In the 1880s chronophotograpic still images dissected the otherwise indistinguishable stages of bodily movement, revealing both the discontinuities between still images that are hidden in cinematic images, and the details of gestures that are imperceptible to the human eye. According to recent film theory, chronophotography reveals that aesthetic fruition is not based on continuity alone, but also on instantaneity, discontinuities of movement and the dichotomy of immobility and motion. The essay argues that chronophotography can express the dynamis of Warburg’s engrams and Ėjzenštejn’s expressive movement, as well as its organic nature and the qualitative changes it enacts on the body. In Ėjzenštejn’s opinion, the changes that occur in the work of art trigger the spectator’s imitative process, which in turn is responsible for ecstatic flow.
The article considers Choros (Langan and Maher, 2011) and the media art project White Horse Hills (Wood, 2002), both of which render chronophotographic, engram-like images of movement through digital techniques. In their analysis, I claim not only that they both emphasize their chronophotographic effect, but moreover that they strengthen the dynamis of gesture, thus demonstrating its importance in aesthetic fruition when it is in line with the laws of nature.
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Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in
Chronophotography and its Contemporary Reproductions
Francesca Scotto Lavina, “La Sapienza”, Università di Roma




Abstract

   In the 1880s chronophotograpic still images dissected the otherwise indistingui-
   shable stages of bodily movement, revealing both the discontinuities between
   still images that are hidden in cinematic images, and the details of gestures that
   are imperceptible to the human eye.
   According to recent film theory, chronophotography reveals that aesthetic frui-
   tion is not based on continuity alone, but also on instantaneity, discontinuities of
   movement and the dichotomy of immobility and motion.
   The essay argues that chronophotography can express the dynamis of Warburg’s
   engrams and Ėjzenštejn’s expressive movement, as well as its organic nature and
   the qualitative changes it enacts on the body. In Ėjzenštejn’s opinion, the changes
   that occur in the work of art trigger the spectator’s imitative process, which in
   turn is responsible for ecstatic flow.
   The article considers Choros (Langan and Maher, 2011) and the media art project
   White Horse Hills (Wood, 2002), both of which render chronophotographic,
   engram-like images of movement through digital techniques. In their analysis,
   I claim not only that they both emphasize their chronophotographic effect, but
   moreover that they strengthen the dynamis of gesture, thus demonstrating its
   importance in aesthetic fruition when it is in line with the laws of nature.




Prelude: the Aesthetic Dissection of Gestures in the Chronophotographic Images
of Movement

  Movement has been thoroughly discussed in cinema theory: the focus has been
on the ontology of movement in relation to cinematic image rather than on the
material nature of movement itself in relation to its inner component, gesture.
  Gesture was first brought to our attention in the 1880s with the advent of
chronophotography, a technique developed by the physiologist Étienne-Jules
Marey and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to create a succession of
snapshots of movement taken at equidistant intervals of time.

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 25, Fall 2015
                                    Francesca Scotto Lavina


   Marey and Muybridge, like other chronophotographers and scientists of the
same period, developed different methods of dissecting the otherwise impercep-
tible stages of movement. Marey’s first experiments were represented by graphs
whose lines reproduced people’s movements1 or sculptures, reflecting his inten-
tion of showing only the phases of movement.
   Marey believed these graphs gave a false impression of continuity, so he deve-
loped a photographic gun to record twelve snapshots per second from the same
angle. Muybridge, on the other hand, used a battery of cameras to record the
subject’s movement from different angles.
   As a consequence, Marey’s analytical reproduction of movement addresses
the qualitative changes of the body. Marey’s snapshots render the trajectory of
movement and its sense of duration; see Man Walking (Marey, 1882),2 where a
black suit hides the body’s features to bring out the stages of movement in one
interval of time.
   Muybridge’s sequences describe qualitative changes of the body in relation to
different positions in space,3 such as in Woman Walking Downstairs (Muybridge,
1887),4 which clearly shows the bodily features.
   Chronophotographers animated the sequences of their snapshots by using a
Zoopraxiscope creating the illusion of movement to entertain larger audiences.
   Despite their different techniques5 both Marey and Muybridge’s single snap-
shot freezes a set of gestures in an eternal any-instant-whatever, by realizing their
mise en pose, which reduces a movement to zero by suspending each single ge-
sture in its execution phase and allows the spectator to focus on its unperceived
details.
   The sequences of snapshots crystallize the whole movement in an eternal pre-
sent progressive and realize a mise en geste of the image by extracting the gestural
features of a movement; e.g. a dance, gallop or walk; however the montage of a
chronophotographic sequence reveals the discontinuities between the still ima-


