Seeing Aspects of the Moving Camera: On the Twofoldness of the Mobile Frame

Abstract

Accounts of the perceptual experience of camera movement tend to extend a truism in film theory that the camera eye is analogous to the human eye. Whether argued from a position of perceptual psychology or phenomenology, such theories claim that when we see the movement of the camera, we experience an illusion of our own embodied movement through space. This article argues against the affinity between camera movement and human perception and for a phenomenology of camera movement that proceeds from the spectator’s ways of seeing aspects of the screen’s surface. Examining experimental films by Ken Jacobs and Michael Snow, this article argues that the phenomenological aspect-perception at work in camera movements is best understood in the terms of Richard Wollheim’s “twofoldness” theory of picture perception, according to which the aesthetic perception of a picture involves a simultaneous attention to its surface qualities as well as its depictive content.