Cinematic Collecting: The Continuous Discontinuity of the Still Frame in Oskar Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin

Theoretical prelude

At the beginning of On Photography (2001), Susan Sontag contrasts the apparent permanence of photography with the perceived ephemerality of film: ‘To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out’, she writes, ‘but with still photographs the image is also an object … easy to carry about, accumulate, store’ (p. 3). What fascinates Sontag is the distinct material quality of the photographic print, as opposed to the intangible light of film. For her the value of the photograph resides not so much in its visual capturing of the things of this world as in its own existence as a thing in this world – a thing we can hold, display, keep safe, and, when brought together with other such things, collect. The photograph, then, not the world, is collectable, in part because it is a reliably present-at-hand thing itself. And it is a thing, in turn, because unlike the ephemeral cinematic image it has thinged the world. In the photographic print, that is, the actions and movements of the mutable world have not only been frozen; they have also been made tangible as an object. What Sontag suggests, ultimately, is that only as such a static image–object, both inanimate and tactile, ⁴ can we exert our desire to collect – seeking completeness in the face of ineluctable lack – the things of this world at all.

The precondition for something to be collectable, then, is that it be both tangible and immobile, if not dead. ⁵ Consequently, the paradox of the collector is that he or she strives for completeness, but only with those things that are most incomplete, either no longer alive or no longer functioning. ⁶ As Sontag claims, the photograph is collectable, because above all it is a tangible object, a thing. But it is also collectable precisely because that which it presents has been lifted out of time, suspended and arrested, stripped of its mobility, its animateness – its aliveness. For the philosopher Manfred Sommer (1999), photography’s thingness – and thus its collectability – lies in its temporal constancy, that it has time, but this is a time that assures permanence, not flux: ‘Everything instantaneous and ephemeral has in some way or another to be connected back to things that “conserve” it, things that make it enduring by loaning it their constancy and persistence’ (p. 106). ⁷

We might therefore collect films, but we experience the indexicality of this medium differently from the same indexicality of photography, in large part because although the storage mechanisms of film and photography are the same (photographic film), the forms their presentation takes are fundamentally different. In the case of film, this presentation is intangible light projected onto a screen. ⁸ Photography, on the other hand, presents us with images in the form of prints that we can hold and hoard. It follows that while both media capture things by way of the meeting of photons and halide, the tactility of the photographic object uniquely reinforces its indexicality, serving as a graspable ersatz for the material, yet absent, things it presents. Film, on the other hand, is experienced as immaterial light in motion, which disguises the materiality of its medium: its images come to us in a fleeting form similar to the ever-changing world it has recorded. ⁹ Therefore, although cinema may capture movement, the animate and living, its images – precisely because they are in motion – cannot endure. They ‘flicker, and go out’; even their permanent poses are swept away. They mimic the very ephemerality of living things themselves, which cannot be grasped, held, collected together, or kept safe – at least not without being immobilized first, and thus being drained of life. Cinema’s images slip between the folds of time – the very time that, according to theorists such as Deleuze, cinema itself makes possible. Film, then, is a medium that can only make things palpable by making them disappear.

Film theory tells us that this disappearance is necessary for the production of a continuous presence. ¹⁰ Jean-Louis Baudry (1999: 351) writes that the individual image that constitutes a film must ‘disappear so that movement and continuity can appear’. That individual image, the single, still frame, represents – for Mary Ann Doane, among other theorists – the contingent and elusive instant as well as a singular ‘thisness’, a privileged indexicality of the things of this world. ¹¹ But precisely as such a momentary, immobile imprint of the real, this instant has no place in film. Doane (2002: 184) expresses this paradox most clearly: ‘the very concept of the instant is inappropriate for defining cinema … The instant, properly speaking, belongs to photography and to the individual frame, which is never seen as such by the spectator’. Even when ‘stilled’ in the freeze frame or drawn out in an uneventful long shot, film’s constituent parts – those contingent instants that it is photography’s privilege to make palpable for us – must remain inaccessible. Film’s technology of repetition necessarily covers over the individual frame’s singularity and inherent difference. ¹² And yet when presented to us as the static photograph, the very life and presence of that singular instant is denied. As Thierry de Duve (1978: 114) puts it, the instantaneous photograph ‘is a theft; it steals life’. Although ‘intended to signify natural movement, it only produces a petrified analogue of it’. The photograph may offer permanence, but it is dead; and while film offers presence and life, it is necessarily fleeting.

Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin, I aim to show, negotiates film’s ephemerality and photography’s deadly permanence, bringing these temporalities into conflict in order to explore the liminal space between movement and stillness, presence and absence, continuity and discontinuity. The result, I will argue, makes use of a new visual language with profound implications for still ongoing debates about the distinctions between these technologies, in particular in connection to archivability and indexicality. Can a film be said to ‘collect together’ instants, even as it lets them slip by? What ‘reality’ might thereby be indexed and preserved? By analyzing Fischinger’s film, these questions are not so much answered as reposed, so that the paradigms of the respective technologies it mobilizes become dialectically renewed. In this article, I thus attempt above all to trace this dialectical movement so as to articulate Fischinger’s unique contribution to animation and the avant-garde in terms of what Doane (2002: 25) calls ‘the representability of the ephemeral’ and the ‘contradictory desire of archiving presence’ (p. 82). Although I am primarily interested in the implications of Fischinger’s experiment for the theory of film, I also consider the problems his film raises in front of the backdrop of film history. My discussion, therefore, situates Walking from Munich to Berlin within a broader trajectory of cinematic innovation, offering insight into the development of avant-garde cinema, ultimately helping us more clearly to conceptualize Fischinger’s own resolute embrace of animation as a cinematic mode.

Walking from Munich to Berlin: Its creation and form

The three-and-a-half minute Walking from Munich to Berlin is anomalous in Fischinger’s oeuvre. Firstly, the film emerged directly from the circumstances of a purely personal dilemma. By late spring 1927, Fischinger was struggling to make ends meet and was forced to borrow money from friends and family. He even accepted loans from his landlady, who also allowed him to fall behind on rent. But she had ulterior motives: she wanted a husband. If Fischinger agreed to marry her, she would cancel his debt. Fischinger decided to flee Munich, stealthily, and make a new life in Berlin. With a backpack, some film prints, and his camera, he set out on 1 June to walk the entire 350-mile route. Not wanting to be found, Fischinger took side roads through the country, passing only through small villages and pasturelands. The journey took him three and a half weeks (Moritz, 2004: 19–20). On the way he shot Walking from Munich to Berlin. The film is thus a record of the artist’s flight, the product of an urgent desire to escape from a life where his creative output was being curtailed. In its exploration of a new cinematic temporality, the film reflects the circumstances of its creation. Fischinger’s wish to overcome the stagnation and personal dead-end of his life in Munich finds expression in the film’s own attempted transformation of stasis into an emancipated movement.

Walking from Munich to Berlin is also unusual for Fischinger’s cinematic output because it is one of only two completed works in which he points the camera at the world. With the exception of Swiss Trip (Rivers and Landscapes) (1934), every one of his other films uses things (in the forms of drawing, painting, silhouette, paper cut-out, wax, and other objects) as the primary medium, which the camera then captures frame by frame. In Walking from Munich to Berlin, Fischinger trades these techniques for shots of both the natural and man-made world around him. The film is, however, unlike Swiss Trip, not exactly a live-action work, but rather still – in a most idiosyncratic way – an experiment in animation. For instead of using his camera to capture action in motion, Fischinger only shot single, still frames, which were later projected, without any editing – i.e. in the sequence in which they were shot and without adding or removing any piece – as a moving picture.

The film consists of 3,755 frames which, when projected at the speed of 18 frames per second (commonly used in 1927), result in a moving picture of three minutes and 29 seconds. ¹³ These 3,755 frames contain 368 discrete clusters. Each cluster consists of stills taken from a single, unmoving position, typically in quick succession. These clusters of stills thus each show a particular subject or scenery, mostly villages and isolated buildings, fields and forests, wild and farm animals, villagers and farmers, farmhouses and churches, clumps of dirt and outgrowths of vegetation, sky and clouds. The number of individual images that makes up each of the 368 clusters ranges from as few as one single frame to as many as 74 frames which, when projected, range from one thirty-sixth of a second to a little over four seconds in duration. ¹⁴ However, only one of these clusters – the penultimate one in the film – is over four seconds long. This and the relatively few other clusters over one second in length ¹⁵ are anomalous. The vast majority of the film’s apparently continuous sequences (333, to be precise), therefore, last literally only a fraction of second, with the average (mean) duration of these clusters clocking in at a miniscule one-third of a second (or six frames).

And yet one can hardly speak of continuity within each sequence, since the brevity of each cluster barely allows for movement, let alone action, to unfold before that cluster of images disappears. Continuity is further problematized by Fischinger’s technique of shooting instantaneous single frames. For although each of the sequences of frames that make up the film’s clusters appears to have been shot in relatively rapid succession, when projected the sequences are not characterized by completely smooth motion. Instead, continuous motion is cut up into pixilated bursts that make palpable the gaps in-between still frames, the missing frames whose inclusion might have created a more naturalistic flow of continuous images. Fischinger thus uses stillness to create motion, as every animator does. Except that the motion he creates is – unlike what an animator by definition tries to achieve – broken up, discontinuous. With moving subjects (people, animals, clouds drifting across the sky) this jerky movement is most apparent. But even sequences of otherwise motionless buildings, villages, or trees appear to be in flux by virtue of shifts in light. ¹⁶ The viewer thus sees neither static images nor smooth motion, but clusters of stuttering activity: twitching, flashing, wavering.

