JOSC 5 (1) pp.

5984 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of Screenwriting
Volume 5 Number 1
2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.5.1.59_1

Andrew Taylor
University of Technology Sydney

Writing with images: The

Film-Photo-Essay, the Left
Bank Group and the pensive
moment

Abstract Keywords
This article is focused on the film-photo-essay form. The first part of the article screenwriting
is a narrative account of my experiments writing with images in the early and writing with images
mid-2000s, using (the then) new digital tools to make film-photo-essays. My account film-photo-essay
reflects on how the change from analogue to digital affected my approach to photog- photography
raphy, film-making and writing with images. I then look at the case study of Siberia digital film-making
(2009), an illustrated script that was written following my experimentation with documentary
the film-photo-essay form. The second part of this article is a more general enquiry
into the film-photo-essay form and work that combines cinema and photography.
Idiscuss the contemporary interest in work that falls on a spectrum between photog-
raphy and cinema; often referred to as still/moving. I then focus on the Left Bank
Group, whose work often combined cinema, photography and the literary and phil-
osophical essay. Examples from the cine-writing of Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda
and Chris Marker highlight how Raymond Bellours idea of the pensive moment
is apt in relation to their work. I argue that still/moving forms allow more space for
audience interaction and emotional response than conventional narrative cinema;
and in a world saturated with information and cluttered with images, there is an
important place for new pensive hybrid art forms.

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Andrew Taylor

1. There is an apocryphal The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the
story that after seeing
an exhibition of
camera as well as the pen.
daguerreotypes, Paul (Moholy-Nagy 1936)
Delaroche rushed to
back to the Academie
and announced to all Introduction
From this day painting
is dead. Many people
In addressing the over-arching theme of Words & Images, for this
have riffed on this conference-based issue of the Journal of Screenwriting, this article focuses on
Delaroche quote in the film-photo-essay form. There are two parts to this article. Part One offers a
relation to changes
taking place with narrative account of my experiments writing with images in the early 2000s,
photography in the using (what were then) new digital tools to make film-photo-essays. It was
wake of Photoshop around this time that most photographic practice was undergoing a shift from
(launched in 1984)
and digital imaging analogue to digital. Mine included. My account offers reflections on how
technologies. this change affected my approach to photography, film-making and writing
with images. It speaks to themes of writing with images and alternative
approaches to scriptwriting, from a practice-led research perspective. These
themes have been addressed in this journal previously: for example, in
Kathryn Millards Writing with light , which maps out an expanded notion
of the screenplay via photography (2013: 123134), and Jill Murphys To
see a script, which traces the evolution of an image-based approached
to screenwriting in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard (2012: 925). My research
connects with the broader frameworks of creative scripting processes avail-
able to support moving image production and an acceleration of these proc-
esses in the digital age (see Maras 2009).
My narrative account also works tongue in groove with Part Two of
this article. Here, I move away from a first-person account to a more general
enquiry into the film-photo-essay form and work that combines cinema and
photography. I begin by looking at Siberia (2009), a script and film that came
out of my earlier experiments with filmphoto essays. I then briefly discuss
contemporary interest in work that falls on a spectrum between still images
(photography) and moving pictures (cinema); often referred to as still/
moving. Drawing upon David Campanys excellent overview in Photography
and Cinema (2008), I suggest this intermingling of film and photography is not
limited to the current era and I outline some of the ways the two forms have
been intertwined from the earliest days of cinema until the present. I focus
in particular on the French Left Bank Group, whose work often combined
cinema, photography, and the literary and philosophical essay. Finally, I look
at some examples from the three most prominent Left-Bank directors Alain
Resnais, Chris Marker and Agnes Varda to highlight how Raymond Bellours
idea of the pensive moment is apt in relation to their work.
There are three related questions that give impetus to the examina-
tion I have outlined above: Why does this seemingly antiquated form the
film-photo-essay persist in the twenty-first century? Does this old form
present new possibilities for writing with the photographic image? What
impact does it have on screenwriting in the digital age?

Part 1: From this day photography is dead1

Winter, 2002. I remember being struck by an image that appeared on the front
page of the Sydney Morning Herald. By Herald staff photographer, Nick Moir,
it showed seagulls in a dense early morning fog. It was a beautiful image
and it was linked to an online slide show called Urban Birds (Fairfax Media
(SMH) 2002). Seeing Moirs work online was a revelatory moment for me.

60
 Writing with images

2. A characteristic of
Flash is that it works
on vectors not pixels,
and so there was a
good trade off between
image quality and file
size.

3. Chris Markers La Jete

(1962) is arguably the
best-known example
of a film made from
still images. The
entire 28-minute
film is re-filmed still
photographs except
for a brief moment
depicting a woman
waking from a sleep
and blinking.

Figure 1: Image from Urban Birds, Photo: Nick Moir (Sydney Morning Herald,
July 2002).

