From the Editor

Welcome to the first issue of our first three-issue volume of Projections. We begin this issue with a truly exciting collaboration between a filmmaker (and scholar), Karen Pearlman, and a psychologist, James E. Cutting. Cutting and Pearlman analyze a number of formal features, including shot duration, across successive cuts of Pearlman’s 2016 short film, Woman with an Editing Bench. They find that the intuitive revisions that Pearlman made actually track a progression toward fractal structures – complex patterns that also happen to mark three central pulses of human existence (heartbeat, breathing, walking).

Shaping Edits, Creating Fractals

We investigated physical changes over three versions in the production of the short historical drama, Woman with an Editing Bench (2016, The Physical TV Company). Pearlman, the film’s director and editor, had also written about the work that editors do to create rhythms in film (Pearlman 2016), and, through the use of computational techniques employed previously (Cutting et al. 2018), we found that those descriptions of the editing process had parallels in the physical changes of the film as it progressed from its first assembled form, through a fine cut, to the released film. Basically, the rhythms of the released film are not unlike the rhythms of heartbeats, breathing, and footfalls—they share the property of “fractality.” That is, as Pearlman shaped a story and its emotional dynamics over successive revisions, she also (without consciously intending to do so) fashioned several dimensions of the film— shot duration, motion, luminance, chroma, and clutter—so as to make them more fractal.

Suspended Moments of the Mundane Routine: Testing the Possibilities of Slow Cinema in Sharon Lockhart’s "Lunch Break" (2008) and "Podwórka" (2009)

In this article, I analyze various ways in which Sharon Lockhart’s experimental films, Lunch Break (2008) and Podwórka (2009), develop the concept of an industrial landscape and local community by simultaneously incorporating and challenging narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the poetics of slow cinema. Focusing mostly on the realities of urban life, Lockhart’s unscripted and intimate portraits of American and Polish localities resonate with a highly meditative approach as well as blend rigorous film aesthetics with an anthropological and ethnographic sensibility to community engagement. Although the filmmaker’s legacy has been predominantly classified, akin to Peter Hutton’s or James Benning’s works, as representing slow cinema (see e.g. MacDonald, Avant-doc… 2; MacDonald, “Panorama” 636), it seems to have taken some of its formal traits to their extreme through juxtaposing stillness and movement of the imagery with “filmic time, subjective time, and real time in mediations on ritual, landscape, and labour” (Kuhn and Westwell 381). To achieve the desired effect, Lockhart experiments and expands on the genre’s typical devices such as: an extended shot duration, fixed camera position, minimalism and austerity or anti-narrative by the use of vertical planes, Z-axis, a single tracking shot slowed down to three frames per second, extremely long takes, a typical camera angles or a detached perspective.

The Framing of Characters in Popular Movies

I investigated the number and locations of characters as they appear on the screen in 48 popular movies released from 1935 to 2010. Sampling an average of one of every 500 frames (∼20 s of film) I amassed data from almost 14 000 movie images. The number and placement of the characters in each image were digitally recorded and compared across years and across aspect ratios (the ratio of the width to the height of the image). Results show a roughly linear decrease in the number of characters on the screen across years. Moreover, the number of characters influences shot scale, shot duration, and mediates their direct effect on one another. The location of characters on the screen was measured by the bridge of the nose between the eyes. By this measure I found that framing varies widely across aspect ratios, but when each image is conformed to the same shape, the overlap of the locations of characters is remarkably constant across years and aspect ratios for images with one, two, and three characters. Together, these results exemplify both constancy and change in the evolution of popular movies.