film stills

The film still, considered photographically, has been under the wire as a primary document, a thing without interest in itself, its meaning generated only in consideration of its subject.

In terms of production in Hollywood it was an integral part of the industry. Stills would be used for publicity & continuity. Classic Hollywood stills were produced throughout productions, with the hyperreal optics of a large format camera. Key scenes would be re-staged for the camera. In such a visual theater the exact perimeters of a drama were made evident, formed into a visual icon.

There have been some great collections of film stills. My 2 favorites have been the Marvin Heiferman/Diane Keaton collaboration Still Life, & the John Divola project, Continuity. Subsequently there have been great collections of silent film stills in lavish editions from Twelvetrees Press & Steidl. One could relate these collections as well to books such as Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon I & II, although the Anger books are much more iconoclastic in their devotions to the shadows of the silver screen.

The film still is a curious document. For narrative films it is a document of a fiction. In classic Hollywood tradition it is the delineation of the drama is at its most concentrated. How a narrative would transmute to an image, at its apogee.

The Heiferman/Keaton Still Life was published in the heyday of black-&-white artistic photography, when the images included were at their most suspect in terms of integrity: artificial, staged, commercial, unreal - yet resonant with ideologies, in fact very clear about values & positions, & likewise, strange, in their all too quick obsolescence as a consumable object. The paradoxes of a photograph in a media based society, with its limited shelf-life & yet its ubiquity, presented themselves in glorious technicolor. From Jane Russell to Lassie.

Along with the classic industrialized Hollywood still, there has been its avant-garde shadow, in innumerable images of various louche productions. Disparate productions that come to mind are the Jack Smith book The Beautiful Book, & the various images by the cinematographer Babette Mangolte, which include work by Richard Foreman & Chantal Ackerman, among others. The Metropolitan Museum has collected photos taken of various performances in the 1960s, such as by Claes Oldenburg & Red Grooms - another example of "primary documents" entering the field of fine art as a collectible. Among filmmakers, I would cite the film stills of Ulrike Ottinger, which, more than most, replicate the high production standards of a classic Hollywood studio, & which also surpass any studio in creating images that could exist independently of any project.

Such a lop-sided juncture of fiction & document has always inspired me. I don't collect stills, the way I do stereocards or cartes-de-visite, but among my treasures are:

Dennis Hopper in Nightide

a collaged image from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Harry Baer in Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King

Candy Darling in The Death of Maria Malibran

Ulrike Ottinger - Image Archive

At the Walker Art Center this week I bought a copy of Image Archive: Photographs 1970-2005 by the filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. The photographs were taken over a 35 year span & include stills & studies for both Ottinger's experimental narrative films as well has ethnographic work done in Mongolia & China.

Seeing it brought back memories of when I worked at Anthology Film Archives, when in its small gallery there was a show of black-&-white images by Ottinger from her films: immaculate, well-printed, finished objects, which could be independent of the films themselves. The production of film stills is something which has for the most part diminished w/ the decline of the studio system in Hollywood, when stills were integral to publicity as well as continuity purposes. & certainly for experimental work it is often not a priority or something done w/ a great deal of work. I recall the show at Anthology as being a setting for a Halloween party. Also that it would have been circa 1989 - 20 years ago now!

There are almost 600 images in the book, mostly in color, mostly from the documentary work in Asia, but there are generous archives of images from the earlier experimental narratives, such as the spectacular Tabea Blumenschein in Madame X - An Absolute Ruler, & Ticket of No Return, & Magdalena Montezuma in Freak Orlando. & my one-time boss at the Bleecker St. Cinema, Jackie Raynal, as 1/2 of a Siamese twin in Freak Orlando. Among many others.(a nude study of Rosa von Prauheim, Delphine Seyrig as Lady Windemere in Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia, etc.).

Ottinger's images veer from the carefully studied film still images to photographs of a much more casual, "collecting" mode. Nevertheless there is a great deal of economy in Ottinger's diversity. The photographs often function as sketches for the larger work of the films. While not intended as a primary work by Ottinger, the photographs can be looked at as great footnotes to her cinematic oeuvre. & given Ottinger's careful practices, these are a truly fascinating addendum to the films.

Years ago my friend K. spoke about the absence of "women's adventure stories." I have always thought of Ottinger's films as being just that: whether a pirate queen, or a society lady drunk on a fabulous bender (Tabea Blumenschein walking on mirrors & destroying them as she walks into the future), or the meetings of all on the Trans-Siberian express on the steppes of Mongolia, Ottinger has created a hypothetical universe of expanding possibilities.

I am less familiar with the later documentary work, but in tandem w/ the narratives I am struck by the absence of tedium or banality in Ottinger's observations. Everything is about diversity & hybrid forms. The minutae of daily life can become an object of deep focus, as well as manifestations of the truly strange & unusual.