For there are films which begin and end, which have a beginning and an ending, which conduct their story from an initial premise until everything has been restored to peace and order, and there have been deaths, a marriage or a revelation; there is Hawks, Hitchcock, Murnau, Ray, Griffith. And there are films quite unlike this, which recede into time like rivers to the sea; and which offer us only the most banal of closing images: rivers flowing, crowds, armies, shadows passing, curtains falling in perpetuity, a girl dancing till the end of time; there is Renoir and Rossellini.¹

The relationship between cinema and narrative has a richness that might suggest the fulfilment of an ancient destiny. The magic lantern and other pre-cinema entertainment had tried, with varying degrees of success, to make stories move. But from the point of view of an imaginary spirit of fiction, the cinema was an extraordinary, transformative gift. Cinema could bring to storytelling much more than the illusion of life. The affinity is structural: the story's drive that takes the stillness of a beginning through to the altered stillness of an end, through its multiple processes of change, is echoed in the cinema's duality, between movement and stillness, within movement itself as ceaseless change extended through time. Its stasis, the still frame of the celluloid strip, echoes the stasis of order and the finity that Rivette associates with Hitchcock, its mobility echoes the infinity that he associates with Rossellini. These attributes are, of course, present in any single shot but a shot also acts as a pivot, carrying cinema's mobility into the encompassing movement of narrative. On the editing table, shots turn into sequences and scenes, weaving cinematic raw material into the web of the story, into larger narrative movement with its own concatenation and progression. In Cinema I. The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze describes the way in which the literal movement of a shot, either of the camera itself or within the image it observes, mutates with the editing out of its own integrated space and time to become part of a new temporal construction. In the process of assembling pieces of film, their original presence merges into an extended duration able to articulate thoughts, resonance and ideas. For Deleuze, this ultimate 'whole' reaches beyond narrative structure to meanings that cannot be contained and reaches out in concentric, widening circles beyond the armature of plot.

But Deleuze's emphasis on the conceptual significance of cinema's mobility chimes with narrative's necessarily mobile nature, also a process of duration, becoming and change. From this perspective, narrative cinema should not be separated into narrative and cinema, and the idea of an elective affinity between them should give way to a more thorough interweaving of their physical and conceptual properties. But in another way, although almost all his examples are taken from narrative films, narrative as structure is irrelevant to Deleuze's argument. 'Open-ness', the ultimate attribute of the Bergsonian whole, has no place for the different temporality of beginnings and ends. It relates to time as 'the spiral open at both ends'. If this movement is 'pure ceaseless becoming', it is also limitless. Narrative cinema, with its beginnings and ends, seems rather to share the attributes of the shot in Deleuze, containing movement while being closed and restricted. D.N. Rodowick, in his illuminating study of Deleuze, makes this crucial point: 'there is an inherent tension between the formation of the cinematic movement-image and the movement-image considered in itself as Image of universal variation.'²

This 'ceaseless change' recalls the aesthetic of resistance to endings, the investment in the unstoppable flow of life that belongs to the repetition and mutation that also defines narrative's middle passage. Between its beginnings and ends, narrative is potentially limitless, built around series and repetition that could well be endlessly stretched out in the manner of a television series or contemporary movie 'follow-ons'. Deleuze's action-images, the 'verb' within the movement-image, are the material of narrative change, altering situation to situation. Thus, the movement of action-images, their change and duration, are analogous to the metonymic aspect of narrative structure, linked by contiguity, combination and the syntagmatic relation. The movement image thus shares the narrative attributes that Peter Brooks describes as 'precedence and consequence, the movement from one detail to another, the movement towards totalisation under the mandate of desire.'³

As both desire and narrative 'need' metonymy, one can find textual elaboration in the other. Similarly, in Deleuze, situation is necessarily subject to passage (S to S'), alternations, the pattern of the duel in the Western and so on. But rather than conforming to the constraining pattern inherent in beginnings and ends, these narrative movements in Deleuze stretch and reach out into larger formations. Ultimately composed of broad, overarching themes of a mythic and transcendental level, the 'whole' is limited neither by the horizontal tendencies of narrative progression nor by any ultimate closure of totalisation or achieved desire. From this perspective, Deleuze's analysis of cinema by and large sidesteps the problem of stillness, whether the entropy of narrative closure or the material stasis of the photogramme. Both, however, involve a particularly cinematic elaboration of the relation between the continuous and the discontinuous, movement and stillness, and the transformative relation between them. These questions of closure and stasis lead to the image of death as a figuration of both.

