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The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?

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The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?

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What is it about stories, anyway?

Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is central to human existence. That it's common to every known culture. That it involves a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener -- an exchange we learn to negotiate in infancy.

Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature -- a face, a figure, a flower -- and in sound, so too it detects patterns in information. Stories are recognizable patterns, and in those patterns we find meaning. We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. They are the signal within the noise.

So powerful is our impulse to detect story patterns that we see them even when they're not there.

In a landmark 1944 study, 34 humans -- Massachusetts college students actually, though subsequent research suggests they could have been just about anyone -- were shown a short film and asked what was happening in it. The film showed two triangles and a circle moving across a two-dimensional surface. The only other object onscreen was a stationary rectangle, partially open on one side.

Only one of the test subjects saw this scene for what it was: geometric shapes moving across a plane. Everyone else came up with elaborate narratives to explain what the movements were about. Typically, the participants viewed the triangles as two men fighting and the circle as a woman trying to escape the bigger, bullying triangle. Instead of registering inanimate shapes, they imagined humans with vivid inner lives. The circle was "worried." The circle and the little triangle were "innocent young things." The big triangle was "blinded by rage and frustration."

But if stories themselves are universal, the way we tell them changes with the technology at hand. Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative. In Europe, the invention of the printing press and movable type around 1450 led to the emergence of periodicals and the novel. The invention of the motion picture camera around 1890 set off an era of feverish experimentation that led to the development of feature films by 1910. Television, invented around 1925, gave rise a quarter-century later to I Love Lucy and the highly stylized form of comedy that became known as the sitcom.

As each of these media achieved production and distribution on an industrial scale, we saw the emergence of 20th-century mass media: newspapers, magazines, movies, music, TV. And with that, there was no role left for the consumer except to consume.

Then, just as we'd gotten used to consuming sequential narratives in a carefully prescribed, point-by-point fashion, came the internet. The internet is the first medium that can act like all media -- it can be text, or audio or video, or all of the above. It's nonlinear, thanks to the world wide web and the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking. It's inherently participatory -- not just interactive, in the sense that it responds to your commands, but an instigator constantly encouraging you to comment, to contribute, to join in.

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The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?

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What is it about stories, anyway? Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is central to human existence. That it's common to every known culture. That it involves a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener - an exchange we learn to negotiate in infancy. Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature - [...]

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Garry Winogrand - A Street Photographer’s Street Photographer.

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Read about the fascinating history and photography of Garry Winogrand, one of the most prolific street photographers of the 20th Century.

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The Heider-Simmel experiment as an illustration of the story paradox.

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The Heider-Simmel experiment as an illustration of the story paradox.

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In 1944, the psychologist Fritz Heider and his research assistant Marianne Simmel produced a very short, very crude animated film. They cut geometrical figures out of cardboard and moved them around on transparent glass in the technique of stop-motion animation. The resulting silent film shows a small triangle, a big triangle, and a small circle moving busily around a rectangle. One side of the rectangle flaps open and closed, and sometimes the geometrical figures slide inside. At the end of the film, the small circle and the small triangle disappear offscreen, and the big triangle butts against the big rectangle until it breaks. Heider and Simmel showed the film to 114 research participants, who were simply asked to describe what they saw. (Before reading further, please take 90 seconds to watch the Heider-Simmel film on YouTube.)

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Things Are Queer – Queer Cultural Center

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The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

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The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

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Satrapi

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Official website of infamous UK illustrator, anti-socialite and pug lady Gemma Correll. Pugs not drugs. Cattitude.

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Nobrow Press - High Times: A History of Aviation

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Nobrow Press - High Times: A History of Aviation

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The first book from Berlin illustration dynamic duo Golden Cosmos and their maiden book collaboration with Nobrow Press.

This beautiful Leporello book folds out to a stunning 139cm panorama detailing the history and mythology of flight, from the legendary attempts of Icarus, to the revolutionary innovations of the Jet Age! The wrap-around cover provides educational entries for each panel, detailing notable benchmarks in the history of aviation.

A fantastic educational tool and a great work of art, Nobrow's best-selling Leporello series is an ideal gift for people of all ages! A beautiful concertina book that can be read as a book, displayed on a mantlepiece, or even framed as a print.

Golden Cosmos was set up in 2010 as a collborative moniker for German artistic couple Daniel Doltz and Doris Freigofas. Their deep knowledge of traditional printmaking techniques and experiences in self publishing that have won them widespread critical acclaim in illustration circles made them the perfect choice for our trademark concertina series. Their bold use of colour and adeptness for shape and form recall the bold patterns and geometry of early Russian constructivism, with a nod to mid century French commercial art. Whilst the book itself can be read, displayed or framed, the new wraparound cover allows us at Nobrow to add an educational element to the series, with entries for each panel of the concertina detailing the notable benchmarks in the history and mythology of aviation.

Praise for the first of our concertina series Rise and Fall:

"A beautifully crafted, exquisitely detailed, illustrated concertina book that's just as good decorating you wall as it is to flip through, and just as good for kids as it is for young at heart grown ups."

