10.54103/ai/15442



The article intends to propose some analyses of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cinema: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz, Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship between cinema and photography will be particularly explored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic will be constructed between the two. 



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Luca Acquarelli
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Bergman
The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy
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Luca Acquarelli
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Bergman
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The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy
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1
                  The fixed image
                  in cinema as a
potential altered
by Luca Acquarelli
           Still image
                        vision strategy
                     Photography
                     Hallucination
                     Antonioni
                     Bergman




                                     Issue №1 Year 2022
                                     → Altered states
                                     Edited by Giancarlo Grossi
                                     and Andrea Pinotti
The fixed image
in cinema as a potential
altered vision strategy
by Luca Acquarelli

Abstract                        The article intends to propose some analyses
                  of a possible formal occurrence of “altered states” in cine-
                  ma: the stopping of the flow of the cinematographic image
                  in a still image. Through some theoretical references (Metz,
                  Bazin, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bellour, Barthes, Montani) I will
                  try to understand if this kind of formal occurrence can be
                  constituted as a figure of the altered state. The relationship
                  between cinema and photography will be particularly ex-
                  plored, starting with films such as Antonioni’s Blow Up and
                  Bergman’s Persona. The hallucinatory effect will thus be
                  discovered not as opposed to that of reality, but a dialectic
                  will be constructed between the two.




Still image          Photography               Hallucination            Antonioni            Bergman
To quote this essay: L. Acquarelli, “The fixed image in cinema as a potential altered vision strategy”,
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 51-68

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                     51                                           AN-ICON
                         Dream as “authentic” absurdity,
                         photography as “true” hallucination

                           Like hallucinations, dreams are not the far end
             of the reality scale but rather share some of its features.
             Metz has argued that dream sequences are always barely
             credible in narrative films precisely because films struggle
             to represent the “authentic absurdity” of dreams. Indeed,
             dreams seem to combine the reality effect with a halluci-
             natory patina that film dynamics find hard to hold togeth-
             er. The most traditional enunciative shifts introducing the
             passage between “reality”’s diegesis and that of dreams,
             such as unfocused borders or images in black and white
             as opposed to colour, are indeed ineffective expedients
             for the purposes of rendering this “authentic absurdity”,
             this double binary between the authenticating effect, like
             perhaps realist photography, and the game of the absurd,
             that injection of perceptual intensity that undermines the
             reality principle.
                           Weaving a somewhat daring theoretical thread,
             this oxymoronic terminology does not seem to me to be
             very far removed from that used by one of realism’s most
             famous theorists – and therefore a very long way away
             from Metz – André Bazin who, speaking of the use of pho-
             tography as a privileged surrealist technique, conceives of
             photography’s potential for creating “a true hallucination”.
             While the realist photography ontology has been widely
             criticised, less space has been given to this hallucinatory
             residue of photography, which occurs even when it seems
             to adhere to a realist aesthetic.
                           It should be stressed that the dream hypothe-
             sis introduced with Metz is at the heart of one of cinema’s
             theoretical paradigms. Without dwelling on all aspects of
             this dimension, it will be useful here to digress into the
             dream-cinema relationship before introducing certain anal-
             yses of this article’s central theme, namely the presence of
             the fixed, especially photographic, image within film, which
             immobilises its movement, as a possible instant of altered vi-
             sion. Metz has thoroughly enquired into the epistemological
LUCA ACQUARELLI                     52                             AN-ICON
              potential of the oneiric vision, through the Freudian prism.
              In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier,1
              condensation, displacement and secondary elaboration
              are the main processes of the oneiric “signifier” explored
              by this French theorist as tools for the interpretation of
              cinematographic language. For Metz, the image’s “affinity”
              with the unconscious and its oneiric imagination increases
              its exposure to these processes as compared to language,
              without the latter being immune to them. Elements of film
              grammar such as superimposition and cross-fading – the
              former being closer to displacement, the latter to conden-
              sation – are key examples of this affinity. These elements
              testify to a survival of the primary process that, for instance,
              tends to abolish the discontinuity between objects. These
              are emergencies, aberrations within a product of secondary
              elaboration, such as the narrative development of a film or
              the attempt to narrate a dream upon awakening, the latter
              being forced, at least partially, to favour narrative logic at
              the expense of the ambiguous and nebulous dimension of
              the primary process. Entstellung, the oneiric deformation
              caused by the power of unconscious impulses, has thus
              also become a theoretical paradigm for thinking in images
              of a sort of energy that is not played out in forms and ac-
              cumulates in fragments and temporary disfiguration.
                            Although Freud wrote that “dreams hallucinate”,2
              the kinship between dreams and hallucinations is anything
              but close, starting from the fact that the former occurs in
              a sleeping state and the latter in waking state. Moments
              of transition between wakefulness and sleep are often
              the scene of phenomena testifying to the kinship between
              the form the two experiences take: so-called hypnagogic
              and hypnopompic hallucinations. This is not the place to
              go into this matter in depth, but we might say that these
              two dimensions, dreams and hallucinations, may be the
              two areas where the fixed image in cinema, as viewed in
              this article, tends to position itself in dialectical movement.