This effect is heightened by the even more dramatic lack of continuity between clusters. Although each cluster was taken on a specific trajectory, the course Fischinger followed from one metropolis to the other, that trajectory is hardly evident. Most of the subjects or scenery in any one cluster do not usually suggest a contiguous or continuous relation to the subjects or scenery of the cluster immediately following it. In a number of cases, a group of two to five clusters reveals the same subject, but from different angles, positions, or distances (see Figure 1). And in a few cases the clusters even reveal a clear direction to Fischinger’s movements, showing, for example, a village in the distance, then that same village at slightly closer intervals before a few clusters of people and buildings that are presumably taken within that same village. Such continuity, however, is the exception rather than the rule, and is made more tenuous by the extreme brevity of the sequences (as well as the extreme brevity of the film itself), so that any connection from cluster to cluster typically disappears as fast as the clusters themselves. Although we know that these were captured consecutively, it is impossible to tell how much time elapsed between them, and the film itself provides few signposts for reading successive clusters as a continuous sequence.

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Figure 1.

Scan of frames from Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin. © Center for Visual Music, 2013. Reproduced with permission.

The film’s juxtaposition of clusters, furthermore, is dictated by the element of chance. Since no editing was involved, Fischinger could only spontaneously consider what had preceded one cluster of exposures. Additionally, since the exact route he took from Munich to Berlin was improvised, the exposures he made could not have been planned in any way. And yet, Fischinger was highly aware of the effect of these aleatoric juxtapositions, and he draws attention to them by deliberately separating most of the clusters from one another with a specific and recurring means of visual punctuation. This punctuation comes in the form of overexposed frames that appear as flashes of white marking the end of one cluster and the beginning of the next. In almost all instances, this punctuation consists of one single overexposed frame (see Figure 2). ¹⁷ Taken together, these overexposed frames participate in the film’s play with the features of light, even as they contribute to its erratic pacing by adding another dimension to the restless and discontinuous movement of images. The bursting white frames thus serve as a kind of rhythmic constant in the film’s unfolding, a visual beat – even if erratic – that accompanies the film’s representations, emphasizing the flashing of its images and marking its discontinuous breaks. The white, overexposed frame, that is, makes visible (by making invisible) its own rupturing of continuity.

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Figure 2.

Scan of frames from Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin. © Center for Visual Music, 2013. Reproduced with permission.

Cinematic predecessors and heirs

The effect of Fischinger’s unusual hybrid photographic–cinematic technique is remarkably unique in the history of cinema. Its closest contemporary cousins would be the pixilated film (stop motion animation using live actors), which had been used only rarely before 1927, ¹⁸ and time-lapse photography, which was used to great effect in the mountain films of the same period in Germany (e.g. in Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain [1926]). Fischinger’s film, however, achieves something distinct from each of these techniques. Different from how the pixilated film is made, most of Fischinger’s moving subjects (e.g. farmers in the field, animals) do not pose motionlessly for the camera. Fischinger, rather, captures instantaneous photographs of their natural movement. Thus, even though the movement of the resulting projected clusters is often similar to pixilated movement in appearing slightly discontinuous and flickering, this is an effect of the photograph’s stillness, not – as in pixilation – of the corresponding subject’s stillness. And in those cases when human subjects do stand still in a series of partial poses, Fischinger’s technique actually introduces discontinuity (in the form of flickering) to what would be a sequence of not just continuous, but unmoving (because mostly unchanging) shots. This technique thus exposes the paradox that stasis in film requires absolute continuity. Fischinger, contrarily, uses stasis to create discontinuity. The result is in effect the opposite of what pixilation attempts to achieve, which is to produce continuous movement out of a sequence of static, but changing, shots. In Figure 2, one can see examples of single frames representing each of these kinds of stills (of the posing subject and of the moving subject). The first frame shows the end of a cluster of a girl who mostly stands still; the third frame shows the beginning of a cluster of a dog that is unable to stay still. This latter frame also reveals how Fischinger’s stills sometimes freeze animated figures with a somewhat blurred effect similar to Marey’s chronophotography (Doane, 2002: 46–60) or the photodynamism of Anton Giulio Bragaglia (Doane, 2002: 84–88), emphasizing the instantaneity of the exposure, the moment of pure temporality otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

