Abstract

CARDENAS MALDONADO, Juan David. Film Technique: A Modern Economy of Time, Body, and Soul. Palabra Clave [online]. 2019, vol.22, n.2, e2222. ISSN 0122-8285.  https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.2.2.

From its very grounds, cinematic expressions are conditioned by the set of a priori technical decisions taken even before any shooting could take place. Film technique allows the creation of images as much as it tends to prefigure possible experimentations and social appropriations. However, this repression has remained silenced because of the naturalization of the imitative, aesthetical and social function of film. It was only in the context of the modern comprehension of time, measured by exact and equal instants by the chronometric clock, that it was possible to invent a device that divided movement in precise and homogeneous instants to be reconstructed on the screen. Resonating with these researches on movement that permitted the development of film technique, new techniques of the body to calculate human perception and attention processes also appeared. Then, the body was not only an object of technical observation in terms of movement, but also in terms of mental activity. As much as the body was understood as a machine of movement, the soul was conceived as a measurable affective system. Finally, the ultimate strategy to make a priori technical presuppositions that remain invisible would be the automation and standardization of film devices. When technique is globally unified, the circle of naturalization is closed.

Keywords : Cinema; cinematographic technique; body; attention; time; modernity.

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