      1 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. The Imaginary Signifier (London: Palgrave, 1982).
      2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010): 79.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                53                                          AN-ICON
               A few case studies will give us a clearer understanding of
               the type of visual alterations we are talking about.

                                 Stopping the cinematic flow:
                                 intermediality and a-cinema

                             The hypothesis discussed in this article is de-
               signed to examine whether there are other cinematic strat-
               egies capable of expressing visual alterity as regards nar-
               rating the flow of cinematic images – an alterity whose
               intensity borders on the hallucinatory – and, in particular,
               the alterity that is generated by the use of photography in
               cinema as a standstill in movement. The film theorist Ray-
               mond Bellour has, on several occasions, taken an interest
               in the interruption of movement in cinema, when it is, in
               various ways, inhabited by the photography hantise.
                             In one short essay, in particular, his aim is to
               promote an, as yet hypothetical, study, in Bellour’s own
               words, whose interest is the “traitement de l’immobile dans
               cet art du mouvement qu’est le cinema”.3 Here this film
               theorist analyses these moments of arrested movement
               as privileged instants of fragmented time within a cine-
               matic time conceived of as unitary: “des points de tran-
               scendance, avérés, reconduits à travers les ellipses, les
               décompositions, les immobilisations qui les traversent”.4
               Bellour’s insistence on privileged movement is also a way
               of questioning the view that sees cinema as a system of
               reproduction of “whatever movement”, of the “equidistant
               instant” chosen to give the effect of continuity. In Bellour’s
               analysis, this change of rhythm is also linked to a change
               in film’s narrative dimension. Following and taking up his
               analysis, this article’s aim is to examine cases in which this
               immobility interrupting the flow of images is, in its various
               forms, bound up with a hallucinatory state, of a dreamlike
               or other nature.


      3 R. Bellour, “L’interruption, l’instant”, in R. Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo
      (Paris: Mimésis, 2020): 131.
      4 Ibid.: 133.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                  54                                           AN-ICON
                           A fixed camera on a long take where move-
               ment is reduced to a minimum can restore this effect of
               immobility rendered by the emergence of a virtually still
               image in a 24 frames-per-second flow. But in actual fact,
               as Deleuze explains so well with regard to Ozu’s still lifes,
               this is a completely different frame of mind:

At the point where the cinematographic image most directly con-
fronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it.
Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the
vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of
that which endures, through the succession of changing states.5
                           However, when photography’s fixity interrupts
               the cinematic flow, what we are left with is an alternative
               configuration. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his famous
               Camera Lucida:

The cinema participates in this domestication of photography — at
least the fictional cinema, precisely the one said to be the seventh
art; a film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of
madness, it is never mad by nature (by iconic status); it is always
the very opposite of an hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vi-
sion is oneiric, not ecmnesic.6
                             If this opposition between photography and
               cinema where hallucination is concerned may indeed seem
               too general, it seems to me that the French theorist sees a
               certain specificity in the still image in relation to the moving
               image.
                             In fact, this thought seems to be echoed in Bar-
               thes’ article on obtuse meaning theorised from a few frames
               of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (I) (1944). Barthes realises
               that the starting point in his analysis is the frame which,
               although all film originates from it, cinema itself seems

       5 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta (Minneapolis:
       University of Minnesota Press,1989): 17.
       6 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill
       and Wang, 1982).

