'Alien' Captured in One Image: Artist Turns Classic Films into Gorgeous Art

alice-in-wonderland — Copyright Jason Shulman courtesy The COB Gallery London

Senior Writer

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the ones created by London artist Jason Shulman are worth millions. The 53-year-old sculptor, photographer and film lover reduced more than 50 feature films down to single image. That's around 120,000 frames per hour of film, all stacked on top of each other.

The results are part of the series Photographs of Films, and they are gorgeous and poignant summations of cinema classics. Horror film buffs will jump at the chance to compare the color scheme of The Silence of the Lambs to The Exorcist, while Disney fanatics may be surprised by the gloomy palette of Cinderella.

cinderella — A single image captures every frame in the 1950 Disney film, 'Cinderella.' Copyright Jason Shulman courtesy The COB Gallery London

To create the images, Shulman uses a long exposure camera to capture the entire film. "I keep the aperture on the camera open for the duration of the movie," he explained to Newsweek. "The camera captures all of the light emitted by the movie and the resulting print shows just that." Each collage takes as long to make as the length of the films. So Georges Méliès famous Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) only took Shulman 16 minutes to create, but 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre took the films' full hour and a half duration.

texas+chainsaw — Every frame of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (1974) in one image. Copyright Jason Shulman courtesy The COB Gallery London

Similar projects have been done in the past. You may remember MovieDNA, a Kickstarter campaign created by film enthusiasts Rob Hansen and Garrick Dartnell, who compressed every frame of famous films into a sliver, and then stitched those slivers together to create on image. And three years ago, a Reddit user prompted a collective attempt to reduce films down to a single block of color using a computer program that averaged the hue of each frame. But Shulman's photographs are a little softer and a little more revealing than either of those projects.

Photographs of Film has been on exhibit at the C OB Gallery Londonsince May 2017, and Shulman told Newsweek he hopes to mount another big exhibition in the United States, possibly Los Angeles. The list of films represented in such a show is still being worked out. "I've got more planning to do," he said.

In the meantime, Shulman has one print of 2001: A Space Odyssey available for sale and more than 50 film photographs to peruse for free on his website.

Here are some stand-outs, roughly sorted by genre for maximum comparison.