{"id":5649,"title":"Motion Perception in Movies and Painting: Towards a New Kinetic Art","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/motion-perception-movies-and-painting-towards-new-kinetic-art","version":"2e60f0df37ee07018d300621e8bb5ecc4d0dc290a5bfb9ebbe6053f0010e727d","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4440976+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Michael Betancourt"}],"authorKeys":["Betancourt, Michael"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Ctheory","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"http://www.ctheory.net/","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"October 23, 2002","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1155","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Motion Perception in Movies and Painting: Towards a New Kinetic Art.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/motion-perception-movies-and-painting-towards-new-kinetic-art.","publication":"Michael Betancourt. Motion Perception in Movies and Painting: Towards a New Kinetic Art. Ctheory. http://www.ctheory.net/. October 23, 2002.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5649.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1155","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":21251},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":702}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks argue in \u0022Movies in the Mind\u0027s Eye\u0022 that the apparent movement of motion pictures should be understood as a mental process described by cognitive theory and gestalt psychology. This argument is a reconfiguration of the traditional, physiological model that makes the motion an effect of ocular physiology. In place of this model, they propose that the movement we see when watching a movie -- whether in the form of a film or a video tape -- is more than simply the illusion of motion: it is perceptually as real as any other visual motion we perceive. The difference between this motion and other motion resides in its empirical status independent of observation, not in our subjective perception. Their transformation of the conceptualization of \u0022motion pictures\u0022 has implications for our understanding of motion in painting. So-called \u0022painterly motion\u0022 is historically one of the most important effects employed in old master paintings (and developed in the Modernist period by Cubism and some of its derivatives). Hochberg and Brooks\u0027 theory about a cognitive basis for film motion is applicable to any form of virtual movement. It provides an account of why we can see \u0022painterly motion.\u0022 This theory implies a connection between painterly motion and movies that has implications for understanding \u0022avant-garde\u0022 film and video. It also suggests a type of kinetic art heretofore unknown. Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks\u0027 discussion of Gestalt theory and the perception of motion in movies begins with a simple observation about the nature of the medium. Their description is the empirical stillness at the foundation of the virtual motion created by movies. This motion is fundamentally different (when considered as a still image) from that of the old master painting. However, it is not the means-to-motion but the cognitive process of human interpretation that Hochberg and Brooks believe is the important factor: A continuous motion in the world is, of course, captured by successive displayed images on film (or their video equivalent). For most events, these displacements are small, and within the range of the low-level sensory receptors of the visual system; these respond identically to the visual displacements on the screen and to the differences provided from one moment to the next by smooth physical motion in the world. [1] Gestalt theory claims human perception treats all visual phenomena encountered in the same way. Those visual displacements which we see in film are interpreted without distinguishing their empirical causes. This approach to movies emphasizes the linkages between motion pictures and optical illusions: both are a result of our perceptions incorrectly interpreting their sense-data. The \u0022principle\u0022 created by Gestalt psychologist Helmholtz to describe this interpretative tendency is the likelihood principle. It is a description that implies a perceptual commonality at the heart of all perceptual interpretations: we perceive that which would in our normal life most likely have produced the effective stimulation we have received. [2] Unlike motion in the real world which is physically emmanent, the motion of movies and in the technique of painterly motion is entirely a result of a human perception. The motion we see does not exist except within our perception. The \u0027likelihood principle\u0027 is an explanation of how we interpret. What we see results from an internal comparison between immediate sense experience and prior knowledge. We see motion in both these cases because we understand what we see in terms of encounters with real, empirically emmanent motion. Our perceptual understanding of virtual motion derives from encounters with reality, thus Hochberg and Brooks argue, it is real in perceptual terms. The motion we see exists in the same way as any other visible motion. This essay will develop the connection between painterly motion and perception before examining some implications of this relationship. The overlap between the motion of movies and the motion of painting is necessary for this theory to be logically consistent. [image: Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion] Painterly motion as a technical phenomenon requires some explanation. The painted image has possibilities that photography lacks. The photograph is static, as Eadweard Muybridge\u0027s photographic motion studies demonstrate by isolating motion into a series of stills where we can see the component adjustments of a figure. Each person or an animal shows us the increments of motion as units in themselves. These pictures \u0022arrest\u0022 the figure imaged, presenting a single moment from all possible moments of the subject in motion. The motion, however, is absent, in the form of possible not-yet-visible action. Taken as a whole, they present us with an idea of the motion; when shown quickly and in proper sequence, the motion becomes apparent rather than potential. The relationship between the motion of movies and the likelihood principle is obvious: the movement created by showing the sequence of photographs imitates our normal experience of the world well enough that we interpret it in the same fashion as our normal experience. This is \u0022photographic motion.