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                55                                        AN-ICON
              to forget in the amnesia of its 24 images-per-second flow.
              Paradoxically, frames seem very different in nature from
              the film they are part of: the possibility to observe a film
              frame offers a totally different epistemology as compared
              to when it is lost in the flow of the movement of animation.7
                           In the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard theorised
             “a-cinema”, namely a cinema which goes beyond the nar-
              rative discourse of diegesis and the normalised image that
              follows on from it. A-cinema is not intended to be a negation
              of cinema, but a dimension in which it is the power of the
              image which takes precedence over its form, giving rise
              to image “pyrotechnics”.8 This French philosopher refers
              to two ways of complying with the pyrotechnical require-
              ment: immobility and excess movement. He examines John
              Avildsen’s film Joe (1970), comparing the only two scenes
              featuring this arrhythmia and bound up with the film’s deep-
              er narrative, namely the impossibility of the father’s incest
              with his daughter:

Ces deux effets, l’un d’immobilisation, l’autre d’excès de mobilité,
sont donc obtenus en dérogation des règles de représentation,
qui exigent que le mouvement réel, imprimé à 24 images/seconde
sur la pellicule, soit restitué à la projection à la même vitesse.9
                           One of the examples of immobilisation described
               by Lyotard – this paralysis in the image that provokes the
               most intense agitation – is most effectively embodied by the
               tableau vivant, linking this dispositif to the libidinal energy
               dimension that lies at the heart of his broader theory of the

      7 Barthes adds: “For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being
      interested and even fascinated by photos from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of
      Cahiers du cinema) and of then losing everything of those photos (not just the captivation but
      the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room – a change which can even
      result in a complete reversal of values”. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana
      Press, 1997): 65-66.
      8 Lyotard takes the idea from Adorno who claimed that the only great art is that of the
      artificers: “la pyrotechnie simulerait à la perfection la consomption stérile des énergies de la
      jouissance” and then talking about currents that could meet pyrotechnic needs: “Ces deux
      pôles sont l’immobilité et l’excès de mouvement. En se laissant attirer vers ces antipodes, le
      cinéma cesse insensiblement d’être une force de l’ordre ; il produit de vrais, c’est-à-dire vains,
      simulacres, des intensités jouissives, au lieu d’objets consommables-productifs”. J.-F. Lyotard,
      Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994): 60.
      9 Ibid.: 63.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                  56                                           AN-ICON
               figural.10 Immobilisation, immobility, stopping on a fixed
               image within the movement of the film: these are all effects
               that come close to the study hypotheses discussed here.
                            But another aspect can usefully be underlined.
               When cinema mediates another kind of image, re-mediation
               and intermediality is generally talked of. This theoretical
               dimension has been approached from various points of
               view: Montani’s book speaks of intermedial aesthetics as
               places of “authentication” process activation.11 The term
              “intermedial” is used here as a philosophical option sum-
               marised in the first pages of the book: it is

only by starting from an active comparison between different tech-
nical formats of the image (optical and digital, for example) and
between its different discursive forms (fictional and documentary,
for example), that one can do justice to the irreducible otherness
of the real world and the testimony of facts, (media and non-media
facts), happening in it.12
                             If doubt is clearly cast on the problem of inter-
                mediality by the hypothesis of this article, let us try to focus
                on the specific case of the still image alone, disregarding
                authentication but rather proposing it as a case of visual
                alteration. That is to say, authentication as the result of a
                montage between different media can – as we shall see in
                one of the cases of still image cinema shown below – be
                understood as visual alteration, in accordance with the
                topic dealt with in this journal issue.




