Hello, Michael: When you make reference to a conception of motion pictures "as being produced in the differential between different frames," how is that different from the moving image produced by continuously running a movie camera while directing it at live action?
When thinking about Deleuze and the "extension of his proposals, such as the movement image, to animation," what do you understand "the movement image" to consist in? Part of the problem with the way this list works is that readers are directed elsewhere rather than addressed in terms accessible within a public "discussion." So the reference to a note in Cinema 1that is to substantiate Deleuze's remarks on the movement image is, for me, counter-productive, unless the idea is shared here in an explanation. You seem to me to be offering a conception of movement that is not from Deleuze when you quote McLaren and Kubelka. One might well wonder what "between frames" means, or what a "perceptual construct" is. I would contest the idea that Deleuze is talking about something an audience invents, or that he would frame things in terms of the difference or resemblance between a pair of frames. You want to hold that filmmakers who "engage with cinema-as-animation" are to be separated somehow from those who would produce live action movies. What does it mean to engage with cinema-as-animation? Does that require that one watch cartoons? Is it a production method? Or could a live action filmmaker engage with live action that way as well? We haven't, after all, established that "cinema-as-animation" is to be distinguished from cinema as anything else. I am resisting the reliance on specific remarks in print anywhere from, say, Deleuze or a scholar, since I prefer to explain what i understand right here. So I am not particulalry interested in a debate over what scholars or philosophers have actually said somewhere. Scholarship for me is secondary to thinking, in as far as we can do that. (That's a tentative stand.) The "approach" that you call more plastic appears to be a working method familiar from a certain kind of production practice. That allows you to draw on a technique involving the production of a Daffy Duck cartoon. This is a nice way to include students interested in Disney. But I don't see how it helps us appreciate anything about the movement image or the way in which works in cinema are to be understood. My interest, of course, stems from ideas from the history of philosophy that Deleuze thinks are significant for understanding cinema. Bernie ---------- The question of "cartoons vs animation" is, in my opinion, a red herring. It's more about the conception of motion pictures as being produced either in 'the shot' or in the differential between different frames. Deleuze, much like Bazin and Cavell (as well as Eisenstein), is at a basic level concerned with the shot and its depicted contents, generally produced via live action production. The extension of his proposals, such as the movement-image, to animation becomes rapidly problematic, esp. when considered in relation to purely artificial constructions of movement in animated and avant-garde works. He makes the restriction of his comments clear in the notes he gives at the very start of *Cinema 1.* Both McLaren and Kubelka arrived at differences between individual frames, articulated over time. McLaren's proposal of "what happens between frames" just like Kubelka's comment that “it’s between frames where cinema speaks” are recognitions of the movement being a perceptual construct, invented by the audience from how similar/different any pair of frames are. This conception puts those filmmakers who engage with cinema-as-animation in a different place than those who construct their cinema from shots produced as records of live action. One approach is considerably more plastic and atomistic than the use of the shot as a basis. It is also an approach that seems to emerge rarely outside of filmmakers who work with animated processes—and this includes the "cartoon" animators of Hollywood. Iwerks and Fleischer both did very radical things with single frame animations, as did Jones (look at Daffy Duck breaking his guitar in *Duck Amuck* frame-by-frame and you can see how Jones' "superfast motion" in that bit is actually radically truncated and overlapped frames rather than traditional animation). These approaches are commonplace now, but historically it's an issue of engagement with individual frames that makes the difference—something that has become much easier and cost-effective with digital movies and their extensive use of CG and VFX than it was in celluloid. Michael Betancourt Savannah, GA USA michaelbetancourt.com | vimeo.com/cinegraphic On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 2:41 PM Bernard Roddy <roddybp0 at gmail.com <https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks>> wrote: >* Eric Thiese is prepared to read about cartoons. That wasn't what attracted *>* me to animation. Although I enjoyed making line drawings in order to shoot *>* them in series, of exploring timing tests, and of implementing cut-out as a *>* visual means of theoriing about other things, it was Fischinger and McLaren *>* (and the '70s text entitled Experimental Animation by Cecile Starr and *>* Robert Russet) that raised the possibility of discovering something other *>* than cartoons to call animation - something that could be sustained in *>* dialogue with an "avant-garde" history (Man Ray, etc.) and take on a *>* lab-like quality for "experiment" in film (where the accident of chemical *>* reaction also seemed to belong). *>>* When I think about it today, however, I think of "animation" as an *>* expression of a conception of time that is contested in Deleuze, who relies *>* on Bergson to cast in question this spatialization of time (in the film *>* strip, in a series of spatial locations). Film theory (separated from *>* digital or video technologies, and thus conceived effectively as "film *>* strip" theory, or Bolex-operation theory) is not ignored in Deleuze. In the *>* first pages of Cinema 1 there is reference to Muybridge and the analysis of *>* human or animal locomotion. But Deleuze joins Bergson in thinking that *>* movement is not strung out in space, that it cannot be divided but is whole *>* and complete at the point when it occurs. *>>* I have recently found that it is Deleuze who best incorporates both this *>* early cinema (which he identifies with an early conception of time) and an *>* appreciation of "art house" narrative (that history of cinema we find in *>* Godard or Bazin, what is essentially photographic, a question of *>* performance, shot, location, edit). A film strip conception of the cinema *>* will limit itself to a philosophical question orientation on time that *>* leave you without any means for talking about cinema's power (in Antonioni, *>* for example). *>>* And then there are the scripts clearly written with introductory *>* philosophy text in mind (science fiction of one kind or another), but that *>* involve profound compromise at the level of production, where directors *>* hold sway, a great deal is taken for granted (and enforced), where markets *>* and money decide so much. But if you were never going to be making work *>* yourself, if it will be theory or education in some broader sense that you *>* will be advancing, then the studio ethos can be sacrificed to reader of *>* images and the writer of theory or argument. *>>* So, although the experience of movement has been among the interests in *>* "theory," one still faces the relevance of film-strip theory for the *>* remaining issues one might one to think about. *>>* Bernie*
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