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Nobrow Press - High Times: A History of Aviation

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The first book from Berlin illustration dynamic duo Golden Cosmos and their maiden book collaboration with Nobrow Press. This beautiful Leporello book folds out to a stunning 139cm panorama detailing the history and mythology of flight, from the legendary attempts of Icarus, to the revolutionary innovations of the Jet Age!

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Jean-Luc Godard obituary: a filmmaker of seismic impact and influence

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Godard, who has died aged 91, was the legendary French New Wave director who dared film culture to keep up with his dazzling, era-defining reinventions of the medium.

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The French-Swiss auteur has died at the age of 91. One of the prime movers of the 1960s French Nouvelle Vague, here we look back at his life and career

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From the perspective of the twenty-first century, which gives us constant access to everything everywhere, it's hard to imagine (or more accurately recall, for those of us old enough) the impact that the domestic videotape player-the VCR-had on how we viewed films: not only what we could watch, but how and when we could watch it, was utterly changed. The technology became affordable in the mid-'70s and commonplace in the '80s; today it is obsolete. Before its introduction, films were viewed either in the cinema or when broadcast on network TV channels-of which, when Douglas Gordon and I were growing up in the United Kingdom, there were exactly four. As well as introducing the ability to watch films of your own choosing (imagine!) at home, the VCR also of course opened up the ability to control how you watched it; sections could be fast-forwarded, paused-creating the delightful possibility of still images-or even played back in slow motion.

Douglas's 24 Hour Psycho, made in 1993 and first shown at Tramway in Glasgow, was his first work to use this newfound ability, which he deployed to slow down a single film so that it lasts a full day. The work opens up unseen and unknowable space in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), with previously unremarked details appearing as stills (the film's extreme protraction meaning that each frame appears on-screen for half a second, where the normal projection speed is twenty-four frames a second). Widespread public knowledge of the film-whether through actually having seen it or not-means that no one need watch it to find out what happens, so the viewing becomes inextricably connected to memory, be it accurate or fallible. As legendary as Psycho is, this transformation plays with our memory and shifts the atmosphere from tense drama to a kind of anxious languor, while still laying bare the irresistible drive to build narrative from the simple succession of images in time.

24 Hour Psycho was certainly an audacious move, and thousands of words have been written about it since. I hardly need add more here, but its genes are in many works that followed while its own significance has only grown. My first encounter with it-projected on a single large screen suspended in the huge space that is Tramway-has certainly proved an indelible memory. It is often talked about as sculpture, and the experience was undoubtedly spatial, but also intensely visual: there is, of course, no sound in the work, though several people seem to recall hearing it-an apt trick of memory, perhaps. 24 Hour Psycho allows the viewer to relish Hitchcock's exquisitely crafted compositions, and the glorious contrasts among the film's blacks and whites and silvery grays.

The group of Douglas's works that followed in 1994 and '95, including Hysterical and 10ms-1, applied a similar technique to historical documentary footage. I first saw both of these works on a small domestic television set hooked up to a cheap VCR in the Glasgow flat that Douglas and I shared for a number of years in the early '90s. The slow-motion approach would be stretched to the extreme in 1995 when Douglas developed 5 Year Drive-By, which draws out John Ford's legendary 1956 Western The Searchers to match the duration of the search referenced in the film's story. It sets up a real-time experience, then, of the time frame the film depicts. The Searchers stars John Wayne as an American Civil War veteran on a tortuous epic search for his abducted niece, played by Natalie Wood. It is one of the first films Douglas recalls watching, at home with his parents as a child; for some reason that remains unknown to me, there were always Westerns on television at the time, especially on seemingly interminable Sunday afternoons. (And, as Geoff Dyer has written of growing up in the 1970s, "Bear in mind how huge afternoons were back then.") Douglas recalls being perplexed by the film:

How can one film, which lasts only 2 hours, possibly convey the fear, the desperation, the heartache, the real "searching and waiting and hoping" that my father had tried to explain to me when I was younger?

How can anyone even try to sum up 5 miserable years in only 113 minutes?

His version therefore serves as a tribute to the heroic nature of the quest and the suffering of Wayne's character. In this instance, one second of cinema time equates to 6.46 hours in real time, or an incredible three frames per hour, meaning that even the most dedicated of viewers is unlikely to ever see more than a few seconds of the original film. It is interminable. Just like a Sunday afternoon at home in the 1970s.

Described by Douglas as "something of a companion piece to 24 Hour Psycho," 5 Year Drive-By was first shown in part at the Biennale de Lyon of 1995, when it marked a century of cinema. It ran for three months, just a twentieth of its intended duration. It was to find perhaps its most perfect iteration in 2001, when it was shown outdoors in the desert at Twentynine Palms in California, set against the expanse of the arid sun-drenched landscape in which so much of Ford's film unfolds.

