Posed photographs aside, the realm of manipulation in film centers on the moving image. The stand alone still, with its frozen moment from a long or quick shudder, explains more than it obscures. We rally around these instant deliverances, these monuments of then, always reverent to the past no matter how quickly they arrive, but also creating a dynamic of hope. We want the past to tumble into what the future might offer. And that’s a good deal. To be able to look at something that has already happened and cherish it beyond its christening is an outbound delight. That you can share the image, and pass it along now with the hyperdrive click of a keyboard stroke, the informative emotion can arrive almost within reach of the moment captured. But the future isn’t the chart. Ultimately, neither is the past. The chemical reaction, the light to eye, that’s what lets the sum come untethered from its parts.
It’s a search. And if you search too constantly you rub raw a pathway that might conceal what you sought in the worn over dirt. Blue bits of man collide with earthen chunks, an exponentially explosive now well past the accumulated and analogous historical recordings. The image steps out of time and becomes comment and we digest the comment so we too leave time and become the story. And surely, a story has a beginning, middle and an ending, but it does not always unfold that way. So goes the photo. I remember sitting in the campus movie theater while at college. The projectionist had the reels of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist out of sequence. At first the confusion maddened me. And then the lack of plotted commitment sank in. Here were his images floating around. Here were the sounds and the actions, all empty of order. Another story took hold.
Light by Janelle Lynch
word by Hank Cherry
