Moving image - still life

• Main Author: Petratou, Kiki
• Published: University of Plymouth 2004
• Subjects: 791.43
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.577005

"Stasis was defined according to Schrader as the form that links the everyday in something unified and permanent". Central to my research is the aim to create a still-life image from filmed scenes documenting the everyday actions in my living environment. In some cases however the scenes being staged function as allegories of the states and situations of daily life. I decided to mix staged and 'real' scenes because I did not want to create a documentary about the activities in my environment but to transform everydayness, as I perceive it, into the permanent and unified quality of the still-life genre. Since I work with video and the moving image it is important to examine structures of movement and time and see in which ways movement once disconnected from time may confront a stasis. Gilles Deleuze's ideas about the movement-image and the time-image will provide my theoretical framework with particular reference to the notions of movement and time in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Deleuze defines three levels of analysis of movement and time: "(1) the sets or closed systems, which are defined by discernible objects or distinct parts; (2) the movement of translation, which is established between these objects and modifies their respective positions; (3) the duration of the whole, a spiritual reality, which constantly changes according to its own relations".^ From these levels derive the two aspects of movement: that Which happens between objects or parts; and that which expresses the duration of a whole. Deleuze explains it as follows: "we can consider the objects or parts of a set as immobile sections; but movement is established between these sections, and relates the objects or parts to the duration of a whole which changes, and thus expresses the changing of the whole in relation to the objects and it is itself a mobile section of duration". In relation to the cinematographic concepts, Deleuze maintains that what determines the whole and produces movement is montage, by means of continuities, cutting and false continuities. Through montage and the movement of the camera the shot can express both the relationship Between objects or parts and at the same time the state of the whole.