Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis

Launching the first major survey of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work Disappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature. Arguing that all films unfold in time, Remes suggests duration is more fundamental to cinema than motion, initiating fresh inquiries into film's manipulation of temporality, from rigidly structured works to those with more ambiguous and open-ended frameworks.

Challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation.