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Abstract
This essay puts forward a case for the importance of engaging with cinematography’s photogrammes. Originally published in French in Cahiers du cinéma in 1971, it responds to Roland Barthes’s now famous essay “The Third Meaning” that had appeared in the same journal some months earlier and, again, uses Sergei Eisenstein as a case study.
Notes
1. For discussion of the specific debates arising around promotional film photography, see: Steven Jacobs, “The History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still,” History of Photography 34, no. 4 (2010): 373–86. This essay reappears in a slightly revised form, contributing to a compelling wider debate, as “Tableaux Vivants 2: Film Stills and Contemporary Photography,” in idem, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 121–148.
2. Sylvie Pierre Ulmann’s recollections are taken from email correspondence with me (January 2016).
3. There is an illuminating email exchange between Sylvie Pierre Ulmann and Bill Krohn published as “Interview with Sylvie Pierre,” Senses of Cinema 23 (2002), 〈http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/pierre/ accessed 17 January 2015.
1. The word “photogramme” is used in two senses, designating: an individual image on the filmstrip; and the photographic reproduction of that image (by various means: either directly from the filmstrip or a photograph of a projection). In this second sense, the term “photogramme” is, of course, an abuse of language. Strictly speaking, we should refer to a “photographic reproduction of a photogramme.”
2. Editor's note: Here, the author introduces the important notion of the photogrammatic letter of the film text. When encountering subsequent references to the “letter of the film” and the “film text,” the reader should bear this specific formulation in mind. Invoking the photogrammatic letter of the film text speaks to a sense of cinematographic specificity—in contrast, here, to that of (still) photography—while, nevertheless, inviting us to grasp this specificity in linguistic terms; suggesting that we recognize cinematographic photogrammes as comparable, loosely speaking, with graphemes.
3. The current practice of non-illustration in a periodical such as Cinéthique can also be regarded as an invitation to reflect on the issue. However, in no way does this practice count as (even the beginnings of) a theorization of this matter.
4. With the exception of those described as “shoot” or “work” photographs—a corpus about which there would be a great deal to say concerning the ideological implications to which their use gives rise (technicist myths or myths concerning the artist at work).
5. Let us make clear for the sake of our more sensitive readers that this is an observation, not an insult.
6. To whose every excess we lay claim, at the risk of shocking a number of connoisseurs.
7. Editor’s note: This is evidently a reference to Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” found in The Republic.
8. There are a number of reasons for the well-known, observable “imperfection” of photogrammes compared with photographs (see the illustrations accompanying the text on “Morocco” in Cahiers du cinéma 225): the photogrammatic image bears all the traces of the material state and varying quality of a given copy of a film—it can become marked (tachée), scratched (rayée), etc.; the exposed area is smaller on the [cinematographic] filmstrip than on the photographic filmstrip, hence a greater loss of sharpness in the reproduction of a photogramme, compared with a photograph, when it is enlarged for print; and because the exposure time of each photogramme is determined by the constant speed of the spooling [défilement] of the filmstrip within the camera, it cannot be adjusted to the speed of movement of the subject, as it can with photographic cameras—this means that in the case of very fast movements by the filmed subject, each photogrammatic image makes for a blurred, shaky photograph when reproduced individually.
9. A violence of which Roland Barthes himself does not seem to have been sufficiently wary in his essay “Le troisième sens” (Cahiers du cinéma 222), where he accords the photogramme equal status with promotional photographs. Today, the latter are virtually never derived from actual photogrammes, other than in the case of very old films of which there are no longer any usable photographs in existence. Editor’s note: Barthes’s essay is translated as “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills,” in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 52–68.
10. Hence its immense archival interest.
11. It is this role that the film distributor tries to make the critic play by “offering” him film photographs in anticipated exchange for a certain amount of publicity work in which these photographs will play a part.
12. Because the production still is also a text in which the analogies with the filmic text are significant enough for it to be used, in many cases, as a way of referring to the latter.
