Camera movements are considered a key element for the intersubjective relation between viewer and screen; nonetheless, their concrete effect on spectators’ experience still lacks the attention it deserves. This paper promotes an embodied approach to the study of camera movements, aiming to better understand the role of motor cognition during the film experience by analyzing the effects of camera movements on viewers’ motor cortex activation. We present an empirical high-density EEG neuroscientific study on camera movements, investigating viewers’ brain motor responses to different techniques like zooming, and the use of a dolly and steadicam.
This is triggered by the idea that each movement implies a particular form of physical relation between the audience and the movie. Indeed the experiment showed that the Steadicam determined the strongest activation in viewers’ motor cortex, providing first empirical ground to the notion of the capacity of the camera to simulate the virtual presence of the viewer inside the movie. This study shows how cognitive neuroscience can contribute to a better understanding of film style and techniques. Finally, this research demonstrates how film technique can be useful to cognitive neuroscience, by enabling the simulation of observers’ movements and, in so doing, allowing a novel approach to the study of action-perception links.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Feeling of Motion: Camera Movements and Motor Cognition
Text.Serial.Journal
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Michele Guerra
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The Feeling of Motion: Camera Movements and Motor Cognition
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16343/17023
14
The Feeling of Motion:
Camera Movements and Motor Cognition
Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra,
Università degli Studi di Parma




Abstract

       Camera movements are considered a key element for the intersubjective relation
       between viewer and screen; nonetheless, their concrete effect on spectators’ experi-
       ence still lacks the attention it deserves. This paper promotes an embodied approach
       to the study of camera movements, aiming to better understand the role of motor
       cognition during the film experience by analyzing the effects of camera movements
       on viewers’ motor cortex activation. We present an empirical high-density EEG
       neuroscientific study on camera movements, investigating viewers’ brain motor
       responses to different techniques like zooming, and the use of a dolly and steadi-
       cam. This is triggered by the idea that each movement implies a particular form
       of physical relation between the audience and the movie. Indeed the experiment
       showed that the Steadicam determined the strongest activation in viewers’ motor
       cortex, providing first empirical ground to the notion of the capacity of the camera
       to simulate the virtual presence of the viewer inside the movie. This study shows
       how cognitive neuroscience can contribute to a better understanding of film style
       and techniques. Finally, this research demonstrates how film technique can be use-
       ful to cognitive neuroscience, by enabling the simulation of observers’ movements
       and, in so doing, allowing a novel approach to the study of action-perception links.


                                        Camera as Fonteyn, operator as Nureyev would be ideal –
                                      a dance partnership capable of any vector of graceful motion
                                          within the range of the operator’s hands, arms, and legs.
                                                                                  Garrett Brown1


Introduction

  Most of the papers and books in the humanities in which we find studies inspired
by a neuroscientific approach use cognitive neuroscience as a tool to confirm, re-


1
    Quoted in Serena Ferrara, Steadicam: Techniques and Aesthetics, Focal Press, Oxford 2011, p. 7.

                                                Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                             Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra


