Liminal Intervals

For All Dead/Alive Time

Abstract

When asked in an 1984 Photogenies magazine questionnaire ‘Does photography teach you something about cinema? Or vice versa?’, Angès Varda responds: “Photography never ceases to instruct me when making films ... every image becomes a memory, and all memories congeal and set”. The late filmmaker gleans and revives a failed film’s ill-fated amber inscriptions from their mortal coils and boxed obsolescence. For the space of Grande Salle concert hall, she recycles the cabane du cinéma (cinema shack) motif from her previous work, building a large scale box with walls comprising strips of photographic cinema’s moribund DNA, the film reel. Diurnal rhythms draw fleeting images through filtered and ephemeral light—the solar pencil shaping time. As luminous waves breach the glass panes of the gallery, the transparent celluloid strips come to life, shivering and awash. Beginning with her film “The Beaches of Agnès”, and eliciting examples from her later gallery work, this paper will elaborate through visual and film-theoretical texts, the intersecting material and medium specific, ontological and phenomenological operations between the image and its projection, screens and contemporary installation. Varda’s intervention interrogates and elucidates the metaphysical and immanent relations of the image, charting irresolvable temporal paradoxes of the liminal interval: a thawing or melting zone between the frozen instant of the photographic still and the fiery flux of post-photographic and cinematic modulations.

Within her perceptual, affective, and pictorial multi-media poetics, Varda registers oscillations within and beyond the instantaneous image through various framing devices—the physical and figurative thresholds between reality and fantasy; presence and absence; dwelling and dying. Frames are ensconced within the logic of a continual re-framing and images caught in time, flickering resurrections.