\u0022 [image: Rubens, Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat] By contrast, \u0022painterly motion,\u0022 which is a technical effect common to \u0022old master\u0022 paintings of the European painterly tradition, presents a single image that incorporates some of the same characteristics as the entire series of photographs employed in \u0022photographic motion.\u0022 The movement we see in Peter Paul Rubens\u0027 portrait of his wife wearing a fur wrap is a example of this effect made famous by critic John Berger\u0027s commentary in Ways of Seeing: [Helene Fourment\u0027s] appearance has been literally recast by the painter\u0027s subjectivity. Beneath the fur that she holds across herself, the upper part of her body and her legs can never meet. There is a displacement sideways of about nine inches: her thighs, in order to join onto her are at least nine inches too far to the left. [3] Displacement causes Helene to appear (depending on the interpretation) to be turning away from or towards the viewer. The apparent motion of her upper body is caused by a specific distortion: as the eye moves across this image the human mind fits the different positions of her body together to form a coherent whole. This process creates the impression she is moving. Her motion is caused by the series of different views showing distinct physical positions. Because we see her from a single vantage-point our minds combine them to form a single body. This effect is identified by Helmholtz as the likelihood principle. In order for us, as viewers, to make sense of the image as a whole body -- a \u0022good gestalt\u0022 -- we interpret Helene\u0027s displacements and distortion as motion. This appearance of motion is an intentional construction, created by a specific technical process that Rubens (and other old masters) learned. It is not a mistake. The \u0022stillness\u0022 which this painting presents is a lively one, completely different from the static, arrested movement of the photograph. This is a complex technical development that evolves from life-drawing and work from living models. It must be planned and built-in to the picture and could not happen accidentally or unconsciously. Yet, Berger makes the assumption that this effect was not intentional: Rubens probably did not plan this: the spectator may not consciously notice it. [4] To assume that a master painter with several decades of experience painting the human form is unaware of a discrepancy in a painting of his wife is difficult to believe. The reason that many viewers may not consciously notice it is they are not supposed to notice it. The fur wrap which covers her body also hides the displacement from immediate observation. Her movement and what it means is the focus of the painting: Helene, teasingly, turns towards and away from the viewer; the possible revelation of her whole body is the subject of the painting. The displacement is what produces the force of the movement, a dynamism that Berger notes [5] even as he denies the artist\u0027s knowledge of what, how, and why Rubens may have produced this image. To deny the intentionally of this movement is to deny the humanity of the artist, his interest in the subject of his painting, and the relationship that picture proposes for the viewer. It dehumanizes and formalizes what is not a formalist painting. Berger\u0027s assumption also reduces the importance of Rubens\u0027 training and the European tradition to mere accident. It repeats the popular assumption that artists are unintellectual actors who perform and produce in an unconscious manner. Critics are more than simply the explicators of art in this formulation. They are the conscious observers of those things of which the artist is unaware. This case is an ironic situation because Berger is unaware or ignores his knowledge of the process involved in producing a painting of this type: the number of studies, drawings and the amount of work required to make the painting itself. Nothing in such a painting should be regarded as accidental or unplanned. Her movement is a technical effect that must remain technically invisible. It is the difference between a painting of Rubens\u0027 period and a Modernist painting where the technical devices and effects tend to be readily apparent. Viewers and critics shouldn\u0027t notice how the effects are produced in art of this type. To do so breaks the illusion that the painting\u0027s meaning depends upon. The appearance of motion within this image is a result of the viewer interpreting the different positions of Helene\u0027s body to be markers of movement through time. This perception follows from the likelihood principle. The movements are interpreted from \u0022signs\u0022 she has moved slightly while the spectator was looking. This is what makes painting active in a way that never \u0022happens\u0022 in (normal) photography. The different and incompatible body positions are treated as motion and appear to be movement because our interpretations work to maintain a coherent gestalt. Art historian and gestalt psychologist Rudolph Arnheim explains this effect in greater detail: Happenings enter experience only when the passing of clock time is accompanied by the perception of change. Change presupposes that the differential of clock time encompasses more than one location in space. [6] Arnheim suggests that our normal perceptions present things to us as \u0022events\u0022\uFF97actions, movement\uFF97only when what we are looking at involves changes over time. Otherwise, we believe what we see is a static reverie. Photographs \u0022arrest\u0022 motion in a single consistent and complete \u0022frame.\u0022 This is why photographs are completely (and fundamentally) different than our perceptions. Arnheim\u0027s observation is not simply a commonplace: it states that our perceptions have developed to involve our memory as part of the perceptual process. The likelihood principle suggests we understand the contorted (in fact, distorted) bodies of \u0022classical\u0022 realist paintings as bodies in limited motion. A more contemporary version of painterly motion is the work of Francis Bacon. Here the distortions of painterly motion are taken to an extreme and revealed to the spectator in a distinctly Modernist fashion. These paintings explicitly develop the dislocated bodies and the fragmentation of Cubism. The simplification of space in Three Studies of Lucien Freud, (1969) is a necessary and typical element of all his images. With a more complex elaborated environment, the bodies would become more specifically disfigured rather than contorted by painterly motion being stretched towards its limit. [image: Francis Bacon Three Studies of Lucien Freud, 1969] [permission to reproduce granted by the Estate of Francis Bacon] These three panels all depict the same figure; Lucien, sitting on a stool in an undefined yellow room. In each panel he is crossin","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":21251,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}