As its title indicates, the subject in Production Stills is a series of production stills of a film that was never made, and that at the same time is the film we are watching. A perfectly enclosed narrative of its own production: the image is one long take (11 minutes) of a wall on which a hand sequentially pins a number of Polaroids, one after the other. The Polaroids depict the crew making the film; the synchronous sound allows us to hear in ‘real time’, their chatter and the hum of the still camera, so that we can anticipate the photos and assign faces to the voices we hear.

“Production Stills presents the usual Fisher-esque inversion of industry procedures. Normally, production stills are taken while a film is being shot as an aid in marketing the finished film: they are a means to an end. In Fisher’s film, the making and presentation of the production stills is the end, and moments of motion picture illusion – the hands entering the image, the apparent use of sync sound, the making of the film itself-are means for getting the stills mounted so that we can examine them. The film also challenges conventional cinematic categories and terminology. (...) It is an unedited film which, however, provides us with eight different views of the action taking place.

- Scott MacDonald