Movement, Imagination, and Cinema
Extract From ‘How do moving images in the form of contemporary feminist films give us access to feminist imaginaries? An exploration of the ways in which images and movement ignite desire for imagination and expand possibilities’ - MA London Contemporary Dance School, 2021
I talk about movement as it is through motion that we experience knowledge in our body. I talk about movement because it is when I am dancing that I fully recognise my self in my body, and my body as myself in motion.
Initially, this research was an exploration of both dance and film as carriers of new possibilities for audiences. However, I understood that, apart from being a vast territory of inquiry, dance was not another subject of my look, but rather the lens that I mostly use to look: dance is my practice and what informs my own way of looking.
By saying that we understand films through our bodies, or dance through empathetic experience, we can not detach it from a sense of motion: bodies grow, develop, interact, feel, create, relate, and make sense through, always in movement.
The connection I sensed between dance and film was their similar engagement in successive actions or images that I could only comprehend as sustained and developed relations. In a way, I understood film not only as presenting dancing bodies, but as a moving and dancing body in itself. In her book Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (1986), dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster, recalls Deborah Hay’s work: ’[in which] the dancer is fully involved in one movement and then immediately engages in the next. The piece acquires interest and meaning because of the dancers’ sustained involvement in each successive activity, as though the dance were about the activity of performing movements’ (1986, p. 13). In film, something similar happens as one image is rarely fully still, but rather it moves onto the next one as it transitions instinctively. The spectator is therefore not in front of images, but in front of movement: spaces, characters and time moving, in a process that resembles dance in its dissolution, as Foster describes it: ’The dancer as a performing subject dissolves as a dance progresses, and the dancer seems to become the very moments being performed’ (1986, p. 13).
The movement in dance and film, is read by the spectator only in its connection and relation, rather than as disconnected parts. The theories about the empathetic experience of dance and choreography expand from the notion that “empathy” ‘register[s] a changing sense of physicality that, in turn, influence how one felt another’s feelings’ (Foster, 2011, p. 36). In this definition, one senses the possibility to feel (the other’s feelings) only through the experience of becoming (through) the other’s movements. This means that, beyond the possibility to relate to the other’s internal state, is the possibility of relation with the body and motion of the other, and understand from there, the other’s way of existing in and relating to the world. As much of a complex of experience as it may seem, Foster describes empathy:
‘Through an act of the imagination, but with the help of kinesthetic sensation (...) [and] by sensing the structure of the object and allowing oneself to project into and experience that structure, one would inevitably assume a mental state that was inspired by its composition. In objects or bodies in motion, this composition would include an apprehension of their gravity and momentum and the relation among their parts if differently in motion’ (2011, p. 200).
Beyond embodiment theories that focus on the physical experience of film, is the perception of movement which allows an empathetic understanding of collectivity, relationality, and of existing in the middle of others.
In relation to film, I now bring my experience of watching the film If It Were Love (Chiha, 2020) to explain how I can only understand these ways of being and relating to each other as derived from movement. I empathetically feel and build a relational knowledge as the characters move. The film looks through the stage images and inside the practice of the dance piece Crowd (2017) by Gisèle Vienne. We see the performers transition between one way of relating to themselves and their partners, into another one that disrupts bodily and temporal relations. The bodies behave differently and engage differently in time. As audience I wonder: how do we perceive that change of movement? How do we start engaging in a different way as they also engage differently? Do we connect to the music with our own bodies, or do we connect to the environment through their bodies? ‘Don’t speed up, just enjoy’ (Vienne cited in Chiha, 2020, 9:00min). I start seeing and feeling myself contracting, twitching my body, breathing at their rhythm, and gradually loosing my gaze to only feel connected to the motion in my own body. I start existing in between the mud and the lights, “effortless”.
The caresses, the looks, the touch and the proximity are all defined in the moment, and not preceding anything else. This film is the exploration of relationships that are never static, never a still image or the shadow of a still posture. As a consequence, the audience can only exist and experience in (between) the movement: when I’m on the edge of my seat reaching my body for the moments when two or more parts encounter - bodies, energies, eyes. It is a party in which everything happens in relation to and in response to something else, and which makes me think that only through these deep sensitive experiences of motion, an imaginary becomes available not only in our (static) minds but especially in our moving bodies. As I find myself losing my glance, and moving like them in slow motion, I become one of them, I am allowed and invited into that space.
The two films - If It Were Love and Portrait of a Lady on Fire - help us understand that cinema is an experience of movement, of motion, and of interaction and relation between the parts. It is through this inherent movement that we comprehend - bodily - that all the subjects on the screen exist collectively and in relation to each other. As spectators, we become part of that collectivity and therefore we can relate and introduce our own movement, bodies, and our own physical experience, to the world in which we are immersed. All of these phenomena correspond to a transformative experience of cinema, which is not limited to our present engagement with a film, but that transcends and permeates our imagination, making more conditions possible to imagine and to perceive through the body. By these powerful experiences of cinema, we arrive at visual representations of new futures, new imaginaries, also in motion - and we move towards them.
References included in this extract:
Chiha, P. (dir.) (2020). If It Were Love [Film]. Paris: Aurora Films.
Foster, S. L. (1986) Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkley; London: University of California Press.
Foster, S. L. (2011). Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London; New York: Routledge.
Vienne, G. (2017). Crowd [Sadler’s Wells, London. 9 October 2019].
