Videographic Film Studies and the Analysis of Camera Movement

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org Videographic film studies and the analysis of camera movement Volker Pantenburg NECSUS 5 (1), Spring 2016: 41–58 URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/videographic-film-studies-and-the- analysis-of-camera-movement Keywords: camera movement, digital film studies, Kevin B. Lee, theory, video essay I. Albrecht Schäfer’s installation Swing (2008) is as simple as it is intriguing. In the catalogue its components are given as ‘video projector, DVD player, nylon thread, DVD, color, no sound’. The nylon thread (in the realised work more a robust steel cord) stands out in this list; as will become clear the punchline of the work literally is delivered by this thread. What Swing pre- sents could hardly be more quotidian: the image is of a bird of prey circling under a blue sky. The camera continually follows its movement and trans- lates its flight into swaying, sometimes jerking circular movements. It is not always easy to distinguish between figure and background against the mon- ochrome surface; there is no unmoving, anchoring object that would enable us to estimate speed and direction of movement. Although we immediately perceive the bird to be in motion, in reality we apply the existing experiential value ‘bird in flight’ to the filmed situation. NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES However, the nylon thread complicates things, as the DVD player and projector hang freely swinging in the exhibition space. As soon as the visitor enters the space the equipment is set in motion by the unavoidable air draft. While the identification of movement types (here that of the bird, there that of the camera) initially causes a mild irritation the gentle swinging of the image on the wall adds a form of movement rarely encountered in film history. Object and observation tool are in motion; the dispositif of perception also ‘swings’. The precise correlation of each type of movement thus becomes even more unclear and the visitor feels a subtle but distinct dizzi- ness. Even if it is possible with some concentration to single out the indi- vidual levels of movement analytically a physical-sensory confusion sets in, more or less intense depending on the viewer. We all know that slightly queasy feeling of sitting in a stationary train while another one approaches on the neighboring track and we think our own carriage is moving. Swing deals with this discrepancy between the cognitive evaluation and somatic experience of movement. 42 VOL 5 (1), 2016 VIDEOGRAPHIC FILM STUDIES AND THE ANALYSIS OF CAMERA MOVEMENT II. Given the multitude and variety of moving images today it is helpful to take a look at the technical and institutional conditions under which a work is created and shown. The first thing about Swing is that it was shot with a digital camera. However, the materiality of the image, its resolution or material carrier are barely relevant. Whether it is on Super 8 or HD video is secondary to the actual effect. More important is the fact that it is a short, two-and-a-half-minute loop. Of course the production of loops was also possible with analogue film material but only with the repeat button on the DVD player did it become the default mode for moving images in exhibition spaces. Through the presentation in loop form and the absence of temporal markers the work seems timeless and abstract despite the con- creteness of its banal event. Swing can thus be understood as a generalising examination of movement – more conceptual than narrative, more recur- sive and cyclical than linear. A second specification is necessary: the work requires a digital projector that, in combination with the DVD player, is light enough to be set in motion by a mere draft. For the same reason the images are bound to an exhibition venue like a museum, as it is the visitors who add the decisive element to the movement palimpsest and complete the work by walking through the space. The antiquated word ‘interactivity’ is inadequate to describe this circumstance as it is not a case of intervening in the structure or nature of the images but rather and more subtly of a discreet involuntary entanglement in the movements of object, camera, and projector in the three levels that intersect on the image swinging on the wall. Because of the conventions of the museum Schäfer can rely on me moving and setting the image surface in motion and not kicking or shoving the projector in order to observe the result on the wall. III. Swing is one of conceptual artist Albrecht Schäfer’s few video works; it is interesting here as an example of a complex that could be described as ‘practical research’ into camera movement. Experimental cinema and (due to the force of attraction of contemporary art) the museum are the privi- leged locations of such studies.