Still Cinema

"I always got in trouble for that; for using common people as models. They, the priests and my patrons, told me it was profane. Hah. Of course it was profane. That's the point."
-Christopher Peachment fictionalizing Caravaggio

"Pero un segundo gesto, el propiamente barroco, de alejamiento y especificación del objeto, crítica de lo figurado, lo desasimila de lo real: esa reducción a su propio mecanismo técnico, a la teatralidad de la simulación, es la verdad barroca de la anamórfosis."
-Severo Sarduy

I used to think that the beginning and essence of cinema was movement, image in movement. I thought this just until last night, when I watched Caravaggio (1986) by Derek Jarman. The most unsettling moments are when the film registers the athletic stillness of the models, enacting the silent drama of their tableau vivant. And then, Caravaggio's and the film's realisms fuse into each other in an illusionistic trick: the cinematic reenactment is so similar to the painting that we don't know whether what is being filmed is the painting or the flesh-and-blood actors. The film turns into a trompe l'oeil! This is the most perfect rendering of the baroque through cinema, to detach movement from the real in a theatrical gesture of simulation. Is stillness the anamorphosis of cinema?