The Shape of Motion

Cinematic motion has long been celebrated as an emblem of change and fluidity or claimed as the source of cinema’s impression of reality. But such general claims undermine the sheer variety of forms that motion can take onscreen—the sweep of a gesture, the rush of a camera movement, the slow transformations of a natural landscape. What might one learn about the moving image when one begins to account for the many ways that movements move? In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema’s “motion forms”: structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the wild and unpredictable motion of flickering leaves and swirling dust that captivated early spectators, to the pulsing abstractions that emerge from rapid lateral tracking shots, to the bleeding pixel-formations caused by the glitches of digital video compression, each motion form opens up the aesthetics of movement to film theoretical inquiry. By pairing close analyses of onscreen movement in narrative and experimental films with concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Immanuel Kant, Schonig rethinks long-standing assumptions within film studies, such as indexical accounts of photographic images and analogies between the camera and the human eye. Arguing against the intuition that cinema reproduces the natural perception of motion, The Shape of Motion shows how cinema’s motion forms do not merely transpose the movements of the world in front of the camera; they transform them.

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.

A Place for Shadows: A Prolegomena to the Authorship Practices and Films of Joanna Margaret Paul

<p>This is an "authorship" study of New Zealand artist Joanna Margaret Paul, with specific reference to her "experimental film" works. Though I will draw on a wide range of theorists, my overall approach is what Laura Marks calls "intercultural cinema." For Marks the term "intercultural cinema" refers to a specific "genre" or "movement" of experimental films created by authors caught "between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge." Intercultural film-makers include feminist, queer, indigenous and immigrant authors (any "minority" which possesses its own "regime of knowledge" and makes experimental film) living in "Western metropolitan areas," whose dominant culture is capitalist, masculine, "hegemonic, white and Euro-American" (a second regime of knowledge). What draws intercultural cinema together (and indeed, one could argue, experimental film in general) is an oppositional stance toward capitalist ideology, the commodification of the art object and the uniformity of classical narrative forms. As David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson write, experimental films are "often deliberate attempts to undercut the conventions of commercial narrative filmmaking" and, as Marks writes, intercultural cinema "flows against waves of economic neocolonialism," and is "suspicious of mass circulation... [as] making commercial cinema still involves significant compromises."</p>

A Place for Shadows: A Prolegomena to the Authorship Practices and Films of Joanna Margaret Paul

<p>This is an "authorship" study of New Zealand artist Joanna Margaret Paul, with specific reference to her "experimental film" works. Though I will draw on a wide range of theorists, my overall approach is what Laura Marks calls "intercultural cinema." For Marks the term "intercultural cinema" refers to a specific "genre" or "movement" of experimental films created by authors caught "between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge." Intercultural film-makers include feminist, queer, indigenous and immigrant authors (any "minority" which possesses its own "regime of knowledge" and makes experimental film) living in "Western metropolitan areas," whose dominant culture is capitalist, masculine, "hegemonic, white and Euro-American" (a second regime of knowledge). What draws intercultural cinema together (and indeed, one could argue, experimental film in general) is an oppositional stance toward capitalist ideology, the commodification of the art object and the uniformity of classical narrative forms. As David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson write, experimental films are "often deliberate attempts to undercut the conventions of commercial narrative filmmaking" and, as Marks writes, intercultural cinema "flows against waves of economic neocolonialism," and is "suspicious of mass circulation... [as] making commercial cinema still involves significant compromises."</p>

Note on Hallucinatory Film

Comparisons between hallucinatory films of the 1960s and 2000s show a conversion of the earlier utopian signifiers from benign fields of intoxicating color that celebrate and induce psychic bliss, into high-definition alarm bells for a world imploding from accelerated hyperconsumption. Paranoid, conspiracy-driven 70s commercial cinema, which appropriates editing techniques from earlier experimental films, marks a threshold of disenchantment. The entropic model of 60s hallucinatory works by Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, and others, where film material and abstract imagery are modified analagous to the intensification of bodily pleasures, is digitally exacerbated in high-definition videos of Heather Phillipson, Ed Atkins, and Benedict Drew as if collapsing under environmental and psychic degradation. This later work maximizes hallucinatory HD properties through relentlessly overlaying imagery of interpenetrating, deflating, and exploding bodies that are avatars of overindulgence, the nightmarish uncanny descendants of 60s utopian intoxications. (MH)

Biblical Presence in Chinese Contemporary Films

This essay aims to look at the exploration of the Christian faith by means of Chinese contemporary photographic images through categorizing Christianity-related image artwork in China. The exploration will focus on the “film” genre, including documentaries and the artists involved. In terms of territories, it mainly focuses on works produced in mainland China but also discusses some works from Hong Kong and Taiwan that have had some influence reaching China. After surveying art films and experimental films, commercial and popular films, the essay re-reads the films using biblical lenses and images.

Repented and Flora and Dambudzo

A practice-research journey across two experimental films, Flora and Dambudzo (2015) and Repented (2019), which share a core compelling question about the influence of colonialism on intimate relationships in Zimbabwe. Flora and Damudzo (2015) depicts a scene between the iconic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera and his German lover Flora Veit Wild using words from their historical writing. Repented (2019) is based on a play by Zimbabwean playwright Stanely Makuwe and focuses on the confrontational meeting of two characters after a long absence. Through split screen editing, the film also incorporates archive material shot during the colonial times in Rhodesia and South Africa which serves as an expressive illustration of the profound injustice, oppressiveness and gestures of defiance that occurred. Through this sustained enquiry, Piotrowska describes the process of adapting different material for the screen, explores notions of theatricality and reflects on the significant period of time between the creation of the films as a period of learning and questioning her own preconceptions and ideas.

China Girls in the Film Laboratory

In the film laboratory, China Girl reference images used in maintaining ideal appearance are literally marginalized on the ends of the filmstrip. Translated into numeric values, the bodies of China Girl models are instrumentalized for quality control procedures, transformed into industrial material embedded in the photochemistry of film. For this to happen, the woman’s body is first dematerialized and then disappears, a process that correlates to the production of the film image. While the laboratory uses of the China Girl are assumed to be rational and objective, this chapter shows that they are often more ideological than they are taken to be. The chapter concludes with a survey of experimental films that foreground the China Girl, including films that reproduce the marginalization of the figure or, from a feminist perspective, critique the laboratory procedures that determine the terms of the China Girl’s liminal appearance.