FILM PROGRAMS

Film and photography relate to each other like fire and ice, as Peter Wollen once wrote: "Film is like fire, photography is like ice. Film is all light and shadow, incessant motion, transience, flicker, a source of Bachelardian reverie like the flames in the grate. Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay." Yet in fact the photograph only preserves the reproduction, and never the object itself. "Fire will melt ice, but then the melted ice will put out the fire (like in Superman III)." We have a poetic image here for describing what happens when the flickering medium assumes the non-moving, frozen medium within itself – or is it the other way around? They react to each other, becoming converted into steam, as no energy is lost. Thus, they abandon the defined aggregate state, permitting a blurring, creating transitions, exploring thresholds. Together, they produce a small but perceptible tremor that causes our familiar forms of knowledge to waver.

Rebecca Baron – The Idea of the North, 1995

Rebecca Baron – The Idea of the North, 1995

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