1. Beginnings: Stillness into Movement

In his 1920 essay 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', Freud theorised a death drive, or instinct, that overwhelms the pleasure principle. Peter Brooks draws on this concept in his essay 'Freud's Master Plot' to find parallels between the death drive and the movement of narrative structure towards a final halt. There are two phases to his argument. Before considering the specific question of the 'death drive', Brooks begins by establishing that narrative needs an engine to start up, out of inertia, into the drive towards movement. He uses the image of an engine as a metaphor for narrative's move out of inertia into 'the dynamics of the narrative text, connecting the beginning and end across the middle'.⁴ In the cinema, an engine as metaphor is often literalised, as Deleuze points out, contributing further movement to the cinema's movement as such:

What counts is that the mobile camera is like a general equivalent of all the
means of locomotion that it shows or that it makes use of - aeroplane, car,
boat, bicycle, foot, metro ... Wenders was to make this equivalence the soul of
this two films, Kings of the Road and Alice in the Cities, thus introducing
into the cinema a particularly concrete reflection on the cinema. In other
words, the essence of cinematic movement-image lies in extracting from
vehicles or moving bodies the movement which is their common substance, or
extracting from movements the mobility which is their essence.⁵

But in his discussion of the aesthetics of the dance sequence in pre-war French cinema, Deleuze describes another pattern of movement that is predicated on desire, but within its beginning and end, has a less linear, more cyclical shape:

The concrete object, the object of desire, appears as a motor or spring acting
in time, primum movens, which triggers off a mechanical movement towards which
an increasing number of characters contribute, appearing in turn in space,
like the parts of an expanding mechanised set... Then everything will return
to a state of order. In short an automatic ballet whose motor itself circulates
through the movement.⁶

These alternative images of movement, the engine that echoes a forward drive along a horizontal line towards a given end, and the dance that circles around, pausing and repeating its own patterns, generating others, also recall the alternative endings evoked by Jacques Rivette.

The beginning of Michael Powell and Emrich Pressberger's The Red Shoes, its transition from initial inertia, uses the literal rush of the hero's movement into the story as its trigger. His figure enacts the motor force of narrative desire and is emblematic of its cinematic engine. The film begins by visualising the transition from stillness to movement: a still shot held for a few seconds as two men struggle to keep the doors to the Covent Garden gallery closed against the press of students trying to force an entry. When the doors are opened, the screen is overwhelmed by the movement of a rushing crowd who then carry this first drive forward into a sequence of shots up long flights of stairs. The film's hero, Julian, is singled out as he fights for the lead, driven harder by the creative desire and burning ambition that will come to be one key element in the drive of the story. The sequence embodies three textual levels. First of all, on a material level: the initial stillness (the closed doors) echoes that of narrative inertia and, implicitly, that of cinema itself. Then, the burst into human movement encapsulates the movement-image as such, both its mechanical force and the force of montage as the sequence builds from shot to shot. Then, the transformation of spatial movement into narrative desire finds visual form in Julian as the embodiment of this desire, and its drive into the story itself. His bodily presence on the screen is a figuration for meanings that go beyond character, condensing these psychoanalytic, narrative and cinematic strands. 'Body' and 'embodiment' can no longer be distinguished. The image of embodied movement becomes, as it were, a metaphor for the metonymic forward drive of narrative itself. At the same time, on a more abstract aesthetic level, the narrative's forward drive echoes the film's forward movement on the projector's reel. Narrative beginning and ending aestheticises the mechanical, prosaic quality of the projector's start and halt.

In principle, the elective affinity between narrative and cinema allows cinema to enhance its own movement and thus obscure or distract attention from its underlying stillness. Cinema's movement is, of course, an illusion derived from a succession of still images, filmed and then projected at approximately twenty-four frames per second. Narrative and cinema have consistently celebrated their mutual drive forward, their energy and dynamism. However, stories lead inexorably to ends. Stillness is an essential element within the pattern of narrative, emerging out of an initial inertia to which it must finally return. Through cinema's ability to represent stillness as well as movement, narrative can attach its formal structure to these material properties. In narrative, movement is predicated on stasis. These two - cinema's material stillness and narrative's structural stasis - can also find a mutual figuration, another elective affinity. The problem of a final stasis, demanded by the conventions of narrative structure, may present cinema with the return of its own repressed but, in turn, its stillness may be disguised and caught up by the rhetorical power of 'The End'.