      10 For an interdisciplinary study of the figural dimension of image analysis, allow me a
      reference to the collective volume, L. Acquarelli, ed., Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images
      entre forme et force (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015).
      11 The term “authentication” can be problematic because it resonates semantically with
      authenticity and, therefore, truth. Montani immediately disambiguated the term, distancing it from
      this risk of confusion: “Authenticating, from this point of view, is akin to ‘rerealizing’, rehabilitating
      the image to the relationship with its irreducible other, with its radical and elusive off-screen”. P.
      Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010): 14. My translation.
      12 Ibid.: 13. My translation.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                     57                                               AN-ICON
                         The shifting fixity of photography in cinema
                         and its hallucinatory effect. From Blow Up
                         to Persona

                          In one of the films most frequently cited in text-
            books on the photography-cinema relationship, Michelan-
            gelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), it is the dialectic between
            the photographic medium as authenticating evidence and
            hallucinatory instrument which plays centre stage. The use of
            photography as evidence is apparently the main theme, but
            it is precisely photographic enlargements aimed at visualis-
            ing the evidence that leads our vision towards hallucination
            rather than authentication.
                          The first scene is set in an anonymous park in
            which the main character Thomas is taking photographs of
            what seems to be the prudishly amorous games of a couple
            in the middle of the lawn, with a paparazzo’s curiosity and
            almost for fun. The whole scene is played back to viewers in
            a sequence in which Thomas, now back in his flat, is hunting
            out detail in the prints from the negatives he has just devel-
            oped. The spectator plays the same investigative game as
            Thomas, scrutinising the black and white images of the scene
            seen shortly before in the diegetic reality of the film. At a
            certain point, Thomas ceases to act as the viewer’s delegate,
            and the frame is entirely taken up by the images (Fig. 1 and 2).




                                                    Fig. 1. Michelangelo Antonioni,
                                                     Blow Up, 1966. Still from film.




                                                    Fig. 2. Michelangelo Antonioni,
                                                     Blow Up, 1966. Still from film.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                     58                                    AN-ICON
                             We leave behind the narrative time frame of the
              film and move into a space-time otherness in which sound
              reproduces the background noise of the leaves blowing in
              the wind. A memory? The authentication of a memory? Or
              rather a hallucination? This exiting from the film, a sequence
              made up of 15 shots, lasting just under a minute in total,
              establishes a further space-time dimension. The succes-
              sion of shots apparently follows a “detective” logic, but the
              leaving behind of diegetic time and the photographic tex-
              ture, in the sense of figurative density – profoundly different
              from the cinematographic texture preceding and following
              on from it – and the immobility of the figuration, confer a
              different iconic nature on this sequence. Not only does it
              shift viewers into a space and time otherness, but it also
              seems to position itself within the film as a sequence whose
              diverse legibility gradually contaminates the rest of the film’s
              shots, suspending its already weak narrative currents.
                             The photo designed to “indicate” the corpse, in
              its exaggerated enlargement, resembles an abstract paint-
              ing (Fig. 3), showing nothing but its support and its texture and,
              moreover, the film urges us to compare it with the paintings of
              Thomas’s friend Bill, an abstract figurative painter (Fig. 4).13




                                                                       Fig. 3. Michelangelo Antonioni,
                                                                        Blow Up, 1966. Still from film.




                                                                       Fig. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni,
                                                                        Blow Up, 1966. Still from film.

      13 In Fig. 4, the female character in a dialogue with Thomas explicitly says that the
      photograph looks to her like one of Bill’s paintings.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                 59                                            AN-ICON
               In an earlier scene, Bill tries to describe his paintings as
               follows:

