Cameras for Killing Bad People

The previous chapter showed how modernist directors used tableaux vivants to create blockages in the flow of the film that result in a kind of enigma. A similar effect is also often achieved by the presence of still photographs in a film. Referring to a wide range of films including Blade Runner, Memento, One HourPhoto, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Road to Perdition, Don't Look Now, Himmel über Berlin, The Truman Show, Rear Window and Blow-Up, David Campany noted that

Campany further states that ‘whether in mainstream or avant-garde, modern or post-modern film, the “proof” of photography as memory or history is nearly always at stake.’ Photographs in film seem always to give rise to a mystery and a very particular kind of trouble – Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) is both a famous and perfect example of this phenomenon. Marking moments of stillness in the narrative flow, photographs in film open up another time and they subtract us from the fiction of the film even if they are part of it. Evoking a kind of double fiction, photographs in film address themselves to what Raymond Bellour calls the spectateur pensif? The hurried spectator of cinema is turned into a pensive one, an effect also achieved by the presence of other kinds of immobile imagery in films such as painted portraits or tableaux vivants.