[1] Here are two examples. In a funding ap- PANTENBURG NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES plication for the Canadian Film Development Corporation, in March 1969, Michael Snow wrote: ‘[a]fter finishing Wavelength, which is in its entirety a single camera movement (a zoom), I realized that the movement of the camera as a separate expressive entity in film is completely unexplored.’[2] Whether a zoom (the displacement of lens components) can adequately be described as a ‘camera movement’ is arguable,[3] but after Wavelength Snow did shoot two further films (Back and Forth [1969] and La Région Centrale [1971]) that are characterised by excessive camera pans and rotations and run through all the technical possibilities and psycho-physical effects of camera movement. Snow’s films are explicitly made for the cinema. Mark Lewis’ mostly short loops, which are either concentrated on a single movement or a calcu- lated combination of camera and image movement, are tailored to the conditions of the gallery and the museum. A hovering dolly shot imperceptibly transitions into a elaborate boom shot in North Circular (2000); an isosceles- triangular traffic island is patiently orbited in Isosceles (2007); the work Willesden Laundrette (2010) names its operations (Reverse Dolly, Pan Right) in its subtitle; The Moving Image (2011) suggests to be what the title says, but in reality a freight elevator is responsible for the movement. It would not be difficult to list further works that, indebted in the widest sense to the legacy of the structural film, isolate and thus analytically expose the element of camera movement. In this respect today’s much-discussed ‘artistic research’[4] has long been an integral part of art and film history. Another conclusion can also be drawn here: the search for studies on camera movement is most likely to be rewarded in the cinematic and artistic works themselves. Film theory, by contrast, has always had a hard time with conceptualis- ing camera movement. As David Bordwell wrote in 1977, ‘[c]amera movement has usually been considered too elusive to be analyzable.’[5] Five years later Vivian Sobchack came to the same conclusion from a different theoretical angle: ‘[a]lthough it is possibly the kind of movement most central to our primary understanding of the cinema as a semiotically expressive form of human communication, camera movement has unfortunately seemed to elude the descriptive and interpretive grasp of traditional and contemporary modes of theoretical reflection.’ She continues: ‘[r]ecognizing camera movement as significant and signifying, film scholars have not been able to account for it as such, or to describe it in terms that speak to our experience as viewers.’[6] Surprisingly, nothing has substantially altered in this during 44 VOL 5 (1), 2016 VIDEOGRAPHIC FILM STUDIES AND THE ANALYSIS OF CAMERA MOVEMENT the more than 30 years that have elapsed since Sobchack’s and Bordwell’s diagnoses.[7] Theoreticians regularly address the cinematic principle of movement but in most cases they operate either too far removed from or too close to the material practice of camera, tripod, and concrete image movement.[8] Too far removed, as in the philosophical reflections on the movement-image by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and others; too close, as in the praxis-oriented handbooks for camerapeople in which the respective operations tend to be assumed rather than problematised and the imparted knowledge is integrated as an on-hand tool into a pragmatics of shooting.[9] There are several reasons for the gap between these poles. The most important one is cited by Bordwell and Sobchack when they speak of the strange elusiveness of the operation. In order to be able to analyse it movement has to be suspended, which paradoxically eradicates it as movement. Maurice Merleau-Ponty put his finger on the problem in 1945 in the chapter on movement in his Phenomenology of Perception, where he gives paragraph 23 of the second part on ‘The World as Perceived’ an unu- sually programmatic title: ‘Thinking of Movement as the Destruction of Movement’. In Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of the Cartesian, analytical ap- proach to movement phenomena there is a clear echo of similar figures of thought from Bergson and Hugo Münsterberg. Merleau-Ponty writes that [e]ven if we invent a mathematical instrument which allows account to be taken of an indefinite multiplicity of positions and instants, it is impossible to conceive in one and the same moving body the very act of transition which always occurs between two instants and two positions, in whatever proximity to each other we choose them. So that, in thinking clearly about movement, I do not understand how it can ever begin for me, and be given to me as a phenomenon.[10] In film studies the fundamental elusion postulated here of the phenomenon of movement and its resistance to mathematical dissection has led to the above-described evasion.

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