Classic, sound cinema, says Raymond Bellour, is vacant from the film still. But what classic film does contain is the camera still, a hang_up from the theatre, where the film set is still a [sound]stage, and the stage an immobile frame. The camera_still is not a photogram, lacking innate movement[image], but a photograph, dynamic in its composition, depth, and time[image].
The cinema of the Neo_realist invests not only the camera but the lights, stage and soundscape with dynamic personæ; they become castmembers, imbued with emotion and [aberrant]mobility, just as the actors possess. The photogram acquires dynamism as an individual; motion_shot, lighting change.
Dead Man.
A two_hour, wet_collodian glass_plate exposure, photographed some time
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, after the development of
the photographic process, and before the development of the cinematographe
by the bros. Lumiere. The shutter release, by trigger and gunpowder,
lodging a weasle of white_man’s_metal next to the heart of one William
Blake, accountant, Cleveland. Like the metal frame_brace used by photographers
of this time to hold the poseur in position for the required and extended
exposure, this bullet was not sufficient to freeze motion entirely, only
to slow it to a point where it could register in the sensitised emulsion.
The delicately blurred image, the glazed eye_balls of the restless retina,
the disquieting quietude.
The cinematic scene, notes Raúl Ruiz in the Photographic Unconscious, is set in the application of still shots. Though "even if there is no movement ... the presence of movement always appears in any filmed image."1 The development of machines ("space and time", Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping) like trains, steamships, elevators, changed the relation between perception and physical movement at the close of the nineteenth century2. And the development of machines of perception near the same time (photographic and phonographic machines) altered physical perception itself. Perhaps the experience of these new modes of looking and moving were complimentary to one another.
look out the window
and doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat
and then later that night you were lying looking up at the ceiling
and the water in you’re head was not dissimilar from the landscape
and you think to you’re self "why is it that the landscape is moving but the boat is still"
and also ...
... where is it that you’re from?
"If movement_image is assimilated to the shot, we call framing the first facet of the shot turned towards objects, and montage the other facet turned towards the whole."3 Deleuze proposes that the montage allows the whole and the image of time. In the opening steam_train sequence of Dead Man, Blake experiences movement_image through the montage of different instances of the same location; the carriage. The in_between of the montage (Blake dozes, fade to black, fade up) becomes the shutter_gate of the film camera. His eyelids become the shutter, and the wheels on the track, the staccato of the gates. As the film progresses (Blake slips in and out of consciousness) these lapses become further apart, and of longer duration, thus the passage of the film through the gates is slowed.
Roland Barthes "third meaning" is found beyond the semiotic recognition of subject. A third sign perhaps, independent of its reading in the world. To be experienced[punctum], not recognised[studium], a function of a priori knowledge/emotion. Bellour attempts to apply the "third meaning" to the freeze_frame or photogram. The still camera position is perhaps the closer of the two. Movement[punctum] within the still comes from dynamic composition and subtle motion. Compare this with the picture_strip[vivid fragments] and abstractive memory of Arthur Koestler, from the Ghost in the Machine. The obvious meaning, Lucida, full of light, well exposed, easily read[studium]. The obtuse meaning, Obscura, shadowed, ambiguous and full of latent significance. The obtuse meaning is approached obliquely, intuitively, and is easily lost back from whence it came. It is filmic, temporal, subconscious. The lucid memory[obvious] functions as a landmark within this darker vista, triggering the recollection of the "third meaning". It is straightforward, photographic and conscious (in its reading, or readability).
...capturing its singular drama, emphasising the fact that it cannot be reduced to the overly natural time of illusion, inducing a time_space at the juncture of the visible and invisible. The characterisation of film’s meaningful instant, linked to the overall conditions of each particular film, is thus found to be both broad and limited, diffuse and precise.
Raymond Bellour, the Film Stilled
A film slowed to the point before the cellulose burns and breaks, not after the fashion of Godard’s time_lapse photography, but in a Borgesian lapse in the progress_of_time, lent by the fortuitous halt of the bullet. In this side_reality Blake loses his ability to perceive his own linear movement[image] and his experience of time[image] is also impaired. In his status as Wanted he becomes, to the world, a nobody himself. Muted by society and blinded by pain and delirium, Nobody, at first reluctant, becomes his interface with the world, and a McLuhan_esque4 extension_of_perception takes place, as Blake begins to perceive the world through the senses of those around him. Nobody seemingly exists in the eternal present of mythic cycles, a capacitor for the collective knowing of North America [bardagh] and forever re_enacting the events of his becoming a nobody.
The disappearance of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions.5
Fredric Jamesom 1983
Jorge Luis Borges’ The Secret Miracle allows writer Jaromir Hladik to complete his life’s goal, the completion of the Enemies, in the instant before his death by firing squad. The Enemies is concluded in the one years grace before the bullets penetrate his heart, and is the tale of another delirious and eternal present, that of the madman Jaroslav Kubin, in a cyclic story similar to Groundhog Day.
i confess, i do not believe in time
Vladimir Nabokov
E=mC2 indicates that as velocity tends towards C, the speed of light, then dimensions contract, mass increases, and time slows. Near the gravity of a black hole[death], mass increases[mortality] and time’s progression slows to a halt.
