Frame and Fortune

The I-House trains its lens on still photography.

by Shaun Brady

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As documentary record, the still and motion picture stand in somewhat uneasy relation to each other. At its best, photography can distill the truth into a frozen instant, while cinema constructs narrative from the rapid succession of incremental snapshots. I-House and Penn Cinema Studies attempt to reconcile the two fraternal forms with "Moving Pictures," a series of films of, about and related to photography.

Chris Marker is no stranger to traversing the gulf between static and active imagery; his most famous film is the 1962 short La Jetée, consisting almost entirely of still photos. Remembrance of Things to Come (pictured), like that earlier work, uses a series of tableaux as a virtual time machine. Using the work of French photojournalist Denise Bellon, Marker and Bellon's daughter Yannick construct a stream-of-consciousness history of the mid-20th century, exploring the way in which the stories related in photos report, predict or preserve that history, depending on the vantage point of the viewer.

Where Marker imagines the past from the snapshots that have survived it, German filmmaker Ilan Ziv attempts to re-create it in spite of the dearth of such documentary material. Inspired by the sole surviving photo of his father's family from before WWII, Ziv shot Tango of Slaves in the form of a letter to his daughter, to relate to her the history of her family. Ziv takes his father back to Poland for the first time since he'd escaped the Warsaw Ghetto nearly 50 years earlier, but finds a modern city refusing to jibe with the senior Ziv's memories.

The relation of photography to its times is reflected via two biographical docs in the series. Zygosis, a short by Brits Gavin Hodge and Tim Morrison, relates the history of the grimly satirical photomontage innovator John Heartfield, while Juan Mandelbaum's Ringl and Pit reunites the female pioneers behind a Bauhaus-influenced studio in Weimar, Germany.

Saturday's program features Magnum Photos: The Changing of a Myth, a 2000 film about the famed Magnum Photos agency. Director Reiner Holzemer finds the venerable collective suffering an identity crisis; founded in 1947, Magnum has gone from avant-garde to prestigious to staid. The doc will be followed by seven selections from "The Magnum Eye," a series of short films made in 1993 by member photographers.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Moving Pictures: From Frame to Screen, Thu.-Sat., April 24-26, $5-$7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.