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Photography v Cinematography


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I am starting my dissertation, and it is based on captured moments

in photography v Cinematography,can you give me five reasons why a

photo moment is greater than a Cinematography moment? Or advice

about where i may find examples of the same Queory, and possible

answers, famous photographers,film critics, who asked the same

question about why photography dipicts a moment more than motion

film? Thank you

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First of all, do you consider cinematography as in #fps (visual

only) ? or are you factoring in the voice, music, scores, scripts

etc... of cinema? If you mean visuals only then it seems

obvious. *A moment* is one single frame i.e. a photograph.

Moving picture is *many moments*.

 

Regardless, checkout Chris Marker's la jetee if you haven't.

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There's a new movie made by Lars von Trier (i've just seen it yesterday), called Five Obstructions.

 

One part is remaking an older short movie with onbly 12-frames scenes. It gets extremely close to still photography... Interesting effect. You should watch it; doesn't answer your question above directly, but maybe it helps in the dissertation you prepare.

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Well, I can give you one of my reasons:

 

A good photo is a captured moment in time that can evoke memories of a whole event or

place. If you videotape your child's first birthday, you can relive the whole experience by

watching the tape. If you have one great picture on the wall from the party, you relive the

entire experience in an instant every time you see the picture. Which seems more powerful

to you?

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<p>Hmm, I'll try to answer your question in three different ways, depending on the interpretation of depicting a moment.</p>

 

<ol>

<li>

<strong>Depicting a moment from a part of the real world, i.e. news documentary.</strong>

 

<p>Decent cinematography is virtually impossible to do in an uncontrolled setting, so great documentary images will mostly come from still photographers. What's more, currently most documentary filming is done on video, and they could just as well do an interpretive shadow play as far as information content is concerned.</p>

 

<p>If it weren't for your previous question, I would have guessed this wasn't what you meant, since it is a very insignificant aspect of cinematography, now virtually non-existent. I'm not including non-news documentary like A Brief History of Time and such, that can be just as great as fiction movies.</p>

 

</li>

 

<li>

<strong>Depicting a very short interval of time, essentially a single photograph or a still frame from a movie.</strong>

 

<p>That's not what cinematography is about, the comparison is like comparing the taste of apples and omnibuses.</p>

 

<p>Now, I guess this definitely isn't what you mean.</p>

 

</li>

 

<li>

<strong>Still photographs versus entire movies or scenes from movies.</strong>

 

<p>This time it's more like an apples and oranges comparison, but at least they can both be eaten, so I'll give it a shot. However the main problem with the question now is the implicit assumption - one that also applied to documentary - that still photography produces greater results than cinematography. Where did that come from?</p>

 

<p>I've seen many great photographs, but few that came close to the pillars bursting through the fields of green in Brazil and nothing that compares to the full impact af spending three hours watching Il Gattopardo or marvelling at the movements and angles in Letyat Zhuravli.</p>

 

<p>On the other hand, great cinematography not only requires great talent and experience, it usually also costs a lot and those requirements are rarely combined. For most movies, Hollywood in particular, doing it "good enough" according to the established rules is all that's required and it's done with the same regularity - and financial reasoning - as product stills. And finally, if the other aspects of moviemaking, like telling a story, acting etc. are no good, even the greatest cinematography in the world won't make much difference.</p>

 

<p>Still photography on the other hand can be done by anyone with a few pounds to spare, literally in your kitchen sink. So there can easily be a lot more great photographs than great cinematographs, but that's just quantity.</p>

 

</li>

 

</ol>

 

<hr width="25%">

 

<p>Adam Weiss gave a birthday party as example, and indeed ordinary people can get lucky and make a great still photo - greater than planned for. Nobody gets lucky with moving pictures, when you're lucky what you planned works as hoped, when you're unlucky (without experience most of the time) it doesn't. Of course most of the time, you get neither a good video (I know, it's virtually an oxymoron) nor a great photograph.</p>

 

<p>The example however also mentions another aspect - how you experience the end product. You sit down to watch moving pictures and they are presented to you in a specific interval of time and in a specific order and then it's over. It happens in time. A still image is something you can put on your wall and see whenever you feel like it. You can watch it for as long or as short as you like. It's a different experience. You can watch the greatest photograph you can think of continuously for a couple of hours, but you can't experience the greatest moment of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony continuously in the same way, just to give an example of something else that happens in time. So is Beethoven inferior to, say Ansel Adams?</p>

 

<p>While we're on the subject of sounds, what do you remember best from the first landing on the Moon? An image? A movie? Or maybe a spoken sentence?</p>

 

<p>So the short answer is, there are no five reasons, because a photo moment is <em>not</em> inherently greater than a Cinematography moment. It's two different media.</p>

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And....is this a graduate dissertation? I think that a good perspective can be gotten by Googling and putting in some Terms like NAZI photography (Seriously here)and I wouldn't worry if a photographer is famous or not...personally, I don't split the hairs between cinematography or photography..I don't see why its relevant, and my brain cells have others things to do during the day...Will your dissertation be read several times and then sit on a dusty shelf for the rest of its life?
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John F- I can't see the point of your last question. ANyway, believe it or not, there ARE dissertations in any field that are useful and some people will eventually read them. And even one single person finding it useful/learning something from it should make the writer happy.

