The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement by Jordan Schonig

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement by Jordan Schonig Philippe Bédard (bio) The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement by Jordan Schonig. Oxford University Press. 2021. 264 pages. $125.00 hardcover; $35.00 paper; also available in e-book. The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, a first book by Jordan Schonig, is a unique and deeply engaging foray into some of cinema's numerous and often overlooked motion forms. By studying six different forms of cinematic motion, the book also, and importantly, presents a method for critically engaging with the movements in and of cinema. Significantly, Schonig proposes what we could call an alternative phenomenology of cinematographic movement, a way to "re-examine an aspect of cinema so fundamental that it rarely garners sustained theoretical attention."1 Throughout six chapters and a conclusion, Schonig consistently and convincingly highlights the fundamental strangeness of movement when it is imaged—that is, when it is framed (temporally and spatially) and made available for reviewing. Each chapter deals with a different kind of motion form, from the "wind in the trees" of early cinema to unusual camera movements to the novel effects of compression glitches. None of Schonig's examples are strictly limited to any particular period in film history, as he prioritizes tracing links between recognizable phenomena, regardless of their context or, for the most part, of their function within narrative films. [End Page 196] As Schonig illustrates in The Shape of Motion, even the unpredictable movement of fire, water, and smoke and the often overlooked subtleties of human movement can be "pinned down and pictured on film."2 This makes such phenomena available for aesthetic judgment, but it also transforms them. A persistent assumption throughout the book is that the simple fact of capturing and representing motion on-screen creates the conditions for an alternative engagement with movements we might encounter in our regular lives but which we might not be capable of witnessing. This stems from the fact that cinema allows us all to see the same images "through the same set of eyes."3 Although Schonig does not make the connection to Vivian Sobchack's description of the cinema's unique duality as "an act of seeing that makes itself seen," his account of our ability to see the seeing of movement through the cinema reaches the same conclusion.4 Put differently, cinema offers us a perception of movement once removed; already bracketed from our habitual modes of perception, cinema makes it possible for us to attend to movement phenomenologically. Chapter 1 illustrates this perfectly, as it deals with the "contingent motion" of smoke, water, and the wind in trees, both in early cinematographic experiments and in more recent computer-animated films with their ever more realistic particle effects.5 To explain what led audiences of early cinema and viewers of contemporary digital animation to enjoy the contingency of these natural phenomena, Schonig insists that these movements are not merely unplanned but unplannable. While Immanuel Kant may have judged these "formless" phenomena incompatible with judgments of beauty, Schonig insists on cinema's innate ability to give them form and thus make them available for aesthetic evaluation.6 Hence, whether we consider the wind's interaction with the leaves in the background of the Lumières' Repas de bébé (Baby's Dinner, 1895) or the elaborate particle effects of contemporary computer-generated imagery (CGI), the fundamental strangeness of cinematic motion is already felt in the fact that the image "frames" a moment and a movement that can therefore be reviewed. In this, cinema offers the capacity to reveal the intricacies of the movements we habitually perceive but to which we rarely pay attention. The second chapter's focus on cinema's revelation of the countless movements contained within the simplest "habitual gestures" serves as a continuation of Schonig's interest in the revelatory effect of cinema's imaging of movement.7 Here, the author turns his attention to the body and face of actors as yet another site for witnessing contingent motion.8 Schonig attentively [End Page 197] describes the emergence of the unexpected in the...