e the fact that the film is made up of what strikes us as a series of discrete and still photographs rather than the "live" and animated action of human actors, even as it foregrounds the transcendental and atemporal non-becoming of the photograph, La jete nonetheless phenomenologically projects as a temporal flow and an existential becoming. That is, as a whole, the film organizes, synthesizes. and enunciates the discrete photographic images into animated and intentional coherence and, indeed, makes this temporal synthesis and animation its explicit narrative theme. What La jete allegorizes in its explicit narrative, however, is the transformation of the moment to momentum that constitutes the ontology of the cinematic, and the latent background of every film. While the technology of the cinematic is grounded, in part, in the technology of the photographic, we need to remember that "the essence of technology is nothing technological." The fact that the technology of the cinematic necessarily depends upon the discrete and still photograph moving intermittently (rather than continuously) through the shutters of both camera and projector does not sufficiently account for the materiality of the cinematic as we experience it. Unlike the photograph, a film is semiotically engaged in experience not merely as a mechanical objectification--or material reproduction --that is, not merely as an object for vision. Rather, the moving picture, however mechanical and photographic its origin, is semiotically experienced as also subjective and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world. Thus perceived as the subject of its own vision as well as an object for our vision, a moving picture is not precisely a thing that (like a photograph) can be easily controlled, contained, or materially possessed. Up until very recently in what has now become a dominantly electronic culture, the spectator could share in and thereby, to a degree, int...
