PICTURES AS A REMINDER OF OUR LIFE

Essay: pictures inside cinematical universe

Cinema is the art and the business of making movies. This two traits are

intrinsic and inseparable. Louis Delluc determined the artistic part as photogénie.

Jean Epstein defines it as “any aspect of things, beings or souls whose moral

character is enhanced by filmic reproduction”. Otherwise, “any aspect not

enhanced by the reproduction is not photogenic, as it plays no part in the art of

cinema“ (1981:21). For him, photogénie must be understood as the purest

expression of cinema.

In cinematic language, a closeup of an object elevates it to the status of character in the drama, as it is showing its importance to the narrative story. To give these objects the sense of life, we must see them on the screen being mysterious about their unanimated life. About this, Epstein says that “personality is the hereditary made evident, the past becoming unforgettable” (1981:22), and nothing is more evident and unforgettable than pictures.

This essay is going to explore the objects and the way they behave on a film

depending on the context it was filmed and the context of the audience who

watches it. The object, depending on its context (space and time) and the person that owns it, has different signified and signifier for the characters of the diegetical world and for the audience that is watching. In order to know if our hypothesis is true, we’re going to focus on the appearance of photographies in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1927) and Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000).

For this analysis we are going to focus on a scene of the early film and the plot of the most recent one. For the example of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1927), we are taking the “Picture Store” scene, the only scene these objects appear, which goes from 00:53:39, to 00:58:34 on the link below. And for Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), we will take a general view of the whole film, as pictures play an important part of it. On the scene of 1927, we can see the couple getting excited by taking a picture together (Figure 1). That is because on the time this ilm was shot, having a picture of yourself was really rear. Not everyone could afford taking a picture and if they did, they had to go to a specific store, which weren’t that common. Their pictures are all prepared (Figure 2, 4, 5), with a decorate behind them (Figure 3). Before doing the picture, they’ve went to a hairdresser and barber to fix their look: this picture is something important to them because it’s not a thing they’re able to do everyday. Furthermore, these kind of picture are prepared because they all want it to be good as it is a one try shot: if it comes to be wrong or moved, it has to be done again from the beginning (Figure 6).

The pictures are a memory of joy and freedom of a specific moment of love between the two main characters. It’s been danger and tension, but the pictures reveal the love and the safety of that moment (Figure 7). Epstein says that “the photogenic aspect of an object is a consequence of its variation in space and time” (1981:21). Then, we can understand photogenic mobility as a mobility in a space-time system. On this example, the photogenic aspect of the picture itself is the time passing trough it. On the moment they take the picture, they can see it as a time freezer, because they will grow old every minute and they will change space too, but that very moment, in that very place will remain forever on the picture (Figure 8). “In addition to relief in space, the cinema offers a relief in time” (1981:21) and that is how we do it nowadays. We preserve that idea of having stored moments forever, the difference is that now, we add real time to the space spectrum. We make videos, mini films, about the moments we want to preserve to have them in space and time. However, with the pictures that the man and his wife have taken (Figure 8), time freezes anyway and everything becomes a memory of space, with a time that will always be past.

On this film, the pictures are just a complement and mostly anecdotic for the film plot as a whole. If we took away this scene and the pictures didn’t appear on it, it will still have sense. It is not a narrative object for the film. The characters behave themselves just like people from the time where the film was filmed: the pictures are some kind of accessory to the screen. This is because it is early film time and the camera and the act of filming or capturing was something that people had interest on. Here, pictures are revealing and preserving the joy of the moment. Everything they are living is something that they want to keep in time, as a reminder of reconciliation, so they take a picture, even though the picture has no meaning for the narrative.

The signifier of the picture, of course, is the image itself, but the signified for the couple, is being able to preserve those memories in time, and that’s how the audience feels it too, now and then.

On the other hand, if we take a close look to Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000),everything changes.

Epstein says that cinema, such as other arts have done during the pass of time, must seek to become cinematic, employing only photogenic elements. Of course, Nolan’s film is not only into photogénie, it is part of the industry and has been created with the goal of receiving profits. Anyway, this most recent film is a really good example of how cinema uses its own cinematic language to create a narrative story. For him, “cinema composed without taking the temporal perspective into account is not cinematic” (1981:22). Memento's montage is used not just to create a connection between the scenes, but also to create confusion to the viewer as every scene has been edited back forwards. Epstein says that “a new reality is revealed, a reality for a special occasion, which is untrue to everyday reality, just as everyday reality is untrue to the heightened awareness of poetry” (1981:23). For me, everything that involves Memento’s narrative is poetry, because Nolan is creating his own world and, furthermore, he is creating his own narrative language. To understand this language and the world that the author is proposing, the audience has to dive into the film’s mind-game, the game that Leonard has dragged himself (Figure 9). In this world of cinema, that shows everything just as we can imagine, “time hurries on or retreats itself, or even stops and waits for you” (1981:23).

On this film, the signifier is again the images themselves, as a piece of paper that’s been printed by light. On the other hand, here the signified of the pictures is totally unexpected. That is because Leonard (the protagonist) suffers amnesia. He uses the camera to record things immediately and writes down on the polaroid everything which will be necessary to remember things, people ,objects or to make an imaginary map of the events. For example, he has a polaroid of his car with a note “this is your car”, a picture of a man named Teddy who says “don’t believe his lies” (Figure 10). Photos are a representation of the immediate reality, as something physical he can carry to recreate and remember things that had happened recently so he won’t be fooled. It is an object that transports in space and time other realities from the past. So here, the pictures are used as a tool to remember.

As Epstein says, the photogénie of an object is the author’s duty: the director puts on it his own personality, ideas, soul and poetry. Here, we can appreciate how Nolan has put every detail on course with the pictures. They are a narrative tool that he will use against us all the time: he’s fooling us with the pictures (or making Leonard to do it). By the end of the film, we know that nothing has happened as we have been told during the whole narration: it is not people who has been messing up with Leonard’s head, but himself. He has been writing false statements on his pictures to go on with his own fantasy: having a purpose on life after his wife’s death. So here, the signified of the pictures is everything that Leonard and the audience imagine by making a mental scheme of the proves to try to solve the mystery. Then we can see that these pictures (just like his tattoos) are actually telling the story we’re seeing, and not the narrator (personified in Leonard) that is tricking us.

As far as I am concerned, after this research we can see that an object can

have different personalities depending on the context it’s presented and the

narrative that holds its dramatic life. Being from different time periods affects to

how we perceive the objects on screen. This is because pictures have had an

evolution in time and the way we have introduced them in our everyday life makes

us behave with them in a different way than people from the 1920’s. This evolution

has culminated with the mobility of stills: gifs, videos and burst of pictures that add

the dimension of time to our memories in space.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Epstein, Jean (1981): “On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie” in “Bonjour Cinéma and other writings by Jean Epstein”. Afterimage, 10 (Autumn)

Cambridge University Press (2019) Cambridge Dictionary (source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cinema )

FILMOGRAPHY:

Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm (1927): “Sunrise: A Song of Two

Humans” FOX Film Corporation (available on: https://youtu.be/6NayFytQeBE )

Nolan, Christopher (2000): “Memento”, Newmarket Films