The renown of 24 Hour Psycho has made it a substantial part of Douglas's biography-shown all over the world, it is regularly cited as a key work of the 1990s. His own history has been a regular thread in his work, through narrative texts, exhibition titles (such as What have I done, at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2002), and the revisiting of his back catalogue in Pretty much every film and video work from 1992 until now . . . (1999- ), an ongoing compendium work that also saw a return to the TV-format presentation: the videotapes for eighty-two works, with new works continually added, are played on VCRs and on over 100 monitors (or CRTs), like a personal archive or memory bank.

24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro (2008) tackles that first work head on, representing it alongside a divergent twin. The new version, shown for the first time at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2008 and at Tramway in 2010-site of 24 Hour Psycho 's original coming to life-takes the form of two identical screens installed side by side, with Douglas's film playing in full on each: forward on one, backward on the other, with one flipped left to right such that-at exactly twelve hours in-they present the same images, mirrored, in a kind of exquisite, time-limited film version of a Rorschach inkblot test. More recently at Gagosian in New York, the screens were set perpendicular to one another so that one screen dissected the other a third of the way along it, creating two separate pairings of images. These formats generate some entirely unforeseeable but remarkable juxtapositions, and the tension is intense: what has happened before will also happen in the future, and, of course, vice versa.

The two-screen, mirroring format is familiar from several earlier works of Douglas's, including Hysterical. His practice has often involved ideas of repetition, inversion, mirroring, doubling, and duality, in what the curator Nancy Spector has called his "perpetual play of opposites." These are, of course, works made from a position of love: a love of film and a vivid awareness of what Douglas has called the social aspect of watching a film, memories of first viewings and the subjectivity of how we remember them. It's a love that may twist itself into an obsession, into extreme viewing, but nonetheless allows the objects of his affection to endure, on an imposing scale and with a physical presence that mirrors the scale of their impact on our culture and imaginations.

1Geoff Dyer, "On Being an Only Child," 2008, in Dyer, Working the Room: Essays and Reviews, 1999-2010 (Edinburgh and London: Canongate, 2010, reprint ed. 2015), p. 311.

2Douglas Gordon, "5 year drive-by; proposal for a public artwork," copy of fax sent by the artist in 1997 and reproduced in Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealized Projects, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1997).

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Katrina Brown discusses the importance of Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and some of the films that followed, touching on threads that run throughout the artist's career.

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"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them," Emerson wrote in contemplating the key to personal growth. Hardly anything does this for us more powerfully than art - it unsettles us awake, disrupts our deadening routines, enlarges our reservoir of hope by enlarging our perspective, our grasp of truth, our capacity for beauty.

This singular function of art is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929-January 22, 2018) reflects on in an interview by the polymathic marine conservationist Jonathan White, included in his wonderful Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity (public library).

In a roaming conversation over tea, "with only momentary interruptions by Lorenzo the cat or chimes from the grandfather clock," Le Guin tells White:

The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We're drawn in - or out - and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we're around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.

Art, Le Guin suggests a century after Kandinsky extolled its spiritual element and a decade after Susan Sontag considered its ethical responsibility, restores to secular culture the sense of sacredness and moral purpose:

Our culture doesn't think storytelling is sacred; we don't set aside a time of year for it. We don't hold anything sacred except what organized religion declares to be so. Artists pursue a sacred call, although some would buck and rear at having their work labeled like this. Artists are lucky to have a form in which to express themselves; there is a sacredness about that, and a terrific sense of responsibility. We've got to do it right. Why do we have to do it right? Because that's the whole point: either it's right or it's all wrong.

In a sentiment reminiscent of Albert Camus's reflection on the lacuna between truth and meaning, Le Guin - who spent the last sixty-five years of her life married to a historian - considers the lacuna between the events of the past and their selective retelling in what we call history:

History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has preempted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can't reach it with words. History is not a science, it's an art.

The paradox, of course, is that because our notion of history is rooted in the written record, words are both our instrument of truth and our weapon of distortion. We use them both to reveal and to conceal - a duality which Hannah Arendt so memorably dissected in her meditation on lying in politics. Le Guin - who has written beautifully about the transformational potential of words - echoes Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the power and responsibility of language, and reflects on the challenging task of those who limn reality in words:

As a writer, you want the language to be genuinely significant and mean exactly what it says. That's why the language of politicians, which is empty of everything but rather brutal signals, is something a writer has to get as far away from as possible. If you believe that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

With a concerned eye to how our metaphors shape our thinking, Le Guin adds:

We can't restructure our society without restructuring the English language. One reflects the other. A lot of people are getting tired of the huge pool of metaphors that have to do with war and conflict [and] the proliferation of battle metaphors, such as being a warrior, righting, defeating, and so on. In response, I could say that once you become conscious of these battle metaphors, you can start "fighting" against them. That's one option. Another is to realize that conflict is not the only human response to a situation and to begin to find other metaphors, such as resisting, outwitting, skipping, or subverting. This kind of consciousness can open the door to all sorts of new behavior.

What literature does, Le Guin points out, is enlarge our understanding of our own experience by enriching its container in language:

One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist's job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It's one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, 'Yeah, that's it. That's how I feel.'