2. Movement Stilled: Endings

In the second phase of his argument, Peter Brooks, having shown that the momentum and metonymy of desire meshes with the momentum and metonymy of narrative drive, moves on to consider their ultimately contradictory dependence on stasis. If desire activates a story out of its original static state, then that same force seeks a means to return, at the end, once more to stasis. Here Brooks turns to Freud's theory of the death drive, pointing out that these instincts are always striving to return to their previous state. As they are fundamentally conservative in nature, they assume the appearance of movement, of progress and change, as a disguise. According to Freud:

Conservative instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of
being forces towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely
seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. [...] It would be
a contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal
of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the
contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the
living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to
return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads.⁷

Throughout 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' the stimulation to movement, inherent in the death instinct, jostles with its aim to return, to rediscover the stillness from which it originally departed. Freud's own use of metaphor provides another dimension to the 'plotting' of the death instinct across narrative event and narrative pattern. As he invokes 'paths' and 'departure' alongside 'return' and 'initial state', his use of language resonates with the topographies of narrative structure. It is well known that there are two grand conventions of narrative closure, devices that allow the drive of a story to return to stasis: death or marriage. Marriage is essential for the rite-of-passage story that lies behind many kinds of folk-tale, and has been passed on like a family legacy to many genres of twentieth-century popular cinema flourishing in Hollywood. Marriage as closure also brings with it the topographical stasis conventionally implied by the new home, the 'palace' in which he will settle, after his travels, that balances the family home from which he had originally departed. Within the conventions of popular cinema, the final emblematic kiss provides an image for the essential and implied stasis of 'The End'. But marriage as ending is only achieved, once again in the conventions of popular storytelling, out of the resolution of narrative conflict represented by the struggle between hero and villain functions. So the 'happy end', with which the hero brings this kind of story to rest, is built on top of the villain's grave. This death prefigures the hero's wedding so that both 'death' and 'wedding' are closely juxtaposed to represent a formal limit of narrative, and to figure its closure.

3. Death as 'The End'

Narrative 'ending', which brings with it the silence and stillness associated with death, may be doubled by the hero's death within the world of the story: 'The more we inquire into the problem of ends, the more it seems to compel an inquiry into its relation to the human end.'⁸ In The Red Shoes, the death of the story is found in the death not of the hero, but of the heroine, introducing the question of sexual difference to both narrative movement and the question of endings. Julian's drive embodies the narrative engine at the beginning of the film; Vicky's suicide brings it to stillness. As Julian cannot tolerate Vicky's creative drive - her desire to dance - the conflict between them comes to revolve around the stillness of marriage and the movement of narrative kept permanently in motion by the image of the ballet. After they fall in love, Julian struggles to keep Vicky in the state of stasis appropriate for the female role within 'marriage'. But her desire to dance belongs with the restless movement of the ballet company, always caught in the perpetual motion of travel, the repetitions of rehearsal and performance evoked by the succession of trains, cities and labelled luggage. Vicky's suicide substitutes the stasis of death for that of marriage. When she jumps in front of the Paris Express, the train (itself an image of narrative momentum, on one hand figuratively, of the drive of desire, and on the other literally, of the dancer's nomadic life) is halted.

As Vicky's suicide, the story's narrative line, closes, it condenses, in Peter Brooks's terms, the story's end with a human end. But The Red Shoes complicates and elaborates this structural device. Vicky's death does not completely 'end' the film. The ballet of 'The Red Shoes', in which Vicky had been about to dance, is not cancelled but is staged without its leading ballerina: a spotlight inscribes her absence into the performance. Here the ballet comes to represent the perpetual movement of narrative flow and the ceaseless duration of the Deleuzian 'whole'. But the ballet itself is actually about the drive towards death. It tells the story of the red dancing shoes that the heroine wants above all else and that then force her to dance until she dies. Vicky's last words - 'Take off the red shoes' - acknowledge the metaphor. The red shoes, figured as desire and death simultaneously, allow the relationship between the two to be represented. The metonymic drive of desire, then transmuted into narrative movement, dances itself into its only possible stopping point: death itself. The ending of The Red Shoes, while acknowledging death as halt, also reaches out beyond its stillness into a celebration of the ballet as ceaseless change and repetition.

