Movies from stills

domtyler

Teasmaid
Recent posts about Patrick keiller and Chris Marker http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2376, have made me think about films made from still images.

As a photographer I've often wondered how far the idea could be taken and when, recently, I was asked to make some sequences of images for a concert performance, I had an opportunity to explore the possibilities. I watched Marker's "La Jetee" very early on in the project (which is still ongoing) and felt that despite the obvious virtuosity of the direction the quality of the actual frames lets the narrative down. It seems like the film is mostly regarded as at best an oddity and at worst as a warning to other filmakers not to try the same thing, interesting but flawed.

"London" and "Robinson in Space" (both of which I've known and loved for years) seem more visually successful to me but I'm not sure if it's just because the frames are more like moving tableaux.

Does anyone know of other still films?

After this project, where the sequences are semi-cinematic slideshows,my eventual hope is to construct a documentary film using my photographs and recorded interviews and ambient sounds. A bit like work by Ken Burns but with the photography shot for the film rather than sourced from archives.
 
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h-crimm

Well-known member
the opening sequence of husbands by casavettes is a set of stills combined with his usual over amped noisy background sound. all but one of the wives and one of the titular husbands only appear in this segment.
the sequence only lasts a few minutes tho...

there's also the semi stationary tableaux set up in la ricotta by pasoilini (part of rogopago), they arent actually the film but the self-serious fake film which the actual short film is (sortof) about the making of... if you see what i mean
i think godard may have tried to actually make this film using nearly stationary live action tableaux in the 80s... is it called passion?

i'm a real fan of the strong dislocation of sound and visuals in some of godards movies, usually confined to fast intense flashes within action. advertising images in 12 things i know about her for example, or the bulk of le gai savoir (which i still really need to see).
i think along with better frames la jetee could have benefited with a more aggressive sound track. i love that casavettes/dogme95 sound recorded through a blanket during rush hour tho...

just remebered there's also the film "letter to jane" which is mostly shots of a single press photograph of jane fonda in vietnam in ~1970 with a discussion of the politics of the image, its a godard/dziga-vertov group short
i think i might go home and watch it tonight....................

havent seen them but from the book of the teevee series which i do have, the john berger 'ways of seing' programs might have a lot of still images. more of a political essay type thing tho than a narrative like le jetee.

sorry, not really an answer to your post. just a few ideas.
your project sounds cool :)

some stills from le gai savoir
9int001.jpg

9int03.jpg
 

labrat

hot on the heels of love
the programme of films documenting the London Filmakers Co-op's production in the late 60's/early 70's called "Shootshootshoot" had quite a number of films composed of static images; the way they were using the images was akin to synthetic cubism at times (spacial exploration-in particular Peter Gidal's Hall from 1969- Love the velvet underground album in the background) Mike Dunford's Tautology from 1973 is similar , as is Iain Breakwell(continuous diary fellow) and Mike Legett 's rather more playful Sheet from 1970. All excellent.Here's a link http://www.luxonline.org.uk/tours/Mark_Webber/mark1.html
 
Recent posts about Patrick keiller and Chris Marker http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2376, have made me think about films made from still images.

As a photographer I've often wondered how far the idea could be taken and when, recently, I was asked to make some sequences of images for a concert performance, I had an opportunity to explore the possibilities. I watched Marker's "La Jetee" very early on in the project (which is still ongoing) and felt that despite the obvious virtuosity of the direction the quality of the actual frames lets the narrative down. It seems like the film is mostly regarded as at best an oddity and at worst as a warning to other filmakers not to try the same thing, interesting but flawed.

[Belated thread-just-noticed response]

Hardly, most film-makers, philosophers, and cultural critics consider La Jetee to be one of the best short narrative films ever made, a sentiment with which I agree.

Does anyone know of other still films?

Yes. The work of Arthur Lipsett.

