Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image (review)

The volume Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image is a selection of essays (both in French and in English) from two international conferences that focused on the temporality of the image. The contributors question the "immobility" traditionally ascribed to the image. Essays on the photographic image, painting, comics (Thierry Groensteen, Mireille Ribière), book covers (Marc Lits), the postcard (Nicole Biagioli), film, photo-novels (Benoît Peeters), and video art (Carole Baker) serve to unsettle the stereotypes surrounding the fixed image.

Reiterated throughout the book is the claim that the rigid distinction between the spatial and the temporal arts has become an anachronism. A cognitivist stance insisting on so-called "experiential repertoires" can, for instance, historicize and destabilize Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's categorization (Karen Parna). As our notion of time forms part of this culturally and historically inflected repertoire, it is argued that our understanding of art will be equally affected, thus making possible a different conception of the fixed image.

The processing of the (fixed) image passes through "verbal narrativization" (Jean-Marie Schaeffer). The spectator of a painting "traverses" the visual field in order to verbalize the different actantial macro-unities into a narrative. From the perspective of art history, it is interesting to point out that it is precisely this "wandering of the eye" that Clement Greenberg denounced in his defense of a "pure" modernist painting (Lut Pil). The "first fresh glance," which highlights unity and sudden revelation, elides spatial and temporal aspects of reception for fear of a "tendency to literature." However, the modernist paradigm is haunted by a contradiction. Resenting the "notational fallacy" of previous pictorial practices, Greenberg had to forge a story (récit) with "immediacy" and "self-referentiality" as its central actants.

The renewed interest in temporality has led to a rediscovery of the works of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey. Carole Baker's video project Circling Greyhounds (1996) can be read as a parody of the scientific pretensions of film and photography (Jan Baetens). Circling Greyhounds quotes chronophotographical experiments in order to demystify positivist ideals. Through the blurring effect and the video loop, Baker succeeds in abandoning movement and speed, an effect that is further enhanced by the coincidence of the visual enunciated and the act of enunciation.

Chris Marker's La Jetée also defies the boundaries between spatial and temporal art. The illegible but visible wall graffiti within its diegetic world are not only indices of absence and death (Philippe Sohet). The enigmatic graffiti are also rebuses—veritable "enunciative ruses"—that, once decoded, verbalize the lost parole of love in the postnuclear age. La Jetée—"the I-was (lá j'étais)"—not only confounds the temporal categories of past, present, and future but also results in an impressive mix-up of narrative levels (Baetens). Moreover, one can view metalepsis itself as an emblematic reading hypothesis overarching the entire work. The dialectic between cut and suture that is so prominent in La Jetée is placed in a metaleptic configuration, suggestive of a coincidence of extremes that can normally not coincide.

New technologies also have their impact on the conceptualization of the fixed image. It can be said that the distinction between "fixed" and "moving" images is superseded by that of "machinic" and "anthropoidal" signs (François Jost). As opposed to the de-anthropomorphization of the film spectacle through the works of Christian Metz, André Gaudreault, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, new technologies seem to call for a reconsideration of signification in terms of communication. The possibility of digital treatment entails that the "fixed" property of a sign may be attributed to the properties of either a natural sign (result of "automatic" production) or an anthropoidal sign, which presupposes human intervention and intention in the production of images.