1
  This technique did not show any characteristic of the observed object and made the use of cap-
tions necessary in order to explain the object’s relation with its movement. Marey’s graphs are
available at <http://cnum.cnam.fr> [accessed 30 September 2015]. Philippe-Alain Michaud,
Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. by Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2007
[2004]), pp. 87–90. Étienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode Graphique dans les Sciences Expérimentales
et Principalement en Physiologie et en Médecine (Paris: G. Masson, 1878), p. 108. Marta Braun,
Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), pp. 8–41.
2
  Marey, Le Mouvement (Paris: G. Masson, 1894), quoted in Michaud, p. 89, fig. 26.
3
  Tom Gunning, ‘Never Seen this Picture Before; Muybridge in Multiplicity’, in Time Stands Still:
Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, ed. by Phillip Prodger (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), pp. 222–72 (pp. 224-25).
4
  Eadweard Muybridge, The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs, ed. by Hans-Christian
Adam (Köln: Taschen, 2010).
5
  Braun. A comparison between Man Walking and Woman Walking Downstairs and its animat-
ed Gif simulating the effect of the Zoopraxiscope (available at <http://www.wikiwand.com/en/
Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_No._2> [accessed 20 December 2015]) shows the differences
between Marey’s analytical purposes and Muybridge’s creative and artistic intents.

60
        Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in Chronophotography


ges of movement, which, by contrast, cinema makes inaccessible to conscious
human perception by its apparatus.

   Chronophotographic sequences show analytical images of movement, or
rather, images of the gestures, which make up movement, and not ‘movement-
images’ that are peculiar to cinema according to Deleuze. By questioning Berg-
son’s thesis on movement Deleuze argued that continuity of movement is inher-
ent to cinematic image, which he contrasted with stillness of photographic poses,
which doesn’t belong to cinema.6
   By contrast, not only did still images appear in chronophotography and then
in the projections of early cinema in the 1900s in order to arouse spectators’ as-
tonished reactions,7 but they were also reintroduced by avant-garde movements,
such as Structural Film. Directors, like Hollis Frampton,8 drawing their inspira-
tion from chronophotography, used the tension between stillness and motion to
investigate the laws of perception and the ‘unconscious optic’.9
   Thanks to a renewed interest in chronophotography, in Early Cinema and
in avant-garde movements, since the 1980s film scholars have developed a new
film history and theories,10 which consider still images, such as the ‘Still-Moving
Field’,11 and argue that aesthetic fruition is not based only on continuity, but also
on instantaneity and discontinuities of movement.12
   Chronophotography, among all the pre-cinematic forms, appears to be the
most meaningful expression of the dichotomy between immobility and motion,
and moreover its montage demonstrates tangibly that movement can be created
using a series of still images.
   The chronophotographic montage of movement actually reminds us of
Bergson’s thesis that movement consists of qualitative changes of matter (a tran-


6
  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habber-
jam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1986]), pp. 23–28. See Raymond Bellour,
‘The Film Stilled’, Camera Obscura, 24 (1990), 99–123 (pp. 99–100) (first publ. as ‘L’Interruption,
l’instant’, La Recherche photographique, 3 (December 1987), 51–63).
7
  Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 736–751 (pp. 740–41).
8
  Mark Hansen, ‘Digital Technics Beyond the “Last Machine”: Thinking Digital Media with Hollis
Frampton’, in Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed. by Eivind Røssaak
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), pp. 45–72.
9
  Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, ed. by
Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Rosalind Krauss sug-
gests that Benjamin came up with the idea of the optical unconscious thanks to Marey and Muy-
bridge’s chronophotographic sequences. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993).
10
   The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. by Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2007).
11
   Røssaak, ‘The Still Moving Field: An Introduction’, in Between Stillness and Motion, pp. 11–26.
12
   Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 27–73.

                                                                                                61
                                    Francesca Scotto Lavina


sition of forms) in relation to its duration. These changes are perceived as a suc-
cession of immobile sections, that is, snapshots of reality, that are cut by the
brain, in much the same way as in cinematic montage, to create an illusion of
perceptual continuity.13 In turn, Bergson himself was influenced by chronopho-
tographic experiments dealing with animal locomotion,14 which fragmented mo-
vement into any-instant-whatever by imitating the (cinematographic) mechanism
of perception and revealing its discontinuity.
   Chronophotography calls into question the importance of still images sequen-
ces dealing with the oxymoron of static movement in the aesthetic fruition. By an
aesthetic of dissection such images reveal details of movement that, despite being
unperceived by human consciousness, are crucial to capturing the qualitative
changes that are immanent to movement.


The Ecstasy of Expressive Gestures: The Chronophotographic Engrams-like Images
Sequences

   The gestural details revealed by chronophotography disclose the organic cha-
racteristics of movement, its physicality, the irreversibility of its duration and its
dynamic and emotional potential, which history of art scholars have debated in
depth in relation to painting and sculpture.
   Both the mise en pose and mise en geste of Marey and Muybridge’s chrono-
photographic sequences are reminiscent of the sense of motion rendered by
Renaissance paintings and sculptures, analyzed by art historian Aby Warburg
(1866–1929), who claimed that such still images triggered emotional responses.
   Warburg, and before him, his art historian professor, August Schmarsow, were
deeply influenced by Robert Vischer’s thinking in the 1870s. The philosopher
argued that works of art representing particular forms based on conformity to
the design and function of body parts (eyes, muscles, limbs, posture as a who-
le) aroused particular responsive feelings.15 Schmarsow emphasized the role of
gestures in the appreciation of visual arts, and Warburg, following his teaching,
during his studies of Renaissance paintings, claimed that some gestures and bo-
dily postures, which he distinguished as pathosformeln (forms of pathos), are
constantly reproduced in the history of art. He suggested that such gestures and


13
   Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), pp.
302–04. Different branches of sciences, such as psychology, physiology and neuroscience, have
been addressing the complex phenomenon of the human perception of motion. ‘Neurophysiologi-
cal and imaging experiments support […] biological movements might be recognized by analysing
sequences of body shapes that correspond to “snapshots” from movies of complex movements’,
which supports Bergson’s thesis. See Martin A. Giese and Tomaso Poggio, ‘Neural Mechanisms for
the Recognition of Biological Movements’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4 (March 2003), 179–92
(p. 180).
14
   Braun, pp. 280–81.
15
   Robert Vischer, Über das Optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (Leipzig: Credner, 1873).

62
         Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in Chronophotography


postures rendering the sense of motion are imprinted in our memory because of
their emotional power. He used the term ‘engrams’, a term he borrowed from
evolutionary biologist Richard Semon (1859–1918), to describe these images in
terms of their energy. Since 1927, Warburg had been collecting various exam-
ples of pathosformeln in his Mnemosyne,16 whose panels join sets of still images
(engrams), which make sense in relation to each other. Not only does each pa-
nel represent a general theme, but it also portrays energy in motion (dynamis),
flowing among the engrams in a way that is quite similar to juxtaposed chrono-
photographic images.17
   Moreover chronophotography ‘reproduces movement as a function of any-
instant-whatever’,18 that is, one ‘instant, which is equidistant from another’.19
Chronophotographic instants are privileged, because they are ‘remarkable or
singular points, which belong to movement […], but simply not ordinary, not
regular […], an organised set of any-instant-whatevers through which the cuts
have to pass’.20 These characteristics give them their organic nature that does not
belong to (unnatural) ‘poses’.21 According to Ėjzenštejn, organic means being
natural and in harmony with the laws of nature22 and it is the basis of pathos.
   Chronophotographic still images are actual images of natural gestures, whose
expressivity turns such images into forms of pathos.23 Ėjzenštejn claimed that
expressivity is peculiar to such organic gestures blending the instinctive and the
conscious or goal-oriented features of movement.24 Such gestures are deeply im-
printed in the human memory because of their emotional meaning as a result of
natural evolution.25
   In Woman Dancing (Muybridge, 1887),26 the dancer emphasizes the expres-