Moirs site had been put together using Flash, at that time a relatively new
software application that was sympathetic to working with images.2 I figured
that using this Flash technology, one could make work like Moirs or, if more
artful with your writing and juxtaposition of sound and image, one could
make a La Jete-style of work not a clone of La Jete (1962), but a film made
from sequences of stills.3 I was excited and attracted to this proposition.
Shortly after these Urban Birds discoveries, Kabbarli (Taylor, 2002), a film I had
written and directed, was selected for screening at the So Paulo International
Film Festival and I was invited to attend. Before leaving for Brazil a colleague
suggested I borrow one of the new digital cameras from the faculty equipment
store. Compact digital cameras had started to hit the market but were still a year
or two away from becoming ubiquitous. The camera I borrowed was big and

Figure 2: View from plane window (my first digital photo). Photo: Andrew Taylor,
2002.

61
Andrew Taylor

4. In On Photography, clunky: 2 or 3 mega-pixels, with a slow processing time, a long delay between
Sontag describes how
the camera has become
shots, and batteries that ran out very quickly. I read the manual on the plane
the tool of the flneur: and took a snap out the window. It was my first foray into digital photography.
The photographer
Between films, parties and Caipirinha hang-overs, I wandered the streets of
is an armed So Paulo and took some photos. I had read no Baudelaire and only a little of
version of the Benjamin, so little did I know, I was behaving like a card-carrying flneur.4 Aside
solitary walker
reconnoitering, from problems with short-life batteries and delays waiting for the camera to
stalking, cruising refresh itself, I more or less embraced this new digital freedom. I did not have
the urban inferno, to worry about stock and processing costs, so I could afford to shoot with more
the voyeuristic
stroller who experimentation and abandon. I still had some residual habits from years of
discovers the city taking 35mm snaps but as I started to loosen up, I took many photos that Ionce
as a landscape
of voluptuous
would have considered too boring and banal to waste expensive film stock on.
extremes. Adept Who cares if images were hastily framed and under-lit? Shoot first, think later.
of the joys Dont worry if its crap. Just press delete.5 Fortunately, the images were not
of watching,
connoisseur of all bad and to my delight there were many that I liked. There was something
empathy, the different about them that I was yet to articulate. This puzzle started to unravel
flneur finds the when I looked at them as a group. Individually few of the photos stood out, but
world picturesque.
(Sontag 1977:55) when viewed in a sequence, they then had some resonance.
I was unsure about how I would get the photos from the camera to my
5. This change in
approach hastened by computer. I followed the quick-guide manual (again) and within moments the
digital photography photos were able to be viewed on my computer, and then arranged, edited
now seems so obvious,
that it is hardly worth
and played back as a digital slide show with an accompanying sound track.
stating. But I have I was raised in the analogue era, so I found the speed of this thrilling. Yes
stated it, because Icould see, even then, that these digital slide shows were a little hokey, and
I think there was
something profoundly the images were gaining power from being placed with cinematic music like
different in the old Russian choral music or Radiohead but what a fabulous sketch pad. What a
approach that is worth great way to rough out ideas for film-photo-essays (or scripts, or films).
remembering. It is also
worth noting that the
new approach has
altered the currency
use and exchange
value of photography.
Snaps and vernacular
photos still have a use
and power but are far
less valuable than they
once were.

Figure 3: So Paulo, September 2002. Photos: Andrew Taylor.

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 Writing with images

Figure 4: So Paulo hands, September 2002. Photo strip: Andrew Taylor.

I made two film-photo-essays in response to this novelty of production 6. I am generalizing here

to make a point. Certain
and my impressions of the new digital photography. To move images around writers and directors
and re-arrange their order was far easier and more intuitive than most digital exploit improvisation
editing programs available at the time. Apart from a more loose and free in their work, including
Mike Leigh, Wim
sketch book approach, this allowed for a greater freedom in reversing the Wenders and Wong Kar
usual order of film production. Typically one would write a script or scenario Wai, amongst others.
(plus necessary drafts) and then use this as the plan, or blueprint, for produc- See Millard (2006) for a
further discussion of
tion. Film-making was, and largely still is, just too expensive and labour inten- this.
sive to make it up as one went along.6 iPhoto, on the other hand, allowed for
7. Aside from using iPhoto
working in a freer and more associative way.7 I was curious about what would and only still images,
come out of playing with the images, moving them around, sketching with I was also working
without the pressures
them. What words came out of these associations? What if the pictures came of actors, crew, budget
first and then the words? Instead of a script or scenario being written and or tight deadline.
then images being filmed to illustrate these words, what if the conventional 8. Again, I am generalizing
word-to-image order was reversed?8 to make a point and
Around this time, I was interested in the idea of portraits and as part of most scriptwriters and
directors aim for their
my curiosity about portraiture, I made an iPhoto compilation of photographic images to be more than
portraits I had taken; mostly people looking straight to camera, in poses that illustrative. A golden
hovered between being performative and naturalistic. rule of scriptwriting is
to show not tell and
I also grouped photos around themes, mostly themes of place or ideas scripts that rely on
about photography. I deliberately didnt script anything nor did I read any images to be merely
illustrative quickly
become leaden or
didactic when filmed.

Figure 5: Coney Island Portraits, 1988 (scans of 35mm slides). Photos: Andrew Taylor.

