We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
44 I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
on which must be experienced, not witnessed. However, the supreme virtue of the camera consists precisely in acting the voyeur.
NASCENT MOTION
The third type of motion which offers special interest cinematically is not just another group of interrelated movements but movement as contrasted with motionlessness. In focusing upon this contrast, films strikingly demonstrate that objective movement— any movement, for that matter— is one of their choice subjects. Alexander Dovzhenko in both Arsenal and Earth frequently stops the action to resume it after a short lull. The first phase of this procedure— characters or parts of them abruptly ceasing to move— produces a shock effect, as if all of a sudden we found ourselves in a vacuum. The immediate consequence is that we acutely realize the significance of movement as an integral element of the external world as well as film.
But this is only part of the story. Even though the moving images on the screen come to a standstill, the thrust of their movement is too powerful to be discontinued simultaneously. Accordingly, when the people in Arsenal or Earth are shown in the form of stills, the suspended movement nevertheless perpetuates itself by changing from outer motion into inner motion. [Illus. 9] Dovzhenko has known how to make this metamorphosis benefit his penetrations of reality. The immobile lovers in Earth become transparent; the deep happiness which is moving them turns inside out. And the spectator on his part grasps their inward agitation because the cessation of external motion moves him all the more intensely to commune with them.6 Yet despite these rewarding experiences he cannot help feeling a certain relief when eventually the characters take on life again— an event which marks the second and final phase of the procedure. It is a return to the world of film, whose inherent motion alone renders possible such excursions into the whirlpool of the motionless.
Instead of transforming, Dovzhenko-fashion, moving life into live immobility, the film maker may also contrast movement with any of the innumerable phases comprising it. In the beach episode of the silent German film Menschen am Sonntag, a remarkable semi-documentary of 1929, snapshots of the bathers, taken by a photographer on the spot, are inserted in different places; and the snapshots snatch from the flow of movement precisely such bodily postures as are bizarre and in a sense unnatural.7 The contrast between the bustling bodies and the poses they assume in the cuts-in could not be stronger. At the sight of these rigid and ludicrous poses the spectator cannot help identifying motionlessness with lifelessness and, accordingly, life with movement; and still under the impact of the preceding commotion, he is at the same time likely to react