16
   Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne. L’Atlante delle Immagini, ed. by Martin Warnke and Claudia Brin
(Turin: Aragno, 2002).
17
   Michaud, p. 86.
18
    Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 5. Deleuze used ‘privileged instants’ in Ėjzenštejn’s meaning, that is,
‘pathetic’, ‘moments of crisis’. Ibid.
19
   Ivi, p. 6
20
   Ibid.
21
   Ivi, p. 5.
22
   For ‘organic’, ‘pathos’ and ‘ecstasy’ see, Sergej M. Ėjzenštejn, Non-indifferent Nature: Film and
the Structure of the Things, ed. by Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987 [1964]).
23
   It is worth noting Warburg’s forms of pathos are related to bodily expressions and gestures, while
Ėjzenštejn’s deals with the pathetization of not necessarily pathetic raw material through the use of
montage. See Sylvia Sasse, ‘Pathos und Antipathos. Pathosformeln bei Sergej Ėjzenštejn und Aby
Waburg’, in Pathos: zur Geschichte Einer Problematischen Kategorie, ed. by Cornelia Zumbusch
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), pp. 171–90.
24
    Ėjzenštejn, Sergei Tretyakov, ‘Expressive Movement’, trans. by Alma Law, Millennium Film
Journal, 3 (Winter-Spring 1979), 30–38.
25
   Both Ėjzenštejn and Warburg were deeply influenced by The Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals published in 1872 by the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin, who argued that
emotions are expressed by facial expressions and bodily movements.
26
    The image is available at MoMa website: <http://www.moma.org/collection/works/44243?
locale=en> [accessed 20 December 2015].

                                                                                                  63
                                    Francesca Scotto Lavina


sivity of her solo ballet by sensually moving the draperies of her transparent
dress; her gestures bring to mind the study of the nymph in motion in panel 39
of Warburg’s Mnemosyne. Moreover we manage to perceive expressivity in the
stylized silhouette’s oriented walk represented in Man Walking reminding us of
the ‘zig zag’27 and the snake (dynamis par excellence according to both Warburg
and Ėjzenštejn)28 in the Laocoön sculptural group (Mnemosyne, panel 6).
   Whenever an artist manages to capture the expressive gestures, as in afore-
mentioned examples, he stimulates the spectators into recalling forms of pathos
and allows expressive gestural language to prevail according to natural laws.
   Ėjzenštejn argued that such a language and the sense of touch triggered by
the sight of the gesture are the inner components of emotional response; he also
claimed that such a response is primitive and prelogical and it causes a sort of re-
gression to an earlier form of thinking, where the distinction between motion and
emotion is less clear and, as a consequence, it allows to represent ideas in a very
tangible way.29 Moreover, Ėjzenštejn's concept of the audio-visual images (he used
the Russian word obraznost) describes the connection between visual motifs and
general ideas or topics in art, in short: empirically invisible abstractions.
   The expressive gestures of the chronophotographic engrams-like images are
visual motifs that crystallize into stable forms leading to a plastic composition of
the shot in pathetic terms.30
   Such stable forms are montaged, as in Warburg’s panels, in an organized set of
images of organic gestures.
   Whenever montage, in Ėjzenštejn’s opinion, manages to arrange a set of im-
ages according to a pathetic composition of all its elements, it means producing
a rhythm31 and showing qualitative changes, which occur in the image and con-
temporaneously in the bodies of the spectators because of an emotionally in-
duced imitative process. This produces the spectator’s transition from one physi-
cal state to another, that is, a ‘going out of himself’,32 responsible for generating
an ‘ecstatic flow’, which deeply affects the spectator’s body at an unconscious
level before he becomes aware of it.
   Chronophotographic montaged sets of still images show the transition from


27
   Michaud, p. 286.
28
   Ivi, p. 285–87.
29
   Ėjzenštejn was deeply influenced by the research of two psychologists, Vygotsky and Lauria,
arguing that the origins of language lie in gesture itself. This assumption might be confirmed by
recent neuroscientific trials demonstrating that language, as well as cognition, might have evolved
through gestures and body language because of the closeness of the mirror neurons and the Broca
area, the part of the brain which produces language. Luciano Fadiga, Laila Craighero, Alessandro
D’Ausilio, ‘Broca’s Area in Language, Action, and Music’, The Neurosciences and Music III,
Disorders and Plasticity: Ann. NY Acad. Sci., 1169 (2009), 448–58.
30
   Ėjzenštejn, Nonindifferent Nature. Ėjzenštejn, Towards a Theory of Montage: Selected Works II,
trans. by Michael Glenny, ed. by Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI Publishing, 1991).
31
   Ėjzenštejn, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1949), pp. 72–82.
32
   Ivi, p. 166.

