regime of movement-images among others, itself instantiates, specifies, and ar-
tifactualizes a more general operation of movement-variation. For cinema’s spe-
cific power–the power to move us phenomenologically, to generate (sensory)
impressions of reality–derives from the more general power of movement-var-
iation, the power to induce temporalizations that operate at divergent time-
scales and that, as we shall see below, confound the actual with the virtual in
highly productive and interesting ways. Understood within such a context, new
media offers a way of expanding the range of movement in which we can parti-
cipate, and is thus–in an irreducible sense–in a relation of continuity and
compatibility with cinema.
In“Moving Away from the Index”, Gunning credits Christian Metz–specifi-
cally, the presemiotic Metz–with the realization that movement is the“corner-
stone of cinema’s impression of reality”.To substantiate this claim, Gunning
turns to an early, neglected essay of Metz’s, namely“On the Impression of Rea-
lity in the Cinema”, where Metz argues that it is movement–and not iconic or
indexical representation–that confers the“impression of reality”on cinematic
experiences. Not without significance for the theme of this volume, Metz’s claim
arises on the basis of a contrast between cinema and (still) photography and
deserves to the quoted at some length:
we may ask ourselves why the impression of reality is so much more vivid in a film
than it is in a photograph.... An answer immediately suggests itself: It ismovement
(one of the greatest differences, doubtless the greatest, between still photography and
the movies) that produces the strong impression of reality....Two things, then, are
entailed by motion: a higher degree of reality, and the corporality of objects. These
are not all, however. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that the importance of motion in
the cinema depends essentially on a third factor, which has never been sufficiently
analyzed as such.... Motion contributesindirectlyto the impression of reality by giv-
ing objects dimension, but it also contributesdirectlyto that impression in as much as
it appears to be real. It is, in fact, a general law of psychology thatmovement is always
perceived as real....In seeking to pinpoint exactly why movement has this power to confer reality
on experience, Gunning stresses the role of participation; participation com-
prises nothing less than the hinge linking the movement-image to the immedi-
ate reality claimed for the perception of movement:
We experience motion on the screen in a different way than we look at still images,
and this difference explains our participation in the film image, a sense of perceptual
richness or immediate involvement in the image....Motion always has a projective
aspect, a progressive movement in a direction, and therefore invokes possibility and a
future. Of course, we can project these states into a static image, but with an actually
moving image we are swept along with the motion itself. Rather than imaging pre-50 Mark B.N. Hansen