c form to its temporal existence. In capturing aspects of "life itself" in a "real" object that can be possessed, copied, circulated, and saved as the "currency" of experience, the appropriable materiality and static form of photography accomplish a palpable intervention in what was popularly perceived in the mid-nineteenth century to be time's linear, orderly, and teleological flow from past to present to future. The photograph freezes and preserves the homogeneous and irreversible momentum of this temporal stream into the abstracted, atomized, and secured space of a moment. But at a cost. A moment cannot be inhabited. It cannot entertain in the abstraction of its visible space, its single and static point of view, the presence of a lived-body--and so it does not really invite the spectator into the scene (although it may invite contemplation of the scene). In its conquest of time, the photographic constructs a space to hold and to look at, a "thin" insubstantial space that keeps the lived-body out even as it may imaginatively catalyze--in the parallel but temporalized space of memory or desire--an animated drama.The radical difference between the transcendental, posited moment of the photograph and the existential momentum of the cinema, between the scene to be contemplated and the scene to be lived, is foregrounded in the remarkable short film La jete (Chris Marker, 1962).[20] A study of desire, memory, and time, La jete is presented completely through the use of still photographs--except for one extraordinarily brief but utterly compelling sequence in which the woman who is the object of the hero's desire, lying in bed and looking toward the camera, blinks her eyes. The space between the camera's (and the spectator's) gaze becomes suddenly habitable, informed with the real possibility of bodily movement and engagement, informed with a lived temporality rather than an eternal timelessness. What, in the film, has previously been a mou...