Fischinger’s film also differs from the time-lapse effect, even if it shares some of its characteristics. For although each cluster in Walking from Munich to Berlin displays a jerkiness similar to time-lapse photography, this visual stuttering is necessarily isolated to each of these clusters. The gaps between clusters, that is, are unable to sustain the effect, because they correspond to spatial shifts as much as temporal ones, introducing breaks where continuity might have been sustained. Therefore, it is the film’s quasi-narrative frame and linear trajectory that impedes an uninterrupted time-lapse effect and thus, paradoxically, also denies the film the continuity such an effect would grant. Although they correspond to Fischinger’s spatial progress on his journey, the irregular and ultimately indeterminate ellipses between clusters actually prevent this very progress from being represented as directional movement. The long duration of the journey from Munich to Berlin is thus only evident in fragments, necessarily cut up due to the lack of continuous space and matching cuts. ¹⁹

The jerkiness and jumps characteristic of Walking from Munich to Berlin, however, have other cinematic parallels. Indeed, they point both forward and backward along the historical trajectory of cinematic innovation. Sequences of discontinuous single frames can be found in a number of films of the American and European avant-gardes beginning a couple of decades after Fischinger’s film, such as in the work of filmmakers Paul Sharits, Ernie Gehr, Peter Kubelka, and Stan Brakhage. In each case, however, the exact implementation of the technique, its effect, and its theoretical implications remain distinct from what Fischinger achieves. Sequences of discontinuous, extremely short – even single-frame – shots found in Jonas Mekas’s Walden (1969) come closest to creating the effect of Walking from Munich to Berlin. The specific technique differs, however, since Mekas uses short bursts of multiple frames just as often as single frame exposures. Furthermore, the sequences of these flashes are often combined with other techniques (e.g. erratic camera movement, superimposition) and are interspersed within a three-hour film of varying pixilated, but mostly non-pixilated styles. Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Oh, I Can’t Stop (Oj! Nie moge sie zatrzymac!) (1975) and the second segment of Hollis Frampton’s Surface Tension (1968) are in some ways also belated siblings of Walking from Munich to Berlin. Each depicts a journey by foot represented via pixilated point-of-view shots that condense the time of the journey from hours down to minutes. These films, however, despite surface similarities, differ distinctly from Fischinger’s in conveying the directional movement of their respective journeys, and doing so with clear – even if jerky and highly sped-up – continuity.

At the other end of the spectrum is the early work of Robert Breer, who used single frames to create radical discontinuity. While only his first experiment, the loop Image by Images I (1954) is a purely single-frame construction, in Recreation (1956) he transformed this technique into a distinct cinematic style, which, as P Adams Sitney (2002: 272) writes, reveals ‘a heightened awareness of the operation of the single frame as the locus of the tension between the static and the moving’. While brief moments of continuity appear in the film (e.g. a toy mouse moving across the screen), these are overwhelmed by its relentless barrage of single-frame images of varying depth, colour, texture, and contrast. The effect is a ‘state of continual flux’ (Mendelson, 1981: 79) in which the brief continuous moments do not provide relief so much as create a ‘coordinated tension’ (Sitney, 2002: 273).

Lois Mendelson (1981: 103) credits Breer with having ‘invented the strategy of single-frame construction’ that she sees only Léger and Vertov having ‘flirted’ with (p. 73). While Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin predates Breer’s earliest experiments by 26 years, belying Mendelson’s claim, any comparison should be tempered with a clear understanding of how these filmmakers’ techniques (not to mention the resulting films) differ. Firstly, Breer is not properly speaking using pixilation. Not only do his single frames capture already immobile objects, in only a few cases are these objects in turn actually animated. Breer’s film thus works by means of a ‘strategy of amalgamation’ (Mendelson, 1981: 78) akin to the modernist collage. As Breer himself puts it, he ‘cuts out’ and ‘separates’ things from their ‘original context’ (quoted in Mendelson, 1981: 74) ²⁰ in order to draw attention to their disparities and to generate disjunctive rhythmic patterns. Fischinger’s film, by contrast, works by means of a strategy of accumulation and subtraction from naturally animate life. By means of the sequential accumulation of images, Fischinger provides the original, real-life context that Breer strategically denies his viewers. And yet he also subtracts from this context – though not so as to use the subtracted images anew. Fischinger’s subtraction is a strategic not-filming, the decision to leave out the frames that would create natural movement, letting them disappear in the time between his successive pixilated shots. Thus, while both films stage and interrogate the discontinuous effects of stillness in motion, they do so in importantly distinct ways. In particular, Fischinger’s film draws attention to its concrete media (film via natural photography) in a way that Breer’s – which is obsessed with its captured objects and the anti-continuity of their juxtaposition – does not.

