Animation Studies – Vol.1, 2006
Marina Estela Graça
Cinematic Motion by Hand
“[…] my philosophy of the simple, handmade movie”
NORMAN MCLAREN, 1948
Introduction
The general goal of my research is to find out what is questioned whenever an animated film is
made by an author who chooses to have maximum control over the device automatisms. I am
trying to understand in what ways that specific kind of film relates with Cinema and the History
of Art as a whole and, more specifically, how its filmic discourse is built within cinematic codes,
workings and machinery.
This paper, in particular, aims to establish that each time an author makes a film by
suspending both automatic ‘motion’ and image recording functions—that which is often known
as “cameraless” film—a process is initiated that simultaneously questions not only Cinema, within
both expression and technology, but also the ontological position this same technology occupies
in current media.
The illusion of motion constitutes the most important defining aspect of cinema. Usually the
process of producing such an illusion begins by starting the automatic film recording process of
moving visible objects at a ratio of 24, 25 or 30 frames per second. Within animation techniques,
the recording process is reduced to a single frame each time the camera is turned on-off, as
though using a photographic camera. In both process the images will be automatically
photographed and put into a sequence by the camera. However, there is one known situation in
which the animator suspends all cinematic recording automatisms and produces the sequence of
images by marking directly onto the film stock.
When setting up an animation film project and composing the impression of motion, the
author appeals directly to the psycho-physiological motion perception mechanisms and world
experience of the viewer. He or she is on a quest for what can be perceived and how, the same
way a composer creates for a specific music instrument by exploring its expression potentials. By
referring to psycho-physiological motion perception mechanisms, I don’t just mean sight as (in
terms of modern research in Neurology) the perception of movement resulting from a complex
combination of multiple neural circuitries in the viewer’s brain that process sensory information
through the functioning of “mirror neurons” (Ramachandran 2000) and “blindsight”
(Ramachandran 2004, p.31). These mechanisms are located in the early stage of visual processing
and don’t depend on high-order cognition (i.e. they don’t depend on thoughtful decisions about
what is seen.
I am aware that this thesis might not be easily accepted by most film academics as they prefer
to assess cinematic communication as a cultural practice in which all elements are socially
constructed. I do not defend this principle. My belief is that whenever an author uses his or her
hand to directly produce not only the images that compose the film but also the impression of
movement—an impression of a specific kind of movement and not just random motion—we can
only watch on the screen, he or she is not building a filmic discourse on conventional signs alone.
My hypothesis is that the handmade animation film author creates film discourse directly from his
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or her experience of the world (technology and communication standards included) while
composing an experience for the viewer. The film seems to be made through a process of
questioning and appropriation.
Pondering the written reflections of Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Pierre Hébert, I am
convinced that their filmmaking is a process that aims to create communication forms for
nameless feelings and experiences that emerge on the fringes of conscience. As I explained
before, McLaren did this by propounding muscular memory to control the formal differences
between successive images (McLaren 1976-1978), along with the paucity of means for a greater
proximity between the author and the film (McLaren 1948); Len Lye by proclaiming the
physiological development of a consciousness of movement which could be discovered «through
the brain in blood, organs, tissues and nerves» (Lye, Riding 1935)”; Pierre Hébert by creating his
film in the collision of languages and technologies, through the pressure of a precise time and
space, before an audience (Hébert, 1984). According to each one of these authors, movement
should never be understood as a formal, external aspect, of a mechanical character, but as an
expression of the physical existence itself, projected externally and seen as a manifestation of life
(Graça 2004).
In this paper, I will first outline and question the essence of cinematic visual recording
technology. Second, I will consider its emergence, evolution and implications within History,
using Vilém Flusser’s thesis about photography. Finally, I will examine the creative attitude
underneath the making of a film based on illusions of specific movement made through the
suspension of all automatic recording. I will conclude with a brief comment about the potential
relevance of such experiments within contemporary image production.
Expression within cinematic technology standards and automatisms
Animated films rely on the same technological inventions upon which stands the entire cinema
industry. Up to the present time, in essence, this meant the photographic recording of visible
objects. Today it also means the use of specific software applications based on algorithms that
embed optical and rendering workings of photography.