63
Andrew Taylor

9. Things fall apart;

the center cannot
hold; Mere anarchy
is loosed upon the
world, The blood-
dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere,
The ceremony of
innocence is drowned;
The best lack all
conviction, while
the worst Are full of
passionate intensity...
(W. B. Yeats, The
Second Coming,1919). Figure 6: Russian Hats (Siberia Portraits), 1992 (scans of 35mm slides). Photos:
Andrew Taylor.

theory. I wanted to see if the images would speak without additional words.
I didnt add any voice-over or sound effects but I did add some music a few
tracks from the limited pool I had on my computer.
I held a small screening of several of these works in progress. When the
lights went back on the response was warm and a few people in the audi-
ence had tears in their eyes. That a sketch could elicit this level of emotional
response was encouraging and I felt I was on the right track. I also remember
one of the audience wiping tears from her eyes and then quoting a few lines
of Yeats: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world .9 The person had quoted these lines as an afterthought,
but they stayed with me. She had identified a problem with the work in terms
of its lack of theme, purpose or unifying force.
The piece on portraiture was played to Nick Caves song People Aint No
Good. Apart from this song now being dated and over-used (it featured in
Shrek 2, 2004) the works strength was derived very much from the music. The
pictures didnt stand up to much when left on their own. People were respond-
ing to the emotion of the song more than the images. The films lacked soul. It
was time to put some meat on the bones. I went away and wrote some scripts.

Figure 7: Vladivostok Portraits, 2003 (scans of 35mm slides). Photos: Andrew Taylor.

64
 Writing with images

Figure 8: Images from film-photo sketch July Road Movie. Photos: Andrew Taylor, July 2004.

The words flowed easily. I thought I had cracked it. The film-photo-essay
form was more intellectually charged than conventional TV programmes but
not as dry, cold and inaccessible as typical academic discourse. In addition, the
scripts would be relatively inexpensive to produce as short TV programmes.
I was so enamoured with this film-photo-essay form, that I wrote over
twenty different scripts, enough to make three series of short films. One was
a series of place portraits called Haunted; the next was a series on portraiture,
photography and biography called Love, Death and Photography; and the third
was a narrative based on a trip to Russia in the early 1990s called Siberia.
I decided to make Siberia first. My production pathway scanning negative
to electronic file was new and untested and I wanted to work through any
bugs before embarking on the other series of film-photo-essays. There were
no major hiccups in the scanning and editing of the images but I severely
underestimated how long it would take for me to complete the project. On
the one hand, in film-making terms, the form of Siberia was very simple; a
scripted monologue played against still images. This did not involve the
complications and expenses often associated with film-making; locations, sets,
crews, catering, equipment hire The underlying photographs were already
shot and there were big sections of the script of Siberia that barely changed
from the earliest drafts. However, the film was very tricky to get right in terms
of the amount and weight of words, and its overall rhythm and balance.
Siberia (2009) is comprised of over 400 still images punctuated with some
short fragments of 16mm film. The soundtrack has no sync sound. It is a

Figure 9: Igor by gas flare near town. Photograph from Siberia

(Photo: Andrew Taylor, 1992).

65
Andrew Taylor

scripted voice-over narration combined with music, effects and atmospheric

sounds. Before writing any words, I made sequences from photos that were
organized around themes of place or groups of people. These photos were
then inserted into my script. Apart from the insertion of images, it was laid
out like a conventional screenplay, with dialogue and voice-over indented and
centred. Below is an excerpt from the ninth draft of the script of Siberia, before
any recording of voice or editing had taken place. At this stage it was a story
told in six parts or chapters. This excerpt is taken from Part 2: Rendezvous in
Tarco (The centred text is intended as voice-over narration).

We rendezvoused with the rest of the crew at an oil gas frontier town
called Tarco-Salle (think Moscow & then head 1000 miles north-east).

It was a town of dogs and ships on ice ...

And a huge frozen river the mighty Por.

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 Writing with images

The crew filmed this and that around town but mostly we were biding
time until we could secure provisions, fuel and a chopper to take us to
our location.

This did not prove to be easy. Nothing was easy in Russia.

There was virtually no food for sale over the counter but we hired a local
called Vlad, who was an expert at ferreting out supplies of tea, sugar and
other rarities.

67
Andrew Taylor

Icy cold winds still blew across the plains but the Spring thaw had began.
Petra, the director, was keen to start filming on the tundra before all the snow
melted, so a skeleton crew set off with minimal equipment and provisions.

Shop with minimal supplies

I was left in town with Vlad and the production manager, Evgeni. We
would join the others when we procured more supplies, and after the
Nenet had moved from their Winter to Spring camp.

As the snow melted, piles of Winter rubbish made their way to the
surface. Kids built rafts from the debris and for a few days Tarco-Salle
became the Venice of the far north.
Then it all turned to mud and slush.

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 Writing with images

One day the blaring noise of a military band woke me up. It was a parade
to celebrate the end of World War Two, the so-called Great Patriotic
War. Everyone was out for the spring sun and a holiday stroll. I met
military men, families with babies, and Uzbekistanis who ran carnival
shooting galleries.

A woman called Ludmilla invited me to her home for afternoon tea. She
hated Tarco Salle but she and her husband, a mining engineer, were
trying to make a stash, so they could migrate to Denmark, with their
twins Pavel and Androoshka.

