TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Photographers as characters have been found throughout film history both before and after the protagonist conceived by Antonioni and his co-scriptwriters Tonino Guerra and Edward Bond.^[1] While stories featuring such characters most often focus on issues around taking pictures – either to problematise the “capturing” of reality or to create observing or even voyeuristic characters – some films do not fit this mould and set out to depict other aspects of the photographic act^[2] which interrogate the specificity of mechanised reproduction, create a mise en abîme around the photographic apparatus and explore the complexity of the relations between photography and cinema by underscoring what they have in common, their differences and the many “grey areas” punctuating their intertwined history. Four examples discussed below will make it possible to make explicit different aspects of these relations.

In 1927, Jean Epstein’s Six et demi onze^[3] put film development [révélation, also meaning “revelation” in French] at the heart of his story. In this melodrama in which the camera lens and the sun are mentioned in the film’s credits alongside the other actors, a young man, hopelessly in love, commits suicide when he learns that his mistress is cheating on him. A little while later his brother, who in the meantime has become the new lover of the femme fatale, discovers the cause of the young man’s death when he develops a roll of film used by his brother right before his death. While Epstein directs with panache the parallel between the camera’s shutter click and the fatal moment when the character dies, the film development sequence – and, literally, that of revelation: chemical, aesthetic, dramaturgical – may be the most inventive and the most sensitive to the animist power of mechanised images, something Epstein developed explicitly in a note he wrote for a screening of the film at the Studio des Ursulines:

One of cinema’s greatest powers is its animism. On screen, there is no still life. Objects have postures […]. Suddenly, an entire life is concentrated and finds its keenest expression in the thumb that torments the shutter release. A photographic lens is like the symbol of a thousand dramatic possibilities. The desires and despairs to which it gives rise, all the combinations to which it is the key, all the endings and beginnings it makes it possible to imagine: all of this assures it of a kind of freedom and personhood.^[4]