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Film stills are photographs that are used in the making of films or in advertising. Film stills today are primarily used in film journalism. Stills make it possible to work on a film or change it after the fact. This E-book on CD-ROM featuring film clips explores the phenomenon of film stills in the context of filmmaking, the fine arts, theory, and media culture. It sheds light on use of the still in film already in the context of silent film, for example in the case of Asta Nielsen, and explores how the film still was not only used as a means of advertising, but repeatedly became part of the plot, as can be seen in films by Preston Sturges, Otto Preminger, Francois Truffaut, or Chris Marker. After 1960, fine artists became interested in the use of the film still, as can be seen in the work of artists such as Richard Hamilton, John Baldessari, or Cindy Sherman, to whom individual chapters here are dedicated. The strategy used in the fine arts is the appropriation of film stills and the deconstruction of film. This E-book engages with these theoretical positions and develops new methods of analysis for film and media studies in its examination of the film still. Finally, the film still surfaces in an altered form in media culture. Since the 1990s, stills taken by surveillance cameras have become icons: images of the kidnapping of James Bulger (1993), Lady Di at the Hotel Ritz (1997), or the terrorist Mohammed Atta at the airport (2001). The concluding chapter of this E-book deals with these stills and describes them as symptoms how the media saturate our lifeworld.
