Garrett Stewart is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa and the author, among several books of literary and art criticism, of Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (1999) and its sequels Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (2007) and Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (2015). He was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2015.
Authors | Garrett Stewart
Articles on Amodern by Garrett Stewart
DREDGING THE ILLEGIBLE
Photogram, Phoneme, Ph. . .ontology
In reading as well as film viewing, the illegible is not so much the cancellation as the constitution of the legible, where the rudimentary element is the time-based increment. Just as phonemes, in the “exposure time” of reading, disappear into morphemes, so photograms on the film strip disappear in projection to generate pictured movement out of mechanical motion. Halting this latter process is the conceptual premise of French artist Eric Rondepierre, one logic of whose photo/filmic work culminates in his turn-of-the-millennium Livre series, superimposing streaks of micrographic text onto magnified images of film strips held up against out-of-focus photographs related to those illegible textual striations that hover above them.