Against Fetishism: The Moving Quiescence of Life 24 Frames a Second

Film images move. Whether structured by fictional or documentary narrative, film images move in sequences that we follow unaware of the filmstrip of separate stills underpinning this movement. Some avant-garde film, especially its materialiststructuralist modes, attempted to expose the mechanisms of cinema, drawing attention to the photographic still that filmic continuity occludes. Avant-garde filmmakers inserted de-mystificatory breaks into this continuity, which was equated with narrative and illusion, by means of disjunctive strategies and techniques: the use of scratching, inserting text, exposing the filmstrip's sprockets, and experimenting with optical printing. When Laura Mulvey wrote her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), as well as co-directing, with Peter Wollen, films such as Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), very clear cut boundaries existed between narrative cinema and avant-garde cinema. A whole gamut of oppositions such as that between movement and stasis, narrative and non-narrative, illusion and materialism were operative. In the current era of digital technology, these oppositions are becoming less distinct, giving rise instead to dialectical uncertainties that oscillate between them. This is the premise of Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Due to digital disruption of linearity, either in editing processes or viewing practices such as watching a home movie on DVD, a cinema of stilled moments can be