moments and characters are real,”and finally:“Only the story is fictional.”
Thereafter, we get the first ordinary film image, a series of stills showing a
young woman coming down the stairs towards us, or towards the camera, as
we hear the sound of a distant female voice saying something vaguely compre-
hensible in Spanish. It seems reasonable to see the three verbal slides as the film-
maker’s expression. But why should Cuarón photograph to document anything
at all? And if he did, why should the photographs be considered a documentary
after they have been reworked and inserted into a fictional story?
In contrast to the viewer comments and film reviews ofAño Uñadescribing
it as a film“composed of only photographs and dialogues”,placing the word
“movie”in quotation marks or even proclaiming (enthusiastically)“‘Año Uña’
isn’t even a‘movie’“,or“Strictly it is not a film. It is more than a film”,I
believeAño Uña, as well asLa Jetéeand alsoSolvornandKarins Ansikte
should be named explicitly as films or movies.
Another possible description could be“still film”.This term has been used
for works characterized as“nearly static films, likeTeatro Amazonas”and
Douglas Gordon’s“slowed”films.George Baker argues that this notion is im-
plicitly dependent on a tension between film and photography, film reduced to
its“foundation of the still frame”and, at the same time,“linked conceptually to
a field mapped out by the expansion ofphotography, to which ... neither of them
[the examples mentioned above] will of course correspond”.To include films
likeLa JetéeandAño Uñaunder this label would imply a redefinition of the
term“still film”, involving both a rethinking of this conceptual link to photogra-
phy and the idea of the film still as a“reduction”of film to“its foundation”.
As an alternative, we could simply redefine Koningsberg’s term slide-motion
film. Whilst“still film”has the possible advantage of ascribing importance to
the stillness of the images in a film,“slide-motion film”emphasizes itsmotion.
Admittedly, one problem with redefining Koningsberg’s term might be that
“slide”refers both to the verb“to slide, or glide”and the noun“slide”pertain-
ing to the photographic still viewed with a slide projector. To includeAño Uña,
La Jetéeand similar films under this label, the primary meaning of“slide”
must be the transparent, photographic image mounted in a frame, the image as
projected, the still on the screen, rather than the gliding movement of the cam-
era, tracking across the surfaces of pre-existing images, that may also be part of
the filmic expression I am describing here, but which doesn’t define it as such.
The motion involved, then, refers not so much to the movement of the camera
as to the impression of movement produced by sequences of projected images
(often supported by the sound). As Christian Metz once noted,“... even if each
image is a still, switching from one to the next creates asecond movement,an
ideal one, made out of successive and different immobilities”.I consider this
“ideal movement”as a formative notion of the filmic expression ofAño Uña,
90 Liv Hausken