Moving pictures: New book analyzes the concept of motion in film

Movies move. It’s their defining feature, differentiating motion pictures from still photographs. Even the word cinema comes from this concept: it’s rooted in the Greek kinema, or movement.

If movement is central to the medium, then why does film studies rarely analyze movement? It’s a question that puzzles Cinema Department lecturer Jordan Schonig, and which he addresses in his new book, The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement.

Yes, theorists make claims about the illusory nature of cinematic motion, which involves the rapid succession of individual images at a rate of 24 times per second, he acknowledged. Nearly every film studies textbook also discusses the mental faculties that allow us to see this illusion, but that’s not the same as considering movement as an object of film analysis.

“Of course, there might be a simple solution to this riddle: we can’t analyze ‘movement’ in movies because we’re not watching movements, we’re watching ‘actions’ and ‘events,’ ‘characters’ and ‘performances,’” he reflected. “How can one analyze particular instances of what is quite literally always there on screen?”

To that end, Schonig came up with the concept of the “motion form”: structures or patterns of motion that viewers can recognize both in the world and in the movies. When we recognize a friend by the way they walk, we’re seeing a form that exists only in motion, he explained. We can also see them in the signature gestures of famous actors — Charlie Chaplin’s tramp walk, for example — or the camera effect known as a “dolly zoom,” made famous in films like Vertigo and Jaws.

At their most basic levels, motion forms are visual concepts — and you need concepts in place before you can transform a specific quality of an artistic medium, whether sound, color or movement, into the focus of aesthetic analysis. Something similar happened with the analysis of film sound; now a sub-discipline with hundreds of published articles and books, film sound studies only took off after the development of certain concepts involving sound and the differentiation of volume, pitch and timbre.

“In a similar way, motion forms are concepts that help us break up the entire visual tapestry of movement in a film into more discrete parts, that is, into ways of moving,” Schonig explained. “If we can learn to see ways of moving rather than simply people and things, actions and events, then I think we can start to make motion an object of film analysis.”

Motion forms

To understand motion forms, it’s important to recognize what they are not. Motions forms aren’t a way to categorize movement as involving people, objects, cameras or editing; they’re not the things that move, but the ways that they move. This differentiation is key to understanding Schonig’s work.

Each chapter of his book looks at a particular motion form, such as “contingent motion,” which names the chaotic movement patterns of natural phenomena like fluttering leaves, swirling dust and rippling waves.

“Such phenomena fascinated the very first film audiences in 1895, and I try to explain that it wasn’t simply ‘nature’ that spectators were fascinated by — it was a particular form of movement that was astonishing when captured in a moving image,” he said.

Other motion forms are crucial for understanding major stylistic tendencies in cinema, such as the everyday bodily movements Schonig calls “habitual gestures.” Many realist films of the postwar era, such as those by Vittorio de Sica and Robert Bresson, isolate these movements for visual contemplation.

Then there are “durational metamorphoses,” or slow, incremental changes that result in profound transformations, such as the movements of clouds or the darkening sky; “spatial unfurling,” an effect produced by certain camera movements that suppress the illusion of bodily movement; “trajective locomotion,” an effect produced by camera movements that follow characters on foot from behind; and “bleeding pixels,” an effect produced by digital compression artifacts. To illustrate each, Schonig relies on multiple examples, from early films to classical Hollywood movies, CGI cartoons and experimental films from around the world.

A textual medium such as a print book can’t adequately capture motion forms, even with the inclusion of stills. That’s why purchasers will also get access to a website with six video essays that correspond to each chapter. The essays visually demonstrate the motion forms under discussion but also function as standalone pieces, summarizing each chapter’s argument through the arrangement of image, text and sound.

What technology changes – and doesn’t

The processes and technologies that filmmakers used to capture motion have changed dramatically over time. Perhaps the earliest example are “optical toys” such as the 19th-century zoetrope or phenakistoscope, hand-held devices that produced the illusion of movement through the rapid succession of still images. The earliest film cameras and projectors further mechanized this process.

Among the greatest shifts was the introduction of digital compression algorithms, which give “motion instructions” only to those small pieces of a frame that have changed from the previous frame, rather than a succession of whole images. This compression saves data, but also represents a fundamental change to the technology of cinematic motion that’s completely unnoticed by most viewers, except when you see a “compression glitch,” Schonig said.

Schonig, however, is equally fascinated by just how much has remained the same in cinema, despite the technological changes.

“For example, one of the key questions I investigate in the book is the fact that early spectators were fixated on the movements of swirling smoke and rippling waves, but in the 21st century, many audiences and critics continue to fixate on these same phenomena when they are convincingly simulated with CGI in Pixar cartoons,” he said. “The technology here is absolutely different — one is a recording, the other a synthetic image — and yet the quality of uncannily lifelike movement projected onto a screen seems to trigger a similar kind of experience.”

Schonig hopes that his book will give readers insight into a way of categorizing cinematic motion. His own favorite books in film and literary studies over the past decade have been organized around individual categories, including Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories and Kristen Whissel’s Spectacular Digital Effects.

These books invite readers to imagine new categories, a strategy that Schonig uses in his classroom. Students in his Cinema in the Digital Age class come up with their own classifications of digital effects and make a case for their significance; in Gender, Sexuality, and Romance, students identify ‘romance tropes’ and examine them through the lens of feminist and queer theory.

“What I love is the ‘aha’ moment that happens when somebody shows you a category — a concept, a pattern, a shape, a form — that’s been right under your nose,” he said. “I do hope I can give readers that ‘aha’ moment from my chapters, but more importantly, I hope that my readers will discover their own categories of motion, their own ‘motion forms.’”