In a sentiment evocative of James Baldwin's assertion that "an artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian [whose] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are," she adds:

Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want, too. If we never find our experience described in poetry or stories, we assume that our experience is insignificant.

Complement this particular portion of the splendid Talking on the Water with Le Guin's immortal wisdom on the artist's task, growing older, storytelling as an instrument of freedom, her feminist translation of the Tao Te Ching, and her classic unsexing of gender.

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Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem

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"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them," Emerson wrote in contemplating the key to personal growth. Hardly anything does this for us more powerfully than art - it unsettles us awake, disrupts our deadening routines, enlarges our reservoir of hope by enlarging our perspective, our grasp of truth, our capacity for beauty.

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Storytelling is as old as culture. Many societies have long-established storytelling traditions. The stories, and performances thereof, function to entertain as well as educate.

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Odessa Steps Sequence in "Battleship Potemkin" credited as an early example of "montage editing" in cinema

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Odessa Steps Sequence in "Battleship Potemkin" credited as an early example of "montage editing" in cinema

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In this essay I will analyse a section of the famed Odessa steps sequence from the film Battleship Potemkin (USSR 1925: Sergei Eisenstein), which appears half way through the scene and begins at the time code reference 0:53:20. I will also be discussing the historical context of the film and how this relates both to the scene and the film as a whole.

Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein in 1925, the film was intended to be an experiment in the use of montage to evoke emotional responses from the audience, for the purpose of propaganda. Promoting the socialist ideals of the current Bolshevik government of the time, Eisenstein uses the relatively new medium of moving pictures, as a vehicle for political expression rather than a source of entertainment.
In October 1917, Russia was subject to a communist revolution led by Vladimir Lenin which culminated in the storming of the winter palace in St. Petersburg.

This was itself the subject of another of Eisenstein's films; (USSR 1927) which celebrated the tenth anniversary of the communist uprising. Lenin was influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and this formed his belief that Russia should be subject to a new socialist governing body, as apposed to the Tsarist dictatorship which had dominated the country's history. The film begins with a quote from Lenin and immediately sets the tone of revolution and the struggle against tyranny and oppression of the Tsarist regime.

The ensuing civil war between the Bolsheviks and the loyal Tsarists resulted in defeat for the White army and its allies and saw the soviet revolutionaries create a new government. The bourgeois provisional government was removed from power and a regime in which a democratic proletariat led the country was initiated under Bolshevik leaders. This was a new dawn in terms of the country's history and it also marked a new era in moving pictures.

The powerful ensemble of images one witnesses in this sequence are indeed unforgettable and a clear insight into the ideals of the soviet ethos. It could not be further removed from the narrative style of story telling favoured by Western film-makers of the time. The portrayal of the massacre on the steps of Odessa is not a re-telling of an actual event, this massacre never happened at all.

However, during the first revolution in 1905, a similar massacre did take place during a peaceful demonstration on "Bloody Sunday" outside of the Tsars' palace. The scene can be viewed as a condensed representation of the entire film's allegory - a testament to the sacrifice, bravery and commitment to socialism of the proletariat in their struggle for freedom.

The sequence I wish to concentrate on is amongst the most harrowing and moving scenes ever committed to film. The editing technique is a landmark example in the use of montage. Its intention was to combine a series of images that would elicit the greatest possible emotional response from the audience. Eisenstein was influenced by the Kuleshev School of film-making, which was itself amongst the first to experiment with montage.

By combining a series of fast-paced jump cuts, emotional close-ups juxtaposed with wide shots and a combination of static and tracking shots, the sequence results in an assault on the audience's emotions and is considered to be a master class in the art of film-making. So much happens in a short time period, that it would be impossible to analyse every single shot in the sequence without writing reams of commentary. Instead I wish to analyse key shots, discussing the cinematic technique and the desired effects that Eisenstein intended.

The first shot in the sequence is a title displaying the words "The Cossacks". These fierce, mounted soldiers were feared throughout Russia as merciless agents of the Tsarist regime. One is reminded of the equally infamous scene in Doctor Zhivago (USA 1965: David Lean) in which a crowd is attacked by a brigade of Cossacks when protesting; this scene was no doubt influenced by Eisenstein's work.

Following the title card, we witness the crowd fleeing at the foot of the Odessa staircase, people of all ages run for their lives, fleeing from the riflemen who had already been firing on the crowd from the top of the steps. In the foreground of this initial shot we see the Cossack's black horses being driven in front of the fleeing crowd and as the action cuts to a wide static shot of the foot of the steps, we see their mounts attacking the defenceless escapees.

Eisenstein then uses a series of images to heighten the tension by combining a multitude of jump cuts that involve several static shots. Firstly the advancing riflemen make their way towards the crowd from their elevated position on the staircase, he then jumps to a shot of several citizens in- front of some railings at the foot of the staircase. One man is shot as he attempts to bolt over the railings and we see the crowd running in terror down the steps in the background.

