Click to Enlarge I found myself thinking about Norma Desmond recently. It happened while I was sitting at my computer, watching one of those TMZ videos of some Hollywood starlet stepping through a mob of paparazzi and climbing into her SUV. If you've seen one of these clips, you know just how interminable a mere 30 seconds can be. The guilt I felt afterward wasn't about the work time I'd wasted but the fact that I'd bought into this imagery and its utter lack of imagination.
And that reminded me of the famous Miss Desmond, the aging silent screen goddess (played by real-life silent film star Gloria Swanson) in the 1950 film classic Sunset Boulevard. Confronted by a young man who vaguely recalls that she was once a "big" star, she replies, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small."
Sunset Boulevard was director Billy Wilder's wicked commentary on Hollywood morality, but at its heart is a rueful admission (from this profoundly self-confident screenwriter) of the omnipotent power of cinematic imagery. "We didn't need dialog," says Desmond of her silent films. "We had faces!" Others have certainly shared Desmond's fundamental outlook. In a 1957 essay called "The Face of Garbo," photography critic Roland Barthes notes that the star of Queen Christina "belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy...when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced."
In considering this cinematic ecstasy, it is not only possible but also essential to consider the still photo. The relationship between film and photography is both obvious and ambiguous. In 1937, Beaumont Newhall, founder of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote that "aesthetically, the moving picture and the still photograph are so independent that they cannot be compared." It is tempting to think that photography, the older medium by some 69 years, was made obsolete by the rich experience of film. But in The Cinematic (Whitechapel/MIT Press, $25), a new anthology of essays about photography and film, editor David Campany wonders why films have so often featured still images.
"Perhaps film sees photography as something it had to give up in order to become what it did. Is it the photograph's stillness that film finds so compelling? Its clarity? Its uncertainty? Its privileged status as record of memory?"
Aesthetics aside, the relationship between photography and film might better be described not as independent but interdependent. You only need look at the catalog for any recent auction of contemporary art -- with work by Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia -- to see the cinema's influence on photography. Without the movies, we might never have known such photographers as Laszlo Willinger, Clarence S. Bull, George Hurrell, Matthew Rolston, or Herb Ritts. And without those photographers we might never have understood the movies as we have come to, because to an enormous degree it was their brilliant work that transformed film's fleeting impressions into a modern iconography.
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