singled out how cinema is characterized by Bordwell and Thompson in their
Film Art, the most popular and, arguably, the best introductory textbook that is
responsible for reproducing the ideology of cinema for new generations of stu-
dents. On the book’s first pages, Bordwell and Thompson write:“Watching a
film differs from viewing a painting, a stage performance, or even a slide show.
A film presents us withimagesinillusorymotion.”That the authors choose to
emphasize the term“illusory”along with the crucial term“images”suffices to
make the point at hand here.
This point–or rather, the positive claim that comes out of it, namely that the
perception of movement in cinema isnot a mere sensory illusion, but has a basis in
phenomenological experience–animates much of Gunning’s recent work on cin-
ema both in relation to certain strands of film theory and in the context of the
transformations, both of cinematic practice and its theorization, brought about
by the introduction of new media technologies. If I understand Gunning’s deep
argument correctly, the ultimate payoff of this line of thinking–beyond a re-
storation of a certain tradition in film theory, running from Münsterberg to
Metz, that places movement at the core of cinema’s operation–is the securing
of a commonality linking cinema backwards to pre-cinematic devices as well as
forwards to new media. Accordingly, in place of the divisive debates around the
digital that have ranged from the highly theoretical–whether new media can
function indexically–to the concretely practical–whether digital film cam-
eras and projection systems can adequately“mediate”the materiality of the
filmic image,what Gunning’s argument seeks to install is a return of sorts to
the phenomenological immediacy of image media, which is to say, to the phe-
nomenological impact of movement (or, more precisely, of movement-images),
that is at issuein all moving image media, and not just in celluloid (or analog)
cinema.
In adapting Gunning’s argument for my purposes here, I want to suggest that
what Gunning claims about the phenomenological“reality”of movement in
relation to cinematic and post- (and pre-) cinematic movement-images can (and
must) be expanded and generalized to the movement of all worldly material
processes, or to what I propose to callmovement-variation. Effectively, this ex-
pansion-generalization calls to the fore the process of temporalization asso-
ciated with selection and the production of concrete intervals; more specifically,
it implicates time rather than space as the crucial materialization through which
movement attains phenomenological reality, in any and every case. Accord-
ingly, if institutionalized cinema, in artifactualizing selection within a particular
temporal scope, comprises one instance of such temporal materialization, it by
no means comprises the only–or even, the most exemplary–such instance. For
this reason, our thinking concerning movement must go beyond the cinematic
movement-image and indeed, must seek to clarify how cinema, as one concrete
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 49