The question of movement in cinema

The question of movement in cinema refers to two related yet distinct aspects. 

There is first what we call the facticity of movement. It refers to cinema’s technological ability to record and project movement, to create images that do not merely represent movement but themselves move. This is the factual, contingent, and intractable given of the cinema. 

Yet, precisely because movement is something like a given, accomplished in a seemingly automatic way by cinema’s technological apparatus, it becomes a problem for the filmmakers. 

The ease with which movement is accomplished turns it into an object of intellectual and artistic unease. 

The question then becomes, what to do with movement; what shape to give it; how to think it? The movement might be a given, but how do we nevertheless produce it? 

We must therefore speak in cinema not only of facticity but also of the idea of movement—the fictional, necessary, and entirely constructible condition of cinema—which determines the nature and the style of a particular filmmaker or the possibilities and limits of this or that cinematic genre. The idea of movement refers to everything that is not given by cinema's facticity. It forms the transcendental condition of cinema.

The two aspects of movement are, of course, linked; even if a distinction between them should nevertheless be rigorously maintained. It is difficult to imagine that cinema would be able to think without assuming the facticity of its movement-images. But it is equally difficult to imagine how the facticity of movement would be at all that interesting or significant to us were it not motivated (made necessary) by the various ideas or fictions of movement as they are constructed in the works of great filmmakers. 

(As someone once said, “le travelling est une affaire de morale.”)