Stillness/Movement

Abstract

The 1970s artists were not the first among those of the twentieth century to engage the cinematic by exploring tensions between mediums. As noted, the process under discussion is not solely to incorporate film images into new work or to juxtapose one medium with another. Rather, the method is to create an oppositional tension between forms. Joseph Cornell, for example, put film as a cultural product into tension with stillness, alluding to the status of photography in the framed confines of his memory boxes. And while the Edison Company’s Annabelle, Serpentine Dance (1894) was a “naïve” work, the filmmakers nonetheless set still photography into tension with the new technology in which they worked. Andy Warhol’s films too provide a major example. In his fixed-frame film Empire (1964), Warhol questioned the movement potential of the image by presenting a timed “portrait” of the Empire State Building. In this chapter I will consider the methods employed by the above-mentioned earlier works as a way of introducing Jack Goldstein’s film loop The Jump (1978). The latter is a work that similarly addresses the question of film movement, and the film image, now in tension with drawing. In The Jump, the whole body in movement is foregrounded, and then distilled, in the contemplation of the “moving picture” itself.