Fasting is a significant path to enlightenment though visions and hallucination
in many of the worlds religio_spiritual histories [ shamanic Siberia,
native American Indian, Buddhism, Yogic practise, Christianity ]. Nobody’s
espousal of this to Blake, and later the administration of Peyote,
induces further delirium, hallucination and unconsciousness in Blake,
the passage of time is further slowed and diffused. 
In La Haine,
the malfactors experience similar disjointed time_sequences while under
the influence of Cannabis and in the epic film Sátántangó†,
one of the longest sequences is a long northern winter all_night drinking
binge on behalf of the entire village followed by the elucidated drunken
dreams of the revellers.
The quest for vision is a great blessing, William Blake.
To do so, one must go without food and water. All the
Sacred Spirits recognise those who fast. It's good to
prepare for a journey in this way.
I have just ingested food of the Great Spirit, my brother Peyote.
Nobody
Duane Michals uses the nature of film to capture moment and duration within an ostensibly still image to advantage. Memorably, the Somnambulist series is the evocative hallmark of much of his work, similar to Dead Man in its exploration mortality, time and places between life and death.
The key figure in the development of direct manipulation of cinematic
time, and the flow of film between the gates, Jean Cocteau, also figures
in this same in_between space of life and death. Orphee, Death
and her minions, move easily between the two states, dissolving their
apparent polarity. The interface between states[or worlds] is the mirror.
I will take you to the bridge made of waters ... the mirror ...then you will be taken up to the next level of the world ... the place where William Blake is from, where his spirit belongs. I must make sure that you pass back through the mirror at the place where the sea meets the sky. Nobody Among the most important examples revealing divine epiphanies we must point to polished bodies, among them mirrors, and among those bodies, that solar machine which is called the photographic machine, invented in our epoch.6
Emir Abdel Kader, Kitah al Mawakif [the Book of Halts, Suspensions and Sudden Stops]
The photograph of the self, likened to a death_mask, is the mirror[dark side] of one’s understanding of oneself [we know ourselves by our reflections]. The single frame which makes up the frame of the silver screen becomes the single_photographic plane through which we sensorily experience Blake’s ride through Hell. The bulk of Robby Müller’s cinematographs are from fixed and still camera positions, with the strictly_no_galloping movement passing through each composed landscape. They resemble Eadweard Muybridge’s Yosemite Valley and Ansel Adams’ Yellowstone National Park much more they do those dusty westerns. Two hours of gazing at a photogram, as if taken by Michael Snow or Andy Warhol.
As noted by Anne Freidberg7 considering Paris Qui Dort, Dead Man makes no direct reference to the cinema camera as the machine that inevitably is the cause of William Blakes slow death [ or in the case of Rene Clair’s Paris Qui Dort, freezes Paris ], in as much as the photographic has the ability to halt movement and still time. Neither does the camera, or the photographer figure in the film, at a time when the entire world was begin captured on film. Freidberg goes on to note that the stilled Paris’ of Rene Clair and Eugene Atget are wondrously similar.
Although the still photograph can be said to posses narrative, it possibly doesn’t contain narrative innately, rather the times before and after the instant are generated through inquiry by the reader. The classic film, however, along with the classic book, rely on relatively linear narrative to communicate. It is here that Bellour8 notes Kasimir Malevich as demanding that communication need not rely on such direct device, and that audiences are able to read more subtle notation. Indeed, one could quote endlessly from Malevich’s dissertation, The Non-Objective World (1926), on the nature of non_perceptual understanding and the public’s ignorance of such.
the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.
Kasimir Malevich
Whether or not the participator does utilise other ways of understanding while watching films, or not, is another matter. Ruis considers the connoisseur, the opposite of the spectator ... [the connoisseurs] understand whats going on, to the point where they can anticipate what happens next because they know the rules ...(the rules of a cinematographic narration are verisimilar, that is, made to be believed, easily legible, because they must be identical to those of the dominant social structure)."9 When the rules of 100 years of cinema are broken, then this verisimilitude is disturbed, which perhaps explains some of the mixed reactions to Dead Man’s near total lack of story_line.
If one insists on judging an art work on the basis or the virtuosity of the objective representation - the verisimilitude of the illusion - and thinks he sees in the objective representation itself a symbol of the inducing emotion, he will never partake of the gladdening content of a work of art.
Malevich
As if g[l]azing upon his own mortuary photograph from without, Blake wanders[wonders] though his death_time wilderness of nineteenth century landscape photographs. We experience this stilled image through the lens of another, an instant without narrative, the passage of the bullet_through_the_apple. Make[take] this picture, and close your photograph album[en] on pages black. [fade]
mr.snow . oct 1997
footnotes
________________________________________________________
† Sátántangó, [Satan’s Tango, Devils Dance] is characterised by it’s indelibly long takes, and black&white aspect.
1 Raúl Ruiz Poetics of Cinema p64
2 Anne Friedberg Window Shopping Introduction
3 Gilles Deleuze Cinema2 p34
4 Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan Arthur Kroker
5 Postmodernism and Consumer Society : Anti_æsthetic p125 quoted Friedberg Introduction
6 Ruiz p63
7 Friedberg p100
8 Raymond Bellour The Double Helix p54
9 Ruiz p58
bibliographywww.world.net/~laudanum/theory/deadman/biblio.htm