While with Walking from Munich to Berlin Fischinger can be said to have anticipated the single-frame experimentation of the 1950s and beyond, though with remarkably original implementation and results, his film might be more fruitfully compared to the pre-cinematic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, both of whom lived from 1830–1904, and each of whom separately experimented with media on the border between stillness and movement. Marey’s work depicted the movement of people and animals in separate exposures on the same film, showing either the distinct positions of the moving body or – with short intervals between exposures – a blurred image. Muybridge famously employed multiple cameras to create stop-action exposures of things in motion. The glass plates that captured these images were too cumbersome to be reanimated, but Muybridge used them to make drawings for early moving-image technology, such as his own zoopraxiscope. The moving images produced by this device and other pre-cinematic technologies such as the praxinoscope and phenakistoscope, however, are not entirely smooth or naturalistic. Their flickering and skipping are reminiscent of the stuttering movements of Fischinger’s film. Except that where these devices were limited to using still images to achieve naturalistic movement, Fischinger had at his disposal the technology to capture movement as movement, but chose to use this technology in a pre-cinematic manner to take only still images, despite his intent to later put these back into (a new kind of) motion.

Walking from Munich to Berlin thus sets out from the potential for live-action filming of natural, continuous movement that early film pioneers were striving to achieve backwards to stuttering, discontinuous animation. Fischinger de-composes the fluid movement his technology affords him, introducing disjunctive jumps and breaking down causality and continuity. He does this by capturing things that naturally move (clouds, animals, people), thereby turning them by means of photographic technology into things, but only to use these inanimate – though importantly once animate – things as the discrete parts for the cinematic technology of animation. This path from movement (life) to stillness (photograph) back to movement (film) produces the film’s idiosyncratic rhythms and also plays with the viewer’s desire for continuity, offering but then withdrawing the effect that animation is meant to create. The film intentionally breaks up the very potential for continuous movement made possible by its ostensible form (animation). As such it is an anomalous work of animation that both interrogates and celebrates its own origins (stillness) and effects (continuity). Indeed, the film continually keeps in tension these features, but without entirely resolving them into one dominant visual language.

This purposefully cultivated in-betweenness is evident not only formally, but also thematically, particularly in the film’s exploration of rural space. If it is generally true that ‘Cinema has always been an urban medium and art form’ (Kirby, 1997: 133), then it is even more so in the case of German cinema which, especially in the Weimar years, is obsessed with the big city, imaginary (e.g. Lang’s Metropolis [1927]) or real (usually Berlin, the setting of countless films from this period). Walking from Munich to Berlin stands out sharply as an exception. Fischinger does not, as Ruttmann does in Berlin – Symphony of a Great City that very same year, seek out the symmetries and disjunctions of urban life, where he could have found the angles, shapes, lines, and movements that would occupy him for the rest of his career as abstract forms. Instead he traverses a liminal space between the grand metropolises of Munich and Berlin, a space characterized by the fluid figures of nature, as well as soft contours and amorphic shapes, both arresting and giving life to the overlooked and marginal things as they exist off the beaten track. In explicitly eschewing images of the city, Fischinger’s film is a ‘Chamber Sonata of a Countryside’ next to Ruttmann’s ‘Symphony of a Metropolis’. ²¹ Despite the titular origin and destination of Fischinger’s walk, neither Munich nor Berlin make an appearance in the film. In fact, only the train tracks with poles for electric overhead wire in the film’s very first cluster suggest anything like a post-industrial world. Fischinger’s film in this sense represents the inverse of Ruttmann’s, which also begins (after a brief prelude) with the image of train tracks. But where Ruttmann’s tracks soon reveal a train that takes the viewer from the countryside outside the city directly into the heart of the metropolis, never to return, Fischinger leaves any trace of the city behind in the very first second of the film (there are 18 frames that show the empty train tracks) to explore the country Ruttmann excludes, never to return to (or arrive at) the city. If with Ruttmann we are propelled straight into the city, with Fischinger we flee far from it. ²²

Walking from Munich to Berlin is from this perspective a celebration of the world beyond the encroachments of modernity, ironically made possible by the very tools of the modern world it excludes. This tension is part of the film’s modernity itself. But it is also a product of its exploration of liminality, not just the overlooked spaces in between the grand metropolises, but also – parallel to these – the aesthetic spaces where dominant conceptions of temporality and structuration are dissolved. By means of its medial hybridity, its opening up of the zone between the photographic and the cinematic, the film succeeds in forging this new cinematic space. ²³ Its mobilization of the still frame to break up continuity is in this respect critical. For Doane (2002: 106), such points of discontinuity have explicitly ideological implications, since they resist the ‘otherwise continuous stream of time … in a capitalist economy’, offering ‘the promise of something other, something outside of systematicity’. Fischinger’s traversal of liminal space in Walking from Munich to Berlin indeed hints at such utopian overcoming; but it does so by mobilizing the still frame to interrogate itself – as an indexical and archival medium.