64
        Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in Chronophotography


one gesture into another, which is directly related to the flow of privileged any-
instants-whatever extracted by movement. The composition of the whole move-
ment creates a rhythm and produces the qualitative changes (claimed by Bergson
as well) mirrored into spectator’s body. This draws him into motion through a
(mental) imitation of the expressive gestures of the image.
   With montage the degree of muscle contractions, the various limbs positions
and the changes of direction in the movement manage to express Warburgian
dynamis, which affects the senses at various levels and intensities.
   In fact, chronophotographic sequences ‘move-with the feeling of the movement
taking form’ and therefore spectators ‘feel-with […] the intensive passage from the
virtual to actualization […], what is amodally felt [...] at the threshold of sight’.33


The Dynamic Echoes of Gestures in the Digital Chronophotographic Reproduction

   Digitization has given further impulse to new film theory and the Still-Moving
Field and has paved the way to a deeper dialogue between cinema, chronopho-
tography, photography in general, and other arts, such as painting and sculp-
ture.34 Digital effects manage to ‘animate and complexify the apparently frozen
or fixed time-frames’35 of chronophotography and therefore they enhance its po-
tential to emphasize the details of gestures and movement.
   Nowadays chronophotography inspires the spectacular effects of mainstream
cinema, the most famous of which is the ‘bullet-time effect’ of Matrix (Lana
and Andy Wachowski , 1999),36 as well as experimental films and art projects, in
which immobility (still images of movement) and movement(-image) can flow
into each other or even coexist in the same frame, as in Choros, an experimental
film by Michael Langan and Terah Maher (2011).37
   We can already see this in an analogical predecessor of Choros, Duo (Pas de
Deux, Norman McLaren, 1968), from which Langan and Maher drew their in-
spiration. In Duo, the dancer’s still figures are duplicated to create two figures
moving about the stage contemporaneously. The moving images of the figures
remind us of the process of ‘going outside oneself’ and seem to physically repre-
sent the concept of Ėjzenštejn’s ecstasy.



33
   Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT
Press, 2009), pp. 94–95. Manning’s considerations refer to Marey’s work.
34
   These arts have been deeply influenced by chronophotography since the 1920s. See Marcel
Duchamp and Giacomo Balla’s paintings, avant-garde movements of Kinetic art and Futurism and,
in the 1970s, Francis Bacon’s paintings.
35
   Hansen, p. 57.
36
   Røssaak, ‘Figures of Sensation: Between Still and Moving Images’, in The Cinema of Attractions
Reloaded, p. 321.
37
    Choros, online video is available at <http://langanfilms.com/choros.html> [accessed 20
December 2015].

                                                                                              65
                                  Francesca Scotto Lavina


  In Choros, the digital technique, besides reproducing this effect, adds the
chronophotographic effect vividly producing a chorus of gestures (fig 1).

   Choros is a significant example of the charm of gestures made apparent
through digital manipulation and allows us to explore the tension between still-
ness and motion and the dissection of the chronophotographic effect by ‘fine-
grained temporal intervals’.38
   The mise-en-scene of the solo ballet of Maher, who is one of the directors as
well as the dancer on stage, is in line with Muybridge’s effort of reproducing the
fascination of dancers’ gestures,39 as privileged any-instants-whatever.
   After dissecting the movements of Maher’s figure into thirty-two engrams-
like image (juxtaposing the body’s gestures side by side) digital compositing sets
them in motion in the continuous flow of a movement-image. The result is a
continuous overlapping of figures hauntingly echoing every graceful and deliber-
ate gesture of the dancer (fig. 2) reminding us of Woman Dancing animated by a
Zoopraxiscope.
   Every chronophotographic sequence of Maher’s gestures starts from a still
image of a single figure and merges into another still image recomposing thir-
ty-two Maher’s bodily images in a unique figure. As the stillness is perceived,
Maher’s body sets in motion another movement that gives rise to the same pro-
cess once again.
   In some of the frames, still images of Maher’s figure coexist with chronopho-
tographic sequences of her movement (fig. 2), which strengthens the composi-
tion of the image in pathetic terms by contrasting stillness with motion. Even
though this clearly reveals the paradox of immobility immanent to the moving
image, both still images and chronophotographic sequences render the sense of
movement, as in the images of Warburg’s Mnemosyne or in the kinetic artists’
paintings, such as Nude Descending a Staircase (Marcel Duchamp, 1912, oil on
canvas, 147×89.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia).40

