Her Man (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Garnett's 1930s studio film Her Man stars now-forgotten Hollywood-actress Helen Twelvetrees, who plays a tragic young woman trapped in a cycle of forced prostitution and petty thievery. Working her trade in a fictional Caribbean port, she falls in love with one of her prospective marks played by Phillips Holmes. Towards the end of the film she is walking in the street and collides with a cyclist. For a moment her shoe gets stuck in the wheel of the bike and, as she frees herself, the shoe is catapulted across the street into the gutter where it disappears into a nearby sewer. To the immense and cruel entertainment of the collected passers-by, she walks away from the accident, hobbling on one high-heel shoe until she passes Phillips Holmes who, having secretly watched the whole episode, gathers her up forcefully in his arms and bundles her into a passing horse-drawn taxi. It is a slapstick moment; difficult to describe, it has to be seen. And it is just one of a series of visual gags and comedic moments that makes this highly formulaic and stage-bound film memorable in ways that are almost inexplicable.

Up until the moment of the shoe gag, the love story between Helen Twelvetrees and Phillips Holmes has not really begun. It has, from time to time, been the subject of some flirtation and banter between the two of them, and indeed other characters in the film react with humour, suspicion and even hostility as its possibility becomes more likely. But up until this moment the love story remains only a possibility. When the film cuts to a medium close-up of Twelvetrees and Holmes riding in the back of the taxi we know that, more or less, the game is up. The two of them start to speak and the romance proper begins. It's a familiar film moment, the moment typically when life is drained from a film, when the extraordinary combinatory montage of accident, real life and rudimentary drama gives way to a stultifying and repetitive narrative. As Jean Epstein once put it, 'the phone rings, all is lost'. If you were watching this film on video you might be tempted to fast-forward through the extended love scene, hoping to reconnect again with the slapstick and plotless episodes that have characterised the film so far; or perhaps you might even stop watching altogether, convinced that 'the sense of an end' now enveloping the film is too overwhelming, too deadly. This would be a mistake, for the next five minutes or so prove that, despite itself, this post-'telephone ringing' taxi-scene is perhaps the film's most visually compelling sequence. And the film achieves this by means that are very far from extraordinary or unusual.

As they sit in the back of the carriage, the two actors are driven through their fictitious Caribbean city, except they are not driven anywhere at all. Similar to any number of other films of the period that wished to show characters talking in travelling vehicles, it is the city itself that moves, projected behind characters who remain firmly studio bound, their carriage rocked gently to and fro by production assistants. And, of course, the back-projected city is not really their city, the fictional city of the film Her Man, but it is rather a stand-in, an anonymous real city complete with real buildings and real people, and one which contains real unscripted movement. It is this reality effect that is so compelling. So compelling, in fact, that you can barely pay any attention to the story of love that is unfolding with dreary regularity in the foreground. The documentary effect of the moving images punctures the fiction that plays out in front of it to the point where it is more or less erased. Who, we want to ask, is that man strolling purposively along the sidewalk? Where is that streetcar going? What are those children playing in the stranded vehicle we have just passed and who are they waiting for (and why is the vehicle not moving)? Where does that sign on the building to the right lead us (its arrow pointing down an alley we cannot properly see)?

Back projection, certainly early back projection, brings together so inefficiently two completely different types of film experience that we can hardly not notice their montage effect: we experience the two visual regimes as separate and unwoven, literally as collage. Therefore, that which is designed to make transition scenes relatively seamless (allowing movements across large distances that would be impossible to build and light on set), in fact makes transition truly palpable. On the face of it this is a paradoxical condition, achieved against the putative intentions of the scene itself.

Transition scenes such as this one are designed precisely to allow massive advances in plot and characterisation: characters speak, kiss or whatever and the story advances. Projecting an anonymous and at the same time familiar backdrop would then seem to be the perfect solution. But it is immediately apparent that the two elements (the moving city and the advancing story) march to different beats, and their visible montage suggests that the film itself is unable to carry the narrative overload of the advancing story. Against the plot and via a reality effect, the film registers a time that cannot be reduced to theatre or story. As we experience this reality effect of the back-projection, we begin to notice reluctant 'extras', all the people in the background who when they saw a flat-bed truck driving around 'their' city with a camera mounted on its back, presumably stole moderately surprised or inquisitive second glances as it passed them by. Therefore the documentary effect that disturbs the love story has its very own disturbance. Normally we recognise this latter disturbance as a sort of mannered form of 'distanciation' (people looking into camera), a disturbance that is not at all unexpected. But with the use of back projection, its appearance can seem quite startling, almost improper. Experiencing it thus in Her Man made me think of the Lumière brothers' Boat Leaving Port. Barely a minute long it features a number of men (probably family and friends of the Lumieres) rowing a boat out of a small harbour. It is a staged documentary moment, designed to show precisely what the title promises. Just as the boat reaches the edge of the little harbour's protection, a large wave rocks it violently sideways. Suddenly the posture of the crew changes, suggesting that they are no longer inside the story of the boat leaving the harbour. But then, in the very same instant, the film ends. It's a magical work: consummate stagecraft and accident come together beautifully, and the extraordinary impact that the details of everyday life impose upon a quickly executed staged event seems to give promise that film might just be the continuance by other means of what Baudelaire called 'the painting of everyday life'. It suggests how film might have proceeded through its inventions and gives the medium its very own promis de bonheur: a viable pictorial future for images that move. This would be a future that might pit staged scenarios against 'the everyday', that might be able to hold these two contradictory elements in suspension in order to depict something that would be both fantastic and real at the same time. But, as is well known, this future never came, or not quite anyway. Yet its memory is certainly there in a film like Her Man, where a tiresome clichéd love story somehow manages to fetishise an extraordinarily distracting real.

