Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
Jean-Luc Godard
I tried to parse the difference between photos and cinema in order to answer the question “What does it mean for a photo to be cinematic?” The clearest answer seemed to come from the Sphinx of Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard. He said once “Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.” It seems to me that in this sentence he was talking about the sense of a narrative developing. But if you take into account also the sentence which is the epigraph of this post, then the narrative is the fraud. This can happen even if each frame is true. In the movie Breathless, Jean Seberg is really there on the curb of the Champs Elysee carrying the New York Herald Tribune in her arms. But the narrative is fiction of course, so not true. That fiction is cinema.
So how can I create a sense of narrative through photography? The easiest way is to catch people in the middle of doing things that you can interpret. The featured photo shows a man with a briefcase looking at his phone. You get a sense of him in motion, and a sense of distraction. If you jump from that to thinking that he is late for something, then I have created that fiction. Perhaps the same with the photo of a cafe above. Why is it reflected in a globe? Why is the rest of the photo dark? Once I get you to ask yourself this question I have succeeded in setting you on the path to a narrative without the twentythree other photos in the second.
The Ukrainian Soviet film maker Alexander Dovzhenko, one of the famous early silent film makers of the USSR, experimented with actors keeping a completely blank face. Then, depending on the narrative in which the shot of the face is shown, people project an emotion on it. Can you see anxiety in the faces of the four young girls facing the camera? Or do you see boredom or anticipation? With enough ambiguity, we can all formulate questions about a shot that call for a narrative.
Having people in the shot helps, but it isn’t even necessary. We are all familiar with spy movies or crime fiction. So when you see a shot with a mirror you immediately think of someone following another person. Those cars in the street look suspicious, don’t they? And the blank wall shows there’s no place to hide. This is a tense situation clearly. Few people have done this kind of claustrophobia better than Alfred Hitchcock.
And then there are the wonderful narratives of modern Iranian cinema. Abbas Kiarostami is an expert in building tension out of absolutely everyday happenings. Take this last photo as a tribute to his most well known movie Where is my Friend’s House?. The children in front are engaged with the camera, smiling or quizzical. But at the back there are two faces which are not relaxed. Is this going to be a narrative about them?
Don't hold your breath 