They don’t mean anything when I do them. Just a mess. Afterwards
I find something to hang on to. Like that...like that leg. Then it sorts
itself out...and adds up. It’s like finding a clue in a detective story.
                           The abstract picture prefigures the search for
              evidence in the photo. But what if the picture itself is ab-
              stract? Thomas looks for fresh evidence of the murder
              seen in the photographs, first returning alone to the site
              of the alleged crime and finding the body. When he tries
              to convince another friend of his to look for proof of the
              existence of the corpse, he is not believed. No one seems
              to care about the possible referent of the photograph, as if
              the photograph itself was pushing for a return to Lacanian
              reality within a society hypnotised by fashionable images
              which no one wants to face up to. When Thomas returns
              to the park for a second time to photograph the corpse up
              close, it has disappeared. Initially examined as reassuring
              ontological realism, the photograph is actually the place
              where memory and hallucination break through into the
              reality effect generated by cinematic movement.
                            Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which
              Bellour himself included in the above-mentioned article, is
              an interesting still image in cinema case study. It takes
              various forms, first occupying the whole screen, then as an
              image displayed as a photograph within a diegetic action,
              then as a photograph explored by the camera, and then
              as a still image juxtaposing close-ups of the two women.
                           The film focuses virtually in its entirety on the re-
              lationship between a patient, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann)
              suffering from voluntary aphasia, and a nurse, Alma (Bibi
              Andersson). This caring relationship becomes increasingly
              intimate once the two women go to the beachfront house
              the clinic’s therapist has advised Elisabeth to recuperate
              in. The central theme of the film becomes the double, in
              the Freudian sense, as the two women’s relationship gets
              gradually more psychologically complex. While on one
LUCA ACQUARELLI                           60                               AN-ICON
             hand Elisabeth’s silence forces Alma to confide the secrets
             of her life, Alma herself, after secretly reading a letter from
             Elisabeth to the therapist which she feels ridicules her, be-
             comes increasingly irritable and begins to despise Elisabeth
             for what she sees as her selfish and corrupt nature. At the
             same time Alma begins to feel guilty for having an abortion
             and to identify with Elisabeth who seems unable to love her
             child, having rejected it from birth. Ingmar Bergman builds
             the film on this progressive identification, in a crescendo
             that culminates in something close to a mirror image be-
             tween the two figures before they are juxtaposed into a sort
             of hybrid face. The dizzying nature of the double is triggered
             even before the two characters come on the scene when, in
             a prologue in a morgue, a child gets up and moves towards
             a close-up of a woman’s photograph to examine it with
             his hand. The facial features of the two women – who we
             later discover to be Elisabeth and Alma – in this seemingly
             fixed photographic close-up gradually become less sharp
             until a subtle transition occurs between them (Fig. 5 and 6).




                                                           Fig. 5. Ingmar Bergman,
                                                      Persona, 1966. Still from film.




                                                           Fig. 6. Ingmar Bergman,
                                                      Persona, 1966. Still from film.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                     61                                    AN-ICON
            Although it is the pre-prologue that “disrupts” the linear-
            ity of the whole film’s narrative (a tight montage of fig-
            ures juxtaposed in disparate ways, sometimes following
            a meta-cinematic theme), the changing portrait sequence
            is charged with such great power as to expand its reach
            into the rest of the narrative. The photograph of Elisabeth’s
            son (Fig. 7) is a further key element, a sort of narrative ac-
            celerator, snatched from Elisabeth herself and then kept
            by her to be reassembled in the scene where the logic of
            the double between the two women reaches its climax.




                                                           Fig. 7. Ingmar Bergman,
                                                      Persona, 1966. Still from film.

             But it is a historical snapshot, an emblem of Nazi violence
             and its humiliation of its victims, the photo of the so-called
            “Warsaw child” representing the greatest perceptive cae-
             sura. In the year Persona was released, although knowl-
             edge of Nazi atrocities was still generally not widespread,
             the photo had already been used a decade earlier in Alain
             Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1956) and was already em-
             blematic of the Holocaust, after it was used as a post-
             er for a first exhibition on Nazism’s calculated ferocity
             in Berlin Die Vergangenheit mahnt. The photo as a di-
             egetic object (Fig. 8) casually found by Elisabeth inside a
             book, and placed under a bedside lamp to make it easier
             to see, absorbs the entire frame accompanied by a stri-
             dent note in a crescendo of intensity lasting 30 seconds in
             which the different shots blot out the photo’s details (Fig. 9).




LUCA ACQUARELLI                      62                                   AN-ICON
                                                              Fig. 8. Ingmar Bergman,
                                                         Persona, 1966. Still from film.




