London-based sculptor Jason Shulman has lately produced a wonderful series of photographs—long exposures spanning the duration of entire films, effectively condensing them into a single frame. The results are hazy and hauntingly lovely blasts of light and color (when he shoots color films, that is), recalling at once the works of J. M. W. Turner and some of the foggier seascapes of Hiroshi Sugimoto. The series, simply titled “Photographs of Films,” is the subject of an exhibition opening this week at London’s Cob Gallery.

The photographs capture something the human eye can’t ordinarily see. They collapse the totality of a movie into a single moment, a single frame. The results vary from luminous colour field abstractions to visual précis that are both a blur and a reveal. The photographs of Hitchcock films show ghostly figures emerging from an abstract background. ‘With Rear Window you can see Jimmy Stewart in his wheelchair against the fragmented lines of window frames. It could work as a poster for the film. ‘The Kubricks, on the other hand, do not show human figures. They stand out for their formal composition, almost dividing the image into a triptych.’

‘There are roughly 130,000 frames in a 90 minute film and every frame of each film is recorded in these photographs. You could take all these frames and shuffle e them like a deck of cards, and no matter the shuffle, you would end up with the same image I have arrived at. Each of these photographs is the genetic code of a film – its visual DNA.’

 

Yellow Submarine
 

The Passenger
 

2001: A Space Odyssey
 
More condensed movies after the jump…