69
Andrew Taylor

25 million Soviets died in World War Two.

25 million.
And on top of that there was World War One, the famines, Stalin

Fade to black.

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 Writing with images

The Indigenous people of the region, are called Nentsy or Nenet. Some
live in towns like Tarco, some out on the tundra, some move between
the two.
Most are part of a poor underclass but Siberia is one of the richest oil-gas
regions in the world, so their traditional lands are enormously valuable ...
Siberia is also vast one sixth of the worlds land mass. When cosmo-
nauts see its gas flares burning from space, they say it reminds them of
a giant birthday cake.
After the fall of the Soviet empire, Russian and mutli-national interests
started clamouring to get a slice of this phenomenally rich cake.

Figure 10: Excerpt ninth draft of screenplay for Siberia, 2006. All Photos:
Andrew Taylor.

The final script reveals many resemblances to earlier drafts. It is filled with
voice-over but in the spirit of thou shall show not tell words were pared
back, as much as possible. I recorded my voice-over and edited this to images
and then re-wrote sections of the script and re-recorded the voice-over, so the
tone and recording was even and consistent in each iteration. I also deleted
the actual images from the script once production (recording and editing)
had started. (I was the photographer, writer, editor and director and so Ihad
a pretty good idea of what the pictures were and where they were being
placed!). In the final completed film, the above section became:

Aerial images of Siberia and oil-gas frontier town (Tarco Salle)

Descent into Tarco.

We rendezvoused with the rest of the crew at an oil and gas frontier
town called Tarco Salle.

71
Andrew Taylor

Dogs and ships on ice.

Tarco was a town of dogs and ships on ice...

A huge frozen river

And a huge frozen river the mighty Por.

A huge frozen river

The crew filmed this and that but mostly we were biding time until we
could secure provisions, fuel and a chopper to take us to our location.

Some battered looking petrol bowsers. An oil slick.

This wasnt easy. Nothing was easy in Russia ...

Except, I sort of liked the down time.

Sequence of portraits of people from Tarco Salle

I was an aspiring cinematographer and I got to take loads of photos ...

Sequence of portraits of people from Tarco-Salle continues and ends with

picture of serious-looking baby dressed in red.

A teen-age Nenet mother with children.

The Indigenous people of the region, are called Nentsy or Nenet

A group of town Nenet at a bus-stop.

Some live in towns like Tarco, some out on the tundra, some move
between the two.

A gas pipeline.

Most are part of a poor underclass but Siberia is one of the richest oil-
gas regions in the world, so their traditional lands are enormously valu-
able ...

An aerial image of gas flares burning on a scorched tundra landscape.

When cosmonauts see its gas flares burning from space, they say it looks
like a giant birthday cake.
Figure 11: Excerpt final screenplay for Siberia, 2009.

Part 2: Still/moving ether

Siberia (2009) falls somewhere in the spectrum between film and photog-
raphy. It is still/moving. This term is used for moving image works made
predominately from still images, or still images that are placed in a film

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 Writing with images

editing timeline and partially animated with virtual camera moves, editing 10. Another example of the
film and photography
and a soundtrack. Initially, I thought Siberia and the still/moving form was coming together is the
an obscure and specialized area of contemporary image production, but after advent of digital SLR
completing Siberia, I needed to re-assess. There was something in the air and (DSLR) still cameras
that can also shoot
suddenly references to the still/moving seemed to be everywhere: from the high quality video.
surge in popularity of filming moving images with DSLR cameras;10 to a spate
11. The most well-known
of documentary films made predominately from stills.11 In academic circles recent example is An
there was a wave of interest in films made from still images,12 as well as the Inconvenient Truth
publication of several influential books focused around the interrelationship (2006) directed by
Davis Guggenheim
of cinema and photography, stillness and the moving image.13 and featuring Al Gore.
Lesser know examples
include Tarnation
(2003), Sadness (1999),
Photography and cinema and before these films
In the Lumires first public presentation of film, the still sprang to life with Ken Burns landmark
Civil War (1990)
the cranking of the projector. The sudden animation of the image amazed TV Series.
audiences and highlighted differences between photography and cinema.
12. In March 2011, an
According to the American scholars, Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, The birth enquiry was posted on
of cinema lead to divergent paths of still and moving images we now find the Visible Evidence
at the death of cinema that these two paths are now coming back to be e-mail list server from
an academic from
one again (2008: 6). Beckman and Mas contention is evidenced by count- Concordia University
less still/moving art exhibitions that feature work that animates still images in Montreal looking for
films revolving around
or slows down moving images so they appear almost as stills. For example, photographs to use for
Andy Warhols Empire (1964), Douglas Gordons 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Sam teaching purposes (see
Taylor-Woods David (2004). However, it could also be argued that since Soar and Prentice 2011).
the very earliest days of cinema, there has been cross-fertilization between 13. Recent publications
photography and cinema. David Campanys book, Photography and Cinema dealing with still/
moving themes include:
(2008), is a brilliant short survey of some of the manifestations of the inter- Laura Mulveys Death
mingling of these two forms. Campany opens his account with the observa- 24x a Second: Stillness
tion that in the earliest roll of moving picture ever a Lumire Brothers film and the Moving Image
(2006); David Campanys
depicting delegates attending a photographic conference in Lyon there is Photography and
a shot of a man with a stills camera who stops, stares and pretends to take a Cinema (2008); and a
collections of essays
picture of the cinematographer (2008:7). (Beckman and Ma,
From this moment on, there have been countless iterations of film and 2008).
cinema being intertwined. Campany gives examples of numerous films about
photographers, and films that use photographs as a central part of their plots
he claims, for example, that one-fifth of all noir films ever made use a photo-
graph as a key prop, plot point, or piece of evidence (2008: 97). Campany also
looks at the work of three prominent post-war photographers Robert Frank,
William Klein and Ed van der Elsken who all made films that reworked
their photography, as well as photo-books that featured photographs with a
cinematic look. In his overview of the intermingling of film and photography,
Campany also cites artists like Cindy Sherman, who made photos that looked
like film stills; photoromanzes popular photo comic book versions of films;
and the famous inter-war exhibition, Film und Foto, that featured artists like
Lszl Moholy-Nagy, who worked across both film and photography, and
who proposed camera-less films that were somewhere in-between (2008).
Adding to Campanys overview, Id argue that this intermingling of
photography and cinema has been most apparent in documentary cinema.
I would also argue that it found a particular form in the immediate post-war
years in France in a group originally known as the Group of Thirty, now
more commonly referred to as the Left Bank Group. Three figures central to
the Left Bank Group are Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Agnes Varda.

