Photography and Cinema

figure seated outside the building’s entrance. A minute

later the camera pans and zooms swiftly to frame a

curtained window. A minute later the shot ends, only to

start again on a loop. Nothing seems to connect the three

framings or the people besides their coexistence in space

and time, but Lewis plays on our compulsion to look for

meaningful coherence and narrative momentum.

Victor Burgin’s recent video works have established a

new ground between stillness and movement.Nietzsche’s

Paris( 1999 ) draws on the written correspondence

between Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée and Lou Salomé

in which the three envisioned living together in Paris.

Theménage à troisnever happened. Burgin’s video

combines three deceptively simple elements. The first

appears to be a series of circular pans, shot from the

promenade of the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

In fact, the images are long panoramas made by digitally

stitching together 24 separately shot stills. The feeling

of movement comes from their slow and steady scroll

across the screen. Intercut with these are short allusive

phrases appearing on screen that could be quotations

from a written text, or captions, or intertitles for a

silent film. We also see a second image, of a typically

‘nineteenth-century woman’ seated on a park bench.

While the leaves around her tremble in the wind, she

seems even more still than her stiffened posture suggests.

She is in fact a freeze frame, key-holed digitally within

a real time shot of her surroundings. The overall effect

givesNietzsche’s Parisa temporality all its own, one that

is uncannily well suited to its subject matter: a past

moment of future hope, re-imagined in the present.

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