"He explored metaphysical aspects of the medium, occasionally beginning with refuse and producing profound experience comprised of light and sound ... "

We should start with Arthur Lipsett, one of the pioneers of found footage avant-garde filmmaking in Canada whose work was admired and quoted by such cinema luminaries as Stanley Kubrick (who wanted him to create the trailer for Dr. Strangelove) and George Lucas (who discovered his work in film school at USC), along with many avant-garde film-makers (Brakhage, Belson, etc). Lipsett has been a too-long underground figure, despite a 1962 Oscar nomination for Best Short for Very Nice, Very Nice.

Lipsett began collecting bits and pieces of "outs" or film discarded by other filmmakers, detombing these scraps from editing bins and garbage cans at Canada's National Film Board. Working late at night, he meshed these odd shapes and sounds together to create his greatest film, Very Nice, Very Nice, a masterpiece of the cut and paste collagist model which stands as a cutting indictment of modern mass culture, released in 1961, just a year before Marker's La Jetee. The film was composed almost entirely of stills and cost a mere $500.00, but Lipsett's technique was different because he was putting pictures to sound. The soundtrack came first: an assembly of disparate voices spliced together.

Visually, the film consists mainly of still photos taken by Lipsett in New York, Paris and London to accompany the soundtrack, along with magazine photographs, outtakes from NFB documentaries, and stock shots of a mushroom-cloud explosion and a space shuttle launch. To these images he married voices critical of contemporary technocratic values, including soundbites from Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan; by severing the words of the famous from their visual referents Lipsett renders them quasi-anonymous, shifting the focus from the speakers' identities to the ironic implications of their statements.


Very Nice, Very Nice has a sober, somber quality to it, speaking of the indifference of humankind. At one point a man's voice states: "People who have made no attempt to educate themselves live in a kind of dissolving phantasmagoria of the world, that is, they completely forget what happened last Tuesday (a series of various close-up faces dissolve one into the other). A politician can promise them anything, and they will not remember later what he has promised."

The film is filled with contradictions: (stuttering voice) "...and the game is really nice to look at." (we see a collage of wrestling photos picturing grimacing faces and hefty men tugging and pulling at each other in agony). A bomb explodes: "Everyone wonders what the future will behold." This is intercut with people having fun and smiling: smiling mouths, smiling eyes... then another shot of the bomb... (man's voice) : "This is my line, and I love it." Later we see shots of newspapers: "There's sort of a passing interest in things." (followed by a shot of a pastry-shop window and a cake in the shape of a smiling cat), "But there's no real concern." "People seem unwilling to become involved in anything..." (more collage photos of faces: a Santa Claus, pause, a shot of a dead man on the street) "I mean really involved."

After his Academy Award nomination, Lipsett received a letter from filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. The typewritten letter said, "I'm interested in having a trailer done for Dr. Strangelove." Kubrick regarded Lipsett's work as a landmark in cinema--a breakthrough, describing Very Nice, Very Nice as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen"” Lipsett refused the offer, but the actual trailer did reflect Lipsett's style in Very Nice, Very Nice.

Lipsett committed suicide in 1986.

More details about his work:


LIPSETTcover.jpg
[Listen here to the soundtracks to four of his films, 21-87, Very Nice, Very Nice, A Trip Down Memory Lane, and Freefall]


lipsett_verynice.jpg


Very Nice, Very Nice (1961, 7mins): Arthur Lipsett's first film. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice."

lipsett_2187.jpg


21-87 (1964, 9mins): A wry commentary on machine-dominated man, the man to whom nothing matters, who waits for chance to call his number. The film is a succession of many unrelated views of the passing crowd. George Lucas' THX 1138 and Star Wars were hugely influenced by 21-87: the phrase "the force" originated from the film's soundtrack. This Wired article claims that Lucas has recently returned to directing the kind of experimental films like 21-87 that had originally inspired him to make films.


lipsett_freefall.jpg


Free Fall (1964, 9mins): A film made from film trimmings assembled to make a wry comment on modern man and his world. It suggests a surrealist dream of mankind's fall from grace into banality.

