Dr. Libby Saxton, Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University London Wednesday 5th of February 2014 (joint event with French Research Seminar), 5:15pm, Faculty Room South, David Hume Tower Dr. Libby Saxton, Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University London Robert Capa’s celebrated snapshot of a Spanish Republican soldier apparently felled by a Rebel bullet has generated much discussion of photography’s relation to political struggle and to the icon. This paper will instead address the cinematic afterlife of Capa’s picture by exploring how it has been interpolated and referenced in film, post-cinematic media and moving image criticism, especially but not only in France. Originally conceived and deployed as a warning against fascism, the image has served different purposes in theorisations of film. In a leftist, anti-humanist critique of the mass media in Cahiers du cinéma in the 1970s, for example, Alain Bergala compares the many reproductions of this and other famous photographs isolating and decontextualising victims of war with classical Hollywood film’s repression of the masses’ role in history. For Bergala, these photographs’ ideological function is bolstered by their resemblance to frozen film frames and their evocation of a cinematic narrative imaginary. Some of the same emblematic images, including Capa’s, are reviewed from divergent perspectives in Raymond Bellour’s influential analysis in 1990 of stillness in film and in the subsequent proliferation of writing that seeks to rethink the distinction between the static and moving image. The dynamism of ‘The Falling Soldier’ is played on in films such as La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) and Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1991) and later digital reappropriations, where (conscious or unconscious) allusions to the photograph imply a variety of stances toward war, the human condition and the cultural fascination with the instant of death, revealing multifaceted relations between film and the icon. Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-Images. Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 1990) Alain Bergala, ‘Le Pendule’, Cahiers du cinéma, 268–9 (1976), 40–6 Between Still and Moving Images, ed. Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2012) Serge Daney, ‘La dernière image’, in Passages de l’image, ed. Raymond Bellour, Catherine David and Christine van Assche (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1989), pp. 57–9 Régis Debray, ‘La belle mort’, L’Œil naïf (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 146–53 Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1996) Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) Vivian Sobchack, ‘Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 9: 4 (1984), 283–300 Peter Wollen, ‘Fire and Ice’, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 76–80 This article was published on 2024-08-13