73
Andrew Taylor

Figure 12: Opening Credit of Agnes Vardas Salut les Cubains (1963).

The essay film, the Left Bank Group and the pensive moment
In a 1948 essay The birth of the new avant-garde: The Camera-Stylo,
Alexandre Astruc wrote:

the cinema is gradually becoming a language

That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema, the age of the
camera-stylo (camera pen) It (cinema) can tackle any subject, any
genre. The most philosophical meditations on human production,
psychology, ideas, and passions lie within its province
(Alexandre Astruc in Corrigan 2008: 44)

In 1953, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Alexandre Astruc and
other members of the Group of Thirty lobbied for the development of the
short film as the grounds for developing essayistic film practices. By the
mid-1950s, the term essai cinematographique/cinematographic essay was in
frequent use in France (Corrigan 2008: 4546). The group of artists, writers
and film-makers who made up the Group of Thirty were part of the French
New Wave (nouvelle vague) milieu, but were more overtly political, literary and
experimental in focus than their more commercially successful counterparts
from the Right Bank Group, which was affiliated with Cahiers du Cinema
(Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, Truffaut and others).
Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1955) and the documentaries of Resnais
Left Bank contemporaries, Agnes Varda and Chris Marker, were more idio-
syncratic and reflective than those made in the more pragmatic Griersonian
documentary tradition that favoured an observable concrete actuality. In the
essayistic works of the Left Bank directors, the film-makers own subjectivity
became part of the subject of the enquiry. This essayistic approach has its roots
in a French intellectual tradition stretching back to sixteenth-century French

74
 Writing with images

philosopher Michel de Montaigne. In an essay on Montaigne and Marker, 14. Little is known of
Markers early life, but
screen theorist Ross Gibson writes: For Montaigne an investigation into the there is an apocryphal
world and its meaning entailed an investigation into ones own subjectivity story that Marker spent
and intelligence (Gibson 19871988: 27). Significantly, Marker and Varda some time studying
with Sartre in the 1930s
both came to film with a background of having studied philosophy.14 (Farmer 2009).
The film theorist Raymond Bellour talks of the pensive moment when a
viewer is presented with a photograph or a freeze frame in a film. For Bellour,
pensiveness is a suspension, a moment of anticipation when things are in
balance. Literally and psychologically, the still image causes a pause (Bellour
1987: 8). Bellours use of pensiveness is apt in relation to the use of still
images in the work of the Left Bank directors. For example, in Alain Resnais
Night and Fog, there is a moment of abrupt punctuation shortly after the trains
arrive at a concentration camp. A still photograph of a newly arrived inmate
stares back at us in big close-up. The sudden insertion of a tight shot creates
a graphic disjuncture and the look to camera is more direct than the previ-
ous images. The inmate looks shocked. His eyes wide open. This use of a
still image works in terms of it fitting with the sequence of events depicted,
and the time and place of the narrative, but it also breaks the flow and has a
piercing, affective impact.
Bellours notion of pensiveness is also relevant in looking at the essayistic
work of Resnais contemporaries, Agnes Varda and Chris Marker. Varda and
Marker both made documentary essays that utilized the photograph far more
than conventional documentaries. Aside from philosophy, Marker and Varda
also came to film with a working knowledge in photography, not cinematogra-
phy. The film-photo-essays of Varda and Marker both make visual arguments
or enquiries about film and photography; stillness and motion. For Varda and
Marker, film and photography are not necessarily antithetical media; and

Figure 13: Inmate just arrived at camp. Still image from Nuit et brouillard/Night
& Fog (1955). Argos Films.