The way in which the film’s archival impulse is intertwined with its indexical impulse is best explained by way of the film’s shared lineage with the nonfiction nature films and travelogues that were popular in the previous decade. The travelogue in particular, as Jennifer Lynn Peterson (2004: 197) notes, does not follow the logic of narrative, but rather ‘a logic of collection’ in which ‘a series of single exterior shots of landscapes or people’ are ‘joined together in a disjunctive manner that preserves the integrity of each shot rather than making connections between shots using continuous space or matching on action’. These films’ shots are ‘typically arranged in a meandering, arbitrary fashion’ that ‘emphasizes that the film is a collection of images, a succession of views resembling a series of postcards or snapshots’. ²⁴ Walking from Munich to Berlin definitely belongs to this tradition of travelogue filmmaking, though it radicalizes one of its key features, the emphasis on its constituent parts (its ‘collection of images’), by making these present not just as images, but also as the material object that has done this collecting. If we recall Sontag’s description of the collectability of the photograph as dependent on its thingness, the innovation of Fischinger’s film announces itself. For what Fischinger ultimately collects and preserves by means of his hybrid visual medium are not the things captured on film (as Peterson, 2004, argues), or even the ‘views’ presented by it (as Gunning, 1997, argues), so much as the photographs that do this capturing and presenting in and of themselves. What Fischinger’s film makes uniquely palpable is the static photographic image as the stubborn material ingredient of cinema. We necessarily overlook the single, arrested image that constitutes a film. Not only does it fly by too fast (when factoring in shutter black-out: in one-thirty-sixth of a second) but, by virtue of a cognitive and physiological process that is still not entirely clear to scientists, we only see a sequence of these motionless images as fluid and alive. Fischinger’s film presents the photographic negatives that comprise a film as perceptible things – things that exist between presence and absence, permanence and ephemerality, stillness and motion. He does this not by editing a collection of duration shots (as in the travelogue), but by lining up a collection of static images, displayed at once as the records of time frozen and as moments lost in time. In this way, the film demonstrates that photography’s having indexically ‘captured’ reality is an illusion: all we have is the materiality of the archival medium. The things this medium appears to capture for us will forever slip away. Only in staging this ephemerality through cinematic means, while still holding on to the static image as its constitutive element – making its motionlessness palpable in and through film’s inherent motion – does Fischinger achieve this extraordinary effect with its critical resonances for film and photography theory.

Stillness in motion

These resonances, in particular, can be seen in the ways this short work uniquely intervenes in recent discussions about the ontology of the image and the distinctions between the still photograph and filmic movement. Most of the literature on the grey zone between these two media focuses on the appearance of stillness in film, either as a photograph itself or in the long take that slows or halts movement. These are moments when the photographic ‘interrupts’ the cinematic, as Raymond Bellour (1990) puts it, opening up a new temporality in between stillness and motion. And yet that temporality is characterized by stillness that is in motion, even if it is perceived as still, such as in the famous case of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), which consists almost exclusively of stills that are granted an ordinary filmic duration to enable voice-over and narrative development. In this film, the difference between stillness and motion is made perceptible at the moment – the only moment – when movement briefly appears within one of its static sequences. For Bellour (1990: 105) such interruptions are critical, especially when stillness interrupts movement, as in the freeze-frame, which ‘makes reappear, in the film’s movement … the photographic’. Writing on Fassbinder’s films, Christa Blümlinger (2011: 101) argues that: ‘Individual images are only perceptible if we slow down or stop the film’, that is, when it is ‘not run according to its realistic running time’. Fischinger’s film differs significantly from Bellour’s and Blümlinger’s examples, offering a new model for conceptualizing the relation between stillness and motion on the border between the photographic and the cinematic. Unlike films by Marker, Fassbinder, or in the works of other filmmakers often evoked in discussions of stillness in cinema such as Béla Tarr, Fischinger’s film – like Breer’s experiments after him – uses stasis in order to create more intense movement, not stillness. And yet the film’s movement is such that its underlying stasis is made all the more apparent.