                                                              Fig. 9. Ingmar Bergman,
                                                         Persona, 1966. Still from film.
              A historical document which was already a symbol of Nazi
              violence (but also its unrepresentability), then, breaks into
              the psychological story of Elisabeth and Alma, isolated
              from the world and the rest of humanity, with its docu-
              mentary but also anthropological load: the gestures and
              glances associated with humiliation, the executioners’ and
              victims’ faces and expressions standing out around the
              child’s frightened eyes and his condition as a totally de-
              fenceless victim. Whilst the rightness of this choice might
              be questioned, if this intermedial treatment of the archive
              can more or less “authenticate” the photo itself,14 there is
              no doubt whatsoever that this half-minute in which photo-
              graphic fixity takes over from cinematic movement triggers
              a perceptive reaction. Not only is the spectator suddenly
              projected into traumatic memory of Nazism, but the film’s
              photographic standstill triggers a sort of perceptive shock,
              a dissonance between the flow of diegetic reality and the
              condensation of the photographic gaze and its details.

      14 See P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                              63                              AN-ICON
            Another case of intermediality brings the historical docu-
            mentary archive into the two women’s seemingly discon-
            nected-from-the-world narrative: a televised news extract
            about the Buddhist monk who committed suicide by setting
            himself on fire during the Vietnamese dictatorship supported
            by the American government. In contrast to the photo, this
            TV montage showing the excruciating image of his self-im-
            molating body remains diegetic, in a first shot because it is
            framed by the television set and, in a second one, in which it
            takes up the whole frame, because the television commenta-
            tor’s voice-off preserves the continuity of the film’s temporal
            rhythm. The turmoil in this sequence, both Elisabeth’s who,
            in alternating montage, brings her hand to her mouth and
            cries out in fright, and the viewer’s, who may identify with
            her feelings, is part of the continuity of filmic perception.
            The arrest scene in the photo, on the other hand, seems to
            be charged with excessive otherness, challenging the film’s
            narrative and rhythmic structure.
                          Moreover, the scene following the photograph
            of the Warsaw ghetto marks an acceleration in the ambi-
            guity between reality and hallucination in which Elisabeth’s
            husband visits and mistakes Alma for his wife.
                         The film’s last prolonged fixedness (Fig. 10)
            does not take the form of a photographic support but
            retains the very nature of the film, suggesting a pho-
            tographic standstill, first prefigured by a juxtaposition
            of the two halves of the two women’s respective faces.
            The hallucinatory feel of the exchange of personalities is com-
            plete and could only take the form of a final and more exper-
            imental freeze-frame.




                                                 Fig. 10. Ingmar Bergman, Persona,
                                                                1966. Still from film.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                    64                                      AN-ICON
                                 A cinema made of photographs,
                                 the cine-photo-romance La Jetée

                             These two analyses would seem to support my
               hypothesis that the presence of a photograph in a film –
               especially when it extends to the entire frame, breaking the
               rhythm of the moving image – provokes a visual alterity that
               generates a reality-hallucination ambiguity. It is difficult to
               generalise this hypothesis because each film has its own
               complexity and internal structure but it may, in any case,
               be a valid element of comparison for future analyses. I will
               bring this article to a close with an analysis of a film that
               brings us back to the dream considerations I made at the
               beginning of the article. Although it resembles a film, La
               Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) is, as the director declares in the
               opening credits, a photo-novel.15
                             The film is, in fact, constructed around the
               montage of photographic images only, often juxtaposed
               by means of a cross-fade, creating overlaps. Dream and
               memory interpenetrate in reminiscence: a survivor of the
               Third World War is taken prisoner and subjected to exper-
               iments, using his vivid imagination, to open up time gaps
               with the past and then with the future, in order to obtain the
               technologies needed to reactivate an uninhabitable world
               replete with destruction and radioactivity. This apocalyp-
               tic environment is the background to a psychoanalytical
               dimension of traumatic time. The beginning of the film is
               clear in this sense; the voice over reads: “Ceci est l’histoire
               d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance”; later it will
               be spoken of as a “scène qui le troubla par sa violence”.

