On the movie screen, space and time are relative
to each other, and we can’t separate them or per-
ceive one without the other. The movies give time
to space and space to time, a phenomenon that art
historian and film theorist Erwin Panofsky
describes as the dynamization of spaceand the spa-
tialization of time.^2 To understand this principle of
“co-expressibility,” compare your experiences of
space when you watch a play and when you watch
a movie. As a spectator at a play in the theater, your
relationship to the stage, the settings, and the
actors is fixed. Your perspective on these things is
determined by the location of your seat, and every-
thing on the stage remains the same size in relation
to the entire stage. Sets may change between
scenes, but within scenes the set remains, for the
most part, in place. No matter how skillfully con-
structed and painted the set is, you know (because
of the clear boundaries between the set and the
rest of the theater) that it is not real and that when
actors go through doors in the set’s walls, they go
backstage or into the wings at the side of the stage,
not into a continuation of the world portrayed on
the stage.
By contrast, when you watch a movie, your rela-
tionship to the space portrayed on-screen can be
flexible. You still sit in a fixed seat, but the screen
images move: the spatial relationships on the
screen may constantly change, and the film directs
your gaze. Suppose, for example, that during a
scene in which two characters meet at a bar, the
action suddenly flashes forward to their later ren-
dezvous at an apartment, then flashes back to the
conversation at the bar, and so on; or a close-up
focuses your attention on one character’s (or both
characters’) lips. A live theater performance can
attempt versions of such spatial and temporal
effects,^3 but a play can’t do so as seamlessly, imme-
diately, persuasively, or intensely as a movie can. If
one of the two actors in that bar scene were to back
away from the other and thus disappear from the
screen, you would perceive her as moving to
another part of the bar—that is, into a continuation
of the space already established in the scene. You
can easily imagine this movement because of the
fluidity of movie space, more of which is necessar-
ily suggested than is shown.
The key to the unique power of movies to manip-
ulate our sense of space is the motion-picture cam-
era, particularly its lens. We identify with this lens,
for it determines our perception of cinematic
space. Indeed, if we didn’t automatically make this
identification—assuming, for example, that the
camera’s point of view is a sort of roving, omni -
scient one with which we are supposed to identify—
movies would be almost incomprehensible. The key
to understanding our connection to the camera
lens lies in the differences between how the human
eye and the camera eye see. The camera eye per-
ceives what’s placed before it through a series of
different pictures (shots), made with different
lenses, from different camera positions and angles,
using different movements, under different light-
ing, and so on. Although both the camera eye and
the human eye can see the movements, colors, tex-
tures, sizes, and locations of people, places, and
things, the camera eye is more selective in its view.
The camera frames its image, for example, and can
widen and foreshorten space. Through camera
positioning, the lens can record a close-up, remov-
ing from our view the surrounding visual context
that we see in real life, no matter how close we get
to an object. In short, the camera mediates
between the exterior (the world) and the interior
(our eyes and brains).
We use the term mediation, a key concept in
film theory, literally to mean the process by which
an agent, structure, or other formal element,
whether human or technological, transfers some-
thing from one place to another. No matter how
straightforward the mediation of the camera eye may
seem, it always involves selection and manipulationFUNDAMENTALS OF FILM FORM 51(^2) Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,”
in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th ed., ed.
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999), pp. 281–283.
(^3) Film director Ingmar Bergman demonstrated spatial manip-
ulation in his 1970 stage production of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda
Gabler(1890), in which a spotlight left only the actor’s face
or lips visible, thus creating a kind of close-up; and Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman(1949), in which past and pres-
ent intermingle within scenes, demonstrates temporal
manipulation.