Human consciousness creates ordered time to organize the rhythms of everyday life according to the demands of society and economy, but also in recognition of the intractable nature of time itself. For humans and all organic life, time marks movement along a path to death, that is, to the stillness that represents the transformation of the animate into the inanimate.
In cinema, the blending of movement and stillness touches on this point of uncertainty so that, buried in the cinema's materiality, lies a reminder of the difficulty of understanding passing time.
Stillness and movement have different relations to time. The illusion of movement is necessarily extended within time, in duration. A still frame when repeated creates an illusion of stillness,, a freeze frame, a halt in time. Stillness may evoke a "before" for the moving image as film strip, as a reference back to photography or to its own original moment of registration. Although the projector reconciles the opposition and the still frames come to life, this underlying stillness provides cinema with a secret, with a hidden past that might or might not find its way to the surface. The inanimate frames come to life, the unglamorous mechanics are covered over and the entrancing illusion fills the screen. But like the beautiful automaton, a residual trace of stillness, or the hint of stillness within movement, survives, sometimes enhancing, sometimes threatening.
