Blackness and the Image of Motility: A Suspenseful Critique

This essay mobilizes the idea of “motility” to interrogate the integrative function blackness is expected to perform in both still and moving photographic images, i.e. the way in which it functions to foster a sense of coincidence between the profilmic space and the photographic image, thus bestowing a sense of wholeness to the image. Leveraging the fact that the notion of motility poses, but cannot conclusively resolve, the onto-political dimension of movement, and particularly the question of whether movement is an expression of agency, compulsion, or injunction, this essay examines the critical act of stillness and suspension Steve McQueen performs in his 1997 work Deadpan where he reproduces, but with an important variation, a famous Buster Keaton’s stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). By departing from the original on the basis of his chosen upright stillness, McQueen pursues a productive wedge between the visible and the visual, against the integration carried out by the image of black motility and the compulsive association of black bodies with surplus affectability and movement.