As I watch the film Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), there is a sequence that leaves me a deep impression and reflection on the relationship between photograph and film. With former experience I received, I was used to thinking photographs appear in the film can be treated as an absence of motion and cinema always make implicit reference to photography whenever stillness or absence happens.
However, when it comes to the scene that Vittoria visits her neighbor, a woman whose house is ornamented with exotic African features, something special appears. At first Vittoria points with her finger at a spot on a landscape photograph, after the camera shows the album , the furniture, the facial expression of the neighbor and the motion of Vittoria in turns, the whole visual field is filled with another photograph. But camera avoids to staying focused on the entire photo as we can only see some trees at first and then some lions on the bottom left of the picture with the movement of camera. The same process happens again to show other photographs, that is, to unfolds and make the subjects shows gradually, like the motion of Vittoria's gaze. It is in some way questioning the nature of photographs.
After that Vittoria shows a dramatic performance in an African woman style and even with her skin colored black. In the first shot Vittoria's face shows still with a background of a portrait of a black woman. The two images are juxtaposed so dramatically similar that Vittoria seems a copy directly from the photograph. When Vittoria starts dancing, the abrupt performance totally works against the story line so that we can make some assumption here that film tries to produce something which is born out from pictures meanwhile deny them totally by bring focus to the things that are happening and moving. That is to say, the stillness or liveness distinction between photograph and film is not a fixed and constant truth. The only approach to separate them is perhaps performance which can be sometimes disrupt the narrative of the film.
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