title: eventually
year: 2010-
format: digital screen grabs, looping slideshow
description: Cinematic moments are screen grabs from DVDs or streaming movies, slightly edited but not dramatically altered.
“A screenshot, screen capture, or screen dump is an image taken by
the computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor or another
visual output device. Usually this is a digital image taken by the host
operating system or software running on the computer device, but it can also be
a capture made by a camera or a device intercepting the video output of the
computer.” (Wikipedia)
“The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also
depended on it. The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a
corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not
betray what was demanded. He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony
Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving
science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too
much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This
was the point. To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking,
to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest
registers of motion.” (Delillo, 2010: 5-6).
Cinematic moments are collections of screen grabs taken from DVDs and streaming
movies, slightly edited but not dramatically altered. I started collecting screen captures of films a few years ago, inspired by the in-depth analysis of cinematic frames that appear on academic journals and magazines like Film Comment, Positif, et similia. A second, perhaps stronger inspiration for me was Nostalgia Party No. 2, an online
repository of screen captures hosted on LiveJournal (note 1)
Unlike Nostalgia Party No. 2, my purpose is not to identify, capture, and preserve the
“perfect” frame. Rather, I’m more interested in constructing micro-narratives
by amputating scenes within a larger story. According to a popular myth, if you
cut the tail of a lizard, a new one will spawn from the cut off appendix. I like to believe that the same
applies to “eventually” as well: the cinematic moments that I post on tumbler
have a life of their own, independent of the “original” source code. They are
fractal-like nano-tales, fragments of popular or obscure movies. I deliberately
avoid including credits and references in my posts: these images are treated as
found artifacts, memories of films that one might have seen (or not).
“There was an element of forgetting involved in this experience. He wanted to forget the original movie or at least limit the memory to a distant reference, unobtrusive.” (Delillo, 2010: 11)
The screen grabbing practice is not intended as an act of cultural appropriation. Rather, it is an act of extrapolation, transformation, decontextualization,
and re-circulation. Creating a cinematic moment is relatively simple: I extract
a dialogue, an episode, a scene from a movie that captivates me – either from a DVD
or via streaming - and then I post the resulting images on tumblr. I like this
blog’s format: an embedded micro-slideshow consisting of ten photos. This
adds another layer of editing, a fixed, non-negotiable montage, a new constrain. "eventually" is a useless archive.
“This was history he was watching in a way, a movie known to people everywhere. He played with the idea that the gallery was like a preserved site, a dead poet’s cottage or hushed tomb, a medieval chapel. Here it is, the Bates Motel. But people don’t see this. They see fractured motion, film stills on the border of benumbed life” (Delillo, 2010: 12)
The slideshow moves at glacial pace: each image stays on the screen for two seconds before being superseded by the next, subverting the director's original intent. I load sets of cinematic screengrabs on my iPad: as I observe the actors' faces, their expression frozen, patiently waiting for a new image to appear. As I watch the sequence, I re-live the "original" scene in my head. The dialogue is delivered by subtitles which replace the (omitted) sound.
A cinematic moment is always a departure from a departure.
“It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing” (Delillo, 2010: 13)
(1) Nostalgia Party 2 calls itself a collection of "film stills", although, technically, a film still, “sometimes called a publicity still, is a photograph taken on the set of a movie or television program during production by a movie stills photographer, primarily used for promotional purposes”. (from Wikipedia). Nonetheless, Nostalgia
Party 2 is one of the reasons why the internet was invented. I
Delillo, Don (2010) Point Omega, New York: Scribner.
Wikipedia, definition of "screengrab" and "film still"
Nostalgia Party 2 (website)
link: eventually (2010-)