fine, or sometimes reject theories shaped up in other domains. During the last two
decades, cognitive neuroscience has shown us that human experience should be
thought of as a natural form of relational experience: we live in relation with other
people, objects, landscapes that are present in our real world, but we also live in re-
lation with people, objects, landscapes that come to us within the imaginary worlds
displayed by the arts.2 Both kinds of relationship are rooted in our brain-body sys-
tem, and if we aim to grasp the basis of the complexity and the multimodality these
relationships imply, we have to go back to our own brain and body.
   Cognitive neuroscience can enter theoretical debates on mediated experience,
bodily engagement in aesthetic experience, new theories of enactment and simu-
lation. In this case, we find that such an approach allows scholars, in diverse
fields, to probe one of the artist’s fundamental questions: how to involve the
public? This approach could be christened as “theoretical/archaeological,” and
its usefulness is to bridge results from neuroscientific experiments planned and
executed elsewhere with old and new questions raised within the humanities.
   A second approach considers these experiments not only as a tool for imple-
menting theories, but also as an analytic instrument capable of refining stylistic
analyses, as several studies on contemporary art, literature, acting, music, and
partly cinema have already demonstrated. Style is basically what strengthens our
relationship with a work of art, what allows us to orient (or lose) ourselves within
the imaginary worlds of fiction. Style is a way to manipulate the mediation, to
establish a peculiar intersubjective relation between us and the work of art. Film
style, for instance, is a matter of technology and techniques: filmmakers are com-
pelled to use what they can afford from a technological point of view, and their
film techniques depend on those technologies.3 Once they understand how to
handle the medium, they can experiment different ways to involve the viewer, to
let him/her enter the story. To study film style, hence, we should have a precise
idea of the technological context and we should wonder how a specific technique
depending on a specific technology could embody or re-embody our experience
in new interactive ways. As we see it, this approach is a very concrete one – we
could describe it as “pragmatic,” – and its goal is to create a real convergence
between issues from film studies and neuroscientific methodologies.
   However, we cannot think of cognitive neuroscience as a panacea for film
studies or, more broadly, for the humanities. We are fully aware that cognitive
neuroscience cannot provide all the keys for the secret doors of our aesthetic
experience: cognitive neuroscience has to be thought of as a “cognitive archaeol-
ogy” capable of clarifying determinate aspects of our experience, for example
the relevance of motor cognition in our social behavior and aesthetic experience.
It can also revolutionize our conceptions of terms like “action” and “simula-


2
  Among the huge literature, see Barbara Maria Stafford, “Crystal and Smoke: Putting Image Back
in Mind,” in Barbara Maria Stafford (ed.), A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Hu-
manities-Neuroscience Divide, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2011, pp. 1-63.
3
  See Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology, Starword, London 1993.

104
                                     The Feeling of Motion


tion,” which have been long discussed within Western philosophy. That said,
it should be clear that if we wish to understand something new about film by
means of cognitive neuroscience, we must question the movies according to the
limits and potentialities of the neuroscientific approach. In a previous paper, we
showed how to blend the theoretical/archaeological approach and the pragmatic
one, starting from film theory, then formulating hypotheses about a new concrete
approach to the history of film style, and finally to programmatically promote a
third step, the “experimental” one, inspired by previous theories and capable of
offering new insights on film.4
    To put it even more clearly, we want to pose some questions: how important
is it to evaluate our embodied relationship with film technology? At which level
and by which means can we study and understand this kind of embodiment?
Does such a perspective contribute to a fuller comprehension of our film cogni-
tion? Does it add something to the traditional and shared knowledge on film?
Could we consider the degree of embodiment as a sign of the salience of a scene
with respect to a multilayered form of viewers’ involvement? Could an embodied
approach to film have relevance also from a historical point of view?
    The viewer’s ability to move inside a virtual spatio-temporal dimension like that
of the screen is tightly connected to these issues, and matters like bodily engage-
ment in film viewing or film subjectivity should cope with the embodied approach
to film techniques. As Jacinto Lageira wrote, referring to previous proposals like
those put forward by Erich Feldmann in the 1950s, viewers’ subjectivity can si-
multaneously locate itself aesthetically in the film while obviously remaining itself
in the real world.5 This is the very mission of film, and this is the field on which
cinema has been challenged by other media, like videogames or VR, which shape
up their virtual space-time often referring to simulation techniques previously
elaborated within film practices. Though in this first phase cognitive neurosci-
ence can primarily provide quantitative data to the study of film experience, as
emphasized by Hasson and colleagues in their seminal work,6 we will show that
some analyses could not only contribute to clarify stylistic issues, but also to focus
on theoretical issues that have been long considered out of reach because of the
difficulties in providing solid empirical bases to their discussion.
    We present here a recent empirical neuroscientific study we performed on
camera movements by means of high-density EEG, which we believe could be
a good starting point to show how cognitive neuroscience can tell us something
new on a quite neglected topic in film studies. This study allows us to talk of


