Roland Barthes says in his 1980 book Camera Lucida: "In Photograpy, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric: and in the case of animated beings, their life as well, except in the case of photographing corpses; and even so: if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this has been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. (...) Here again, from a phenomenological viewpoint, the cinema begins to differ from the Photograph; for the (fictional) cinema combines two poses: the actor's 'this-has-been' and the role's, so that (something I would not experience before a painting) I can never see or see again in a film certain actors whom I know to be dead without a kind of melancholy: the melancholy of Photography itself."
Fatal Attraction has to do with the state that exists between reality and fiction, between the fantasy and real life. Film is inherently a medium that exists between these worlds and is both very lifelike and deathly. My fillmstills contain this idea of the state in between, the fake deaths of film. Of how actresses can die many deaths. They are attractive and repelling at the same time. How can we feel an attraction in death, in the fake, in the unreal? The interest lies in what Leonid Andrew said about cinema in the 1930s: "Will it be [the] dead? No, because what is reflected in the mirror is neither dead nor alive, it is a second life, an enigmatic existence".
In 'On Photography' (1977) Susan Sontag says the following about filmstills' relationship to film: "To quote from a movie is not the same as quoting from a book. Whereas the reading time of a book is up to the reader, the viewing time of a film is set by the filmmaker and the images are perceived only as fast or as slowly as the editing permits. Thus, a still, which allows one to linger over a single moment as long as one likes, contradicts the very form of film, as a set of photographs that freezes moments in a life or a society contradicts their form, which is a process, a flow in time. The photographed world stands in the same, essentially inaccurate relation to the real world as stills do to movies. Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."