Shudder – Shutter – Shatter

An essay by Esther Leslie (Professor in Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London).

Commissioned on the occasion of SHUDDER: Edwina Ashton, Barry Doupé, Ann Course, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Matt Mullican, Raymond Pettibon, Naoyuki Tsuji and Markus Vater.
Shudder: the shutter snaps up and down in the camera. Shudder: the filmstrip snags its way through sprockets of the projector. Shudder: the frame and the frame rate are misaligned. Shudder: the figure who moved too quickly for the frame-rate appears to judder. Shudder: the handheld camera nears its object, jittering as it zooms. Shudder: the high shutter speed matched with a low frame rate generates a strobing effect. Shudder: the pixels drop out micro-momentarily on the LCD screen. Shudder: the backgrounds in the HD film tingle in the deep field of focus as if animated. Shudder is intimate to film, in many ways’.