   However, in spite of the astonishment of audiences of Early Cinema at the
transitions from moving to still image and vice-versa, and besides the disclosure
of the optical unconscious that Structural Film directors aimed at, the emotional
appeal of experimental cinematographic forms like Choros seems to be the result
of the ecstatic flow triggered by the qualitative changes occurring in the image of
the dancer’s body.
   Flowing in sequence, Maher’s expressive gestures generate a continuous flow
of privileged any-instants-whatever extracted by movement rendering a sense of


38
   Hansen, p. 57.
39
   Laurent Guido, ‘Rhythmic Bodies/Movies: Dance as Attraction in Early Film Culture’, in The
Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, pp. 139–56.
40
    Image available at <http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_No._2>
[accessed 20 December 2015].

66
        Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in Chronophotography


duration expanding into space. The gestures seem to create a rhythm, crucial to
pathos and to spectators’ (mental) imitative process of Maher’s movements.
   The rhythm is enhanced thanks to the close match of the tempo of the
soundtrack, Music for Eighteen Musicians (Steve Reich, 1976) with the number
of gestures created by using the chronophotographic digital effect, thus showing
that ‘the attitude of the body is like a time-image […]; the gesture is already a
different time-image, the order or organization of time’.41
   The pathetic composition of Choros images (fig. 2) often realizes figures of
montage that Ėjzenštejn had previously analyzed in still images, such as Balla’s
paintings42 or the aforementioned Laocoön sculptural group,43 which he defined
the totem of movement, as did Warburg.
   As in Laocoön, the montage is based on the collision of elements (colours,
forms) that are re-composed after being decomposed to give each of them a
pathetic role.44 Montage ‘brings a succession to simultaneity […], [and] pro-
pagates a dynamic impetus’.45 Maher’s pale limbs are highlighted against a dark
background and are further accentuated by the appearance of small flames and fi-
reballs illuminating the movements. Their red wake simultaneously collides with
the darkness of the stage, which in turn, collides with the brightness of a green
field in the last sequence (conflict of colour and form). Nevertheless Maher’s still
figures often appear larger than the moving figures in the background (conflict
of volumes and planes).

   As in Warburg’s Mnemosyne panels, the images render the force of movement
acting on Maher’s body, its dynamis, its ‘vis elastica’ […], [its] affective athletici-
sm’,46 which brings the digital composition of the image closer to Francis Bacon’s
paintings. This means making ‘the interior forces that climb through the flesh
[…] [and] the spasm visible’.47 These forces reorganize the body in the most na-
tural (organic) postures according to the body’s inner attitude: turning around,
standing still, falling asleep or getting up.
   The visual rendering of the digital chronophotographic effect makes some of
Maher’s bodily traits, such as her face, indistinguishable, as in Marey’s works,
except for the last frame. At the same time the image vividly presents the details
of her vibrating gestures, as in Muybridge’s chronosequences. This further colli-
sion of elements draws our attention to Maher’s contracted muscles and pathetic
postures. The white dress, which gently contours her dancing body, reminds us


41
   Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1989]), p. 195.
42
   The Film Form, p. 50.
43
   Ėjzenštejn. ‘Laocoön’, in Towards a Theory of Montage: Selected Works II, pp. 109-202.
44
   The Film Form, pp. 31–63.
45
   Michaud, p. 286.
46
   Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London, New York:
Continuum, 2003), p. 41.
47
   Ivi, p. XI.

