Considering the film still.
To document my paper eating I will be using a matchbox pinhole with XP2 35mm film. Attached to the winding apparatus will be a knotted string which I will pull on to wind the camera on from my position opposite the camera. Using a roll of 36 exposures I will eat a corresponding 36 sheets of good quality paper. The macerated paper will then be constructed into 36 sheets of continuous paper and the negatives from the film will be printed onto each sheet creating a roll of positives. The exposures will last as long as takes to chew as sheet of paper and the movement of my mouth will cause motion blur.
To understand the aestheics of this medium I have been reading ‘History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still’ by Steven Jacobs from History of Photography journal November 2010.
There are references in my process to what Roland Barthes called the photo-gramme also known as frame enlargements where a single frame of a film from a movie is selected and enlarged. These images are often blurred because of the shutter speed that a movie camera operates on. Barthes is interested in what these photo-grammes show us. There are the unseen as they allow us into a world where we can scrutinize what would usually stream past us so quickly that our eyes are unable to keep up. He talks about photographic punctum (punctum meaning a small, distinct point) which occurs when you analyse a photo-gramme. A ‘third meaning’ can be found in the analysis of a still when extracted from the moving image because you see details otherwise unseen. But by exposing the film to the duration of the motion of eating the paper, this ‘third meaning’ will be eliminated from the work and small distinct points will no longer be visible. In a way it is opposite to a photo-gramme film still as all these moments of motion are captured on top of each other.
As well as the image extract from the movie film Jacobs goes on to talk about still photographs taken by a still photographer usually on set. ‘After a successful take, actors are often asked ‘to do things once more for stills’, thereby retaining the fictional illusion of the film by staying in character and respecting the so-called ‘forth wall’ of the narrative film by ignoring the camera and the fact that they are actually being photographed’. Here again I had planned to be the camera operator and had imagined that I would be looking in the vague direction of the pinhole aware of the viewer. But this is not in keeping with the aesthetics of the still image either. Again it goes against this convention.
Jacobs goes on to point out that this aesthetic changed when magazines and newspapers printing these promotional images. ‘they eliminated static, posy art; they demanded pictures that moved and lived and had feeling. natural beauty replaced statuesque beauty perfection. heath, vigor and action supplanted precise, mechanical artificiality in still art’ and ‘the only precondition is that stills ‘do tell a story’ and that ‘they have a suggestion of an intense situation’ and ‘suggest amusing or exciting developments and sequences’.
Going back to the ‘third meaning’ that Barthes talks about and which I expect to loose in my process a possible fourth meaning can be found in the medium the work is presented on, i.e. the macerated paper. The work then becomes reflexive as the materials in the process are both the subject and the object. The subject which is the action of eating paper (by a woman, see previous post) and the resulting object is repeated images of the subject on the material that results from the process. Having tested out some images I have found that eliminating the eyes from the image recreates the ‘fourth wall’ showing the subject ‘in a condition of introspection and absorbtion’ ‘to establish the ontological illusion that the beholder does not exist’.
