modulate duration. In selectionally transforming worldly movement-variation
into movement-images, cinema exemplifies the potential of technology to insin-
uate itself into the process of framing–into the condensation of worldly depre-
sencing that yields the capacitation of a presencing body.
Temporalizing the“Moving-Still”
In her recent work on movement and image, Erin Manning focuses attention on
the practice of Etienne-Jules Marey who, in contrast to fellow chronophotogra-
pher Eadweard Muybridge, concentrated on creating, and not simply analyzing
and representing, movement:
To look at Marey’s photographs is to feel them. Feeling is an amodal experience that is
a passing-between of sense-modes....Affectively, feeling works on the body, bringing
to the fore the experiential force of the quasi chaos of the not-quite seen. This not-
quite is the quality of potential we perceive in many of Marey’s movement images.
These images do not represent movement, they move-with the movement of the feeling taking
form. They are affective because to see is to feel-with, to participate in the intensive
passage from the virtual to actualization. What is amodally felt, perceived-with, is
the microperceptual appearing at the threshold of sight, but not actually seen.Based on this understanding, chronophotography is credited with opening up
movement not simply to a retroactive appreciation of its complexity butto an
actual living through, a feeling of or being affected by, that which remains imperceptible
within it. What Marey’s chronophotographic images afford is an opportunity for
us to“see-feel”–recalling Massumi–the very emergence of movement:“What
must...be felt”, Manning specifies,“are the microperceptions through which
the displacement is activated. Many of...these perceptions are non-sensuous
because they work at the level of the barely there, below the threshold of sensu-
ous perception. Rather than the sensory perception itself,we must feel the relation
out of which the movement event emerges.”
In relation to Marey’s work and the question of its divergence from cinema,
what is of particular interest here is the claim that suchseeing-feelingarises in
conjunction with the perception not of moving images, but rather of still images
that–because they enfold movement’s virtuality into themselves–are“always
already moving”. What Manning understands to be Marey’s predilection for the
still image marks a certain disjunction between his practice and the cinema, at
least as the latter was historically institutionalized:
Marey’s focus was on making felt the incipience of movement in its verytaking-form.
Marey was never interested in how poses could be combined to elicit a sense of move-54 Mark B.N. Hansen