Photography and Cinema

In his bookCamera Lucida, Roland Barthes attempts to locate

an ‘essence’ of photography. He is led to the medium’s relation to time

and the trace. A photograph is an existential index of a place, a person,

a thing or a scene ‘which has been’ at a particular moment. Something

was there and a camera was there to record and fix it. As such, the

photograph is marked by the trauma and enigma of death. Barthes was

well aware that this mark is usually covered over, buried below other

meanings (death is not what comes readily to mind when we look at

food photography, fashion or advertising), but that founding condition

is always there.^2 Strip away what ‘tames’ a photograph – text, context,

other images, voice-over and so forth – and what remains is the uncer-

tainty of a spectral presence.For Barthes, the images that dramatize this

essential condition are the most powerful. ‘Ultimately’, he concluded,

‘photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stig-

matizes, but when it ispensive, when it thinks.’^3 Taking his cue from

Barthes, the film theorist Raymond Bellour described as ‘pensive’ the

response of the spectator faced with a photograph or freeze frame in

a film.^4 Pensiveness is a suspension, a moment of anticipation when

things are in the balance. Literally and psychologically, the still image

in film causes a pause.

Viewing a photograph in a film is very different from viewing it

directly. Film tends to overstate the photograph’s difference, while pre-

senting that difference as if it were its essence. We see the photograph

exaggerated by those qualities that distinguish it from film: its stillness,

its temporal fixity, its objecthood, its silence, its deathliness, even.

Perhaps the purest illustration of this is an early film by Roberto

Rossellini, the comic parableLa macchina ammazzacattivi(The Machine

for Killing Bad People, 1948 ). A photographer in a small Italian post-war

village is granted by a man whom he assumes to be a saint the ability to

kill people with his camera. This he can do not by photographing them

directly, but by re-photographing photographs of them. At the instant he

shoots, the victim – wherever they are – freezes for eternity in the pose

they strike in their photo, as if turned to stone. The town doctor calls it

‘total psycho-motor paralysis’ (which is not a bad description of photog-

96 raphy). The photographer begins by eliminating those he is convinced