Contingent Motion: Rethinking the "Wind in the Trees" in Early Cinema and CGI

[U]ndulating waves, moving clouds, and changing facial expressions . . . conveyed the longing for an instrument which could capture the slightest incidents of the world about us—scenes that often would involve crowds, whose incalculable movements resemble, somehow, those of waves or leaves.

—Siegfried Kracauer

It is one of the most persistent anecdotes of film history: audiences of the first exhibited films were awestruck by what Dai Vaughan has called the "incidentals" of scenes, such as "smoke from a forge, steam from a locomotive, or brick dust from a demolished wall."¹ Most famously, during exhibitions of the Lumière actuality Le Repas de bébé, audiences were reportedly more interested in the distant tree leaves blowing in the wind than the baby eating breakfast in the foreground. This myth was repeated in famous remarks from Georges Méliès and D. W. Griffith; by Siegfried Kracauer's preoccupation with rustling leaves, undulating waves, moving clouds, and flowing crowds; and more recently by Christian Keathley's intellectual history of cinephilia.² Such an interest even persists in the era of computer-generated images, as the uncannily convincing renderings of spraying water, flickering flames, and waving hair are garnering a similar fascination. Throughout film history, from the "wind in the trees" to digital dust, our astonishment at "incidentals" has served as a useful reminder of an attraction to the moving image that precedes narrative pleasures.

At a deeper level, incidentals have been at the center of foundational narratives in realist film theory, where they have led theorists to invoke the term "contingency" to explain the phenomenon as an attraction to the camera's indiscriminate capture of physical reality.³ For Kracauer—and much later for Mary Ann Doane—seeing the unplanned movement of the windswept leaves captured onscreen coincides with a uniquely modern paradigm in which chance, ephemerality, and spontaneity are newly privileged modes of experiencing the world.⁴ For Vaughan, the attraction to contingency is less a historical symptom than a groundbreaking novelty in the history of visual representation. He argues that because the first film audiences would have been familiar only with the painted backdrops of the theater, they were astonished not by the moving figures in the foreground but instead by the seemingly uncaused, unplanned movement of the previously inanimate background, "spontaneities of which the theatre was not capable."⁵

On this model, the wind in the trees is taken to reveal cinema's ability to show the autonomy of the world unfold independently of authorial control. Such an interpretation undergirds its phenomenological claims with attention to the material properties of the photographic process. For this reason, theories of cinematic contingency are often indistinguishable from theories of photographic contingency so that the emphasis on marginal details and fleeting moments is intimately related to the "indexical" properties of photographic emulsion.⁶ The attraction to such details in turn derives from a basic knowledge of the photographic process and the corollary "this-was-thereness" that attends such knowledge.⁷ This leads into the discourses of cinematic contingency. As with the dog that walks across the screen in the Lumière brothers' Le Faux cul-de-jatte (1903) or the fly that lands on Joan's face in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the wind in the trees is singled out because of its contingent existence as an unplanned incident, thus its testament to the indexical properties of photographic materiality.

But this line of thinking misses something crucial. The wind in the trees, the ripples of waves, and the brick dust from a demolished wall are not necessarily unplanned events. Nor are they, as in Vaughan's formulation, "incidental" with respect to a staged action. In Démolition d'un mur (1896), for example, the existence of the dust cannot be said to be unplanned, as it is ultimately linked to human action through a chain of causality (man pushes wall, wall hits dirt, dirt rises). I want to suggest that the attraction to the rising dust and the wind in the trees is not a matter of...