Be-hold: Touch, Temporality, and the Cinematic Thumbnail Image

Behold the “thumbnail image,” a cinematic trope in which a still photograph appears onscreen as it is grasped by a character whose thumbs remain visible at the surface edges of the photograph’s borders and within the film’s frame. Although this type of thumbnail image bears scant resemblance to its digital successors, it does anticipate digital imagery and interfaces and, oddly enough, model a critical response to a common problem with today’s interfaces.

These images bring into visibility a kind of disruptive, unexpected in-between space that creates an opportunity to think about the ethical relationship between viewer and viewed. At this threshold between cinema and photography and between vision and touch, there arises a momentary delay and a moment of direct contact that allow us to puzzle over the nature of cinema as a coexistence of stillness and movement. The temporality and tactility of these images also enable an extended look at the nature of the encounter between viewing subject and viewed object/subject, whom the narrative attempts to fix in their respective places but in the thumbnail images remains in a restless tension, never quite merging, never fully apart.

The most thought-provoking of these thumbnail images are those in which the copresence of photograph and human hands points to contradictions that remain unresolved in the images’ framing and temporality. The restless unease that exists here between photography and cinema parallels a productive tension between identity and alterity in the relationship between the beholder and the beheld at both the level of the diegesis and the level of spectatorship. As they invite us to think about the relationship between (still) photography and (moving) cinema, these thumbnail images also ask us to reflect on embodied, tactile relations between self and other. They bring to mind what Anne Cranny-Francis, in the context of touch-based technologies, refers to as the “semefulness” and “seamfulness” of touch. The visible contact between thumbs and printed photograph is rife with complex, variable meaning (that is, “semeful”), establishing both a connection and a distinction simultaneously. As such, these images mark the “seams” of the relationship between photography and cinema and between viewer and viewed (both diegetic and extradiegetic), seams whose visible presence in the image encourages us to be mindful of the terms of this meaningful encounter.¹

Examples abound in classic and contemporary cinema, of course, but I am drawn to those from midcentury American films, perhaps because thumbnail images in this period so often seem to reflect a crisis of identity, unsettling categories and entities that had managed to seem relatively stable up to that point: national identity, class hierarchies, gender roles, and race relations in the industrialized postwar period, for example, or even life, death, and the status of the human species in a new nuclear age. Examples I have in mind include shots of Roger O. Thornhill examining photographic “evidence” of his nonexistent alter ego in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), a white male scientist holding a photograph of a claw belonging to the decidedly nonhuman creature from the Black Lagoon in Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), an obsessive police lieutenant examining a shadowy photographic negative that may reveal the whereabouts of a woman thought to be dead but who is very much alive in Joseph Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955), and the comically paradoxical image of the lascivious cartoon wolf grasping in his white-gloved hands—complete with opposable thumb—a cartoon photo of a cartoon redhead in Tex Avery’s Swing Shift Cinderella (1945).

Imitation of Life

For the purposes of this discussion I will focus on a particularly intriguing thumbnail image in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), in which Annie Johnson, African American housemaid to white working-class actress Lora Meredith, gazes upon a black-and-white photograph of their two daughters at play on a Coney Island beach (figure 1). The shot encapsulates a host of anxieties over race, class, gender, and motherhood as well as a complex array of perspectives—optical, emotional, and ethical/political...