4
  Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra, “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Studies,”
in Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 3, 2012, pp. 183-210.
5
  Jacinto Lageira, “Imaginary Subject,” in Dominique Chateau (ed.), Subjectivity: Filmic Represen-
tation and the Spectator Experience, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2011, p. 150. See
also Erich Feldmann, “Considérations sur la situation du spectateur au cinéma,” in Revue Interna-
tionale de Filmologie, no. 26, 1956, p. 83.
6
  Uri Hasson et al., “Neurocinematics: the Neuroscience of Film,” in Projections. The Journal for
Mind and Movie, no. 1, 2008, p. 21.

                                                                                              105
                              Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra


mediated experience, embodied techniques, spatial cognition at the movies, and
most of all to talk of the crucial role that motor cognition plays at a pre-reflexive
level in making us empathize with the moving pictures.


Film and camera movements

    As Vivian Sobchack pointed out, there are four basic kinds of movement in
moving pictures. The first is the movement of the human beings or even the
objects within the frame; the second is the movement between the images, that
is, the editing; the third is the optical movement of the camera lens from a fixed
position, that is, the zoom; the fourth is the camera movement: “the bodily mo-
tion of the camera itself.”7 Since the very beginning, the relevance of what Don
Ihde would call “motile experience” to provide a stronger form of simulation,8
was perfectly present to the mind of film operators and technicians. While the
still camera can provide a strong impression of reality, but it does not reduce
the distance between the viewer and the screen, the moving camera not only
implements our experience by adding kinesthetic, bodily, tactile cues as well as
the sense of balance and gravity, but also gives the impression that the movie is
to some extent live, that there is an intentionality which endows it with peculiar
bodily functions and subjectivity.
    The resonance effect provided by the camera movement would suggest that
the impression of “being there,” and exploring the film space and measuring its
time, largely relies on a shared motor code. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in
his notes for the “Cours au Collège de France” of 1953 – where cinema plays a role
and the influence of French filmology is quite well detectable – “on perçoit donc
mouvement, son sens, son allure characteristique, par possibilité motrices du corps
propre.”9 As we have already showed in our abovementioned paper, this view was
widely shared by many “film physiologists” between the 1910s and 1920s, and
partly by some film theorists like for instance Léon Moussinac or Sergej Eisenstein,
but it would be enough to read some interviews given by Hollywood directors to
have an idea of how deep this conception of camera movement was.10


7
  Vivian Sobchack, “Toward Inhabited Space: the Semiotic Structure of Camera Movement in the
Cinema,” in Semiotica, no. 1-4, 1982, p. 317.
8
  “In the trajectory that began with monosensory simulations and then increased its complexity of
those dimensions, adding audiovisual to visual, and ultimately kinesthetic-tactile to audiovisual,
one could see a trajectory toward, although not reaching whole body, motile experience.” Don
Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology 2nd Edition, SUNY Press, Albany 2012, p. 142.
9
   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Cours au Collège de
France. Notes 1953, texte établi et annoté par Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert et Stefan Kristensen,
MetisPresses, Genève 2011, p. 119.
10
   To refer just to some of Bogdanovich’s interviewees (Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It,
Knopf, New York 1997), Allan Dwan talks of the first time he decided to move the camera in 1915
movie David Harum, saying that viewers thought they were moving, while Fritz Lang, talking of the
reasons of each camera movement, admits he never loved the zoom because it looks “unnatural.”