In 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' Freud gives a considerable amount of attention to the difficulty of relating the death drive to the pleasure principle, particularly, of course, the sexual instincts. His final opposition is not, as previously, between ego-instincts and sexual instincts but between life and death instincts. This tension recurs with the problem of endings. For instance, Hollywood has been derided throughout its history for following the convention of the 'happy end', marked, at least in popular imagination, by the final kiss which fades out to 'The End', displacing, as mentioned above, the drama of the villain's death. But some darker genres, particularly the climactic deaths of gangster heroes and the femme fatale heroines of film-noir, were able to mark 'The End' without the villain function working as a displacement. Furthermore, the attraction between the two ways in which the stasis of the ending is so often figured finds a complex, dual image when the sexual drive of desire and the death drive are woven together in the 'dying together' ending. King Vidor's melodramatic Western Duel in the Sun (1947) ends like this. The doomed lovers, Lewt and Pearl (Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones), shoot at each other in a desolate mountain landscape. Wounded and bleeding, Pearl crawls towards her lover and they kiss passionately before dying in each other's arms. The narrative thus ends with a double 'human end' as well as the iconic Hollywood kiss, correctly and traditionally framed, which dissolves to the couple's death and then to the sign 'The End'.

But in the 'doomed couple' sub-genre of the gangster movie, the dying together ending echoes the death drive more literally. Once again, the motorcar makes an important aesthetic contribution to these 'death drive' movies. The movement of the story is extended to and rendered by the movement of the car, and the line of the road echoes that of the narrative line and its inexorable movement towards death and stasis. Not only do car and road provide a 'mental image' that links narrative structure to thematic content, but they also create an actual momentum and mobility that give an aesthetic unity to these films. The machine's momentum, the plot's inevitability and its unstoppable slide towards a final stop, work towards the rhythm or texture that characterised the Hollywood B-movie. There was neither time nor money for the more complex chain of events, the shifts in atmosphere or setting, that broke up the plot structures of more sophisticated movies into comparatively self-sufficient segments. The dying together motif itself is a further contributing factor: hero and heroine undergo the same fate so that the sense of finality and stillness in the ending is complete. It was this stylistic cohesion and internal unity that gave these Hollywood movies a legacy that leads over into art cinema.

Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937) is the prototype of the genre, followed by They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965) takes up a number of these themes and a version of the genre's ending. Ferdinand shoots Marianne and then carries her to her deathbed where she dies in his arms. Ferdinand's suicide then stages another, more abstract, image for narrative closure. The camera follows the smoke drifting away from the explosives with which Ferdinand had killed himself, into the sky, which then turns into an empty frame of pure blue. Out of the emptiness an image of formal stasis - the lovers' voices whispering 'eternity' - emerges that transcends the metaphoric significance of death as narrative closure. The blank screen, simultaneously something and nothing, creates an ending that is purely cinematic, one that can only be given by cinema. The abstraction of pure light merges with the whiteness of the screen as, for instance, in the endings of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet's The Bridegroom, Comedienne and the Pimp (1968) and Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma (1970).

Pierrot le Fou echoes the literal, topographic death drive of Hollywood's doomed couple movie, and Godard takes the gangster road movie into the European art movie, once again with car as figure for the motor force of desire. Belmondo and Karina reach the end of the road when they reach the Riviera, re-staging Charlton Heston and Jennifer Jones's ecstatic swerve into the sea in Ruby Gentry (King Vidor, 1952). From there, with a slow build up of violence, the sea gradually comes to signify the point of narrative halt. The story reaches a geographic limit and waits for its 'dying together' ending. The death-drive tropes, the long car journey with a 'dying together' love story mapping the story's movement towards the sea, all represent ways in which cinema realises the topographies of narrative. Takeshi Kitano's Hana-Bi (2000) creates a variation on these themes. Whereas Brooks sees desire and Eros as the initial motor force of storytelling, only mutating into the death drive to signal 'ending', Hana-Bi has desire inextricably entwined with death as its opening premise. It is his love for his dying wife that generates the policeman hero's impulse to movement, and he takes her on a last journey of happiness across Japan until they reach the sea. The journey is punctuated by violence, the residue of the gangster plot, but these eruptions of violence do not carry the inevitability of death inherent in the wife's illness. The ending is marked geographically by a dead-end (the sea), romantically by the couple's dying together, and in narrative by the chance presence of a little girl whose dance might suggest that 'life goes on'. The death, which is also metaphorically a ritual of re-marriage, is the ending of Hawks or Hitchcock but makes a gesture to Renoir and Rossellini. But from the start the story is reconciled with its ending, which has already been accepted. In this sense Hana-Bi realises the Freudian 'death drive' narrative very closely.

