has never been entirely clear-cut. Wall himself has made complex staged photographs at the scale of cinema (see chapters Two and Four), while Figgis is one of several directors who have experimented with digital video cameras and minimal crews, seeking the lightness and independence we associate with footloose photographers. In the 1960s Andy Warhol took cinema away from narrative and motion and close to the stillness of photography. His first film, comprising six hours of a sleeping man, was an almost pure expression of time passing, ending in a freeze frame (Sleep, 1963). His Screen Tests (1964–6) were single-take short films of friends and celebrities. The ‘sitters’ remained before his 16mm movie camera for four minutes, the length of a film spool. Often Warhol would simply walk away leaving the camera rolling and the sitter to do as they wished: sit bored, stare into the camera, flirt with it, pose as if being photographed, or act up. The films were lit like noir-ish film stills or more flatly like a passport photo booth, which Warhol also used to make simple timelapse portraits. Unsure as to quite what the Screen Tests were, Warhol toyed with calling them Living Portrait Boxes, Film Portraits or even ‘Stillies’ (rather than ‘movies’). For Warhol, ‘The great stars are the ones who are doing something you can watch every second, even if it is just a movement in their eye.’10 He soon concluded that the attention of the movie camera could make anything a star, even the Empire State Building. Asked what he hoped to do in films, he replied: ‘Well, just find interesting things and film them.’11 What mattered was duration, the passing of cinematic time. The viewer’s movement as they adjust to what they see was more important than any depicted movement. Cinema’s ‘long take’ may strike us as boldly photographic and it is often described as such. Even so, when asked about the difference between a photograph of a static object and a film of it, Jean Cocteau
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