The Still/Moving Image

What happens when we suddenly feel that a moving image is being slowed down or halted? Nowadays it happens all the time in the cinema and the art galleries. A basic question of life – is it still or is it moving? – here urgently addresses emotional and aesthetical issues as well as questions concerning media. The still/moving image compels a new sensibility. Eivind Røssaak''s highly original media aesthetic analysis of the arts explores how the malleability of the speeds of motion instantiates odd relationships between different art and media forms. Three works are exemplary: Larry and Andy Wachowski''s The Matrix, Ken Jacobs'' Tom, Tom, the Piper''s Son, and Bill Viola''s The Passions. The last chapter calls for a “Politics of the Slow”. This book is part of the emerging still/moving field within the interdisciplinary study of visual culture, cinema, new media and the arts. “The usefulness of this book lies above all in the judicious and felicitous choice of contrasting complementary case studies, each of which is given a highly original historical placement and subjected to a complex and multi-layered historical hermeneutics”, Professor Thomas Elsaesser writes.