vious or anterior states, we could say that through a moving image, the process of
motion is projected onto us. Undergirded by the kinesthetic effects of cinematic mo-
tion, I believe“participation”properly describes the increased sense of involvement
with the cinematic image, a sense of presence that could be described as an impres-
sion of reality.Through participation, the movement in the image (the moving-image) seam-
lessly and directlybecomesthe real perception of movement by its embodied
spectators.
By far the most opaque moment in Metz’s essay occurs when he invokes the
source that makes possible such seamless and direct becoming: namely, the“in-
substantiality”of movement. (By“insubstantiality”, Metz would seem to mean
something like“immateriality”.) Movement’s insubstantiality literally renders it
immune from the doubling that is constitutive of representation; unlike solid
objects, which can be captured in representational images that refer to their ex-
periential (most notably, tactile) properties, movement actually suspends the
very machinery of representation. Metz extracts the most radical consequences
from this situation:
Movement is insubstantial. We see it, but it cannot be touched, which is why it cannot
encompass two degrees of phenomenal reality, the“real”and the copy. Very often we
experience the representation of objects asreproductionsby implicit reference to tacti-
lity, the supreme arbiter of“reality”–the“real”being ineluctably confused with the
tangible.... The strict distinction between object and copy, however, dissolves on the
threshold of motion. Because movement is never material but isalwaysvisual,to re-
produce its appearance is to duplicate its reality....In the cinemathe impression of reality is
also the reality of the impression, the real presence of motion.Three points need to be made here.
First, what Metz is effectively claiming in this passage is that cinema, once
movement is restored to the role of its fundamental principle, cannot be consid-
ered a representational medium at all: due to the necessity and inescapability of
our participation in it, cinematic movementdoes notandcannotrepresent move-
ment; on the contrary, it does nothing butgeneratemovement. More bluntly still:
cinema is not about the objects it depicts but rather exclusively about our ex-
periencing of them. And that is why the impression of reality–cinematic move-
ment–is also the reality of the impression–the movement it induces in the
viewer.
Second, Metz’s transitivity claim (impression of reality = reality of impres-
sion) comes at a cost: namely, the cost of the materiality of cinema’s reality.
Metz is straightforward here when he states that movement“is never material
but isalwaysvisual”: this conclusion would seem to follow from the particular
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 51