the pretentious titleThe Complete Film Dictionary(),
Ira Koningsberg uses the term“slide-motion film”for“A film, generally a docu-
mentary, that uses a series of still pictures like a filmograph, but in which the
camera seems to move among the picture’s elements by means of panning or a
zoom lens”.
The typical example of films that fits Koningsberg’s conception of slide-mo-
tion film would be a documentary about a particular historical event, or a bio-
graphy about an exceptional individual (a famous adventurer, or a distin-
guished artist) composed of singular photographs from different times and
places, illustrating the story told by a voice-over. Only in exceptional cases is
the voice-over is left out, as is the case in Ingmar Bergman’sshort film
Karins ansikte(Karin’s Face), a-minute portrait of the filmmaker’s mother
Karin Åkerblom Bergman. The film opens with a close up of a passport, its
identity information pages indicating a person’s identity in terms of name, na-
tionality, date of birth, hair color, eye color, etc. We are shown the passport
photo of an elderly woman and the passport holder’s signature before an inter-
title is cut in to note that Karin got this passport only a few months before she
died.Karins ansiktethen slips into Bergman’s family album, for the camera to
visit, in some cases scrutinize, one old photograph after another, with the earlier
ones as sepia prints, and more recent ones in black-and-white. There is no dia-
logue, no voice-over, only the occasional inter-title and a spare, delicate piano
score. It is a collection of singular photographs presented in a film that does not
treat them as illustrations of a verbal narrative. The film creates a space of re-
flection and association, where the audience–based on their assumed knowl-
edge of Bergman’s biography and his other films or, more generally, based on
experience with family relations and photo albums–is invited to indulge in
identification and memory.
A similar status is accorded (or allowed) the photographs in Anja Breien’s
nine-minute short filmSolvorn()that, in contrast toKarins Ansikte,
does present a voice-over but also fits Koningsberg’s definition and is thus of
interest here. The film is based on a collection of one-hundred-years-old glass-
plate photographs discovered in the attic of the filmmaker’s grandmother’s
house. They all appear to have been taken in the same, somewhat narrow geo-
graphical area, in and around the house over a period of few years. The voice-
over does not tell a story that is illustrated by photographs. Instead, the voice-
over questions the photographs and, even more profoundly, the photographer’s
desires, and the wishes and intentions of the unknown photographic practice of
the filmmaker’s grandmother. The film investigates the photographs in an ex-
86 Liv Hausken