The Cinematic (Paperback) | Released: 20 Apr 2007

Key writings by artists and theorists chart the shifting relationship between film and photography and how the rise of cinema forced photography to make a virtue of its stillness.

The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism.

Still photography--cinema's ghostly parent--was eclipsed by the medium of film, but also set free. The rise of cinema obliged photography to make a virtue of its own stillness. Film, on the other hand, envied the simplicity, the lightness, and the precision of photography. Russian Constructivist filmmakers considered avant-garde cinema as a sequence of graphic shots; their Bauhaus, Constructivist and Futurist photographer contemporaries assembled photographs into a form of cinema on the page. In response to the rise of popular cinema, Henri Cartier-Bresson exalted the decisive moment of the still photograph. In the 1950s, reportage photography began to explore the possibility of snatching filmic fragments. Since the 1960s, conceptual and postconceptual artists have explored the narrative enigmas of the found film still. The Cinematic assembles key writings by artists and theorists from the 1920s on--including László Moholy-Nagy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, and Catherine David--documenting the photography-film dialogue that has enriched both media.

Thierry de Duve is Director of Studies, Association de préfiguration de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes/Saint Denis. He published 25 books, including five in collaboration with Félix Guattari.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur.

The works of Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) translated into English include Theory of Film, The Salaried Masses, The Mass Ornament, History, and From Caligari to Hitler.

Blake Stimson is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (2004), and coeditor (with Alexander Alberro) of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (2000), both published by the MIT Press.

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2012 to 2015. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989 and 2nd ed., 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1992), and Death Twenty-Four Times A Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006). She has co-edited British Experimental Television (2007), Feminisms (2015), and Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (British Film Institute 1977; DVD publication 2013), and two films with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis.

Chris Marker (born in 1921) is one of French cinema's most influential artists.

David Campany is a curator and writer based in London. He is the author of Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (Afterall Books/MIT Press), and other books.