In McLaren’s, Lye’s, or even Hébert’s and others’ work, we often find that the film develops
directly from the hand gesture of its author through the omission of that stage in which images
are recorded using a camera. This implies that in such films the recording photographic
foundation technologies of cinema suddenly have been elapsed. This is completely against what
we have been told by conventional film theories as they declare that film is an indexical art form
in essence and that this is what precisely differentiates film from other communication forms. As
stated by French film theorist André Bazin, a photographic image is an index, more specifically, a
trace left behind by the referent itself. Thus, film images connect with reality in a way that does
not exist for other methods of depiction such as painting (Bazin 1971). Similarly, Siegfried
Kracauer argued that “Film . . . is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and,
hence, gravitates toward it” (1960, p.28). Someone might declare, then, that McLaren’s Blinkity
Blank (1955) or Lye’s Free Radicals (1958, revised 1979) are not film, but until now nobody
dared to.
Film scholars seem to disregard that photographed pictures are graphical constructs that can
be – and are – used to deceive. We only have to consider how many different meanings can be
achieved by merely choosing lenses, illumination, and film sensibility not to mention the more
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Animation Studies – Vol.1, 2006
obvious photomontage and all sorts of other special visual effects. Above all, we have to realize
that a set of photographs doesn’t constitute a film nor does what we see when we look directly at
a piece of film stock – a linear sequence of still images looking similar.
A film is what we see on a screen: the regular, sequential, and rapid display of still images plus
something: the effect of apparent motion that only happens inside the viewer’s mind. How and
when it happens and, above all, in what ways – both technically and expressively – it can be
achieved, are the essential questions that lead the creative animation filmmaker’s work.
While doing their films, authors like Len Lye or Norman McLaren seem to have developed
some sort of experimental epistemology (a study of how the brain represents knowledge and
belief) and in doing so, they have not only developed new assumptions – as shapers of sensibility
and thought – but they also have established new possibilities within technological functioning
and image production as well. They have questioned, affronted, and improved the concepts
behind cinematic technological evolution towards new, unexpected ontological possibilities.
The evolution of the cinematic device
In the physical world, motion is essentially perceived as the changing of form or position of
something within a three-dimensional space over time. However, the understanding and repre-
sentation of time, space, and movement has constantly changed throughout human evolution. As
Vilém Flusser explains, in prehistoric times environment variation was experienced through
physical exploration and the images produced were referential maps that enabled their addressees
to orient themselves within it. Their producers had been able to encrypt their environment in a
manner that enabled others to decipher it. According Flusser, “Prehistoric images are subjective
world pictures that are stored in memories. Once there, they are codified intersubjectively. Then
they can be retrieved from memory. Thus, the designing subject is himself embedded in an inter-
subjective tradition: to a large extent, his code is preset. […] There is a consciousness for which
time circulates in space, to order space. And there is a behavior that works to obey the structures
of time and space seen in the image” (pp.126-7). Both consciousness and behavior are magical
because time and space are experienced as a function of the images.
Flusser argues that “[l]inear writing (especially the alphabet) was invented to replace magical
consciousness and magical behavior with enlightened consciousness and historical action”
(p.127). During historic times, texts describe images within progressive linear chains of causality
and thus the environment can be causally explained and progressively manipulated. These images
are not of the kind that dominated before the invention of writing as “historical images are
manifestations by means of which the imagination defends itself against the linear conception of
the world that wants to explain it away” (p.127), imagination being understood as “the ability to
step back from the environment and to create an image of it” (p.129).
With the invention of letterpress printing, around 1450, texts get literally out of hand. By
almost the same time (1435), during Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti publishes the first
scientific study of linear perspective that will improve the production of seemingly exact (virtual)
representations of the natural world. The production of such images became, therefore, the result
of a complex calculation and coding process and, consequently, the images – as Art – are expelled
from everyday life. Simultaneously, Science and Art became two separated entities. During the
late Renaissance, society started to introduce strict boundaries between the two, as it considered
them to be different cultures, different ways of relating to the world. European society
definitively instituted these differences by the end of the 18th century, as universities started to be
organized into faculties of science and academies of fine-arts.
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Animation Studies – Vol.1, 2006
Photography was invented at the beginning of
19th century as an automatic drawing machine
and aimed to bring pictures back into daily use, to
bring perceptions and behavior depending on them
back to experience.
It seems that it did
so not only be-
cause photos are
easier to make than
paintings, but also
because we can
identify some sort of
Fig. 1 – Example of ‘Camera Obscura’ being used to point-to-point rule
watch a sun eclipse, Louvain, 1544. of correspondence
between them and
physical reality. However, Flusser strongly argues that each
photographed picture is already the result of a calculation
process and, in its very essence, is not the expression of a
physical direct human experience of time and space but rather a
visualization, that is “the power to concretize an image from
[computed] possibilities” (p.129).