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                                     Francesca Scotto Lavina


of the flowing draperies of the aforementioned Woman Dancing and of the nym-
phs-like images of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio’s paintings analysed by Warburg in
panel 39 of Mnemosyne.
   In some of the shots, the chronophotographic effect deforms the Maher’s face
and body, an effect we see in Two Figures (Francis Bacon, 1961, oil and sand on
canvas, 198×142 cm),48 thus rousing the spectators to create ‘original relations
which are substitutes for the form’.49 This is what Bacon does according to De-
leuze, who claimed that these relations erase the figurative data and create levels
of sensation through ‘a non figurative resemblance for the same form’.50 This
process stimulates creativity as the brain attempts to interpret the figures and to
find the correlations it needs to arrive at a unitary perception of the elements.51
   In fact, Ėjzenštejn believed that the audience’s emotions are heightened when
a film presents incomplete fragments that spectators are required to assemble
themselves,52 actively and emotionally.
   The juxtaposition of Maher’s gestures generates images (obraznost), whose vi-
sual motifs bring to mind the mythological Icarus spreading his wings (fig. 3) or
the nymphs in motion (figs 1, 2), both represented in panel 39 of Mnemosyne, or
one of the Niobides sitting on the floor on her bent knees in panel 5 (fig. 4). These
visual motifs also generate empirically invisible abstractions, because they recall
ancestral images that are deeply imprinted in our brains because of their (uncon-
scious) association with sexuality and fertility,53 such as the peacocks spreading
their tails during courtship rituals (fig. 3) or flying birds (fig. 5) reminding us of
Marey’s chronophotographic studies of birds’ flight.54

  Unlike Choros, Jeremy Wood’s locative media art project, White Horse Hill
(2002), explores the representation of bodies in motion by reducing them to
black dots, so focusing solely on movement in the same way as Marey when he
erased the body’s features.
  The participants in this locative media art project are given a GPS mobile


48
    Available at <https://artimage.org.uk/4602/francis-bacon/two-figures--1961> [accessed 20
December 2015].
49
   Ivi, p. 158.
50
   Ibid.
51
   Thanks to the activation of the limbic system, a complex set of structures primarily responsible
for our emotions, the process evokes an agreeable sensation. See Vilayanur S. Ramachandran,
William Hirstein, ‘The Science of Art. A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience’, Journal of
Consciousness Studies, 6 (1999), 15–51, <http://www.imprint.co.uk/rama/art.pdf> [accessed 20
December 2015].
52
   Towards a Theory of Montage.
53
   The exaggeration of such bodily traits by the artist overstimulates specific areas in the brain
responsible for the ‘peak shift’ effect; i.e. the perception of essential elements (colours, forms and
movements) that allow spectators to give the figures emotional significance. This process is height-
ened by the limbic system, which joins these elements in a unitary perception in order to achieve
an aesthetically pleasing experience. See Ramachandran.
54
   Braun.

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        Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in Chronophotography




 Fig. 1: Choros (Michael Langan and Terah Maher, 2011). The simultaneousness of the moving
          image of thirty-two Maher’s figures and of the chronophotographic sequence.




Fig. 2: Choros. On the right the chronophotographic dissection of bodily gestures, on the left the
                                  still images of Maher’s figures.




                                                                                               69
                                    Francesca Scotto Lavina




     Fig. 3: Choros. Chronophotographic sequence reminding us of both Icarus (see Mnemosyne,
                          panel 39, figure 1) and a peacock opening its tail.




         Fig. 4: Choros. Chronophotographic sequence reminding us of Niobides’s posture
                               (see Mnemosyne, panel 5, figure 6).




70
        Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in Chronophotography




 Fig. 5: Choros. Chronophotographic sequence deforming Maher’s traits reminding us the figure
                                       of a flying bird.


device and are asked to stroll through White Horse Hill, in Uffington. As soon
as each participant steps forward, a dot, which represents the GPS coordinates,
appears on a display which draws animated GPS tracks of the trajectory.
   The aim of this work is to trace a human presence within a delineated public
space and to use the data collected from the sensors to visualize both individual
and collective movements via a representational system.
   Wood’s project allows the participants to map their course in physical space
and to share their maps by means of GPS mobile devices: they can reformulate
their physical space actively by using strolling movements, which reminds us of
Benjamin’s idea of flânerie.55
   At the end of the walk, the succession of dots forms an undulating line merg-
ing into the still image of a continuous line graph, creating a false impression of
continuous movement.
   Wood’s graphs are similar to Marey’s first experiments, which produced only
a mise en ligne of movements.
   The locative projection is created by the expressive gestures of both the artist
and the participants, which trigger the spectator’s abstract representation of the
participants’ movements in a process of imitation.
   The juxtaposition of dots side by side in Wood’s undulated line going in diffe-
rent directions does, in fact, evoke the idea of human movements. The swedish
psychologist Gunnar Johansson demonstrated that spectators shown only ten


 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
55

MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 442.

