Steve McQueen - Static

"One of the first impressions the viewer has of Static 2009 (Tate T13425) is that of movement. The image projected on the wall never remains still, so that while the viewer knows that the Statue of Liberty itself is immobile, McQueen’s film instantly creates a paradoxical relationship with its title."

"Unlike Static, his feature films have become known for significant lengthy scenes which are allowed to play out in front of a static camera for much longer than conventional cinema would allow. The sixteen-minute single static shot in Hunger (2008), for example, in which Bobby Sands and Father Moran sit at opposite ends of a table and talk, breaks the narrative flow of the film with its prolonged insertion of real-time conversation, and reflects the inertia of imprisonment. Critic and curator Cameron Bailey suggests that this scene invites viewers ‘to a kind of clock-watching: how long must I keep my focus, how long can the actors keep it going, how long before the camera blinks?’4 There is a similarly intense and famous scene in 12 Years a Slave (2013), in which the camera remains still and distanced while the central character Solomon Northup hangs from a tree and makes tiny, fraught movements with his toes as he strains to stay alive. If these lengthy scenes shot from a static camera in Hunger and 12 Years a Slave emphasise the discomfort of staring into a forgotten, supposedly completed past via the unfolding narrative of a feature film, the bobbing, jostling camera in Static uses the disrupted temporality of a looped artwork to suggest the difficulty of seeing the present condition of an iconic, supposedly timeless historic construction."

"While movement has often been considered as a defining aspect of film as a medium, the role of stasis has often been ignored. Film historian Justin Remes has noted the centrality of the static within film, noting that motion in film began only as an illusion created by the serialising of still frames."

quotes from: Rachel Wells, ‘Medium: Seeing, Stasis and Movement’, in Static 2009 by Steve McQueen, Tate Research Publication, 2017, www.tate.org.uk/research/in-focus/static-steve-mcqueen/