The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement - a book by Jordan Schonig
We know that one of the defining characteristics of film is that it involves movement. Unlike painting and photography, cinema offers us the possibility of seeing colors and shapes moving in time, while maintaining a photographic resemblance to reality. But when we watch a film, especially one with a narrative, we are usually so absorbed by plot and characters that we rarely pay attention to how movement appears on screen.
Blending philosophy and film theory, The Shape of Motion encourages us to go beyond an appreciation of movement in general and really pay attention to the myriad ways in which it appears on films. Once we start paying close attention, we can discover patterns and regularities: ways of moving that repeat across genres and different types of films. The author calls them forms or shapes, and they are multiple. Each chapter addresses a different shape of motion, from the formless movements of clouds to habitual bodily movements, camera movements, and glitches.
One of the book’s premises is the idea that the movements we see in films have a specificity that distinguishes them from those we see in real life. There is no simple continuity. Cinematic recording is not the mere transposition of the movements of the world onto a screen. Cinematic movements have a strangeness on their own that this book will attempt to identify and analyze. Let's examine some of them in more detail.
Contingent Motion
Rustling leaves, floating dust, rippling water, undulating clouds, flickering fire. What do all of these phenomena have in common? Why are they so fascinating to look at? They consist of a multiplicity of tiny movements that are unpredictable, that could go one way or another, giving us the impression of whimsical, chaotic motion. They are certainly less predictable than the trajectory of a ball, and they look less driven by agency than the flight of a bird or human actions. Some of them seem to be formless, or their form is constantly changing, so much so that it’s very difficult to establish boundaries and say where they begin or end. The more ungraspable they seem, the more one is lost in their contemplation.
This is the first shape of motion that the author describes. If the aesthetic pleasure we get from looking at these phenomena predates the invention of cinema, he argues that this pleasure takes a new life once the camera is able to capture them and we see them unfolding on screen. In fact, one of the things that most astonished and delighted early audiences when they watched the first films was not so much the human figures moving in the foreground, but all those collateral things happening in the background: the rustling of leaves in a faraway tree, the steam of a locomotive, dust from a torn down wall. Early audiences were confronted for the first time with the detailed and hyper-realist reproduction of unpredictable, unplannable movements that until then they had only seen in the natural world.
But the author asserts that this realistic capacity of cinema is not the only or the main reason why we are so fascinated by contingent motion when we see it on screen. There is something else. It’s the spatial and temporal framing of those movements that gives them extra appeal. Spatial framing, because through cinematic recording all those chaotic and unpredictable trajectories of the world can be captured and contained in a rectangular frame. What was a formless motion of clouds and water is now enclosed within clear-cut, geometric boundaries. What was a multiplicity of perspectives from which the real world could be viewed now becomes a fixed point of view through which all viewers have access to the same scene, thus making it shareable. But there is also a temporal framing implied in cinema, because recording movement means extracting it from the flux of time and preserving in it celluloid (or by digital means), making it thus permanent and repeatable. What was originally ephemeral movements in the world, never to be seen again exactly as they occurred, is made repeatable by film. What was a unique rustling of leaves in a unique tree, connected to everything that came before and after, with cinema becomes a shot with definite temporal boundaries that we can watch hundreds of times in a loop.
In a way, it seems to be a sense of mastery and control that adds to the aesthetic pleasure of contemplating contingent motion on screen. But we could also say that spatiotemporal framing gives us the opportunity to experience a kind of hightened and more focused attention. And then this cinematic experience has effects in the way we experience movement in the natural world, as it defamiliarizes our perception and reawakens us to the wonder of its contingent phenomena.
Habitual Gestures
To a large extent, our daily life is made of habits. Walking, washing the dishes, pouring tea. Many of the actions we perform during the day are done with a minimum of attention, in an unconscious way. When we first learned some of those actions in all their complicated steps, we had to be conscious and pay attention, but since then we have repeated them so many times that by now we can do them without noticing them anymore. They are performed through a knowledge of the body as it navigates the environment. All of this automatization is energy saving, so that we get full attention to pursue some more difficult goals. But it also means that a great part of our lives becomes invisible to ourselves and others. All those little gestures, all those radically unique ways of moving in our daily lives, we don’t see them anymore.
And so cinema can be a remedy to this blindness, this book argues, by encouraging attention to ordinarily overlooked forms of bodily motion. When someone is acting, the camera registers indiscriminately everything that they do, even what we wouldn’t normally see in everyday life, busy as we are pursuing one goal after another. The camera can capture the slightest micro-movements and twitches of the hands, the minutest tics of the face, without imposing any predetermined hierarchy, and then these recorded gestures can be amplified by editing and other cinematic techniques. And so thanks to certain films (for example, postwar neorealist films and documentaries) we get to see what we cannot see in real life. We learn that within and between willed actions, there are thousands of particular involuntary movements. Some of them are the effect of someone having grown in a specific culture, or belonging to a particular gender, others are the effect of idiosyncratic motor skills. In all cases, we are confronted with a moving excess that goes beyond someone’s will or intention, thus contradicting our basic assumption that the movement of our bodies is solely the effect of inner motivations (thoughts and feelings).
