ment; his main concern was mapping the imperceptible within movement’s conti-
nuum....[In his experimentation with gases, Marey] sought to make apparent that
which cannot be seen: the movement of air. This radically empirical exploration–
radical because it makes felt the force of the virtual within the actual–brings to the fore the
force of the imperceptible taking-form. With Marey, as with [digital artist Jim] Camp-
bell, what stands out is not the cinematographic habit of adding movement to a pose,
but a direct encounter with perception in the making. The poses are always already
moving.In seeking to comprehend what is at stake here, we must ask an important ques-
tion about images and their relation to movement: why is it necessary–and
indeed,is it necessary–to oppose the still to the moving image as Manning
does? Is there no other way for us to move beyond our culturally-inherited fixa-
tion ondisplacement, on the spatialization of time and movement?
It seems to me that the answer to this two-part question is intimately bound
up with the principal wager of the second section of this paper, where the re-
ceived historical status of cinema was put into question. There, following Tom
Gunning, I argue that cinema is more than simply the animation of still images
and resulting sensory illusion, that in fact cinema presents a case of the direct
sensory“pickup”of movement (or movement-images).If we accept this posi-
tion, it becomes impossible to play off the still against the moving image in
quite the way that Manning does here: cinema–the art of the movement-image
- cannot be reduced to a mere illusion based on the animation of still images,
but is the direct presentation of movement to the perceiving mindbody. Rather
than being opposed to one another, still and moving images offer differentbut
complementarymediums for expressing movement, and in fact Marey’s practice
illustrates the potential of both types of image to induce the direct experience of
movement,beyondthe logic of displacement.
Technical Distribution
Marey’s interest in what wecannotperceive informs his own self-distancing
from the institution of cinema. Rather than seeking to represent natural move-
ment, Marey aims to capture“extreme speeds”: thus, he slows down“the flight of
a bird”or a“bullet from a revolver”and he“accelerates the crawling of a star-
fish at the bottom of an aquarium.”In short, rather than reproducingsome-
thing that we are already able to experience, Marey focuses on movements that are
not simply beyond our perceptual grasp but that open a“cognitive”interface
onto the largely imperceptible realm of movement-variation, onto what
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 55