the gap between them. The Phenakistiscope generated a new sort of image, an
image that moved.
The reader might observe that my task in describing this threshold might be
easier if I simply described what the Phenakistiscope produces as an“illusion”
of motion. But this is a thorny term and I don’t want to descend into philosophi-
cal conundrums. From one viewpoint I would agree we are dealing with some-
thing like an illusion, in that the successive drawings of Plateau’s dancer never
move–except in a Phenakistiscope. But I am not willing to say that when the
wheel is spun and I look through the aperture I do not see a figure of a dancer
moving. My position is obviously phenomenological; that is, I maintain that
perceptions need not be dissolved into their physiological process (I am not
against doing this–if we are studying physiology rather than moving images).
But my task here is to describe our perception as we experience it. The riddle of
the perception of the moving image lies in the fact that no one can explain it
purely physiologically and the psychological explanations are still debated. In
other words, we have a true challenge to explanation here. Yet the phenomeno-
logical description, while still difficult, is, I think, possible. We see motion, and
yet it is somehow truly different from a physical dancer or puppet. We see a
moving image, two dimensional in appearance. As an image, it has something
of the virtuality of the composite picture in the Thaumatrope, provided, as I
believe we do, we sense the flicker fusion occurring.
A moving image delights us with its novelty, because most images do not
move; but also for its familiarity, since it recalls for us the way we perceive the
world,which is primarily moving.Recent investigators of perception claim the
greatest distortion in our understanding of visual perception comes from as-
suming it is founded on static images, pictures, to which somehow movement
is superadded. As the ecological and phenomenologically-minded perceptual
psychologists (such as J.J. Gibson and Alva Noe) have demonstrated, movement
provides the norm for visual perception, because our eyes are moving, our
bodies are moving and the world around us moves as well, in concert and in-
dependently of us. The static retina image is a myth created in the perceptual
laboratory. I believe our investigation of the discourse surrounding the early
moving image devices shows that the mechanistic worldview of the nineteenth
century was determined to see human perception in terms of machines. Thus
the education offered by philosophical toys included not only the disciplining
of the body that Crary finds embedded in these devices, but a worldview in
which the viewer identified his (and others!) perception with the operation of a
machine. This is an education with social and political consequences. Some-
times the greatest trick lies in claiming something is only a trick and that one
can unmask it easily.
The Play between Still and Moving Images 39