Thus, as viewers try to find continuity in Walking from Munich to Berlin’s disparate sequence of stills that flicker and fade, they are pulled into Fischinger’s playful experiment on the threshold of two distinct but related media, an experiment that performs the paradox born of their coupling even as it tries to overcome it. If cinema – especially animated cinema – must cover over its constituent parts (the individual, static image) to be what it is, then Fischinger’s hybrid photo-film reintroduces those parts in a most palpable and powerful way, even as it emphasizes their necessary transitoriness. The film’s flickering back-and-forth between grasping and losing also evokes the collector’s impulse, forcefully colliding the temporalities of duration and impermanence. After all, we collect together and keep safe mere things – dead things – because we strive for completeness, something that will forever elude us, not least because that completeness was relinquished the moment we appropriated these things in the first place. Fischinger’s work responds to this dilemma most profoundly: he captures things in a mode of cinematic collecting that paradoxically preserves and presents them as things-that-cannot-be-captured. He in effect performs their very uncapturability, making these things present – in a moment’s flash – and then relinquishing them to the ether. ²⁵

In Walking from Munich to Berlin, however, it is not exactly the photographic that, to use Bellour’s (1990) term, ‘interrupts’ movement with stasis. Rather, what interrupts the film are the gaps that correspond to those missing frames that would create continuous movement, the frames that Fischinger did not have, in part because he wanted the film he took with him on his journey to last the whole route. The continuous trajectory of that journey, therefore, might be posited as the ‘total film’ next to which Walking from Munich to Berlin is a mere fragment. Except that the movements of the one correspond to the interruptions of the other, and vice versa. Only in interrupting his walk could Fischinger take the stills that comprise the film; and only in interrupting this photographing could Fischinger take the steps needed to complete his walk. The stills themselves, therefore, although they correspond to Fischinger’s interruptions on his actual route to Berlin, are not what actually interrupt the movement of the film. Instead, the gaps that correspond to Fischinger’s real-life movement on his journey grant the film its unique visual language by denying it continuity. It is these gaps (in real time) that interrupt (in diegetic time) the film’s potential for continuous movement.

But these are also the gaps necessary to make the film, not only because Fischinger needed to move forward on his route from one city to the next, but also because these gaps are what lend the film its specific rhythm. The paradox would not have escaped Fischinger. His actual movement corresponds to the lack in stills that would create the film’s continuous movement, but instead introduce a new type of movement: its distinctive discontinuous stuttering. Even more critically, the gaps in Fischinger’s film are more radical instances of what is ultimately necessary to make any film. Cinema, after all, must consist of static, still frames. And in between each of these stills one might have captured another ‘instant’ of reality. In other words, although cinema attempts to reproduce the continuous movement of reality, it really only divides up this continuous movement into 18 or 24 frames per second. ²⁶ Film translates the infinite into a finite and calculable number. As Doane (2002: 60–61) puts it: ‘In concealing the division between frames, [cinema] refuses to acknowledge the loss of time on which it is based.’ Cinema’s temporality, she also remarks, is a ‘duration based upon division, upon the sequential serialization of still photographs, which, projected, produced the illusion of motion and the capturing of time’ (p. 208). In this way, Fischinger’s film points to the paradox of the cinematic in relation to photography and, by extension, to film’s redemption in animation. Walking from Munich to Berlin, that is, uniquely makes palpable cinema’s necessary gaps, the inevitable absences between filmic images. In effect, Fischinger’s experimental short announces that film will always skip over the real, which (as time) is infinite and thus indivisible. Film, it demonstrates, will always at core be a kind of animation. ²⁷

Conclusion

The preservation impulse of collecting – with Sontag and Sommer I count photography as a critical medium for this mode of preservation – expresses this paradox of the desire for attaining the infinite through finitude. If collecting is a longing for wholeness in a fragmentary world, an attempt to store in an archive (a permanent or at least enduring thing) that which is otherwise fleeting; if, as Benjamin (1999a: 211) puts it, the collector ‘takes up the struggle against dispersion’ then this attempt to rein in the things that are scattered is also at the same time an attempt to overcome these things as finite objects. In the first part of his Sleepwalkers trilogy, written only a couple years after Fischinger made Walking from Munich to Berlin, Hermann Broch (1996: 71) describes this paradox of the collector with acuity:

Certainly Elisabeth did not know that every collector hopes with the never-attained, never-attainable and yet inexorably striven-for absolute completeness [lückenlosen Absolutheit] of his collection to pass beyond the assembled things themselves, to pass over into infinity, and, entirely subsumed in his collection, to attain his own consummation [Absolutheit] and the suspension [Aufhebung] of death.

