Movie Stills1977

Original footage: Chuck Hudina. Assistance: Terry Williams. "The more recent MOVIE STILLS (1977) is a melancholy procession of frozen moments being born, ripening, beginning to die before our eyes. Murphy selected 16 frames from a found home movie, photogrpahed them with a polaroid camera, then filmed the three minutes it took each image to materialize. Because of the higher contrast caused by this rephotography, the pictures seem to be darkening past their prime just as Murphy cuts to the enxt. Every shot starts out white and there's a key element of suspense as one's retitnal afterimages compete with the emerging forms of the developing photo. After a while, the ghost of an anecdote – a woman and two men mugging for the camera, an odd flirtation – develops too. 'A photograph is a secret about a secret,' Diane Arbus once wrote. 'The more it tells you the less you know.' With its heightened sense of mortality, MOVIE STILLS invites the viewer to contemplate not only the fleeting gestures and expressions momentualized by the camera but the process by which our minds construct narratives or deduce character from them."–J. Hoberman, Village Voice.