 

If you are bitter based on your own epxeriences, i'm sorry about it. Honestly.

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John

 

Get a hold of a copy of "Veronica's Revenge" by Elizabeth Janus. The book is a compilation of essays. One of the essays, "Voodoo Auteurism: Film Stills and Photography" by Richard Flood, might be the ticket to getting you going on your paper.

 

It briefly touches on the two worlds of cinema stills and photography as it's only a short, five page, essay.

 

Hope the above helps.

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Not bitter at all. Just pointing out a well-known fact about dissertations and the fact that many photographic folks ALSO have their own blinders on. WWII was heavily photographed and might be a good base of reference for a different perspective. Likewise some photography from a different time era, such as the sixties might give some input. This might give greater depth than "five reasons" and might help your dissertation...maybe it WON'T sit on the shelf gathering dust. BTW I know of MANY dissertations, including mathematical ones that are useless...
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A strong single frame image say's it all and conjures up the imagination as the eyes carry you through the photograph. In cinemaphotography the DP's job is to do that work for you. although both are image realted products. They are apples and oranges as referred to previously. If I watch a film several times it iscertainly for me different then why I will go to my library and pull out a beautiful photograph. The challenge is to with one shot tell an entire story.
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Try reading John Berger's "ways of looking", or maybe it was "about seeing" anyway,

read them both and you'll find his bit about still vs. filmed images.

 

Also, look at W. Eugene Smith quotes on brainyquote.com. or better yet read his

biography, Shadow and Substance. He had a lot to say about the nature of still

photographs.

 

Then, look at the (I think it was CBS) newsreel footage of the street execution

following the Tet offensive during the Vietnam war and compare that to Eddie Adams'

shot of the same thing. (if you don't know what I'm refering to, just google, Eddie

Adams tet execution).

 

I'm not sure how you plan on narrowing this down, but I don't see how you base a

dissertation on a floppy value judgement like, "why a photo moment is greater than a

Cinema..." Greater at what?

But you might find something a lot less spurious and/or open-ended in the above

leads.

 

good luck, I'd love to see what comes of it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My own opinion is that still photography is a relatively tongue-tied medium. Few photographs really manage to express their full potential - especially in the documentary mode - without some commentary, relation to a text, or to a visual context (series of images, narrative in intention or not). La Jetée is striking for how poor the photography is, taken as a series of still images not many of them would stand up, but as a _film_ it works quite well.

 

Cinematography (and the use of images in La Jetée _is_ cinematographic) is far more expressive, in my opinion. One of my favourite DOP's is Vilmos Szygmond, who manages to embue Deliverance and The Deerhunter with a significance which goes far beyond the stories the films themselves recount. For another way of using the camera to _undermine_ the surface narrative, see The Conversation and Coppola's and Murch's very enlightening commentary tracks on the DVD.

 

Anyway, as a still photographer, I am constantly aware of how weak photography really is. The moving image is far more expressive and has greater potential to influence our understanding of the narrative. Just my opinion.

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<I>Anyway, as a still photographer, I am constantly aware of how weak photography really is.</i><P>I couldn't agree with your more. Still Photography is too often a narcissistic pursuit simply to fulfill the ego of the photographer. Cinematography is a pursuit to fulfill the ego of the viewer.<P>Even bad photography must be respected as art if it fulfills the external criteria; B/W, or has a big white matte around it. Poorly filmed movies still suck, and critics will say so.<P>Exellent comments about Deliverance and Deerhunter, and right on the mark. I've always marveled at Deliverance and how this seemingly empty story was was transformed with such minimalistic and yet hypnotic camera work. Regretfully today most audiences today don't have the attention span so directors use camera work gleaned from shooting MTV videos.<P>I was watching AMC last night, and ran across a 1968 B/W film I had never seen before called 'The Incident', which was primarily filmed inside a NY subway car. One of the most effective and yet technically straightforward pieces of filming I've ever seen to deliver a great film.
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  • 4 months later...

Hi John,

 

I believe that still photogrpahy will remain a part of our world only as long as people remain interested in it. It is useful for defining a givem moment. In that moment one can use a variety of technical devices and interesting views to construct an image. Sometimes less is more........sometimes not.

 

 

I believe that we will eventually be shooting movies of our lives, and then selecting stills from that. There will come a time where technology is far advanced and can allow us to do such things easily. Even now there are reasons to get a decent video camera vs. a still camera. Life moves, and that is easier to convey with a movie than a still moment. Perhaps when we study things sometimes we prefer to see a still image, quicker and easier to imprint from the retina to the brain, anaolgue or digital?

 

I cannot give you five reasons for your dissertation, but I can say that there are more than five reasons why people prefer movies, look at the money involved. Clint Eastwood played an itinerant National Geographic photographer in 'The Bridges Of Madison County'.

 

Depends what you want to do with the product, a moment or a movie?

If I could afford to I would use a movie camera every day for the rest of my years, still a long way to go though, I am a beginner.

 

Interesting post John and good luck with your dissertation.

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