Film & Media Studies | Contingent Motion @filmandmediastudieschannel | Uploaded 4 years ago | Updated 6 hours ago
Accounts of early film spectatorship often explain the viewer’s fascination with peripheral details—i.e. the wind in the trees of the Lumieres’ Repas de bebe—as an attraction to the “contingencies” indiscriminately captured by the camera. Such accounts tend to understand the attraction as an effect of cinema’s novel ability to show the autonomy of the world unfold independently of authorial control.
Rethinking the appeal of rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves in terms of unplannable movements rather than unplanned events, this video essay examines an unlikely sympathy between early cinema spectatorship and the recent attention to hyperrealistic details in computer-generated animation, such as the dust in Wall-E, the flowing hair in Brave, and the snow in Frozen. Convincing digital simulations of such phenomena require stochastic algorithms, thereby deploying contingency to simulate contingency. In breaking down easy distinctions between creative control and accident, artistic virtuosity and machinic autonomy, the digital manufacture of the “wind in the trees” reincarnates the aesthetic experience of early spectators for a generation inured to the novelty of cinematographic capture. In doing so, computer-generated imagery renews cinema’s capacity to compel a revelatory reflection upon the incomprehensible complexity—the contingency--of the natural world.
The Video Content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.
Accounts of early film spectatorship often explain the viewer’s fascination with peripheral details—i.e. the wind in the trees of the Lumieres’ Repas de bebe—as an attraction to the “contingencies” indiscriminately captured by the camera. Such accounts tend to understand the attraction as an effect of cinema’s novel ability to show the autonomy of the world unfold independently of authorial control.
Rethinking the appeal of rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves in terms of unplannable movements rather than unplanned events, this video essay examines an unlikely sympathy between early cinema spectatorship and the recent attention to hyperrealistic details in computer-generated animation, such as the dust in Wall-E, the flowing hair in Brave, and the snow in Frozen. Convincing digital simulations of such phenomena require stochastic algorithms, thereby deploying contingency to simulate contingency. In breaking down easy distinctions between creative control and accident, artistic virtuosity and machinic autonomy, the digital manufacture of the “wind in the trees” reincarnates the aesthetic experience of early spectators for a generation inured to the novelty of cinematographic capture. In doing so, computer-generated imagery renews cinema’s capacity to compel a revelatory reflection upon the incomprehensible complexity—the contingency--of the natural world.
The Video Content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.