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Andrew Taylor

stillness and motion are not necessarily opposite modes of expression. In the
work of Varda and Marker, film and photography often coexist within one
work, and their nature and the differences between the two is used in an
expressive, poetic, and musical way. In order to make this point more tangible
and highlight instances of pensiveness, I offer some examples of the film-
photo-essay work of Chris Marker and Agnes Varda.

Marker and still/moving expression

I am an essayist Film is a system that allows Godard to be a novelist,

Gatti to make theatre and me to make essays.
(Chris Marker in Alter 2006: 16)

Marker is a 1:1.33 Montaigne.

(Roud 19621963: 24)

Several of Markers works can be described as still/moving simply in terms

of the large number of photographs or still images the works employ. Most
famously, La Jete (1962) is made entirely from still images, except for one very
short sequence involving a blinking of the eye. Si javais quatre dromadaires/If
Ihad four Dromedaries (1966), is made from re-working 800 still photos, many
of these taken while working on a series of alternative travel guides, Le Petite
Planet/Small Planet (19541958) for the publisher Edition du Sueil. Another work
Corennes/The Koreans (1959) was published as a photo-text album but had an
iteration as a 16mm film. And Photo Browse, a compilation of just over three
hundred photos, appeared as part of the installation work, Zapping Zone (1990).
Markers first collaboration with Alan Resnais, Les statues meurent aussi/
Statues also die (19501953) is not made from still photographs but features
many static and inanimate images of statues and African art. Statues also die
was commissioned as a film about African art but Marker and Resnais took it
to another level and in their hands became an essay about the cultural impact
of colonialism, and the consequences of imposing a white imperial gaze upon
African art and culture (Lupton 2005: 36).
Following from Statues also die, Markers first documentaries where he
was the sole writer and director were two travelogues entitled Dimanche
Pekin/Sunday in Peking (1957) and Lettre de Siberie/Letter from Siberia (1957). On
the surface, there are some definite points of connection between a slide show,
Sunday in Peking, Letter from Siberia and Sans Soleil/Sunless (1983), Markers
later and most famous documentary work. These films are all, at least partially,
motivated by journeys to foreign lands and a fascination and curiosity with
the exotic; and although they are made mostly from moving pictures not stills,
they are all narrated (like a slide show) by an off-screen voice usually male
(or in the case of Sunless, a female speaking on behalf of a male). Letter from
Siberia even has one sequence that directly references a magic lantern slide
show, where a history of the gold rush is illustrated by bordered sepia photo-
graphs, animated to pass back and forth (Lupton 2005: 56).
However, to dismiss or reduce these films as mere slide show travelogues
misses the point. All three films are to varying degrees also reflections about
less tangible themes: representation, art, communication, collective politics,
memory, time and death. Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia were both
sponsored documentaries, and are in fact more like straight travelogues than

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Sunless, but there is still evidence in these early Marker films of an innovative
use of collage elements (cartoons, paper cut-outs, extracts from fictitious TV
commercials), and a questioning of truth and documentary representation. In
a well-known sequence in Letter from Siberia, location footage from an inter-
section in Yukust is shown four times in succession. In the first instance, it
is shown without narration. We see road labourers, a Russian ZiL car and
a Yukut man with an eye injury. The footage is then repeated but this time
the narrator interprets it from a pro-Communist official Soviet perspective.
Next, an anti-Communist perspective. And finally from a more personal
space, somewhere in between the two. Marker makes no claim that any of
these interpretations are more truthful than the next. By implication, he is
suggesting the film is not the reality of Siberia, but just one possible version or
interpretation of a contested and changing reality, bringing into question the
nature of documentary truth and representation.
Markers essayistic voice and assemblage approach evident in his early
films was far more developed and adventurous in his later work Sunless.
Markers Sunless is made from fragments of 16mm moving images, not photo-
graphic stills, but the film nevertheless involves interplay between stillness and
motion. Early in this film there is a sequence that illustrates how Bellours idea
of the pensive moment relates well to the moments of pause and reflection
in Markers work. In this sequence, there are three moments where Marker
uses freeze frames as punctuation points. After talking about remembering
and forgetting (and the relationship between the two), the narrator asks How
can we remember thirst? which, I presume, is about how can we remember
a feeling, a physical sensation. The image shown with this narration is one of
a woman on a ferry looking at the water, and the wake going by. She turns
to camera, looks into the lens and the image freezes for about ten seconds.
The length of time is long enough to stand out as an unusual juncture in a
moving picture film. It also allows space to think about the cryptic comment
(I think I can remember thirst but maybe I can only remember a time when
I felt thirsty).
Shortly after this moment are two more extended freeze frame moments.
The first is in a working class bar in a Tokyo suburb called Namidabashi. The
camera man/narrator (an alter-ego of Markers) says he paid for a round of
drinks in the bar. Its the kind of place that allows people to stare at each
other with equality. The threshold, below which every man is as good as any
other, and he knows it. Cut to a medium close-up of an older looking man
with a face that looks like it has been toughened and hardened with age and
too much drink. He turns to face the camera. Freeze frame. 10 seconds.
We then are introduced to a jetty on Fogo in the Cape Verde Islands, once
a marshalling yard for slaves in the former Portuguese colony. People of mixed
Portuguese and African decent are milling around waiting for a boat. Several
of the people look at the camera looking at them. The narrator asks: Frankly,
have you ever heard anything stupider than to tell people as they teach in
film schools not to look into the camera? As the question is posed we see
an image locked off and almost as piercing as a still of a handsome young
African woman looking straight into the lens. We then see several images of
people at the jetty aware of the camera looking at them. Mostly, the people
look away, but in the final image a young woman looks straight back at the
camera looking at her. Cue the freeze frame. 10 seconds.
Using freeze frames in this manner, Marker is saying something about
the interrelationship of cinema and photography (and time). But this is a