Movement, Imagination, and Cinema
Extract From ‘How do moving images in the form of contemporary feminist films give us access to feminist imaginaries? An exploration of the ways in which images and movement ignite desire for imagination and expand possibilities’ - MA London Contemporary Dance School, 2021
I talk about movement as it is through motion that we experience knowledge in our body. I talk about movement because it is when I am dancing that I fully recognise my self in my body, and my body as myself in motion.
Initially, this research was an exploration of both dance and film as carriers of new possibilities for audiences. However, I understood that, apart from being a vast territory of inquiry, dance was not another subject of my look, but rather the lens that I mostly use to look: dance is my practice and what informs my own way of looking.
By saying that we understand films through our bodies, or dance through empathetic experience, we can not detach it from a sense of motion: bodies grow, develop, interact, feel, create, relate, and make sense through, always in movement.
The connection I sensed between dance and film was their similar engagement in successive actions or images that I could only comprehend as sustained and developed relations. In a way, I understood film not only as presenting dancing bodies, but as a moving and dancing body in itself. In her book Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (1986), dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster, recalls Deborah Hay’s work: ’[in which] the dancer is fully involved in one movement and then immediately engages in the next. The piece acquires interest and meaning because of the dancers’ sustained involvement in each successive activity, as though the dance were about the activity of performing movements’ (1986, p. 13). In film, something similar happens as one image is rarely fully still, but rather it moves onto the next one as it transitions instinctively. The spectator is therefore not in front of images, but in front of movement: spaces, characters and time moving, in a process that resembles dance in its dissolution, as Foster describes it: ’The dancer as a performing subject dissolves as a dance progresses, and the dancer seems to become the very moments being performed’ (1986, p. 13).
The movement in dance and film, is read by the spectator only in its connection and relation, rather than as disconnected parts. The theories about the empathetic experience of dance and choreography expand from the notion that “empathy” ‘register[s] a changing sense of physicality that, in turn, influence how one felt another’s feelings’ (Foster, 2011, p. 36). In this definition, one senses the possibility to feel (the other’s feelings) only through the experience of becoming (through) the other’s movements. This means that, beyond the possibility to relate to the other’s internal state, is the possibility of relation with the body and motion of the other, and understand from there, the other’s way of existing in and relating to the world. As much of a complex of experience as it may seem, Foster describes empathy:
‘Through an act of the imagination, but with the help of kinesthetic sensation (...) [and] by sensing the structure of the object and allowing oneself to project into and experience that structure, one would inevitably assume a mental state that was inspired by its composition. In objects or bodies in motion, this composition would include an apprehension of their gravity and momentum and the relation among their parts if differently in motion’ (2011, p. 200).
Beyond embodiment theories that focus on the physical experience of film, is the perception of movement which allows an empathetic understanding of collectivity, relationality, and of existing in the middle of others.
In relation to film, I now bring my experience of watching the film If It Were Love (Chiha, 2020) to explain how I can only understand these ways of being and relating to each other as derived from movement. I empathetically feel and build a relational knowledge as the characters move. The film looks through the stage images and inside the practice of the dance piece Crowd (2017) by Gisèle Vienne. We see the performers transition between one way of relating to themselves and their partners, into another one that disrupts bodily and temporal relations. The bodies behave differently and engage differently in time. As audience I wonder: how do we perceive that change of movement? How do we start engaging in a different way as they also engage differently? Do we connect to the music with our own bodies, or do we connect to the environment through their bodies? ‘Don’t speed up, just enjoy’ (Vienne cited in Chiha, 2020, 9:00min). I start seeing and feeling myself contracting, twitching my body, breathing at their rhythm, and gradually loosing my gaze to only feel connected to the motion in my own body. I start existing in between the mud and the lights, “effortless”.
The caresses, the looks, the touch and the proximity are all defined in the moment, and not preceding anything else. This film is the exploration of relationships that are never static, never a still image or the shadow of a still posture. As a consequence, the audience can only exist and experience in (between) the movement: when I’m on the edge of my seat reaching my body for the moments when two or more parts encounter - bodies, energies, eyes. It is a party in which everything happens in relation to and in response to something else, and which makes me think that only through these deep sensitive experiences of motion, an imaginary becomes available not only in our (static) minds but especially in our moving bodies. As I find myself losing my glance, and moving like them in slow motion, I become one of them, I am allowed and invited into that space.
The two films - If It Were Love and Portrait of a Lady on Fire - help us understand that cinema is an experience of movement, of motion, and of interaction and relation between the parts. It is through this inherent movement that we comprehend - bodily - that all the subjects on the screen exist collectively and in relation to each other. As spectators, we become part of that collectivity and therefore we can relate and introduce our own movement, bodies, and our own physical experience, to the world in which we are immersed. All of these phenomena correspond to a transformative experience of cinema, which is not limited to our present engagement with a film, but that transcends and permeates our imagination, making more conditions possible to imagine and to perceive through the body. By these powerful experiences of cinema, we arrive at visual representations of new futures, new imaginaries, also in motion - and we move towards them.
References included in this extract:
Chiha, P. (dir.) (2020). If It Were Love [Film]. Paris: Aurora Films.
Foster, S. L. (1986) Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkley; London: University of California Press.
Foster, S. L. (2011). Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London; New York: Routledge.
Vienne, G. (2017). Crowd [Sadler’s Wells, London. 9 October 2019].