106
                                     The Feeling of Motion


   The reasons that bring a director to move the camera are multiple: of course,
the profilmic implicit 3D experience will gain intensity through movement, but
also the kinetic, psychological and dramatic effects of the movie will be enhanced
by these techniques, sometimes consisting of a complex combination of differ-
ent camera movements. That said, we could sum up the very meaning of camera
movement by borrowing Garrett Brown’s statement: “In the movies, when the
camera begins to move, we are suddenly given the missing information as to
shape and layout and size. We are there.”11
   Though camera movement has even become a “moral issue,” as notoriously
French critics and filmmakers like Rivette, Moullet, and Godard saw it, such a
technique was originally conceived as a means for strengthening cinematic inter-
subjectivity and to emphasize the relational nature of film style. Its importance
was not well grasped by film theorists, and if we tried to look for essays or books
on camera movements we would be disappointed. During the first phase of film
history, camera movements were discussed and analyzed only in magazines devot-
ed to the craft of cinematography, like for instance American Cinematographer.12
In the following years, we do not find any thorough analysis, as such when David
Bordwell decided to focus on camera movement in two 1970s essays, he observed
that this issue had been considered as too elusive to be analyzable for long.13
   Bordwell, who is more interested in the visual perception of camera move-
ments than in their motor implications, focuses immediately on their anthropo-
morphism, saying that they would represent

   a basis for the orthodox comparison between the camera and the human body. The head
   may rotate, that is, pan or tilt, or the entire organism may displace itself, may “locomote,”
   by tracking or craning.14

   Bordwell goes on pointing out that we can hardly resist reading the effect pro-
vided by camera movements as a “persuasive surrogate for our subjective move-
ment through an objective space,”15 properly referring to our anthropomorphic
conception of camera movement. Bordwell’s assumptions have been basically
shared both by film phenomenologists like Sobchack – who approaches camera
movements from an embodied perspective, understanding them as natural as
our bodily movements in space,16 – or Voss – who put forward the idea of the

11
   Garrett
   ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
            Brown, “The Moving Camera. Part I,” http://www.garrettcam.com/movingcamera/arti-
cle1.htm, last visit 7 January 2014.
12
   A historical and theoretical survey on camera movements is Jakob Isak Nielsen, Camera Move-
ment in Narrative Cinema: Toward a Taxonomy of Functions, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of
Information and Media Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Aarhus, 2007.
13
   David Bordwell, “Camera Movement and Cinematic Space,” in Ciné-Tracts, no. 2, Summer 1977,
pp. 19-25 and the prior “Camera Movement, the Coming of Sound, and the Classical Hollywood
Style,” now in Paul Kerr (ed.), The Hollywood Film Industry, Routledge, London 1984, pp. 148-153.
14
   David Bordwell, “Camera Movement and Cinematic Space,” cit., p. 20.
15
   Ivi, p. 23.
16
   Vivian Sobchack, “Toward Inhabited Space: the Semiotic Structure of Camera Movement in the

                                                                                             107
                               Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra


viewer’s body as a “surrogate body,” which “loans” a three-dimensional body to
the screen.17 More obviously, such a position has been also shared by ecological/
cognitive film theorists like Anderson – who says that through camera move-
ments we feel as if we moved inside the diegetic space of film, and who was the
first to claim an empirical study of dollies and zooms.18
   When we first thought about an experiment on the viewer’s brain motor respons-
es to camera movement, we started from the idea that each movement implied a
particular form of physical relation, and that a motor approach to its meaning
would add to what Brown calls the “camera’s putative presence and behavior.”19


Moving mirrors: Motor Cognition and camera movements

   For quite a long time the cortical motor system was considered as the mere
neural controller of elementary physical features of movement such as force,
direction and amplitude. This picture was revolutionized by the discovery that
many cortical motor neurons do not discharge during the execution of elemen-
tary movements, but are active before and during motor acts – movements
executed to accomplish a specific motor goal. Furthermore, it was discovered
that the cortical motor system is endowed with sensory properties, percep-
tually responding to visual, auditory and somatosensory inputs.20 Particularly
revealing, in this respect, was the discovery of mirror neurons.21 Mirror neu-
rons, originally discovered in macaques and later on also revealed in the human
brain, are motor neurons that not only respond to the execution of movements
and actions, but also during their perception when executed by others. It has
been proposed that the mirror mechanism instantiated by mirror neurons ena-
bles a direct form of action understanding: the relational character of behav-
ior as mapped by the cortical motor system would enable the appreciation of
purpose without relying on explicit inference. Altogether, these findings led