4. Endings, Death and the Freeze-Frame

To reiterate: for cinema, the movement and momentum that carries narrative desire into the space of the 'arabesque', into the story's journey and the elongation of its delay, echoes its own movement. On the one hand the representation of the end as death and quiescence risks a return of the repressed stillness on which cinema's illusion of movement depends. On the other, the power of the condensation between stillness, death and the end also works to mask the cinema's secret. The silence of 'The End' echoes the silence of death itself but it also signifies total erasure, the nothing that lies beyond it. The story's chain of events, with their relation to metonymy and to the linkage of meaning and action, comes to a halt with an image in which a 'human end' stands in for the formal, structural closure of the narrative. Just as the cinema offers a literal representation of narrative's movement out of an initial inertia, with its return to stasis narrative may offer cinema a means through which its secret stillness can emerge in a non-traumatic, medium-specific form.

Garrett Stewart, in his book on stillness in the moving image, demonstrates the way in which cinema introduces another dimension to the metaphoric condensation between death and endings. The cinema's specificity is able to supply the perfect image for the metaphor: doubling-up the 'end as death' with an image of death itself stilled by a freeze-frame. As he discusses this death in freeze-frame ending he too sees metaphor coming to replace metonymy:

Stop-action does just what its name suggests; it stops the narrative action
not just the representation of activity. Hence the totalising force of the
freeze-frame in such closing death scenes, its power to subsume narrative
entirely to graphic figuration. Into the (metonomyic) chain of contiguity,
continuous motion, of sequence, of plot, breaks the radical equation stasis
equals death, the axis of substitution, the advent of metaphor.⁹

He points out that the force of the metaphor, the extra meaning given to the frozen cinematic image at this particular narrative point, masks the stillness of the filmstrip itself. The image takes on an almost literary inflexion that overwhelms its potential for self-reference. In the final freeze-frame, in which the stillness of human death and the stasis of narrative closure coalesce in the (apparent) halting of cinematic flow, film can, in Garrett Stewart's words, 'subsume narrative into graphic figuration'. On the other hand, the elective affinity between cinema and storytelling, generally associated with movement, finds another aesthetic materialisation at moments like these. The cinema's ability to create the illusion of stillness complements the illusion of movement and contributes to the figurations and patterns it generates within narrative. Furthermore, the frozen image of death brings with it the stillness of the still photograph, which the powerful impact of 'ending' cannot completely subsume, as Garrett Stewart suggests: 'For doesn't the held image occasionally remind us that the stillness of photography, its halt and its hush, is never entirely shaken loose by sequential movement in and as film but is merely lost to view?'¹⁰

It is undoubtedly true that the 'held image' may well recall the 'stillness of photography' that insists beyond its narrative recuperation. However, the aesthetic of the photograph confuses the material nature of film. The photograph has an elegant integrity that can only be represented in cinema by the illusory stillness of, for instance, the rostrum camera. From this perspective, the freeze-frame ending leads in two directions. First of all, it is the ultimate finality, exploiting the association between the still and death itself, the photograph as the death mask. It enacts very precisely the homology between the 'non-narratability' associated with death, with endings and the stillness of a photograph itself. Secondly, as Stewart points out, the individual photogramme is inevitably only a frame within a series. Rather than carrying the connotation of finality, the freeze-frame can suggest the continuum of infinity. If the single frame takes the materiality of cinema back to the photograph, the repetition of frames within the celluloid strip takes the materiality of cinema into sequence. One expresses death through metaphor. The other expresses the aspiration to stories without end, a ceaseless metonymy.

5. From Stillness to Sequence

Deleuze gives particular attention to those aspects of the movement image that reach beyond the limited movement of action and the anthropomorphic direction of most fiction. These are movements that not only cannot be reduced to measurable time but also evoke cinema's movement less in terms of the shot, more in terms of sequence. Deleuze recognises this more-than-human dimension in his discussion of 'liquid perception' and the image of water in the French school of the inter-war period.

