Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography

In Still Moving noted artists, filmmakers, art historians, and film scholars explore the boundary between cinema and photography. The interconnectedness of the two media has emerged as a critical concern for scholars in the field of cinema studies responding to new media technologies, and for those in the field of art history confronting the ubiquity of film, video, and the projected image in contemporary art practice. Engaging still, moving, and ambiguous images from a wide range of geographical spaces and historical moments, the contributors to this volume address issues of indexicality, medium specificity, and hybridity as they examine how cinema and photography have developed and defined themselves through and against one another.

Foregrounding the productive tension between stasis and motion, two terms inherent to cinema and to photography, the contributors trace the shifting contours of the encounter between still and moving images across the realms of narrative and avant-garde film, photography, and installation art. Still Moving suggests that art historians and film scholars must rethink their disciplinary objects and boundaries, and that the question of medium specificity is a necessarily interdisciplinary question. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors take up that challenge, offering new ways to think about what contemporary visual practice is and what it will become.

Contributors: George Baker, Rebecca Baron, Karen Beckman, Raymond Bellour, Zoe Beloff, Timothy Corrigan, Nancy Davenport, Atom Egoyan, Rita Gonzalez, Tom Gunning, Louis Kaplan,
Jean Ma, Janet Sarbanes, Juan A. Su rez

Author: Karen Redrobe Beckman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 09/17/2008
Pages: 324
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780822341550

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2009

About the Author

Karen Beckman is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Film Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, also published by Duke University Press.

Jean Ma is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.