I watched a movie while I was sick this week. It’s called Still Film, and it was made by artist and filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins. Wilkins said in an interview with BOMB that, “The foundation of a movie, as far as I’m concerned, is a durational period with a beginning and an end. Beyond that, anything goes.” This reminds me of Randall Jarrell’s thesis that “a novel is a prose narrative work of some length that has something wrong with it,” which is one of my favorite lines, and a good way to make a totalizing aesthetic claim for your preferred form. I bring this up because Still Film seemed to resent that I thought about it like a movie. There was something in it that reminded me of Alexander Kluge—that kind of flatly ironic voice and orthogonal relationship to documentary—and also, in the dialogue, Saul Bellow. I’d been having serious difficulty focusing on anything, but Still Film proved to be an exception: It concedes to a threshold at which further, or deeper, attention becomes unremunerative. This isn’t to say that it’s boring, or “easy,” but more that it encouraged a looseness of response; less like a movie and more like an image.

Museum of Modern Art.

Still Film is seventy minutes long. One hundred and forty images click across the screen, like there’s someone with a remote standing behind you and advancing them as you watch. Some of them come up twice, some more. I didn’t know what film stills were before seeing the movie, and maybe you don’t either: Film stills are photographs taken by a person called a Unit Photographer, a department of one responsible for documenting the creation of a movie. These are used to promote a movie, generally either for use in advertising or for distribution to critics or fans. Many of the stills were taken with large-format cameras and printed on 35mm film, like movie footage itself, and then distributed on carousel projector slides. Today, like everything else, they’re distributed digitally. The stills have an unheimlich quality, as they render familiar scenes from movies without being the images that make up those moments: Once you realize they’re different, it’s almost like seeing another person’s memory of your life. 

There is a dialogue between four characters, all of whom are voiced by Wilkins, playing overtop the images—there’s no discernible causal relationship between the pictures and the audio, apart from whatever rhymes you find between them. The conversation is modeled on a deposition, involving a witness, two lawyers, and a recordist; it is apparently based on a transcript of an actual deposition. The terms of the dispute, parties involved, or relevant events are not disclosed. To gloss its content would be both hopeless and possibly a kind of vandalism, but something like this gets close: Are the things in movies there because we do them, or do we do things because we see them in movies?