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                                     Francesca Scotto Lavina


light dots moving against a dark background on a videotape were immediately
able to identify the movement of the dots as those of a human being.56 In Wood’s
progressively composed animated lines we can (mentally) visualize the strolling
motion of a person, and we can associate human steps with flight in his sculptu-
res. The overlapping lines in Wood’s images are indirect evidence of the tracks
of human body in movement, and are, therefore, time-images, which establish a
direct relation to any-instants-whatever.
   The animated lines depicted in Wood’s graphs also represent visual motifs, as
‘zig zag’ or the silhouette of a snake, like the one in the above-mentioned Lao-
coön group, considered by Warburg to be a pure manifestation of energy. In fact,
Warburg claimed that the most representative and universal form of movement
is the serpentine form. Nevertheless, the aesthetic value of lines was recognized
by artists such as Paolo Uccello during the Renaissance, and later emphasized by
Cezanne, cubists and abstract painters, like Mondrian or Malevich, and kinetic
artists, such as Calder.57
   Wood also created GPS sculptures, representing the participants’ bodily
movements,58 which give rise to an ancestral image resembling Marey’s chrono-
photographic sequences and sculptures, such as the Flight of seagulls (Marey,
1886)59 and reminding us of Calder’s kinetic sculptures, e.g. Mobiles, which have
the appearance of dots blown in different directions by the wind.60
   As in Choros, the process of forming a unitary perception triggers an agreeable
emotional state in the spectator. The process involves consciousness and cogni-
tion and further enhances the aesthetic experience.61

   Warburg and other contemporary art historians, such as David Freedberg,
and neuroscientists like Zeki, argued that the sense of movement is crucial to the
spectator’s emotional response.
   In the 1880s, chronophotography was introduced as an experimental techni-
que and produced engrams-like images representing the dynamis of movement
in still image sequences consistent with Ėjzenštejn’s idea of the organic and of
pathos. Pathos lies in an appreciation of the details of expressive gesture, re-
vealed by both the paradox of the immobility of the still images of movement
and by the chronophotographic aesthetics of dissection. Choros’s visual echo ex-

56
   Gunnar Johansson, ‘Visual Perception of Biological Motion and a Model for its Analysis’,
Perception & Psychophysics, 14.2, (1973), 201–11, quoted in Giese and Poggio.
57
   Neuroscience has confirmed that the line is essential to the brain’s perception of movement, be-
cause its view overstimulates the area of the brain that responds to fast movements. Semir Zeki, In-
ner Vision: an Exploration of Art and the Brain (London, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
58
    Animated graphs and images of White Horse Hill project are available at: <http://www.
gpsdrawing.com/gallery/maps/whh-model.htm> [accessed 20 December 2015].
59
    Marey’s motion studies and images of seagulls’ flight are available at <http://yin.arts.uci.
edu/~studio/resources/175/marey.html> [accessed 20 December 2015].
60
   Images of Calder are available at <http://www.calder.org/work/by-category/household-object>
[accessed 20 December 2015].
61
   Neuroaesthetic trials support this assumption. See Zeki and Ramachandran.

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       Still-moving Engrams: The Ecstasy of Bodily Gestures in Chronophotography


periment improves the visual potential of chronophotography: the overlapping
gestures reveal that the obraznost effected by natural movement is etched and
deeply imprinted in the brain, thus creating high (e)motional potential. Wood’s
mise en ligne of gestures leads us to awareness that we, as humans, can experien-
ce motion through an imitative process, which, as Ėjzenštejn claimed, lies at the
basis of the ecstatic flow.
   Finally, not only do the aforementioned artistic forms extend the limits of
human perception, as in Structural Film, and allow gestural language to prevail,
but the digital effects also strengthen the dynamis of the engram-like images in
a more organic way when they are set in motion by giving a false impression
of continuity. Cinema works in this way, as does the brain, when it forms a uni-
tary perception of the image of movement. The analysis of the use of digital
effects in these forms offers a deeper insight into how the ‘movement-image’ can
represent gesture to improve its dynamic characteristics and emotional power.




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