Cinema”, cit., p. 317.
17
   Christiane Voss, “Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: the Spectator as ‘Surrogate
Body’ for the Cinema,” in Cinema Journal, no. 4, Summer 2011, pp. 136-150.
18
   Joseph D. Anderson, “Moving Through the Diegetic World of the Motion Picture,” in Lennard
Højbjerg, Peter Schepelern (eds.), Film Style and Story: a Tribute to Torben Grodal, Museum Tus-
culanum Press, Copenhagen 2003, pp. 11-21.
19
   Garrett Brown, “The Moving Camera. Part II,” http://www.garrettcam.com/movingcamera/
article2.htm, last visit 7 January 2014.
20
   For reviews, see Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese, “From action to meaning,” in Jean-Luc
Petit (ed.), Les Neurosciences et la Philosophie de l’Action, Vrin, Paris 1997, pp. 217-229; Vittorio
Gallese, “The inner sense of action: agency and motor representations,” in Journal of Conscious-
ness Studies, no. 7, 2000, pp. 23-40.
21
   Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Action recognition
in the premotor cortex,” in Brain, no. 119, 1996, pp. 593-609; Vittorio Gallese, Christian Key-
sers, Giacomo Rizzolatti, “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition,” in Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, no. 8, 2004, pp. 396-403.

108
                                      The Feeling of Motion


to formulate the “Motor Cognition” hypothesis22 as a leading element for the
emergence of social cognition. According to this hypothesis, cognitive abili-
ties like the hierarchical representation of action with respect to a distal goal,
the detection of motor goals in others’ behavior and action anticipation are
possible because of the peculiar functional architecture of the motor system,
organized in terms of goal-directed motor acts.
   It should be added that a limiting factor of most experiments carried out so
far to study the mirror mechanism in humans consisted of their avoidance of
real social interactions, like movements of the observer towards or away from
the observed agent. In a recent study we tried to fill this gap by devising a more
ecological approach. We used a combined behavioral and high density EEG ex-
periment to determine whether various types of camera movements, more or less
simulating an observer’s own movement toward the observed acting agent, might
modulate observers’ mirror mechanism.23 Stimuli were short videos showing an
agent performing goal-related hand actions, like grasping an object from a table
and looking at it. We studied observers’ motor cortex activation by measuring
Event Related Desynchronization and Resynchronization (ERD/ERS) of the mu
rhythm, a standard marker of “motor resonance,” that is, of the activation of the
mirror mechanism in observers’ brains. Previous studies showed that voluntary
action execution and observation correlate with ERD in upper alpha bands as
well as in lower beta bands recorded over sensorimotor areas. Building on the
design normally employed to investigate the hand action mirror mechanism, we
focused on two questions: 1) whether the mirror mechanism responds differently
to the observation of the same hand action filmed by a static camera in compari-
son with a moving camera approaching the scene; 2) whether the mirror mecha-
nism activation is modulated by different ways a camera can be used to approach
the scene. More precisely, we investigated whether the mirror mechanism is dif-
ferently modulated by camera movements such as: a) zooming in on the scene;
b) real camera movement towards the scene realized by using a dolly (camera
mounted on fixed tracks); c) real camera movement towards the scene obtained
by using a steadicam (camera fixed to the body of the cameraman, walking to-
wards the scene).24 We also investigated whether differences among viewing con-
ditions (still, zoom, dolly, steadicam) could be related to participants’ subjective