Fluxes (1967, 24mins): FLUXES is a disturbing reflection on the world around us, amalgamating an incredible arsenal of found images and sound to effectively foreshadow the coming Vietnam war as well as comment upon everything from space travel to Buddhism.


According to Amelia Does , "Lipsett was educated about avant-garde film, art history, and the early collage artists like Kurt Schwitters. He was particularly influenced by Joseph Cornell’s rose hobart (1936) and Bruce Connor’s a movie (1958). Lipsett used his own photographs, along with the contents of the waste bins of the NFB as his sculpting materials. Like the German visual artist Joseph Beuys he attempted to use garbage materials to create a new experience for his film audience. He attempted to carry the viewer to a spiritual place. In Lipsett’s collage you see a becoming, a desire to re-arrange and to transcend ... Lipsett’s use and re-invention of film language was often revolutionary. Though he remains critically unattended and popularly obscured, he did win several significant awards in his lifetime and the admiration of many luminary filmmakers, specifically Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Walter Murch. Lipsett succeeded in turning film on its head, taking new image and sound-image relationships – perhaps often arbitrary ones – to create a deeply personal and dynamic form of expression. He explored metaphysical aspects of the medium, occasionally beginning with refuse and producing profound experience comprised of light and sound ... Lipsett, in his films, proposals and writings, contributed greatly to the exploration of new forms of film language that clearly impacted the era within which he produced much of his work. Furthermore, the energy and technique illustrated in his films is found throughout contemporary visual media practice. Building upon Conner’s ideas for found footage collage and his own investigation of sound collage, Lipsett’s films achieved an emotional depth and dynamism that may leave the viewer confused and speechless, but never indifferent."
 
P

Parson

Guest
i watched la jetee again couple months ago and started thinking heavily about making my own static image movie in flash.

also i can't remember if la jetee used panning or not.

i'd probably do like tarkovsky with lotsa panning
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Thomas Koners 'from the outskirts of nothing to the suburbs of the void' had some good bits.

The first sequence travels down a highway into a city. All the shots are from CCTV cams.
 
i watched la jetee again couple months ago and started thinking heavily about making my own static image movie in flash.

also i can't remember if la jetee used panning or not.

None whatsoever. At the time, the use of any such technique (tilting, panning, zooming, tracking etc) would invariably have required filming the still photographs. Instead the only technique employed was that of the "jump cut" successive close-ups of the same image, apart, that is, from the film's one, startling, "instant" of live-action, a montage that erupts into a sublime moment.

i'd probably do like tarkovsky with lotsa panning

Except that they were all filmed pans; whereas I assume your's would be digitized post-production pans using standard digital-editing software?

Needless to say, since Marker's La Jetee there have been thousands of "photo essay" shorts made that were directly inspired by that film (example ), its "futur anterior" now manifesting in the recent huge growth of multimedia photojournalism.

Three recent examples of lengthy "photo essays" - these are feature-length narrative films edited from still images to a soundtrack.

And two more mainstream and very popular (including hundreds of thousands of youtube "hits"), award-winning zero-budget shorts, shot using digital still cameras in "burst mode" ie. at approx 2-frames per second: the simple, Amelie-influenced Between You And Me (4mins) and the polaroid-to-digital still music video Lets Build A Fire (3mins), both directed by Patryk Rebisz.


Marker, of course, more recently returned - in 2001 - to the genre, with the 42-minute Remembrance of Things to Come (Le souvenir d’un avenir), ostensibly using still images in a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon - a montage of photographs from Bellon's photo-reportage from the period between the two world wars - to inspire an erudite, witty, and poetically nuanced eclectic tour both through modern European history and the ontological dynamics of human memory.
 
P

Parson

Guest
oh yeah i'm just talking about doing something in flash.

seems like from conception to completion would be a few days tops if i put my mind to it

someday i suppose
 
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