Out of Frame

Abstract

No, no, I am but shadow of myself:

You are deceived, my substance is not here;

For what you see is but the smallest part

And least proportion of humanity:

I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here,

It is of such a spacious lofty pitch,

Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t.

(Shakespeare 2.3.52–58)

Framing occurs but there is no frame.

(Derrida, qtd. in MacLachlan and Reid 6)

Notes

1. Benjamin’s archives, his editors comment, “reveal the passions of a collector. The remains heaped up in them are reserve funds, . . . crucial to life” (2).

2. See, for example, comments recorded on the back cover of Ellmann: “Here is the definitive work, and I hope it will become a model for future scholarly biographies” (Dwight Macdonald, The New Yorker); “A biography that we are justified on every count in regarding as definitive” (Stuart Gilbert, Saturday Review of Literature); and “A truly masterly biography, wise in its completeness” (Cyril Connolly, The Sunday Times [London]).

3. Trinh, as a filmmaker, was deeply interested in “framing” and its political power. In Framer Framed, she reports on her conversation with Leslie Thornton, who makes the comment: “I think work that stretches the form is often hybrid in genre, crossing the traditional categories of narrative, documentary, and experimental film. My own interest is in the outer edge of narrative, where we are at the beginning of something else” (244).

4. Barthes’s explanation of the relationship between captions, or written text of any kind, and the photographs they accompany is relevant here and for the other essays in this special issue where there is interplay between text and image: “the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text—title, caption or article . . . the analysis must first of all bear on each separate structure; it is only when the study of each structure has been exhausted that it will be possible to understand the manner in which they complement each other” (16).