Georges Didi-Huberman felicitously calls“the dance of every thing”.No-
where is this anti-cinematic impetus more consequential than in Didi-Huber-
man’s characterization of the“chronophotographic magic”that appears when
the dancer Loïe Fuller gives a“concrete, indubitable, prolongable and trans-
formable existence”to the Mareysian“trail of movement”:
This dynamic touches most closely the Mareysiantrailin thedelayand the marvelous
slowing down produced by the drapery [the veil Fuller wears to perform theSerpen-
tine Dance]: not only does this latter produce the wake [sillage] of the bodily gesture,
but it slows down the accomplishment of the gesture through its own sumptuousness
[grandeur].... Its trace, born of thespeedof the gesture, retains its memoryfor a long
timeand onlyvery slowlygives way to the following trace. Such is its“chronophoto-
graphic”magic, its way not of rendering visible bodies in movement but of trans-
forming thevisual milieuitself into something like ageneralized site of change or varia-
tion[mouvance généralisée].”What is at stake in the“magic”of chronophotography is a certain technical dis-
tribution of sensation: chronophotographysupplementshuman perception by
coupling it to an open machine for recording, analyzing and visualizing the im-
perceptible“transcendental-sensible”preconditions for perception. Chronopho-
tography does not bring the imperceptible into actual experience, as Manning
would have it, but puts present perception into relation with its own immediate
pastness. What results from this is not a recomposition of the body rooted in the
enfolding of incipiency into actual perception, but a technically distributed cog-
nitive-perceptual system in which the human body is only one element among
others rather than the sole element. As part of such a distributed system, tech-
nology does not functionlikethe emergent body; rather, it functions according
to its own protocol–in Marey’s case, as a proto-digital inscription, analysis and
visualization system–that extends cognitive-perceptual capacities in waysthat
do not get directly embodied, that do not pass entirely through emergent embodi-
ment but that remain–in some crucial sense–exterior to the human.
No one has more clearly grasped this situation, with reference to Marey, than
historian of photography Joel Snyder, who writes that, in Marey’s work:
there is no question of substituting mechanical instruments for a fallible human med-
iator and of correcting thereby what might otherwise have been falsified....The gra-
phic data show what otherwise cannot be found in the realm of events and processes detectable
by human beingsand accordingly, questions concerning the reliability or accuracy of
machine-generated visualizations cannot be answered by recourse to a human arbi-
trator, no matter how exquisitely sensitive or impartial. Questions about the accuracy
of these data can be resolved only by appealing to other, perhaps even more refined
mechanical instruments.56 Mark B.N. Hansen