Technological objects never stand alone. They are always part
of a row constituted by earlier and later instances of related
Fig. 2 – L. B. Alberti’s grid.
objects. It is known that the photographic camera evolved from
the camera obscura and from Leon Battista Alberti’s grid, among other devices, two examples of
drawing machines that were used to calculate visualizations since Renaissance. Their principles of
rendering are built into the photographic camera’s technical scheme: photography was invented
to automate and fixate linear perspective mathematical representations. Images made through the
application of linear perspective rules are computed possibilities, as the Baroque painters and
architects have widely demonstrated by manipulating our perception and making us experience
‘virtual realities’. Flusser states that “[p]hotographs are only the first of […] posthistorical
images” (p.129) but my opinion is that we can establish an evolutionary direct line between linear
perspective and photography. We can also ascertain a strong conceptual familiarity between
‘perspective’ images and CGI images.
Additionally, with the invention of photography, images became mechanically producible,
reproducible and distributable, as text was already. From that point on, image makers were
required to work together with technicians. Today, within the digital production of images, the
presence of technicians is even more evident, to the point that it is considered normal to join a
technical school in order to learn how to produce an image.
From this brief overview, I want to retain two premises. The first is that photography does not
correspond to a neutral process of ‘copying’ physical reality but, instead, is a process of building
virtual representations according a set of precise mathematical rules. The second is that the
production of contemporary images—posthistorical images—depends on collaboration with a
hierarchy of highly specialized technicians able to identify and operate different aspects of the
technical object functional scheme used in the process. This establishes a secondary and derived
position for the artist.
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Animation Studies – Vol.1, 2006
Incorporating and questioning technology instead of the human factor
entering into the apparatus
Len Lye arrived at an original conception of the mind and its significance
within the process of creation: his theories of the ‘old brain’. Above all, he
developed a unique way of comprehending movement, which he applied in
his direct film technique by scratching directly on the celluloid through the
sudden (“spastic”?) movements of his body.
I consider Lye’s short film, Free Radicals, a masterpiece. Starting with
black 35mm film leader and using all sorts of blades and needles, Lye pierced
marks through the emulsion, revealing the clear acetate below. Accompanied
by African rhythms, the scratches are perceived as three-dimensional forms
that twist and transform. They are meaningless scribbles – insignificant – but
they succeed to awaken motion in our viewer’s body (in what part of my body
do I feel that?). Concerning Len Lye, Pierre Hébert will recognize his resolve
to break with standard images made by western mass culture: to escape from
Griffith style, Lye will assert about his jump cut experiments. Lye was looking
for deeper realities, as Hébert suggests. He also argues that, if Lye followed
unknown and irregular technical paths, it was to get away from western
realism. Technical invention has never been an objective by itself. Hébert is
convinced that, through spontaneous doodling, Lye was looking forward to
escape western rationalism all together (Hébert 1983, pp.10-12).
By 1986, Pierre Hébert invented an unusual kind of performance (live
scratched animation), which took him to perform in many countries in
Europe and North America. In those performances, he improvises live
cinematic dialogs with musicians such as Fred Frith, Robert Marcel Lepage,
Jean Derome, René Lussier, and Bob Ostertag, whom he met in 1989. Since
then, Hébert has collaborated with Ostertag on many Living Cinema projects,
the most recent being Portrait of Buddha in which computers are used to
process live animated images and sound in front of an audience.
Speaking at the Images Festival, Hébert explained why his work in film had evolved to this
point: “What I like in scratching on film is its deep anachronical character. It’s a technique where
there is a sort of historical short circuit. When you decide to disregard the photochemical
technology of film you take a very naive stance, saying ‘well, this is supposed to bear an image, so
I will scratch an image on it, using a gesture that is as old as humanity.’ I understood that there
was in this a critical or remote stance, and it could be quite provocative, a statement about the
historicity of technology” (Hébert in Gehman 2001). It was Pierre Hébert’s writings that first
brought my attention to this aspect of handmade films. His work and thought pushed me further
in order to better understand the philosophical dimension of this specific attitude within film
creation.
We only have a few writings from Norman McLaren. Most of all, they are explanations and
guidelines about his animation techniques, made having in mind those who were curious about
the ‘secrets’ beneath his work. Instead of stressing, with respect to the elaboration of films, the
logical priority of industrial standards, McLaren suggested to focus on the absolute priority of
handling personally the technical mechanisms within the process of film construction itself:
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Animation Studies – Vol.1, 2006
“To sum up, the conception and execution of
most of my work for the National Film Board has
probably depended on four things:
(1) Attempting to keep at a minimum the
technical mechanism standing between my
conception and the finished work.
(2) Handling personally the mechanisms that do
remain, in as intimate a way as a painter his
painting, or a violinist his violin.
