Film and photography have been brothers since the whole industry got going. The move from photography to film, whilst huge in terms of what society had seen before, was always going to happen. Once people figured out that they were able to capture exact images of the world around them, it was only a matter of time before they made them move, too. From the early rudimentary cinematic models, cinema took photography as its influence, concerned initially with representing real life on film, expanding the capacity of the single photograph to the world around it. Since then, of course, the rules for cinema have changed entirely and what was originally the direct representation of reality has become something a little less close to what we experience in the world around us.
How we view the world around us has become so utterly changed due to cinema that it is hard to imagine how we saw it before. Similarly, the changes that cinema has made in the world have had knock on effects for photography. What was once an instant representation of a thing had been turned into something potentially avant garde, capable of twisting the way that we view objects and places. When cinema and photography come together, then, things get very interesting. The world becomes doubly represented, doubly skewed and doubly displaced. Our proximity to reality through film is removed one more stage; we view art within art.
Photographers in film often get a bad rep, though. Presented as loners, outcasts and obsessives, cinema hasn’t exactly been kind to its brother in art over the years. Despite this, some of the most lasting cinematic characters have had a camera strung around their necks. Where film goes, the stranger, the more interesting. One of the most notorious photographers in cinema comes from Michael Powell’s masterpiece Peeping Tom. Telling the story of filmmaker and photographer Mark Lewis, the film plays on fear, obsession and murder with fascinating results. The more introspective Lewis becomes, the more he relies on his camera to communicate with others. He seems to have displaced a part of himself into his camera, manifesting his dark side into his instrument. In doing so, Lewis attempts to pass off some of the blame for his questionable hobby, imbuing the lifeless camera with a murderous energy.
Continuing the obsessive behaviour most recently was Jake Gyllenhaal’s cameraman Louis Bloom. Whilst not a photographer per se, Bloom’s obsession with his camera and capturing life shows similarities between the two professions, bridged by a need to capture the world. Bloom begins a production company, chasing crime and murder around nighttime Los Angeles, selling his bootleg footage to news channels. Bloom’s unsettling ability to get right into the action and orchestrate the crime around him marks a similar emotional displacement as Peeping Tom did. Viewing the brutality through his camera seems to create a reality in his environment. Soon, it seems that Bloom’s version of reality exists only within the camera.
Photographs can also be a marker of reality, creating tangible reminders of the real world. Leonard in Christopher Nolan’s Memento suffers from short term memory loss and uses a polaroid camera to remind him of significant events in his life. In order to find his way back to reality, he snaps images of the world around him, hoping that seeing them again will get him back on track. His reliance on and trust in the images eventually causes his mental downfall, however. When outsiders manipulate his memories, he perceives the images in different ways, believing the lies to be true because of his utter trust in the camera.
Photographic images can be incredibly manipulative; because we view them as an insight into reality, we never question their veracity. As they have been captured by objective machines, we rarely question the version of reality that we are shown. Thai horror film Shutter plays with our trust in the photographic image. When a couple hit a young girl dead on the road, they begin to experience strange things. Photographer Tun begins seeing strange faces and shapes in the images that he captures and whilst he initially thinks little of it, he soon begins to suspect that things are becoming somewhat sinister. In Shutter, photographs function as gateways to another world, allowing the unseen to take form. What we think is real is put under scrutiny and for once, the unreality of the twisted photograph seems to hold more truth than real life does.
Photographs have a remarkable way of enabling us to see reality in further clarity. Capturing a moment in perfect detail, we are able to elongate time and scrutinise every facet of a specific moment in incredible detail. Blow Up focuses on this fact as a young photographer happens upon a series of telling images. Initially believing the photos are innocuous, the photographer soon begins to blow up the image in minute detail, uncovering a murder which takes place at the corner of the picture. The image gives him insight into a forgotten moment, enabling him to unearth a major event which had gone overlooked in the banal scene.
Of course, photos can be used for entirely different purposes and in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the very notion of the paparazzi was born. Following the life of a wandering journalist as he drifts in and out of Italian cities, La Dolce Vita introduces us to photographer Paparazzo, a friend of writer Marcello who takes pictures of events around the country. Fellini took the name of the photographer from an Italian slang word which describes a certain, irritating buzzing noise, accompanying people like a trailing fly. Whilst describing the sound of the camera shutter, it also describes the irritating intrusion associated with the paparazzi as they capture seemingly innocuous events. In La Dolce Vita, the figure of the photographer is an intrusion, a surplus figure capturing the banal events of the world.
The photographer is a strange, multifaceted figure. At once intrusive, introspective, misleading and insightful, they continually change their face, using the images they take as a representation of their identity. If cinema has taught us anything, it’s that the photographer is a shadowy presence and we would be better served looking for them in the photos they take than anything else.