television to be paused, rewound, and subsequently fast-forwarded. Mimicking the interruptive processes afforded and encouraged by the DVD, these televisual practices similarly alter the temporal integrity of the moving image. Here Mulvey again touches on the peculiar effect of the gif in the context of traditional moving image habits: ‘Return and repetition necessarily involve interrupting the flow of film, delaying its progress’.26 As an extreme instance of this return and repetition, the gif represents an affront to the history of narrative convention in the moving image, which rests on ‘linearity [and] causality’.27
Subversive Power As a particular reconfiguration of linear time the gif, like the ‘delayed cinema’ for Mulvey, is thus capable of attaining a ‘political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered.’28 In its brevity and looped-ness the gif can be seen to undermine the dominant structure of cinematic narrative, posing a forceful challenge to narrative forms of broadcast culture.
The gif is an inversion of photography, since it allows for an animation of the inanimate, and is simultaneously an exaggeration of the cinema since the animation it presents is perpetual and tight in structure. With the appropriative gif it is possible to chart a more nuanced movement from inanimate to animate states that goes beyond cinema, which simply
26
Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p.8.
27
Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p.69.
28
Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p.23.
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