In this week’s 3rd episode of “On the Frame”, Daniel Binns began class recaping on what he talked about the week before – colour, composition, lighting, and perspective in order to treat the frame as a visual art piece. He then proceeded to give a talk about what this week consisted of – “frame as an index or signifier for whatever you’ve taken it from. This means that a still image, or a screenshot of a film, does not just show colour and composition. It also shows time and movement; it creates meaning as it signifies a point in time where that particular frame is set within the film. One of the most interesting point that Daniel pointed out is that “frame is not just a signifier of time – frame is time.”. I think this is very significant in terms of what the actual frame signifies within the moving image.

Daniel then went on to talk about Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love“, and how Wong Kar Wai distorts the strict conventions of classic invisibility of style. He also talked about Wong Kar Wai’s use of colour throughout the film. “If the film is a dance, then the colours swirl and mingle like a kaleidoscope.” Time is also apparent in “In the Mood for Love”, as Wong Kar Wai slows down time to the point where it becomes a still image – slowing down time to such an extent, leaving normal time altogether, whilst inscribing the digital in the cinematic image.

In Bruce Isaacs’ ‘The Ontology of the Bullet Time’ (2008), “bullet-time segment inserts a visual frame into the narrative reality and achieves what Baudrillard conceptualizes: that the real is no longer real”. (p. 145). In this reading, Isaacs talk about the relationship between time and space within the cinematic frame. Using The Matrix  franchise as an example,  the audience is brought IN to the “reality” of the moment, creating a virtual effect within the narrative frame. Bullet-time represents an “incursion of ‘virtual reality’ into an art form dominated by a real aesthetic.” (p. 145) Bullet-time cinematography was created specifically for the Matrix, to give the audience a “stylistic way of showing that you’re in a constructed reality“. (p. 146).

When I watched how they created various scenes using bullet-time cinematography, it was very interesting and mind-blowing. The frame can either be frozen, slowed-down and fast-forwarded, but through bullet-time, you can move through Reality, capturing a spatial and virtual reality. This technology has given cinematographers the ability to manipulate real time and push the boundaries when it comes to transcending both reality and virtual reality, and how the two concepts coincide together to push just how far conventional cinema can go.