FILM VS PHOTOGRAPHY
Some comparisons between the film medium and the image medium:
Someone once suggested making a film version of an image. It would certainly add a dimension, time. A moving image would provide more content, provide more information, "what's going on". A film provides answers to questions that the image does not answer. The film gives a conclusion.
Sequence pictures a span of connected events or shift in any visual aspect.
A photograph is static in time, never changes.
A video on the other hand is dynamic in time, it changes and doesn’t keep the same image to the viewer. Each image arrives and leaves. Nothing is for the viewer to keep. It presents a steady flow of movements. There is a fixed progression that the viewer cannot alter. A photograph is fixed in time, so the viewer is not forced to follow a predetermined path neither backwards nor forwards in perceived action. This leaves room for the viewers’ own interpretation of the pictured moments context. What happened before and what is going to happen next.
The viewer can also stay in this moment as long as desired.
A photograph leaves space for the viewer’s own imagination to play.
One picture shows a frozen moment. Everything that happened before the moment and after the moment is absent. The image is a point in time, film a vector. Even if the image itself is static in time, I believe that the viewer’s experience is not static. Personally, I notice that pictures stimulate the imagination. It is not just an experience initially as soon as you fix your gaze on the image, but there is a constant dialogue with the brain. It is something unbound, in contrast to the film's imposing pace and inevitable trajectory towards the end. A film is finite; an image is infinite. The viewer has more control of interpretation, action and tempo.
Even if there would be very little happening in a film, it still takes over from your own imagination. The film keeps the viewer in a context. It could even be the case that in a film where virtually nothing happens, except for small micro-variations or an extremely slow macro event such as a protracted transition between two states in the image's character, the viewer is held captive in uneventfulness. An image, on the other hand, gives the viewer the freedom to create their own context and even an action. A still image could, according to that reasoning, be more dynamic than any film.
