28 L’ ATALANTE JULY-DECEMBER 2011 (2013 reedition) MIGRATIONS: THE GRAPES OF WRATH AND THE AIMS OF THE FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION* Rebeca Romero Escrivá "The lost cause of cinema" Many relationships can be established between photography and cinema. To begin with, since cinema is a direct descendant of photography, they share formative principles: the medium, their photochemical nature, the opti- cal elements, the camera and even the same visual language for the composi- tion and illumination of scenes. Even the spatio-temporal dimension provi- ded by cinema, as its main difference from photography, needs twenty-four frames per second to generate the illu- sion of movement for the spectator. In other words, the cinematic experience would not exist without projection te- chniques (sequences of images) and the psychodynamics of sight (a quality of the human eye of retaining the images in the mind long enough so that the next image can fuse the separation bet- ween it and the last). From this basic and extremely well-known principle we may conclude that we will never fully appreciate the real debt the filmic medium owes to photography without stopping the continuum of images on the screen –which would be to alter their cinematic nature. It is hard for the spectator to retain an image in his me- mory because the next one erases the previous one. In this sense, it could be argued that photography cuts a story rather than tell it. Cutting means more than capturing an instant; figuratively, it means tearing a story apart. The cut in the story is not objective since it is chosen by the photographer. In fact, due to the violence of the cut and its apparent neutrality, the photograph is likely to absorb meanings that could alter the photographer’s original inten- tion. Although the permeability of the image is a quality shared with cinema, the static nature of photographic ima- “The photographs are a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others