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Andrew Taylor

Figure 14: Three images from Sunless (1983). Cape Verde Islanders looking at the
camera. The final image is held as a freeze frame (Argos Films).

truism any moving picture that freezes the image poses some sort of ques-
tion about the interrelationship of cinema and photography (and time).
Idont think this questioning is his sole reason for these extended moments
of stillness. The freeze frames are extended moments of pause, reflection and
punctuation. Or, using Bellours words, they are pensive moments.
The three freezes occur within a minute or so of each other, and in each of
them, the subjects look into the lens. The final Cape Verde island freeze is a
cap to an action, a beat, the end of a pattern of three. In other words, part of
Markers use of still and moving imagery is not only for the purposes of expres-
sion and punctuation, it is also rhythmic and verging on musical. With this
idea in mind, Id like to now turn to some of Agnes Vardas documentaries.

Varda and Salut les Cubains still/moving rhythms

Significantly, the term cincriture, or cin-writing, has been central to the
practice of Agnes Varda. She describes as the process of cin-writing in the
broadest of terms: editing style, content and tone of voice-over, choice of
place, season, crew and light (Carter 2002). Like Marker, Varda has a large
and impressive body of work and many of her non-fiction films employ still
imagery. For example, the film-photo-essays, Ulysse (1982); Ydessa, les ours et
etc./Ydessa, Teddy Bears and etc. (2004); and seventeen episodes of Une minute
pour une image/One minute per image (1983), a series of meditations on specific

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photographs made for French Television. My discussion focuses on Vardas

early film-photo-essay, Salut les Cubains (1963).
Like Markers early works, Vardas Salut les Cubains resembles a slide
show; that is, the film is made almost entirely from still images. It documents
a journey to an exotic location, it relies on voice-over narration, and it is
organized around conventional themes such as education, schools, farms and
industry. In this regard, the film has the hallmarks of a slide show travelogue,
or a picture essay in Time-Life or National Geographic.
On the other hand, Salut les Cubains turns these conventions on their head
and is not like a slide show travelogue, or a National Geographic picture essay in
significant ways. The film mixes live action and stills, it is all filmed in black and
white, it is deliberately photographed to be an animated film, and the organ-
izing principle is not just conventional categories of farmers, faces, arts and
culture but is also playful and idiosyncratic. At one point the images are organ-
ized around a theme of Cuban men and beards; at another, the curvy figures
and sexiness of Cuban woman; and late in the film, there is a very French
New Wave nod to Cuba evoking Hollywood (big American cars from gang-
ster films, and cowboys who look like characters from Johnny Guitar 1954).
The narration is different in Salut les Cubains as well. It is a dialogue of
sorts, not a monologue, and the two voices one male and one female
are in song, in rhythm and in counterpoint to each other. Finally, the film
differs from a mainstream slide show travelogue, or picture essay, by taking
sides with the revolution (not vice versa, as was the view of the contemporary
dominant American and French media of the early 1960s, Cold War era). Salut
les Cubains is much more than a slide show documentary. The film takes a
well-worn form the travelogue and re-works it in playful and inventive
ways. It is an exploration of a form and innovative hybrid of film, music, docu-
mentary, photography and propaganda.
We might connect Vardas work with Markers use of stillness, where it
is not just about rhythm and punctuation but also being expressive and even
musical. Reviewing Salut les Cubains, I was struck by its joyousness, its love
of people and faces (its humanity), and its musicality. It did not feel like a
film poem, so much as a piece of film jazz. The animated portrait of Salut les
Cubains seemed like an attempt to combine modernist ideas of visual music
with social(ist) realist documentary. According to Varda, at the time the film
was made in the early 1960s, the Left in France saw Cuba as the hope for
revolution with cha-cha-cha (Varda 2007). The film opens with live-action
footage of Cubans playing jazz in the street. Music continues for most of its
21-minute duration. There are some changes in tempo and tune, but an Afro-
Cuban beat is never far away. The opening credit sequence sets up the film in
other ways as well. Images pan from musicians playing infectious Afro-Cuban
jazz to the French film crew documenting them. As the camera pans to the
westerners filming and sound recording, there is a freeze frame and then a
superimposed credit. This is a simple and effective strategy for an opening
credit sequence but it is also an unassuming piece of documentary reflexivity;
foregrounding the constructed-ness of representation, and that the film is
ultimately an impression from a group of western tourist/reporters. This type
of reflexivity a questioning of our choices, our means of representation, how
we perceive images is a recurring theme in the work of Varda and other Left
Bank writers and directors.
The opening credits also establish a still/moving approach, as part of the
films visual style. Musicians play. The scene is full of movement, life and