      15 It is curious that Barthes, who wrote his text on the photogram and obtuse sense in
      1970 (already quoted extensively at the beginning of this article), does not mention this film,
      especially if we consider a note in his text referring directly to the photo-novel, on popular
      culture magazines: “Here are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story,
      diegesis – namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts’, born
      in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new
      signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic strip but
      I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: ‘their
      stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning)”. R. Barthes,
      Image, Music, Text: 66. If we are dealing here with an entirely different kind of photo-novel
      (surely not touching for its stupidity!), it seems to me that Barthes’ reflections on obtuse sense
      could also apply to La Jétée.

LUCA ACQUARELLI                                  65                                            AN-ICON
              The gap between image and scene explains the problem
              of the difficult figuration of childhood memories. An image
              affecting a child, then probably forgotten and stored away
              in the unconscious then emerging once again in a dream, in
              the film’s narration, in a memory of the past heterodirected
              by the executioners’ experiments.
                           The key to the heterogeneity of the traumatic
              time grafted onto the images is once again present in the
              words recited by the voice-off:

Rien ne distinguent le souvenir des autres moments. Ce n’est que
plus tard qui se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices. Ce visage [Fig.
11] qui devait être la seule image du temps de paix à traverser le
temps de guerre. Il se demanda longtemps s’il l’avait vraiment vu
ou s’il avait créé ce moment de douceur pour étayer le moment
de folie qu’allait venir.




                                          Fig. 11. Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. Still from film
                           Memory becomes image only après-coup,
              re-signifying certain moments, reabsorbing them around
              images. The La Jétée images indeed seem to have this pa-
              tina of après-coup re-signification. The sharpness of their
              black and white with vivid contrasts is only opacified by
              cross-fade transitions. In any case, even in their transpar-
              ency, all the images seem to be inhabited by this traumat-
              ic time, somewhere between memory, dream and hallu-
              cination. A very brief moving sequence suddenly breaks
LUCA ACQUARELLI                          66                                          AN-ICON
             into the montage of still images when, in the intimacy
             of her bed, the woman in the memory wakes up, opens
             her eyes and directs her gaze into the camera (Fig. 12).




                                                             Fig. 12. Chris Marker,
                                                      La Jetée, 1962. Still from film
             It is a sudden enunciative change that seems designed to
             awaken us from the torpor induced by this story told through
             salient points, fixed images where the forces of the image in
             movement converge, as if absorbed, in an oneiric iconology
             that barely opens up a gap in traumatic time.
                          This douceur scene, immersed in a distant child-
             hood memory in the context of the children taken onto the jetée
             at Orly airport to watch the planes take off, is none other than
             the image preceding the trauma: the child who, on the jetée,
             sees the murder of his adult self, having been followed through
             time by one of his executioners to kill him (Figg. 13 and 14).




                                                             Fig. 13. Chris Marker,
                                                      La Jetée, 1962. Still from film




                                                             Fig. 14. Chris Marker,
                                                      La Jetée, 1962. Still from film

LUCA ACQUARELLI                      67                                   AN-ICON
                          While it is clear that the La Jetée theme lends
             itself to a hallucination rhetoric, it seems to me that the
             decision to use still images may make this film an extreme
             case corroborating this article’s thesis.

                         Conclusions

                         This short paper suggests that the boundary be-
            tween the transparency of the reality effect and the opacity
            of hallucination is labile and porous. We have seen that cin-
            ema, which immobilises 24-frames-per-second movement
            in favour of the fixed image, is one of the artistic strategies
            that seem to bring in the complexity of this boundary and
            this dialectic. As we have seen, this hypothesis is difficult
            to generalise, but it seems to me that it deserves further
            study in the broader field of intermediality and its effects.
            The three case studies analysed here bring in some addi-
            tional elements, differentiating in particular cases in which
            photos are inserted into the film’s diegesis (in Blow Up in
            the various scenes in Thomas’s studio, in Persona with
            the photo of the child but also, in a certain way, with the
            large portraits of the two women) and when they replace
            the film’s diegesis itself. The latter seem to highlight the
            hallucinatory power of the still image in cinema with greater
            intensity.




LUCA ACQUARELLI                    68                              AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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