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  • Walter Benjamin and the Dispersion of Cinema
  • R. L. Rutsky (bio)

Cinematic Movement

Cinema, by definition, moves. But what is this movement written into cinematography? In what space—or time, for that matter—does cinematic movement occur? Where are its boundaries, its borders?

These questions take on added urgency as cinema shifts from a filmic to a digital instantiation. Yet, digital cinema is still defined by movement, even if the inscription of that movement has changed.

At an obvious level, of course, cinema is motion pictures, the moving image. As every student of cinema knows, this motion is made technically possible by a sequential movement of individual images, united by the phenomenon that perceptual psychologists call "apparent motion." Even in digital forms of cinema, it remains the succession of image-fields that produces the effect of kinetic movement upon the screen.

This conception of cinema as a successive movement of images has, however, been contested by various theorists. Perhaps most prominently, Gilles Deleuze has argued that cinema cannot be conceived as "an image to which movement is added" (1986, 2), but that instead movement must be considered intrinsic to the cinematic image, a concept that Deleuze refers to as the movement-image. For Deleuze, of course, cinema is not defined strictly by movement, but I will return to his distinction between the movement-image and the time-image at a later stage.

In any case, the moving image per se—that is, the motion of objects and bodies within the filmic frame—is merely one dimension of cinematic movement. As Deleuze explains, the frame itself may also move (mobile framing), as well as the perspective or position from which shots are taken and combined (montage). It is important to note, however, that these "three dimensions" of cinematic movement refer to movements that take place onscreen or that are implied by what is onscreen (as with movements presumed to take place diegetically, but [End Page 8] offscreen). Taken together, these varieties of onscreen movement have generally been seen as defining cinema; the old arguments between the respective importance accorded to mise-en-scène or montage may, for example, be seen as disputes over the precedence given to different types of cinematic movement.

Movement and Effects

These onscreen movements have generally been considered—from Eisenstein to Bazin to Screen theory and beyond—in terms of how they affect, or move, a perceiving subject, whether that subject is conceived as primarily conscious, unconscious, or bodily. These movements, in short, are taken to find their culmination in a receptive subject that serves as the destination at which these movements—and indeed cinema itself—must eventually arrive. Thus, with rare exceptions, cinematic movement has been conceived as directed toward, and subordinated to, an autonomous subject or viewer. From this perspective, cinematic movement on the screen is seen less as a matter of movement qua movement than as merely a matter of effects.

Thus, for example, cinematic movements of the frame and of editing have been seen to evoke a sense of mobility for—or in—the spectator as well, which Anne Friedberg has famously described as the "mobilized and virtual gaze." Cinematic movement, in this case, reinforces the imagined auto-mobility of the spectator. For Friedberg, this effect of mobility provided by cinema is closely akin to the mobility attributed to the consuming subject, strolling past display windows, browsing an array of goods brought from all over the world. Here, the cinematic illusion of a freedom of movement becomes the virtual enactment of the supposed freedom of choice that defines the subject in consumer society.

This sense of subjective mobility is, as Friedberg has herself suggested, foregrounded in many digital technologies as well, where movement from one virtual space or site to another is often closely aligned with consumption. In a digital world, however, these movements are "mobilized" in the service of a process of consumption that is, at once, increasingly global and increasingly customized. If, at a global level, these movements seem to respect no national or geographic borders, they at the same time become effects of the desire for an ever more customized mobility and consumption. One might well predict, then, that...

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