Again, a series of shots are combined to show rifles being fired on a group of people surrounding an old woman. We briefly witness the panic stricken group and the action cuts briefly to a close-up of the rifles being discharged from the right hand side. We are then led straight to a shot of the rifles now raised and advancing once more from the left of the frame to the right. This frantic style of editing gives the scene an extremely quick pace and intensifies the action as we witness innocent and unarmed citizens being slain by a ruthless enemy.

Significantly, we rarely see the Cossacks' faces as we do the citizens of Odessa. In contrasting the anguish of the victims in close-up with the cruelty of their faceless antagonists, Eisenstein increases our sympathy for the former. A young and beautiful mother is introduced in the next shot and so begins the most harrowing, celebrated and imitated set of images in the film.

The woman dressed in black is pushing her baby in a pram and enters the frame from the right hand side. Stopping in the centre of the shot, she leans over the carriage to protect her baby. All around her is chaos as scores of people run down the staircase, away from the approaching soldiers.

This powerful imagery pulls on the heart strings of the audience as there is nothing more defenceless than women and children. Next, a series of brief shots create an unforgettable montage of horror and dismay. Here, using a combination of static, travelling and wide shots and close-ups, Eisenstein, in an obvious ploy to completely win the sympathy of the audience for the victims, creates immense tension.

We bear witness to the murder of the young mother who is shot by rifle fire. By concentrating on the woman's face with a series of extreme close up shots, the audience is forced to watch as the mother is unable to protect her child or herself. Following a series of close ups of the soldiers' advancing march down the steps and interspersed with previous shots of the crowds at the foot of the staircase and the railings, there follows a close up shot of the mother's midriff, revealing an emblem of a swan on her belt buckle.

This perhaps represents purity, beauty and love and is a fine example of the use of semiotics to convey these themes and subconsciously evoke sympathy for the slain mother who is the representation of all that is pure and good in life. As her hands fall down over the buckle, we see they are bloodstained.

Eisenstein creates even more tension by focusing on a close up of the pram's wheels, which are about to be tipped over the edge of the step and in a combination of close up shots, the mother falls to the ground and in so doing, pushes the pram forwards by leaning back against it, her baby still inside the carriage. This is all witnessed by another older woman who is seen to gasp in horror as the pram begins to hurtle down the steps, gathering momentum as it goes. Here the use of travelling shots follow the baby in the carriage as it free wheels down the staircase.

Combined with several static shots viewed from the right hand side of the steps, we see the infant travel towards untold doom as it makes its way down towards the bottom of the steps. The sense of perspective is maintained by the constant jump cuts back to the advancing soldiers and the struggle with the Cossacks at the bottom of the steps. A young man also witnesses this as the pram passes him and he cries out in anguish.

This is revealed in a close up of his face which turns from left to right, implying the pram has passed before him. The pram then reaches the bottom of the staircase and we are spared the details of the fate of the child, although it is assumed that the carriage tips over. There follows a close up of a soldier who hacks at the camera three times with a vicious expression. We are then shown a blood spattered old woman's face in close up; the broken lens on her pince-nez reveals that she too has been shot. The shot then dissolves and the sequence is over.

It is also important to note that throughout the sequence, the First movement of Shostakovich's Fifth symphony is playing. This is a powerful and emotional piece of music that fits the imagery perfectly and evokes a greater amount of emotion with its dramatic minor key motifs, played primarily on stringed instruments.

Eisenstein's most famous film will always be synonymous with this scene and it has had a wide reaching and long lasting influence on film-making. Even Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels hailed it as a masterpiece and its iconic imagery has been widely imitated ever since. Despite its lack of success upon release in its native country, Battleship Potemkin will forever remain a landmark in cinematic technique and the greatest example of montage in the entire history of cinema.
Filmography
The Battlship Potemkin (USSR 1925; Sergei M. Eisenstein)

Dr. Zhivago (USA 1965; David Lean)

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Scene Analysis: The Odessa Steps Sequence in Battleship Potemkin

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In this essay we analyze the Odessa Steps sequence from the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin which was directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein.

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The video So Much I Want to Say consists of a series of still images, changing every eight seconds, which show the artist's face in close-up with a pair of male hands gagging her mouth and preventing her from speaking. Meanwhile her voice on the sound-track repeats over and over the words of the title. This is one of Hatoum's earliest video works and is based on material from a live performance . During a tour of Canada in 1983 she participated in a slowscan video exchange between Vienna and Vancouver entitled Wiencouver IV. Slowscan satellite transmits an image every eight seconds, with continuous sound via telephone lines. Hatoum's contribution, transmitted live from Vancouver, was also titled So Much I Want to Say. The video work uses footage from the live transmission. It was made at the Western Front Art Centre and is a Western Front Production.

