FROM THE BOOK

"Iaia Filiberti's and Debora Hirsch's ongoing project Framed and the images of stars that emerged from the Hollywood golden age are inextricably, vitally, linked by the continuous shift between movement and stillness, life and death, and the power that this connection has to generate fascination. From the motion of the actual films to the stillness of the glamour shots, back to movement and stillness through their circulation in their intermedial forms during the subsequent decades, these images start and stop up to the moment when Filiberti and Hirsch step in to reclaim the portrait cards and return them to circulation in a new context, the art world, that repositions the images in a new space of signification as the real lives and deaths of these stars come into play. Here we are asked to look at them as both stars and women in installation form, as a found-footage video, and now as a bound book, and each step of the way the passage from movement to stillness, from one form to another, demands a rereading, a reconsideration of how all the elements discussed thus far are held in a balance and how they express the complexity and contradictions inherent in the visual manifestations of the movie world. All this depended on 100 stars taking 100 round trips to Hollywood. Unlike real lives, the images continue to come back, pitting stillness against movement, and will continue to do so as we leaf through the pages of this book."

Maggie Cardelús and Antonio Somaini, excerpted from One Hundred Comebacks in Framed.