Still waters

A man stands before a grave in a country cemetery. He doesn’t move, nothing moves; no birds, a still world.

But this is a man in a motion picture, we have seen him move, and he will move again in a moment when his spell of meditation and memory is over. The film is John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939).

You like the shot and its framing, so you pause the film. Now it looks and feels quite different. How can it?

A stopped frame of a movie isn’t part of the movie, unless the movie is using this frame as part of its design. A stopped frame outside of a movie isn’t anything, not even a photograph.

A film is made up of precisely those stills that aren’t anything - that aren’t anything until they are projected at the right speed, 24 frames a second (or once upon a time, 18 frames).

There’s more. We not only see movement where there is none, we fail to see, or our brains skillfully occlude from us, the swift patches of darkness between the frames. During the projection of a film, the spectator is sitting in an unperceived darkness for almost 40 percent of the running time.

The brain constantly receives and makes sense of stimuli, combines them into what look like pictures of a steadily moving or stationary world. Reality is recorded by the eyes, so to speak, and composed by the brain. “Each eye movement gives the retina a ‘snapshot’ of some part of the visual scene, but the brain must put these still pictures together to create the illusion of a continuous world.”

Even neuroscientist don’t have much of an idea about how this complicated process works. Where there is movement, the brain doesn’t watch a movie, it makes a movie; it is producer and director and movie theatre all in one.

Moving pictures both capture and make motion, and they do it by means of the magic I’ve just described: a mixture of speed and light.

What is a film? What is film?

A film is a roll of such material that can be run through a projector in order to throw moving images, or images of movement, on a scene.

And it is also, of course, a name for what is projected on the screen as well as the art and industry of making such images.

I would want to amplify the notion of film-making, and its attendant activity of film-watching. Taken together, these practices constitute something more than an art-form, and something more than a variety of entertainment. Let’s call it for the moment an institution: an enterprise and a cultural ritual all rolled, or reeled, into one.