Hatoum grew up in Beirut, but became an exile during a visit to London in 1975 when war broke out in Lebanon. She attended art schools in London (Byam Shaw 1975-9 and Slade 1979-81), where she began to make work about her experience of cultural displacement. She has said: 'my work is about my experience of living in the West as a person from the Third World, about being an outsider, about occupying a marginal position, being excluded, being defined as "Other" or as one of "Them"' (quoted in Mona Hatoum, London 1997, p.127). Her early performance works focused with great intensity on her body, which she used as a metaphor for oppression, often separated from the audience by some form of barrier, membrane, cage, cell, wall, hood or veil.

In So Much I Want to Say the male hands, which gag Hatoum's mouth, form a physical and visual barrier between the artist and her audience, which seems on one level to prevent her from being seen, heard or understood. They provide a symbol for a cultural elite which stifles the voice of society's dispossessed, those who are alienated through their race, nationality and gender. By presenting images where she appears to be silenced, Hatoum exposes the predicament of political minorities who are silenced or ignored. Her ineffectual struggle to pluck the hands from her face contrasts with the persistent repetition of her voice on the sound-track, demonstrating that it is through her artwork that she has found a channel for her political ideas.

Further reading:
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini, Bristol 1993, pp.8-9, 16, reproduced p.5
Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Catherine de Zegher, Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum, London 1997, pp.42-3, reproduced p.42

Elizabeth Manchester
February 2000
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'So Much I Want to Say', Mona Hatoum, 1983 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'So Much I Want to Say', Mona Hatoum, 1983 Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, and now resident in London, Hatoum often addresses themes of identity and exile in her work. This video consists of still images of her face in close-up, with a pair of male hands covering her mouth which prevent her from speaking.

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Curtis’s latest documentary finds moment after moment where lies have become codified and accepted, where Western leaders have built simplistic, patently false narratives.

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Article on Chris Marker's "La Jetée" a film made up of still images

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Article on Chris Marker's "La Jetée" a film made up of still images

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Movies as we know them are a trick. They do not technically depict motion, but rather a series individual images shown in succession. Chris Marker evokes this idea as he tells the story of La Jetée (1962) through a series of still frames. By almost entirely removing motion from his film, Marker challenges the idea that cinema is solely the domain of the moving image as he weaves together an intricate portrait of memory, time and space.

When the first filmmakers emerged, they discovered that it was possible to achieve the illusion of motion on the silver screen by showing sequential still images in rapid succession. These images would alternate with blank screens, making use of the stroboscopic and afterimage effects to trick the mind into perceiving movement. Specifically, they learned that displaying 16 frames of film per second would yield what appeared to the audience as realistic onscreen action. This number was important because it minimized flicker while reducing the need for excessive manual cranking for camera operators and projectionists.

With the advent of talkies, 16 frames per second was raised to 24 frames per second to accommodate soundtracks; this also offered much smoother motion that seemed to more closely mimic how movement occurred in the real world. 24 frames per second remained the standard for the rest of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, even with the industry transition from film to digital media. In this way, still images that captured separate moments were and are used in concert to spatialize time over the physical length of a film strip (or movie file). The discovery of 16 and then 24 frames per second standards meant that filmmakers could display this spatialized time in a way that an audience would understand: by running it through a projector at a constant speed.

Through formal and aesthetic choices that reflect themes of time and space, Chris Marker addresses the fundamental motion-focused nature of cinema in La Jetée. Not coincidentally, these ideas complement the narrative requirements of his time traveling science fiction tale. His work stands as direct commentary on the basic operations of cinema, as well as the philosophical ideas of freedom and movement.

Marker tells a compelling story of love and loss using just narration and stationary visual cues. When Marker does include one brief 5-second moment of motion picture, captured on ordinary 35 mm film, it feels abnormal. Its incongruence draws attention to both its own kinetic value and to the static visuals which surround it.

This moment of motion picture is carefully introduced in La Jetée. In the stills prior to this sequence, as the main character ("The Man") travels back in time, we see repeated close-ups of the face of the character known as "The Woman." These shots are interspersed using crossfades with The Man in his future-present hammock. Each time The Man goes back in time, he sees her and she sees him, although their interaction remains minimal.

In this sequence, The Woman calls The Man "her ghost" and leans toward him, although they do not physically interact beyond that gesture. The narrator explains, "He never knows if he advances toward her, if he is led, if he is making it up, or if he is dreaming." The images conclude with a dissolve to black as the narrator mentions the word "dreaming."

In this moment, Marker (through the narrator) frames the nature of motion picture as a product of uncertainty. The Man, in this case a stand-in for the audience, is unsure whether he has seen true motion or if he simply imagined it. This phenomenon is endemic to film. As the film scholar Vivian Sobchack says in discussing the film, " La Jetée allegorizes in its explicit narrative ... the transformation of the moment to momentum that constitutes the ontology of the cinematic and the latent background of every film." We go to the cinema to be tricked into believing figures onscreen are alive, but here, Marker lays the skeleton-like frames of film bare for us to gaze at.

In this way the film is almost a deconstructed film reel - motion missing its connective tissue, leaving inert frames behind. Yet the forward (and recursive) march of time is palpable in the film despite these static scenes. As Sobchack puts it, Marker's film "phenomenologically La Jetée, Sobchack states, "foregrounds the transcendental status and atemporal nonbecoming of the photograph." projects as a temporal flow and an existential becoming."