Why does water seem to correspond to all the requirements of this French
school: abstract aesthetic requirement, social documentary requirement,
narrative dramatic requirement? It is because firstly water is the most
perfect environment in which movement can be extracted from the thing moved, or
mobility from movement itself.¹¹

And he goes on to suggest:

Finally, what the French school found in water was the promise or implication
of another state of perception: a more than human perception, a perception not
tailored to solids, which no longer had the solid as object or condition or
milieu. A more delicate and vaster perception, a molecular perception,
peculiar to the 'cine-eye'.¹²

Deleuze then carries the discussion of the cine-eye logically to Vertov, who introduces the question of film as material, as a strip of still images. To find the ceaseless change beyond the shot, beyond narrative, is to return to the formal properties of sequence and flow in the filmstrip itself. Here, the 'power of a whole which is constantly becoming' is located in the photogramme. Using the editing sequence in Man with a Movie Camera, Deleuze emphasises that:

In Vertov's view, the frame is not simply a return to the photo: if it belongs
to the cinema, this is because it is the genetic element of the image, or the
differential element of movement. It does not 'terminate' movement without also
being a principle of its acceleration, its deceleration and its variation.
[...] Thus the photogramme is inseparable from the series which makes it
vibrate in relation to the movement to the movement which derives from it.¹³

And he argues that movement here goes beyond the liquid towards 'the gaseous state'. While the liquid had a metaphoric relation to the camera's movement, Deleuze seems to have found in the photogramme and the series a metonymy between movement and cinematic material. The flicker film, for instance, sets up a serial pattern using the frame and its relation to the filmstrip as a basic point of departure, implying an infinite series of identical units. The flicker film, whether projected or displayed as a strip, uses the frame for repetition and pattern polemically, standing at the furthest remove from the frame as the unit of the illusion of movement. Peter Kubelka's concept of the 'metric rhythm' that is the basis of his cinema brings the static but serial nature of the strip into conjunction with the movement of the machine. Deleuze refers to this in relation to the 'gaseous' in Vertov's cinema: 'Movement must go beyond itself, but to its material energetic element.'¹⁴ He then goes on to discuss Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow, without any mention of Kubelka (probably the truest descendent of Vertov) who says in an interview with Jonas Mekas:

Kubelka: For example, people always feel that my films are very even and have
no edges and do not break apart and are equally heavy at the beginning and the
end. This is because the harmony spreads out of the unit of the frame, of the
one twenty-fourth of a second, and I depart from this ground rhythm, from
twenty-four frames, which you feel, you always feel. Even when you see a film
by de Mille, you feel it prrrrr as it goes on the screen.¹⁵

For Kubelka, movement is essentially tied to the projector, the succession of frames and the emergence of rhythm. Rather than to the literary precedent of narrative that necessarily brings with it a lack of evenness across beginning, middle and end, his reference is to music.

The interview continues:

Jonas: Some people say cinema is movement; some others say cinema is light. Do
you have anything to say on the essence of cinema?

Kubelka: Cinema is not movement. This is the first thing. Cinema is not
movement. Cinema is a projection of stills - which means images that do not
move - in a very quick rhythm. And you can give the illusion of movement, of
course, but this is a special case and the film was originally invented for
this special case. But, as often happens, people invent something, and, then,
they create a different thing... Cinema is the quick projection of light
impulses. These light impulses can be shaped when you put film before the
lamp - on the screen you can shape it. You have the possibility to give light a
dimension in time. This is the first time since mankind exists that you can
really do that... [Cinema] has a great fascination just because you can do
something with the light. Then: it's in time. It can be conserved and
preserved.¹⁶

Although Kubelka starts with essence, this reflection on different key cinematic elements is more about juxtaposition, or even dialectic, than purity. The pure abstraction of light depends on the registration of an image in order to produce the dimension of time. The projection of still frames introduces the necessary dimension of movement through sequence and series. The illusion of movement is there as an origin and, if it were not, it would be an almost essential ancillary offshoot to these attributes of the machine itself.

There is an irony in the way that the infinite and the finite co-exist within the celluloid strip. The single frame has its own specific relation to the moment at which it was registered. It represents a moment of given time. The strip relates more to the pattern of infinite repetition and change associated with serial forms. The photogramme is, as Deleuze points out, always part of 'the series that makes it vibrate'. While in its projected form it may on occasion generate the illusion of stillness, it is inseparable from the movement of cinema. On the other hand, unprojected the strip is, of course, still, and its presence in Svilova's editing room is a reminder of that fact. Even while the still image 'vibrates' on the screen, the editing table vividly dramatises the fact that at the moment of 'montage' the strip of film is motionless in the editor's hands and stilled by the machine. Viewing The Man With A Movie Camera on video or DVD, the cinema's uncertainties and protean forms are enhanced by the ease of finding not only 'acceleration, deceleration and variation', but also stillness. With the varied viewing resources that come with new technologies, the complexity of the editing table can be imitated and its effects reproduced. Today's viewer can pick up the questions that Vertov raised about the nature of the cinema, and take them further down the path he pioneered.

— Laura Mulvey