(3) Making the very limitations of these
mechanisms, when brought in touch with the
theme, the growing point for visual ideas.
Fig. 3 – Bob Ostertag and Pierre Hébert during a performance. (4) Making sure of a chance for improvising at
the moment of shooting or drawing” (1948).
It seems clear to me that he was struggling to bring technology within the reach of human
experience, to the distance of his hand. The alternative would have been to become part of the
production line as a functionary of the technical scheme within the apparatus: that is, behaving
according to its function.
As we know, there’s no author in a production process controlled by machines, as the creative
essence of the process is only to be found at the process of concretization of the technical tool
itself and not in that which it is able to produce. Therefore, we only have users in a process
defined by the qualities and limits imposed by the technical object’s functional scheme. In these
circumstances, the creative skills of the user would only develop by optimizing the
epistemological model it integrates, i.e. the perception of order and the ways in which that order
is imposed upon reality by documents and the technical workings that holds them. By
overwhelming the cinematic technical workings with the gesture of the hand, ‘cameraless’ authors
exposed its technical scheme to contingency, thus opening the production process to new
unpredictable expressive and communicative possibilities. This corresponds to a renewed way of
comprehending technology by, simultaneously, revealing the human reality it contains and
physiologically incorporating it. Within these circumstances, the film is made directly through the
body of the animator but throughout the appropriation of representation and transformation
routines of its own era. Film becomes the expression of this relation itself. The essential purpose
of making this specific kind of animation seems to come from the necessity of connecting the
human self and its technological creation: to gather the world catching our self at the core of the
function and performance of the technological devices created to alter the relationship between
each human being and his or her life context. To get closer with what makes us as we are today.
This process recovers an experienced – and thus differentiated – time-space at the core of the
industrial film technological set, through the poetic manipulation (which is also a probing
attitude) of the filmic technological workings themselves. Through that gesture it seems possible
to re-install a “prehistoric image” creation attitude within a context clearly defined by the massive
production of “posthistorical images”, those who subsume a calculated vision built upon
scientific texts and data. These experiences stand for a new concept that we will have to take into
consideration in order to comprehend – both with our minds and with our bodies – not only
contemporary film production made through digital technologies but all available fast developing
technologies. ^
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Animation Studies – Vol.1, 2006
Marina Estela Graça is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Software and Media Technology of Aalborg
University Esbjerg. Contact: Niels Bohrs Vej 8, 6700 Esbjerg, Denmark. Paper originally presented at “A divided
Art? Animation in Germany and Europe” – a Society for Animation Studies (SAS) conference in co-operation with
Deutsches Institut für Animationsfilm, Dresden (DIAF) and Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden; 13th, 14th
and 15th of April 2005.
References
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Rpt. Portland, Oregon 1972. Italian translation: Della pittura, Venice 1547. English
translation: On Painting, 1956 (complete text available at http://www.noteaccess.com/
Texts/Alberti/index.htm, accessed June 22, 2006).
Bazin, A. (1971), What is Cinema? (Vol. I), trans. by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Flusser, V. (2002), “Photography and History”, in Writings, Ed. Andreas Ströhl, Trans. Erik
Eisel, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gehman, C. (2001) “Pierre Hébert: Animation without Borders – filmmaker”, Take One, July.
Graça, M. E. (2004), “Between looking and gesturing”, 7th International Literature and
Humanities Conference, EMU, Cyprus.
Hébert, P. (1984), “Musique improvisé et cinema d’animation, 2 pratiques en confrontation”,
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internationale du film d’animation − Canada, vol.11, nº3, Montréal, December, 1983 pp.10-
12. Rpt.in Marcel Jean, Pierre Hébert, L’homme animé, Québec : Les 400 coups, 1996,
p.108-109.
Kracauer, S. (1960), Theory of Film: The redemption of physical reality, London: Oxford
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Horrocks (Ed.)(1984) Figures of Motion, Selected Writings, edited by, Auckland: Auckland
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McLaren, N. (1948), “Animated Films”, Documentary Film News, May 1948, pp.52-53.
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Ramachandran, V. S. & S. M. Anstis (1986), “The Perception of Apparent Motion”, Scientific
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Ramachandran, V. S. (2000), “Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind
‘the great leap forward’ in human evolution”, EDGE 69 - June 1, 2000. http://www.edge.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lectures.shtml, accessed June 22, 2006. Rpt. in
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to Purple Numbers, New York: Pi Press.
© Marina Estela Graça
Images courtesy The Len Lye Foundation and Pierre Hébert
Edited by Nichola Dobson
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Marina Estela Graça
