originally posted here:
http://www.mattscape.org/eventually-2010.html
author: Matteo Bittanti
title: eventually
year: 2010-
format: digital screen grabs, looping slideshow
description: Cinematic moments are screen grabs from DVDs or streaming movies, slightly edited but not dramatically altered.
“A screenshot, screen capture, or screen dump is an image taken by the computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor or another visual output device. Usually this is a digital image taken by the host operating system or software running on the computer device, but it can also be a capture made by a camera or a device intercepting the video output of the computer.” (Wikipedia)
“The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it. The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded. He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.” (Delillo, 2010: 5-6).
Cinematic moments are collections of screen grabs taken from DVDs and streaming movies, slightly edited but not dramatically altered. I started collecting screen captures of films a few years ago, inspired by the in-depth analysis of cinematic frames that appear on academic journals and magazines like Film Comment, Positif, et similia. A second, perhaps stronger inspiration for me was Nostalgia Party No. 2, an online repository of screen captures hosted on LiveJournal (note 1)
Unlike Nostalgia Party No. 2, my purpose is not to identify, capture, and preserve the “perfect” frame. Rather, I’m more interested in constructing micro-narratives by amputating scenes within a larger story. According to a popular myth, if you cut the tail of a lizard, a new one will spawn from the cut off appendix. I like to believe that the same applies to “eventually” as well: the cinematic moments that I post on tumbler have a life of their own, independent of the “original” source code. They are fractal-like nano-tales, fragments of popular or obscure movies. I deliberately avoid including credits and references in my posts: these images are treated as found artifacts, memories of films that one might have seen (or not).
“There was an element of forgetting involved in this experience. He wanted to forget the original movie or at least limit the memory to a distant reference, unobtrusive.” (Delillo, 2010: 11)
The screen grabbing practice is not intended as an act of cultural appropriation. Rather, it is an act of extrapolation, transformation, decontextualization, and re-circulation. Creating a cinematic moment is relatively simple: I extract a dialogue, an episode, a scene from a movie that captivates me – either from a DVD or via streaming - and then I post the resulting images on tumblr. I like this blog’s format: an embedded micro-slideshow consisting of ten photos. This adds another layer of editing, a fixed, non-negotiable montage, a new constrain. “eventually” is a useless archive.
“This was history he was watching in a way, a movie known to people everywhere. He played with the idea that the gallery was like a preserved site, a dead poet’s cottage or hushed tomb, a medieval chapel. Here it is, the Bates Motel. But people don’t see this. They see fractured motion, film stills on the border of benumbed life” (Delillo, 2010: 12)
The slideshow moves at glacial pace: each image stays on the screen for two seconds before being superseded by the next, subverting the director’s original intent. I load sets of cinematic screengrabs on my iPad: as I observe the actors’ faces, their expression frozen, patiently waiting for a new image to appear. As I watch the sequence, I re-live the “original” scene in my head. The dialogue is delivered by subtitles which replace the (omitted) sound.
A cinematic moment is always a departure from a departure.
“It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing” (Delillo, 2010: 13)
For example, the following collection features nine sets of screengrabs extrapolated from a single sequence:
I keep watching.
I keep collecting.
I keep posting.
Notes
(1) Nostalgia Party 2 calls itself a collection of “film stills”, although, technically, a film still, “sometimes called a publicity still, is a photograph taken on the set of a movie or television program during production by a movie stills photographer, primarily used for promotional purposes”. (from Wikipedia). Nonetheless, Nostalgia Party 2 is one of the reasons why the internet was invented. I especially admire their code of conduct and rules for posting.
References
Delillo, Don (2010) Point Omega, New York: Scribner.
Wikipedia, definition of “screengrab” and “film still”
Notalgia Party 2 (website)
link: eventually (2010-)
