Spatial Unfurling

This chapter examines the perceptual and aesthetic properties of “spatial unfurling,” an effect achieved by moving the camera across space rather than into it, such as in lateral tracking shots. By emphasizing the flatness of the screen and the boundaries of the frame, spatial unfurling lacks the feeling of kinesthesia characteristic of forward camera movement. As a result, spatial unfurling illustrates the limitations of the long-held truism in film theory that camera movement produces an illusion of our own embodied movement through space. By critiquing the logic of this truism as it appears in phenomenological film theory, and by examining the perceptual effects of spatial unfurling in narrative and experimental films such as Mauvais Sang (Carax, 1986), La région centrale (Snow, 1971), and Georgetown Loop (Jacobs, 1996), this chapter argues for a phenomenological account of camera movement that forgoes analogies with bodily movement and instead emphasizes one’s perceptual encounter with the screen.