Still Images/Motion Pictures

When, in the late 1800s, inventors such as Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, William Friese-Greene and Louis and Auguste Lumière developed the means to record and project moving images, the worlds of entertainment and mass communication changed forever. Motion pictures (or film, cinema or "movies") became a huge, influential and continually evolving industry, and life without it is nearly unimaginable. Stories, previously told only through oral, written or staged communication, could now be constructed as "photo plays" for repetitive exhibition anywhere. Yet, often within these pictures in motion, it is a static image such as still photograph or a painting, that captures our imagination, or serves as a significant plot point around which the narrative is built. Take Otto Preminger's 1948 film noir, Laura. A large, striking painting of the title character dominates the apartment crime scene, and is obsessed over by the detective (Dana Andrews). Laura (Gene Tierney) exists only in that painting until a full 46 minutes into the film. Similarly, an ornately framed photograph of an early 20th century actress, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) provides the entire basis for the 1980 film, Somewhere in Time. Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) is so obsessed with the photograph that he finds a way to time travel back to 1912 in search of her.

In Hitchcock's Vertigo, James Stewart’s character is engaged to investigate Madeline (Kim Novak) whose husband fears has become possessed by the spirit of her dead great grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. Scotty follows her to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, where Madeline sits before a painting of Carlotta for some time, as if in a trance.

In some cases, the image in question is so essential that it becomes the film's title. In Portrait of Jennie, a 1948 film blanc starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, the portrait is not even seen until the final shot of the movie, representing the culmination of all that preceded it. In the 1945 film, The Picture of Dorian Gray (based on the Oscar Wilde novel), the painting of the title character (Hurd Hatfield) is seen periodically as the story progresses, each time revealing more of Dorian Gray's cumulative corruption while he, himself, remains youthful in appearance. Interestingly, while both Portrait of Jennie and The Picture of Dorian Gray are filmed in black and white, the two portraits themselves are presented in full Technicolor.

In Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of a Steven King novel, The Shining, the final image of the film is that of a photograph on the wall in the Overlook Hotel, showing a large gathering of guests posing for a group photo at the 1921 July 4th Ball. In the foreground of that image is, impossibly, Jack Torrance, the film's main character, played by Jack Nicholson. The enigmatic photo has led to many attempts at interpretation of its meaning and origin. Photographs are the basis of important revelations in The Omen, a 1976 chiller starring Gregory Peck. A photographer, developing pictures in his darkroom, discovers that the images of deceased characters have inexplicable markings that coincide with the manner in which they were gruesomely killed.

A frequently utilized plot gimmick (as well as a real life investigative technique) is the process of using technology to enhance photographic images to obtain better information from them. In the pre-digital era of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966), David Hemmings' character discovers that he may have photographed a murder in a London park. In his darkroom he enlarges (blows up) the images, zooming tighter and tighter, in an attempt to solve the mystery. Image enhancement by computer soon arrived to the movies, as in 1987's No Way Out. An underexposed Polaroid negative of Kevin Costner's character is found which, if properly enhanced, could implicate him as a murderer and spy. Fortunately for him, the mainframe computing power of that time meant hours of processing were required. We watch the slow progress of the image enhancement effort, as the hero races to find the real killer. Lake Mungo, a 2008 mockumentary, portrays the use of still and video photography to determine the existence of the ghost of a recently drowned young girl, Alice. A particularly chilling moment occurs when a nighttime backyard photograph is enhanced to reveal the ghostly image of Alice standing in the distance. The opening titles of Lake Mungo are superimposed over a montage of examples of vintage spirit photography. Marty McFly (MIchael J. Fox) carries a snapshot of himself with his brother and sister when he time travels to 1955 in the Robert Zemeckis' 1985 hit, Back to The Future. When he interacts with his own father and mother there, the images on the photo begin to disappear. His interference in the past could result in his parents never marrying, thus negating his own existence. A mysterious camera is at the center of a 1960 episode of Rod Serling's TV anthology, The Twilight Zone, entitled "A Most Unusual Camera". The odd looking device delivers instant photos of events from five minutes in the future, and the characters see pictures of their own demise before it occurs.

Probably the ultimate example of still images in a motion picture is Chris Marker's 1963 short science fiction film, La Jetée. It is a tale of time travel and memory told almost entirely with hundreds of black and white still images and voiceover narration. The technique foreshadowed a familiar style of documentary films such as those by Ken Burns. Covering historical subjects where little archival motion footage exists, he adds a sense of motion by slowly panning across still photos, a device that has been named after him, the "Ken Burns effect."

Could it be that it's time to retire the old aphorism "a picture is worth a thousand words" in favor of "a picture is worth a thousand frames."