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Hitting the “Vérité Jackpot”: The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence
- Cinema Journal
- University of Texas Press
- Volume 50, Number 4, Summer 2011
- pp. 48-72
- 10.1353/cj.2011.0059
- Article
- Additional Information
This essay proposes that the conspicuous appearance of freeze-frames in commercial cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s figures the popularization of ecstatic fantasy in American culture during this period. Setting the contingency of photography against cinema’s comparatively abstract construction, freeze-frames not only crystallize ecstasy’s answer to unsatisfying realities but also register the violent hypostatizations of “inside” and “outside” on which it depends.