Durational Metamorphosis
When watching arthouse films, especially those belonging to what critics call slow cinema, we may come across shots where it seems that nothing is going on. It could be a shot of the sky, a landscape, a face. Everything is so still that we have trouble deciding whether we are in front of a photograph or a moving image. But if we have patience and watch closely, we’ll begin to see that there is no stillness at all. Although very subtle, a whole array of gradual shifts in light and color is taking place. If we follow the shot in all its long duration, we’ll be rewarded by noticing that very slow transformations are occurring before our eyes: a new shade of pink gaining intensity in the sky, a sad hue gradually appearing on someone’s face. This shape of motion is what the author calls “durational metamorphosis”, a type of movement that at first sight is more transformational than locomotive (that which involves changes of place). And whenever we experience these kinds of gradual, visual transformations, we are reminded that the material world we live in is endlessly open and in flux, despite our tendency to perceive objects as if they could ever be static and stable.
In mainstream cinema, it is a common practice to cut dead times. All those moments that are not significant in narrative terms, without relevant actions or events, are cut for the sake of plot and so as not to bore the audience, or so they say. But those are precisely the moments that slow cinema chooses to focus on and bracket—a sunrise, a character sitting in silence on a chair, clouds in the sky—so that we are finally able to perceive changes that we don’t normally perceive. When nothing we expect is going on, a shift of attention takes place: we are able to attend to little details and see life simply unfolding as teeming interconnected processes.
Another way we get to see matter as constant and continuous movement is through time-lapse photography. There are changes in our bodies and in the environment that happen too slowly for our perceptual apparatus to capture them. We can only see the effects: one day we look at ourselves in the mirror and we see a new wrinkle, or we notice a new flower, but we haven’t born witness to the actual process of metamorphosis in real time. But through time-lapse photography we can, and so our sense that there exists something like unchanging “selves” and “substances” becomes seriously challenged.
Likewise, there are movements that happen too fast for us to notice with the naked eye, and we are only able to perceive them once they are recorded and reproduced in slow-motion. Such is the case in Bill Viola’s work The Locked Garden, which shows two faces as they pass through different emotions in very slow motion. To the patient viewers that stop for a while in front of the screens, these faces appear as a mass of plastic and fluid transformations, almost a landscape, where most of the time it’s difficult to recognize a definite and nameable emotion. The thing is that with our concepts and words, we tend to isolate emotions as if they were clear cut states, “fear”, “joy”, “anguish”, but in fact they are nothing but fuzzy, interpenetrative processes with no definite boundaries, continuously passing and morphing into something else.
So thanks to films and installations that depict durational metamorphoses, we can experience life as a continuous flow, and not as a succession of discrete states, something that the author analyzes at length as a visual analogue of Henri Bergson’s concept of duration, and that we could also link to the Buddhist’s ideas of impermanence and emptiness.
Spatial Unfurling (or Lateral Camera Movements)
Perhaps when we think about camera movements the first ones that come to mind are those that correspond with how we, humans, tend to move through space. We are embodied beings situated in the world, and we have the tendency to move forward into depth, in a z-axis, going toward one object after another, full of curiosity about what’s around us. And so when the camera moves forward into depth, into an ever receding horizon, we might get the illusion that we are also moving around, the world on screen unfolding in a familiar way before our eyes, revealing new sides of objects while concealing others.
But despite the focus of many film theorists on anthropomorphic camera movements, there are many other movements used in films that don’t give us the illusion of body movements. Cameras can move in ways that humans can’t. Machines are able to surpass some of our body limitations. Again: we should not think of cinematographic recording as the mere transposition to a screen of our human-embodied perception of motion. And so the book spends some time analyzing non-anthropomorphic camera movements, for example, lateral movements, that is, when the camera doesn’t penetrate into space but rather moves laterally at various speeds.
Lateral camera movements evoke the experience of looking out at the world from a passenger window in a train or an automobile, when we are traveling inside a machine ourselves, and space rather unfurls mechanically in front of us, sitting passively on our seats. In those cases, although depth is not completely obliterated, although we don’t completely forget what’s being depicted, changes in velocity can turn the shapes in the foreground into blurry patches of color, something that we rarely experience as we move with our bodies through space. Lateral camera movements can transform what happens on screen into a flat, abstract spectacle of moving light, shapes and colors, that we appreciate for itself, all potential for action momentarily forgotten and replaced by the pure enjoyment of aesthetic sensations.
In the last two chapters of the book, the author continues analyzing other shapes of motion, like follow shots and the distortive effects produced by compression glitches. And there are still many other forms of motion, he suggests, that we could find if we pay attention to the special and strange ways in which movement unfolds across different films. I think I might have found one too. It’s the kind of movement we see in hand-painted experimental films, where colors and shapes seem to be falling down with enormous, inexorable force, blending together like water in a cascade. I’ve called it “cascading motion”. You can check it out here:
https://selvaoscura.cargo.site/Clinamen