All motion in cinema is the product of rapidly alternating these frames with and blankness. This comes across to the audience as movement, but is in reality a product of the human mind filling in spaces between still frames to create that illusion. Like The Man, audiences can only assume they are watching movement when they see a movie, because that is what their eyes seem to be telling them. Films are therefore also dreamlike mental projections; cinematic motion seems real, even though the trick is taking place solely in the viewer's mind (not unlike the stereoscopic effect).

Marker's ethereal aesthetic is exemplified when The Woman does eventually move; her motion is so brief, so subtle and so sudden that the audience does a double-take, reassuring themselves that what they are perceiving is motion. After the initial stills of The Man in the future-present and The Woman as he sees her in the past, the narrator stops talking and a soundtrack of bird calls takes over. The shot reopens on The Woman sleeping in bed, ostensibly naked, covered by a blanket.

Contrary to the temporally disparate stills shown before, the first three shots in this sequence zoom in on The Woman's face as she continues to sleep. As the moment progresses, the stills appear more frequently in diegetic time, showing minute shifts in her facial expression as well as small movements of her head, hand and arm. Crossfades between these temporally adjacent frames gives the illusion of motion blur and, by association, motion. In these frames, it is almost as if she is breaking out of her frozen state and thawing into a kinetic space.

As Marker continues to reduce the diegetic time gap between stills, the bird calls crescendo. When volume of the birds reaches its apex, the shot is no longer still. The viewer is suddenly staring directly into the open eyes of The Woman. She hardly moves, her chest barely rising and falling as she takes a breath, but the switch from stills to motion picture is confirmed when she blinks her eyes several times. In the next frame, the Marker has returned to still images.

In this motion sequence, Marker seems to make direct commentary on the nature of cinema. Not only does this scene stick out because it contrasts with the rest of the movie, depicted in stills-it sticks out because of what The Woman does with her five seconds of kinetic freedom. In that brief release from the staccato images that precede it, The Woman blinks.

Much like the blank frames in between still shots which comprise a film strip, blinking is a universally unconscious phenomenon. Although humans see the world as if it were one continuous image, eyelids are always opening and closing. They act as a shutter which moves so fast that it is almost imperceptible, punctuating what appears to be one long visual intake with "frames" of blackness.

This makes shut eyelids analogous to the blank closed shutter interspersed between the images on a film strip.In this scene, The Woman's eyes can be seen as the shutter or blank frames which are part of the technological form of cinema. Marker is making the audience aware of her blinking, an action which we normally ignore, while also forcing the audience to think about the technological techniques-specifically, the stroboscopic and afterimage effects-that make cinema work.

In cinematic antiquity, lifelike motion was critical to the pioneers of the medium because it more accurately captured reality; as a consequence, it was believed that portraying movement in a realistic capacity meant the viewer could more easily engage with the material because it was similar to the viewer's own world. Marker uses a distinctly disconnected approach to dissociate himself from this mode of storytelling. In doing so, he prevents the audience from relating to the story as if it were similar their own reality.

One reason Marker does this is narrative orientation. Because he is telling a science fiction story, he must spend time building an alternate but believable reality in which his characters can operate. Although this film uses a minimal budget to portray a futuristic France, Marker was nevertheless careful to make it feel as though the audience was truly seeing a desolated country divorced from contemporaneous reality. By showing a new society embroiled in World War III through still frames, he prevents immediate recognition from the audience of any particular time or place, and thereby creates a new France which is separate from (but reminiscent of) the France of 1962.

There is other narrative significance to Marker's still images in La Jetée. The protagonist is forced to recount old memories in order to physically launch himself into the past. During each of these time traveling moments, The Man is allowed only a brief visit before waking up again in the future-present. These sequences are perhaps not unlike going to the movies, where a brief 1-3 hour experience can transport us, the audience, to another time and place before bring us back to our daily lives.

Moreover, these moments of discrete journeys in time are mirrored by the still images Marker uses to tell his story. The audience is allowed only static glimpses of The Man's journey, both in the future-present and in the past. This makes his story elusive, offering a disconnected view of his life. This intangibility for the audience echoes the ephemeral meetings between The Man and The Woman of whom he dreams, wherein The Man can spend no meaningful amount of time with The Woman before being brought back into the future-present. In parallel, the audience cannot spend a quantifiable or extended period of time with The Man because of Marker's cinematographic technique.

Marker makes clear his narrative intentions with this formal choice when The Man and The Woman meet in a museum. The narrator says, "Around the fiftieth day, they meet in a museum filled with timeless animals." In this dead zoo, the animals are not stationary because the film is shown through still images, but because they have been taxidermied-perhaps a reflection of Marker's taxidermied film reel. They will not live or die because they are already dead, nor will they ever move again.

