Film Stills and Third Meanings

In his essay "The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills" (published in Cahiers du cinema in 1970 and translated and reprinted in Image / Text / Music in 1977), Roland Barthes made a poetic claim that looking at a film's stills we might find a meaning that escapes even the fiercest intentions of the filmmaker. He wrote that "the third meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely." This "obtuse meaning" is "discontinuous, indifferent to the story and to the obvious meaning." And later in the essay: "The still offers us the inside of the fragment" and "the still throws off the constraint of filmic time."

We see stills all the time today; the rise of home-viewing technologies in the 1970s, DVDs in the 1990s, and the Internet and screen-capture software more recently make it possible to take hold of film in unprecedented ways. And yet what do they teach us? Or, more precisely, why is it we refuse to be taught something new by them? Someday I hope to return to my abandoned Frame-by-Frame project, which was to examine a film literally frame by frame.

Until then, there is the radical beauty of CGI action sequences of so many Hollywood blockbuster films (The Day After Tomorrow and Spiderman 2 below). These are surrealist still images, experiments with time and space and frame composition whose beauty is lost on us because they go by so fast, and because they are embedded in familiar stories that practically beg to be dismissed. Take them out of the film, blow them up, and hang them in some swanky art gallery showcasing surrealist images and they'd be right at home.

Their "third meaning" would allow us to trace a different, perhaps secret history, one that takes us into the realm of art--not film--criticism. Someday, these images will be liberated from their films.

Comments

[Kurtiss Hare]

Do you think increasingly liberated frames are changing the way films are made? Will Barthes theory of fiercely *un*intentional perpendicularity be made obsolete in light of these changes?

[LeDaddySwing]

when i was in film school, robin wood and bruce elder would bring in this massive projector with a liquid cooled gate that allowed for frame by frame analysis. you haven't lived until you've seen "rear window" pulled apart at its dna by a master surgeon.

the soviets of old like vertov understood the elemental dialectic of scene construction, that there had to be a dynamic energy between shots. so frame by frame analysis is a great way to *think* about that energy but you can only really feel it at 24fps.

[Ratfink]

the stills you posted look much more interesting then the movies themselves, more about random architecture and paranoia then the subjects they've been plucked from-- i 'd refrain from calling them surreal as that seems a little nebulous and loaded a term for such crass and slick productions -- but yr ideas about space and time are interesting -- am also a fan of "third-mind" thinking via Gysin & Burroughs... new interpretations of the stills can be had by their random placement and "cut up" nature-- have been collecting random film stills myself since the early 70s -- they are also a good reflection of cultural values-- akin to paperback book covers. Take any 5 pb covers in any genre over 5 decades and you will watch the world in freeze-frame-- this also works great with classics such as WINGS OF A DOVE.