13. It is even very easy to imagine a new form of cine-photolatry in which the photogramme could play a part, involving the fetishistic possession of a piece of a film. One would have to willingly give up the precision and sharpness of photography in advantageous exchange for the “vivacity” [vives] of photogrammatic blur. Naturally it would not be an increase in the metaphysical valorization of the text, of the filmic body that we would want to introduce through the photogramme.
14. Which explains why it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish an average-quality photograph from a “good” photogramme.
15. “A dictionary would start at that point where it indicated not the meaning, but the task of words. Thus formless is not merely an adjective with such and such a meaning, but a term that serves to declassify [déclasser] things, demanding in general that each thing have a form. That which it designates has in no sense any rights and all around is crushed like a spider or an earthworm.” Georges Bataille, Documents. Œuvres Complètes, vol. 1, 217.
16. Editor’s note: The author’s use of “image” here is ambiguous; she may have in mind a film “shot,” comprising, as it does, a series of photogrammes. Indeed, this ambiguity runs throughout the essay. That said, by the end, the author will have elucidated its components and conditions.
17. Editor’s note: Here, the author is making a direct, implicit juxtaposition between form and formless that refers back to the Bataille quotation in note 15.
18. To adopt the terminology used by Barthes—the first meaning, the informational; and the second meaning, that of signification. Also that, without the establishment of these two meanings, it is doubtful whether a third (obtuse) meaning could emerge. Editor’s note: Again (see note 16), the author’s use of “image” is ambiguous and suggests she has in mind the “shot.”
19. The illegible photogramme, while statistically important in the body of the filmic text, is, we note again, always the reject of the photographic library because it is only ever reproduced by accident, because it does not support any argument or reading, because no one wants it. (See Cahiers du cinéma 225: 13: the photogramme on the top left is supposed to show Marlene Dietrich breaking her necklace in Morocco—it is unsuccessful, nothing can be seen, the pearls have become small sticks of light.)
20. See Jay Leyda, ”Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow,” Sight and Sound 28, no. 2 (Spring 1959): 74–7.
21. See the essay by Jay Leyda in the same issue: “Sur Le Pré de Béjine,” Cahiers du cinéma 226–7 (January–February 1971): 95–102.
22. Cahiers du cinéma 210 (1970).
23. See Cahiers du cinéma 210: 13: the shot-by-shot analysis, based on one photogramme per shot, of the fragment of a scene from Battleship Potemkin.
24. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage in 1938,” in Notes of a Film Director (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1958).
25. Cahiers du cinéma 219.
26. Eisenstein occasionally analyzes the temporal articulations of artistic effects in arts that are reputedly immobile, such as painting. See his famous analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s text “How to Paint the Flood” in Eisenstein, “Montage in 1938.”
27. Cahiers du cinéma 215 (1969).
28. Cahiers du cinéma 210 (1969).
29. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Organic Unity and Pathos in the Composition of Potemkin,” in Notes of a Film Director.
30. Eisenstein, “Montage in 1938.”
31. Ibid.
32. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (the Little Logic) [1830].
33. Engels, Dialectics of Nature [1883].
34. Cahiers du cinéma 215.
35. Cahiers du cinéma 215, from a text significantly titled “Hors-cadre” (“Out of frame”).
36. Cahiers du cinéma 218 (1970).
37. My emphases.
38. Translator’s note: Typage: “The term used by […] Eisenstein in reference to his use of non-professional performers in his films who fit certain human types easily identified by the audience, a practice he traces back to the theater (see his essay ‘Through Theater to Cinema’ in Film Form).” Ira Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary, second edition (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997).
39. Cahiers du cinéma 215.
40. Cahiers du cinéma 225.
41. Professional or not, this is not the issue. Just as Eisenstein sometimes employed professional actors as “typage” types in his silent films, and even in his talking pictures, he occasionally employed non-professionals as proper actors (for example, the child in Bezhin Meadow).
42. Sergei Eisenstein, “Organic Unity and Pathos in the Composition of Potemkin,” in Notes of a Film Director.
43. Editor’s note: In the original publication, a non-existent footnote (38) is given here. Assuming this is an obvious typographical error, the reference is either: if 18, Cahiers du cinéma 210; or if 28, Cahiers du cinéma 218.
44. Eisenstein, “Montage in 1938.”