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William Larson: Film on Film
Artist’s Statement
There are no moving images in cinema. The mind is the great animator of the seemingly invisible stream of still frames that outwit and mystify human visual perception. No medium is ever completely replaced by another, and with the advent of cinema at the end of the 19th century photography was redefined through the simple mechanics of the rate and method of display of the image in time. Still photography and cinema quickly drifted apart and offered very different expressions of our cultural and social realities. Film on Film is a conscious effort to rejoin them at a point of their declining materiality and transformation into an electronic medium.
In examining various sources, archives, and mining my own collection of films for discrete moments of narrative and diagnostic value, I have used the still image to dislodge and reconfigure selected fragments generally obscured, buried, or so insignificant to be invisible within the flow of the primary cinematic “story” from which they are taken. In their relative obscurity or ironic displacement these moments offer a different way of thinking about the nature, mechanics, and physicality of film. Events as mundane as a woman blinking (in four frames, as it turns out) or as unsettling as a man caught on film leaping to his death (disarmingly rational as a still image of 23 sequential frames), all conspire to reframe our sense of film, its structure and properties, while triggering the magic between our imagination and memory of cinematic archetypes and vivid personal experiences in viewing films of all kinds, from safety films in elementary school to familiar classic feature productions.
The maze of detail and particularity offered by all optical images seems to feed an insatiable curiosity about the expressive surface of the way things appear on film. In looking quantitatively rather than subjectively at the films, the element of time emerges as a very tangible and objective means of measuring and exploring certain fugitive moments absorbed within the larger subjective intentions of the filmmaker, or, as Barbara Stafford has suggested, it “reveals invisible presences through mechanical means.” Although in photography the connection between the image and the machine is well understood and rooted in the history of its means of production and display, we’ve come to appreciate that the overlay of scientific precision and technological objectivity only renders possibilities rather than indexes the absolute nature of the events around us. With the broader picture undoubtedly changing, these material artifacts remain as a tribute to the rich history they reflect.