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The Moving Image

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The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures

Abstract

Films typically provide an experience that is very much like the experience of ordinary motion. It is for this reason that they are commonly known as moving pictures or, slightly more broadly, moving images. Our focus in this chapter is on making sense of that experience. We begin our chapter by exploring the centrality of the experience of movement (or apparent movement) to film. We turn then to various explanations of that experience. Perhaps film images are transparent and allow us to indirectly see the movement of the objects they depict. Or perhaps certain theories of depiction can make sense of the experience of motion in cinema. In the final section, we address a range of ontological issues raised by the question of cinematic movement. Is the motion of images real movement or merely illusory? What is a cinematic image?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an approach to cinematic images that we can’t hope to summarize here, see Gilles Deleuze’s heroic attempt to taxonomize the distinctively cinematic forms of movement in both space and time—that is, those forms of movement that cinema is uniquely or distinctively able to show: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986), and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, (London: Athlone Press, 1989).

  2. 2.

    Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xiii.

  3. 3.

    Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7–8.

  4. 4.

    Trevor Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (2006): 187.

  5. 5.

    Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema”, 195.

  6. 6.

    Jonathan Walley, “On Ponech on the Essence of Cinema”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 4 (2007): 408–12.

  7. 7.

    Trevor Ponech, “Cinema Again: A Reply to Walley”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 4 (2007): 412–16.

  8. 8.

    Arthur C. Danto, “Moving Pictures”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 1 (1979): 1–21; Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 63–6; Carroll, “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image”, in Philosophy of Film, ed. Cynthia Freeland and Thomas Wartenberg (New York: Routledge, 1995), 66–85; Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 58–9.

  9. 9.

    Danto, “Moving Pictures”, 5.

  10. 10.

    Carroll, “Towards an Ontology”, 73.

  11. 11.

    Such people might find more appealing Carroll’s idea that films are moving images because they “belong to the class of things for which creating the impression of movement is a technical possibility”. Carroll, the Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 59. For criticism, see Robert Yanal, “Defining the Moving Image: A Response to Noël Carroll”, Film Philosophy 12 (2008): 135–140.

  12. 12.

    James Shelley, “Motion Sickness” (unpublished manuscript, May 2017), Microsoft Word file.

  13. 13.

    Robert Hopkins, “Depiction”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009), 65.

  14. 14.

    Hopkins (personal correspondence) suggested this.

  15. 15.

    Kendall L. Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1984): 67–72.

  16. 16.

    Diarmuid Costello and Dawn M. Phillips, “Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography”, Philosophy Compass 4, no. 1 (2009): 6.

  17. 17.

    Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 91.

  18. 18.

    Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 62–3; Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 56–8; Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 2 (2004): 197–210; Currie, Image and Mind, 65–7.

  19. 19.

    Kendall L. Walton, “Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (1986): 805.

  20. 20.

    Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 97.

  21. 21.

    George Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Films (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  22. 22.

    Robert Hopkins, “What Do We See In Film?”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 2 (2008): 149–59.

  23. 23.

    Carroll, Theorizing The Moving Image, 63; Cohen and Meskin, “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs”, 203.

  24. 24.

    Cohen and Meskin, “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs”, 201.

  25. 25.

    For example, Catharine Abell, “Canny Resemblance”, Philosophical Review 118, no. 2 (2009): 183–223; John Hyman, “Depiction”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 71 (2012): 129–50.

  26. 26.

    For example, Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968); John Kulvicki, On Images: Their Structure and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  27. 27.

    Dominic Lopes, Understanding Pictures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Flint Schier, Deeper Into Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  28. 28.

    Richard Wollheim, “On Pictorial Representation”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 3 (1998): 217–26.

  29. 29.

    On experienced resemblance, see Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); On imagination and perception admixed, see Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 293–352.

  30. 30.

    The term “motion recognition” is typically applied to machine detection of motion.

  31. 31.

    Dominic McIver Lopes, “Pictorial Color: Aesthetics and Cognitive Science”, Philosophical Psychology 12, no. 4 (1999), 419–423.

  32. 32.

    For more on the issue, see Currie’s discussion of whether films represent time and motion by way of presentation of time and motion, or in some less direct manner, in Image and Mind, 96–102.

  33. 33.

    Currie cites several culprits who insouciantly assume the truth of illusionism (Image and Mind, 34).

  34. 34.

    Andrew Kania, “The Illusion of Realism in Film”, British Journal of Aesthetics 42, no. 3 (2002): 243–58.

  35. 35.

    Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 248–9.

  36. 36.

    Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 89–92.

  37. 37.

    Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 90.

  38. 38.

    Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 91.

  39. 39.

    Currie, Image and Mind, 34–42.

  40. 40.

    Currie, Image and Mind, 34–5.

  41. 41.

    Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 250.

  42. 42.

    Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 254.

  43. 43.

    Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 258, referring to Currie, Image and Mind, 47.

  44. 44.

    Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 254–5.

  45. 45.

    Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 255–6.

  46. 46.

    Christoph Hoerl, “Seeing Motion and Apparent Motion”, European Journal of Philosophy23, no. 3 (2015): 692–94.

  47. 47.

    Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 694.

  48. 48.

    Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 686–7.

  49. 49.

    Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 689–90.

  50. 50.

    Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 690. For a similar argument, see Trevor Ponech, “External Realism about Cinematic Motion”, British Journal of Aesthetics 46, no. 4 (2006): 349–68.

  51. 51.

    Currie, Image and Mind, 30.

  52. 52.

    Cf. Currie, Image and Mind, 35–6.

  53. 53.

    Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 65.

  54. 54.

    Currie, Image and Mind, 30–4. Gaut claims that Currie holds that cinematic images supervene on the light pattern on the screen, but this does not seem right. Currie’s supervenience claim is about the movement of the images. See Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 65, and Currie, Image and Mind, 40.

  55. 55.

    Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 682–5. Hoerl does not endorse this thesis.

  56. 56.

    Currie, Image and Mind, 36.

  57. 57.

    Shelley, “Motion Sickness”.

  58. 58.

    Currie, Image and Mind, 34.

  59. 59.

    Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), sec. 447.

  60. 60.

    John W. Carroll, “Instantaneous Motion”, Philosophical Studies 110, no. 1 (2002): 49–67; Shieva Kleinschmidt, “At It Again: Time-Travel and the At-At Account of Motion”, Erkenntnis 82, no.2 (2017): 185–98.

  61. 61.

    Graham Priest, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, expanded ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 180.

  62. 62.

    Chris Mortensen, “Motion Perception as Inconsistent”, Philosophical Psychology 26, no. 6 (2013): 913–24.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Nick Wiltsher

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Aaron Meskin

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Noël Carroll

  2. William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA

    Laura T. Di Summa

  3. Baton Rouge Community College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Shawn Loht

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Wiltsher, N., Meskin, A. (2019). The Moving Image. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_3

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