22
   Vittorio Gallese, Magali Rochat, Giuseppe Cossu, Corrado Sinigaglia, “Motor cognition and its
role in the phylogeny and ontogeny of action understanding,” in Developmental Psychology, no.
45, 2009, pp. 103-113.
23
   Katrin Heimann, Maria Alessandra Umiltà, Michele Guerra, Vittorio Gallese, “Moving mirrors:
a high density EEG study investigating the effects of camera movements on motor cortex activa-
tion during action observation,” in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, no. 9, 2014, pp. 2087-2101.
24
   Video clips were recorded in a professional film studio, enabling us to film the same scene 4 times
under highly controlled conditions. The camera starting position was always 260 cm far from the
filmed agent, the end position (in case of movement) was 80 cm from it. The camera movement
speed as well as its height from the ground were kept identical in the three different movement
conditions, so that the only difference among them consisted of the type of movement/approach
to the scene: zoom, dolly and steadicam, respectively.

                                                                                                 109
                         Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra


reports regarding the feeling of involvement and the experienced naturalness
or artificiality of the camera movement used. At the end of the EEG recording
session participants were again shown the same video clips and for each of them
they were asked the following six different questions: 1) How much did you feel
involved in the scene? 2) How much did you feel like the actor? 3) How much
did you feel as if you yourself would approach the scene? 4) How comfortable
did you feel watching the scene? 5) How realistic did you find the camera move-
ment? 6) How much did you feel the camera movement resembled a person’s
movement when approaching the scene? Questions 3, 5 and 6, of course were
not asked for still camera video clips.
   The results of our study demonstrated that reducing the distance between
spectators and observed agent, realized by moving the camera towards the scene,
evoked stronger ERD of the mu rhythm during the observation of goal-directed
hand actions. This difference reached significance only when the camera move-
ment was realized by using the steadicam. Videos in which the zoom was applied
reliably demonstrated a weaker activation of the motor cortex, as demonstrated
by a stronger resynchronization. Results of control recordings from electrodes
located over occipital visual areas, which were not affected by the different film
styles, demonstrate that the observed different responses of the motor cortex to
different film techniques are not due to mere increased attention evoked by the
observation of these specific ways of filming actions.
   The behavioral rating task showed that the steadicam was most able to pro-
duce a visual experience close to the one of a human approaching the scene. In-
deed, participants perceived the movements of the steadicam as being the most
natural and most resembling the movements of an approaching observer, thus
eliciting the feeling that the observer him/herself would walk towards the scene.
   These results suggest that film technique predicts time-course specifics of
ERD/ERS during action observation, with only videos simulating the natural
vision of a walking human observer eliciting a stronger ERD than videos filmed
from a fixed position. Among videos dynamically reducing the distance between
the observer and the observed agent, only those simulating the “natural” vision
of a human observer approaching an agent do elicit a significantly stronger “mo-
tor resonance” in comparison to videos showing the same scene from a fixed
distance. Furthermore, the artificiality of other ways of simulating the dynamic
distance reduction (such as those obtained by filming the same scenes with the
zoom or the dolly) appears to be reflected by differences in the time course of the
resynchronization phase of the mu rhythm. The time-course of observers’ motor
cortex activation is modulated by the resemblance between the effect of camera
movements and ordinary human vision. Familiarity with the visual experience
provided by the video predicts the time course of the mu rhythm ERD/ERS.