Collectors hope to overcome death in and through dead things; they collect out of the recognition of lack, knowing that wholeness is impossible, but embracing that impossibility as an impetus to transcendence. Collectors thus participate in their own dialectical redemption from the finite world of things through the infinite lack of things into a transcendent realm beyond things. This dual longing for wholeness and embrace of lack is what Benjamin (1999a: 211) expresses when he writes that ‘in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector’. The collector, that is, though ostensibly seeking wholeness, secretly cultivates a ‘patchwork’, in part because a complete collection is impossible, but also because if achieved, such a perfect collection would put an end to the act of collecting itself. Most important to the collector, then, are not the pieces collected, but the pieces missing. These gaps in our collections are the negative traces of the potential for transcendence.

Those gaps, I have argued, are also what Fischinger’s film represents in and through its emphasis on the materiality of film’s individual, static parts: the photographic still. As a problem of temporality (cinema’s privileged purview as a medium), the gaps in film are the infinite instants in between frames. Even at 48 frames per second (the rate at which Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit [2012] was shot) or at an impossible 480 frames per second, information is still necessarily lost. And yet the instant represented in the photographic or single, still frame – made perceptible as it fleets past us – conveys that lost time even as it suggests having captured it. Such is the paradox performed by Walking from Munich to Berlin. If, as Doane’s (2002) work in particular has cogently shown, ‘it is the cinema which directly confronts the problematic question of the representability of the ephemeral, of the archivability of presence’ (p. 25), then Fischinger’s film stages this confrontation in a singularly forceful and visually powerful way. The modernity of the film is to have grappled with the problem of transcendence through fragmentation, and to have done so via an exploration of a utopian space outside the realm of corrupting temporality, as represented by the absent, but titularly present urban landscape. Like the cinema of attractions as theorized by Tom Gunning (1999: 826), Fischinger’s film is an example of the ‘cinema of instants, rather than developing situations’; yet unlike it, Fischinger’s film explores an explicitly rural space. Fischinger thus takes the experience of fragmentation characteristic of modern, urban life and transplants it into the country, not to show its inescapability, but to redeem it. If the cinema of attractions replicates the experience of urban shock in ‘consciously heightening [its] use of discontinuous shocks’ (p. 831), to quote Gunning’s appropriation of Kracauer and Benjamin, then Fischinger takes this ‘discontinuous shock’ of the city into the countryside, where he transforms it into the image that shocks us into seeing anew. Here loss and transcendence merge, as they do with the collector, in the gaps between clusters and frames that the film so powerfully and singularly conveys. In the end, Walking from Munich to Berlin even tarries – if one can speak of its still-flickering images in this way – with a picture of transcendence itself, an expression of the desire to escape not just the city, but materiality altogether. As the frequency of clusters displaying the sky and clouds increases in the final moments of the film, it slows down and ends in two longer clusters showing an ethereal sky with clouds glimmering in the heavens. The penultimate of these two clusters is the film’s longest sequence, lasting over four seconds. The viewer is thus at the end transported not just away from the city, but away from the mundane world in and of itself. We don’t arrive at any destination, but float suspended in an atemporal space of pure liminality that the film has been pointing toward and performing all along.

If the ineffable of film is found in the infinite gaps it must elide to make smooth motion possible, then Fischinger’s film embraces that ineffable, not by laying claim to grasping, let alone representing, the infinite, but by suggesting it in its necessary negation. In this way, the film’s indexicality points not to any thing, but to the ephemeral and unarchivable instant as ephemeral and unarchivable. It makes possible a new kind of vision, parallel to what Benjamin (1999b), writing only a few years later, would characterize as ‘the optical unconscious’: photographic (and by extension cinematic) technology’s ability to reveal through the contingent instant something invisible to the human eye, but charged with utopian potential (pp. 510–512). ²⁸ Walking from Munich to Berlin’s persistent overexposed white flashes, finally, might be read as the markers of these ungraspable moments – instants that also contain the infinite. For unlike the relatively common black frame, which shows nothing by excluding all light, the overexposed frame is a result of film taking in everything. It is the index of the infinite (and necessarily protracted) moment that cannot appear as such, or can only be ‘present’ as that which is invisible. In the context of Fischinger’s film, these flashes suggest the ethereal, transcendent moment of seeing everything – taking everything in – even as they reveal that such transcendence is only ever available to us as emptiness, the transparent frame through which the projector’s light passes to reveal not any image, but nothing – the mere functioning of the apparatus by itself. In the end, Walking from Munich to Berlin conflates this emptiness not only with photography’s space and cinema’s time, and the peculiar zone between the two, but with the pure possibility of animation, in which that white rectangle invites the artist to draw anything and everything he is capable of dreaming up. In Fischinger’s case, those blank spaces would be the material of his cinematic production for the next 40 years.