Photography and Cinema

36

action in front of the rolling camera. For Bazin, the synthetic nature of

montage should be subordinate to the organic nature of the individual

shot. When the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton imagined the

‘infinite film’ it included both versions:

The infinite film contains an infinity of endless passages wherein no

frame resembles any other in the slightest degree, and a further

infinity of passages wherein successive frames are as nearly identical

as intelligence can make them.^18

Popular narrative film stays away from endless difference and endless

sameness.Itoccupiesasmallmid-groundof‘sentence-length’shots,neither

too short to be comprehensible nor too long to be tolerable.^19 By contrast,

the history of avant-garde cinema is a history of gravitation to those two

extremes. At one end there is the film built up from rapid cuts and at the

other the long single take. Significantly, at both ends we find versions of

photographic stillness. Montage sees the photograph as a partial fragment,

as we have seen. The long take sees the photograph as a unified whole.

Theshorterafilm’sshotthemorelikeaphotographitgets,untiloneends

up with a single frame. The longer the shot the more like a photograph it

gets too, the continuous ‘stare’ of the lens giving us a moving picture.^20

The advanced art and film of the inter-war avant-gardes were charac-

terized by their engagement with speed and montage. But by the 1950 s

speed had lost much of its artistic appeal and almost all its critical

potential, particularly in Europe. Beyond the sobering effects of the war,

modernity had developed a terrifying autonomy, not least at the level

of the image. The ‘society of the spectacle’, diagnosed by Guy Debord in

1967 but intimated much earlier, relied upon the breathless turnover of

popular culture with is ephemeral advertising, commodified news and

droning television. Speed and montage were degenerating from the

promise of mass mobilization into mass distraction. The accelerated

image world began to feel dehumanizing, repetitive and monotonous.

In this contextslowness, the deliberate refusal of speed, became central

in vanguard art and culture and we can see this change of pace both in

photography and film.