110
                                    The Feeling of Motion


Camera movements, the brain and film theory: closing the gap

   The literature on film shows converging evidence on the centrality of camera
movement for, on the one hand, building a concrete spatiality within film space25
and, on the other, for inventing a film technique capable of approaching human
vision. One of the most relevant characteristics of the steadicam, as explicitly
stated by its inventor Garrett Brown, is precisely to simulate human vision.26 Ac-
cording to the operator Larry McConkey, by means of the steadicam, the “cam-
era becomes like another person and the audience becomes connected through
that person to the other actors. The audience becomes more empathetic, more
involved.”27 According to McConkey, what steadicam basically does is to convey
the viewer’s point of view inside the cinematic space-time, giving this point of
view the immanence of a virtual body capable of moving in a very natural man-
ner together with the film characters. Martin Scorsese used steadicam this way
in very famous shots like the “Copacabana shot” in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese,
1990) and the “Counting room shot” in Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995). In both
scenes the camera/viewer not only follows the characters, but also explores the
profilmic space by turning its “head” and by focusing on details or accomplish-
ing movements both related and unrelated to the characters’ behavior. The sense
of immersion is of course provided by the fluidity of the movement that conveys
a very ecological approach to the scene without the overexcitement caused by
the handheld camera, but it is provided as well by the motor engagement of the
viewer, which has the impression to move freely inside the shot, following both
the characters and his own curiosity.
   In other words, the feeling of motion triggered by the steadicam seems to sug-
gest a sort of independent movement of the viewer inside the shot, heightened
by a stronger motor resonance, as we demonstrated for the first time with our
study. This effect is quite well detectable in some shots of Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980), when the camera follows Danny’s tricycle in the hallways or the
kitchen of the hotel. When the kid exits the shot, Kubrick does not cut, but
leaves the camera walking again for some seconds in the empty space, giving on
the one hand the physical impression that a phantasmatic entity is actually fol-
lowing and threatening Danny, and on the other hand that the feeling of motion
is to some extent independent from the character’s action and intentions.
   Even if sometimes the steadicam – as any other stylistic technique – can be
used in a less embodied way, our experiment is more in line with Sobchack’s
ideas about steadicam than with Geuens’ ones, according to which steadicam
would leave behind the force and subjectivity of personal enunciation and
would basically disembody vision.28


25
   John Belton, “The Bionic Eye: Zoom Esthetics,” in Cineaste, no. 1, Winter 1980-81, pp. 20-27.
26
   Serena Ferrara, Steadicam: Techniques and Aesthetics, cit., p. 104.
27
   Ivi, pp. 123-24.
28
   Jean-Pierre Geuens, “Visuality and Power: the Work of the Steadicam,” in Film Quarterly, no.

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                              Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra


   Our experiment clarifies widely shared ideas among film directors on the na-
ture of camera movements. The zoom is usually considered as a fake movement
or, at least, an abstract one, while the camera movement is the only way to elicit
the audience’s sense of presence. David Cronenberg stated:

   One tool I never use is the zoom lens, because it doesn’t correspond to my idea of film-
   making. The zoom is just an optical gadget; it’s purely practical. And I will always prefer
   moving the camera, because I find that it physically projects you inside the film’s space.
   And zooming doesn’t achieve that. It keeps you outside.29

   Similarly, Bernardo Bertolucci said: “I hardly ever use a zoom. I don’t know
why, but I find that there’s something fake about its movement.”30 As our experi-
ment shows, the relationship between viewers’ motor and empathic involvement
and camera movements is best obtained with steadicam. Considering that, as
Geuens notes, it is not so easy to distinguish a steadicam shot from others using
traditional techniques, the results of our experiment emphasize the skill of the
motor brain to recognize a different kind of camera’s motor behavior.
   By the same vein, these data allow us to say that film’s intentionality and sub-
jectivity are also grounded on viewers’ embodied simulation of camera move-
ments, suggesting that the immanence of cinematic subjectivity largely relies on
the bodily nature and understanding of film. Our experiment provides strong
empirical neuroscientific evidence supporting what Dominique Chateau wrote
about subjectivity: “If film has something to do with subjectivity, it is to the ex-
tent that its moving form bears the imprint of a subjectivity.”31 In conclusion,
the relational nature of film style and cinematic intersubjectivity can be usefully
investigated by focusing on viewers’ motor cognition implied by film techniques.




2, Winter 1993-1994, pp. 15-16.
29
   David Cronenberg in Laurent Tirard (ed.), Moviemakers’ Master Class, Faber and Faber, New
York 2002, p. 108.
30
   Ivi, p. 53.
31
   Dominique Chateau (ed.), Subjectivity: Filmic Representation and the Spectator Experience, cit.,
p. 166.

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