Sllllloooooowwwwww Dooooowwwwwnnnnnn

A major instruction from the Cinematic book that I see is that we have to use the technologies at our disposal to slow down film in order to isolate a gesture or a fragment. For Constance Penley, this is where we find the "filmic." If our project is ultimately photographic, but our analogy is cinema/film, then perhaps Penley hits the nail on the head when she contrasts photography's 'self containment' to the film still:

Film is not in this instance [of Barthes reading of the ‘film still’] reduced to photography because the still has nothing in common with the self-containment of the photograph. It is no more than a fragment which contains the trace of the film experienced as an animated flow; it is here, however, that we can find the ‘filmic’” (118). 

These "fragments" can be related to Lacan's notion of the partial object. We then must take these fragments, shorn against our ruins so to speak, and (re)assemble them into a Felt. These fragments/segments, writes Blake Stimson, must be "sutured back together again into an affective unity or common thread of feeling or being" (93). 

But we don't want the full suture offered by film. The suture we want is not between two present "nows" but between the present moment and the past -- this is the suture of transference that we want to create. Not the illusion of continuous time. 

 In this sense, maybe we should think of our experiment as a photographic essay in Stimson's sense: 

“The photographic essay is thus a form that holds onto the opening up of time, the ‘spatialized duration’ given by the experiments of Muybridge and Marey. It draws its meaning from the back and forth interrelation of discrete images that is eliminated when those images are sutured together in film” (98). 

We want a kind of spatialization (which Prezi and the blog allows for) that produces time, that makes us "feel time." As Chantal Akerman puts it, "“I don’t want it to look REAL I don’t want it to look NATURAL but I want people to FEEL the time it takes which is not the time it really takes” (196). 

Only through a slowing down of film (or a slowing down of our lives) can be isolate these gestures, these frames, these fragments.