This moment directly reflects Marker's use of still photography in narrative storytelling. Like these animals, the human characters in La Jetée remain completely stationary in each still photograph; Marker only implies their motion by showing subsequent frames juxtaposed in montage. Through image association (and, to some extent, through narration), the audience is expected to understand that each image follows the other in chronological order.

In the major twist of La Jetée, the audience comes to learn that the protagonist eventually dies at the eponymous "jetty at Orly." In that light, the museum animals become a metaphor for The Man and for fate. Because he is destined to die, and because time appears to function in a loop in La Jetée, he is-in a sense-already dead. Therefore, his inability to move when he first travels back in time echoes the taxidermied animals who, like The Man, are dead, frozen in time, and unable to move.

Marker may have something specific to say about fate through this analogy. The protagonist in La Jetée eventually comes to understand that he saw himself die as a small child. Since he has already seen his own end, The Man has no means of escaping his demise. Therefore, the still images that Marker uses throughout the film represent his restricted life. In this reading, motion is not a broad analogue for freedom, but specifically for the freedom of choice. The Man has no control over his own destiny and so his motion is confined the set path eventually leading to his murder. Even his visits to the past are depicted as still images because those visits are also part of his preset journey.

Marker reaffirms his association of life with freedom of movement in the motion picture sequence. As discussed earlier, The Woman hardly moves in this scene outside of a simple blink of the eyes. However, she also takes a breath in this scene. Breath, in both the Biblical and biological sense, can be directly linked to life. In the Abrahamic religions, God breathes into Adam to give him a soul. In biology, all living organisms must respire (which doesn't always mean "breathing" in the broader sense, but you'll forgive the generalization) in some way to generate energy. Therefore, it is key that The Woman breathes in her brief moment of motion. This displays not only a sense of kinetic energy, but also one of mobile life in contrast to the stillness of death.

Marker goes further to link the ideas of life and motion. In the motion picture sequence, bird sounds supplant the voice of the narrator. Marker intentionally uses these particular animals because of what they represent: unfettered freedom. Birds have total dominion over all three Cartesian dimensions (x, y, and z). They can move through the air in any direction with seemingly no limit on their mobility; they are the very definition of "free." In this moment of motion in the film, then, the crescendo of the bird calls and the increasingly frequent succession of still images signify that The Woman is breaking free of her static confines and embracing the freedom of movement.

When The Man and The Woman go to the animal museum, the narrator mentions The Man finds that he can move without any resistance, unlike earlier trips into the past. As they navigate around the museum of taxidermied animals, the bird display holds their interest the longest. This is emphasized when a camera shot through the back of the display frames a stuffed bird in flight just above both of their heads.

This shot is held longer than any of the other still frames in the museum. Marker goes on to show upwards of fifteen more still frames of bird exhibits around the museum. This is done with intention; for Marker, birds are iconographic manifestations of The Man's ability to move around without restriction, and of The Man and The Woman's freedom to enjoy one another's company.

It is not coincidental that La Jetée is titled as such, nor that Marker's story begins and ends at a pier positioned next to an airport. A jetty, or a pier, is a launching point for boats and other water crafts. Likewise, an airport serves as the landing and liftoff site for airplanes. In both cases, these vehicles can be taken to or from virtually any place on Earth. To strengthen this point, images and sounds of planes are prevalent in the opening shots of La Jetée. Again, themes of motion and freedom come into play.

Following the symbolism of the birds in the motion picture sequence and in the subsequent scene in the museum, planes and boats take on a new meaning. In a film where nothing seems to move, these are key representations of physical freedom. Like a fish in the water or a bird in the air, these vehicles give humanity freedom it did not previously possess and a dominion over parts of the world it theretofore did not control-all of which are elusive to The Man and The Woman, trapped in discrete moments in time.

While Marker seems to associate life with movement and freedom, it could conversely be argued that he believes death is the only true means to achieve freedom. In the first shots of the film, shortly after he introduces The Woman to the audience, The Man recalls a childhood memory of seeing a man shot and killed. At this moment, the sound of a plane revving its engines in anticipation of takeoff accompany scene. The plane is then shown in the air as the man dies.

As The Man later learns, the person he saw die at the pier near Orly was an older version of himself, visiting the past using future-present technology. After realizing this, that death represents an inevitable fate for The Man. In that light, dying is the only release The Man has from the time loop; every time he goes back to that pier from the future-present and dies, he is freeing himself from a life that was ultimately predestined and absolutely determined.

Whether it is in life or death, Chris Marker certainly values freedom as an escape, a goal for the mind, body and heart, and uses the very form of film itself to emphasize his point. Indeed, La Jetée poses existential questions about freedom from time itself-a powerful idea that has resonated with audiences for decades. As film scholar Réda Bensmaïa once said, "...we cannot think of La Jetée without being touched, moved, and even deeply upset. It is a film that leaves its mark, that cannot be easily forgotten."

~ Søren

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The Freedom of Movement in Chris Marker's La Jetée * Academic

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With aesthetic choices that directly contrast with the conventions of cinema, Chris Marker's La Jetée is a masterful interrogation of time and memory.