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Andrew Taylor

liveliness. Suddenly it is frozen still. The musical beat continues but there is a
moment of pause and punctuation in the visual track. This rhythmic interplay
between motion and stillness recurs throughout the film. After the opening
credit sequence the rest of the film is made totally from photographs, so it is
not just a matter of using select freeze frames in moving images. Re-watching
the film it is clear that Varda set out to make an animation using photographs.
Varda did not just shoot 800 images in Cuba and then put them together
on a film-editing bench. There are numerous sequences where the camera is
locked off and then dozens of photographs are taken from that position. When
re-assembled in editing, these then play back as animated sequences. Most of
these locked off sequences depict people in active modes working, danc-
ing, playing. Because these people have been photographed while moving
during activity, when they are reanimated in a film timeline, it is almost as if
they become doubly animated. For example, there is a sequence in the film
featuring a legendary Cuban musician and dancer widely known as The
King, Benny Mor. Through a repeated sequence of animated stills, and deft
editing, The King dances to the beat of the music, towards camera. The
images move from showing his full body-length in a medium wide shot, to him
dancing towards camera and looking straight into the lens in a big close-up.
At this point the still frame is held for several extended beats and the image
stops moving.

Figure 15: King Benny, Salut les Cubains (1963). Three images from a sequence
made from an animated series of photographs showing King Benny Mor, in a
fluid dance to camera (Cin Tamaris, Socit Nouvelle Path Cinma).

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 Writing with images

Conclusion 15. A short form of the

French plus a change,
After my initial thrill in making short iPhoto movies and scripting numerous plus cest la mme
film-photo-essays, I thought I had discovered a new essayistic form for the chose/the more it
changes, the more its
digital age. Sadly, the more I saw of the Left Bank work, I realized it was a the same thing.
case of plus a change 15 Yes, their work was analogue and filmed using an
animation stand, not scanned electronically and edited using digital software
like Final Cut Pro and After Effects, but essentially their approach was similar
to my own. So, why revive a form that is at least 50 years old? And why is
there so much interest in the still/moving? What relevance does this have for
contemporary audiences?
I suggest part of the answer lies in Bellours idea of the pensive moment,
and in Agnes Vardas voice. Vardas documentary work, especially her
film-photo-essays and films like Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and
I (2000), involves much literal speaking voice, a lot of words. But here
I refer to Agnes Vardas voice in a figurative way. I am not anti-art, nor
anti-academic, and I would hate to see everything reduced to a mid-grey,
mid-brow, middle of the road blandness. However, there is a voice in Vardas
documentaries and film-photo-essays that is rare in academia, in art, in
culture. This voice doesnt surrender to easy populism, nor to high art
obfuscation. It is familiar enough to engage with and not feel threatened
by, but challenging enough to provoke, and other enough to be unsettling,
strange and deliciously enigmatic.
The essayistic work of the Left Bank directors and other more recent still/
moving works is often pensive. It offers an opportunity for expression often
missing in film and photography. It is as if photography alone is too silent
to speak. It is mute. And cinema is usually so busy moving that it is unable
to stop and hear it is deaf or suffers from partial deafness whereas still/
moving films are in-between; they can speak more than still images do
standing alone, but they allow for a more reflective, pensive space than their
pure moving image relatives.

Figure 16: Two buckets. Still/moving image from Siberia

(Photo: Andrew Taylor, 1992).

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Andrew Taylor

Earlier in this article, I mentioned that my early experiments with iPhoto

lacked soul. I still think this is the largely the case but it is not that simple.
I would now contend that the film-photo-essay form even the variation of
images and music alone allows more space for audience interaction and
emotional response than conventional narrative cinema. In a world saturated
with information and cluttered with images, there is an important place for
new pensive hybrid art forms forms between word and image; essay and
story; stillness and movement; photography and cinema.

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Girl In A Mirror (2005), Wr/Dir: Kathy Drayton, Australia, 55mins.

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Les statues meurent aussi/Statues also die (19501953), Wrs/Dirs: Alain Resnais
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suggested citatioN
Taylor, A. (2014), Writing with images: The Film-Photo-Essay, the Left Bank
Group and the pensive moment, Journal of Screenwriting 5: 1, pp. 5984,
doi: 10.1386/jocs.5.1.59_1

Contributor details
Andrew Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of
Technology, Sydney (UTS). Andrew is also a film-maker and photogra-
pher. He has worked as an animation director, screenwriter, documentary
film-maker, and cinematographer and his film work has been awarded and
screened at Australian and International festivals. In 2009, Andrew wrote and
directed Siberia, a film made from still images filmed in Siberia in the early
1990s. Prior to this, his last major film as writer and director was a feature
length dramatized documentary on the life of Daisy Bates (Kabbarli, 2002).
Andrew is currently working on Love, Death & Photography, a series of film-
photo-essays for TV broadcast and online exhibition.
Contact: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Technology
Sydney (UTS), PO Box 123, Broadway NSW, 2007, Australia.
E-mail: andrew.taylor@uts.edu.au

Andrew Taylor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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