Le Pont des Arts, Paris (Auguste Renoir, 1867/8)

Renoir's painting Le Pont des Arts, Paris depicts a view of Paris alongside the river Seine. In the middle ground is the Pont des Arts, in the far distance behind it is the silhouette of Notre-Dame. To the right is the quai Malaquais, where small crowds of mixed social backgrounds have 'gathered' to enjoy a sunny afternoon alongside the river - they stroll, they watch, they exchange conversation, or at least we imagine they do. In the foreground, running right across the image is the very prominent shadow of the Pont du Carrousel. It's actually a composite shadow: it is 'made' by both the bridge and the people who seem to be moving forward across it. It is also a shadow of the place where Renoir presumably set up his easel in order to sketch the scene below him. Perhaps he is one of the shadows on the bridge, perhaps not. Maybe the absent people who have produced the shadows are glancing down at the scene below, or maybe they are oblivious to what is happening, lost in the reverie of their passage from one place to another. In this case they are simply transitory, or rather they are the sign of transitoriness; they move and their movement is what is registered; not who they are, but the fact that they pass through, and their movement is, in turn, testimony to the fact that time was passing while the painting was being made, indeed, that time is still passing while the spectator stands in front of the painting.

If the shadows on the bridge seem to suggest continuous movement across the bridge, this is in stark contrast to the apparently slow, ambulatory movements of the crowd gathered below. Thus the painting is, in one respect, an attempt to represent two different times simultaneously, or, more properly, two different kinds of time. There is the slow condensed time of the gathered crowd, of people taking 'time off' to enjoy a lazy afternoon and for whom time 'stands still'; and then there is the real transitory time of the movement that the scene seems to depict via the shadows on the shadow bridge. There is also perhaps a third, rather more complex time: the real time of the painting's making, a time that embodies both contemplation and passage, stillness and movement, a condensation that the viewer experiences or unpacks when considering the formal depiction of the different kinds of time.

A Still from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene and Willy Hameister, 1920)

In an often-reproduced still from Robert Wiene and Willy Hameister's 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the doctor is depicted with a book in one hand and his other hand raised in emphasis as he gives a dramatic presentation. Next to him, touching him and spreading massively across the wall, is his own larger-than-life shadow. Discussions concerning the meaning of this shadow have typically been confined to considerations of the uncanny and 'the other', whereby the shadow apparently reveals the evil that cleaves the soul of every man. But, strictly speaking, the shadow simply creates a strange formal distortion that destabilises the image. It appears like a two-dimensional stain that sits on the surface of the photographic image, working against the pull of the illusion. Its very flatness seems to reveal something of what must be condensed in order for the photographic illusion to work. In short, it seems to unpack and reveal the optical distortion performed by this photograph and indeed all photographs.

I am discussing a photograph here. Strange how the most famous of expressionist films are often summed up, remembered and talked about with reference to a photograph (think here Murneau's Nosferatu, Ernst Lubitsch's The Doll, and so on). And is it not true that when we (try to) remember any film visually, we often recall a particular or exemplary image? It almost goes without saying that films where the compositions are the most studied are recalled time and time again by the still. And here the expressionist film is just the most obvious example. Think of how Roland Barthes, in his attempt to understand Battleship Potemkin, dedicated so much passion to the reading of a few stills from the film. Think also of all those memorable films from Antonioni through Godard and even to Greenaway, where the films can be recalled so particularly with regards to this or that composition. To be composed is, after all, to be without movement. Manny Farber in Negative Space, perhaps one of the most perceptive books ever written on film, so often invokes the memory of a particular film through something approaching a composition: a turn of the lip, a slight gesture with the hand, a look to the sky, a tip of the hat. What we remember in film, according to Farber, are in fact those almost 'irrelevant' moments (ones that do not tell story or develop character) that seem to will themselves into the status of image - frozen image, still image, arrested image, but ultimately just an image - what painting and photography perhaps can be, but which film cannot, but nevertheless tries to be. It is this 'trying' that makes film unique and, that by a simple inversion or mirroring, binds it irrevocably to the history and ambition of painting, which attempts to depict movement without moving at all.

Considerations of what currency pictorialism might have for contemporary art are what underpinned our early editorial discussions for this issue. What quickly became clear to us was that we needed to think how this very ancient tradition of depiction could be considered as being embedded in different forms of art, and not just those works that were immediately and obviously 'pictures'. A picture, by definition, must have a relationship to the transitoriness of the present, to movement and to time, even if these are only revealed through absence or against the grain of particular forms. The argument for the importance and continued vitality of pictorialism, therefore, is traced through the relationship between different kinds of representation. Painting, photography and film (for example) all play across each other in their very different abilities to conjure time. It is this complex relationship, one that assumes both the anticipation of the other forms' inventions and the retrospective knowledge of each form's own failures, that keeps the original difficulty and vitality of pictorialism alive.

— Mark Lewis