Hi Pip: The perceptual experiments you describe don't seem to me to be necessary. We already have the moving image of cinema. What I have noticed, however, is that there is an attraction to the various lab studies. And this will be of particular interest for "experimental" animation.
One of the things I am a little impatient with is this continual observation that Delueze is somehow not saying anything about whatever we want to identify as this "phi phenomenon." It's as if the lab protests the writer from philosophy. All I have to do is open these first pages of Deleuze to see that his thinking begins with broader questions than some sort of film history. You write that "Deleuze rejects the notion that motion is an illusion created from stills [. . .]." The very reliance on illusion, as far as I can tell, has no relevance in what I understand of Deleuze. So, in a sense, I can agree. But this point doesn't shed any light on what Deleuze thinks. (I don't think A Thousand Plateaus is a reference.) No, all these details about tests with lights going on and off reminds me of Bergson, who is also reading that kind of research, or what we would today call cognitive science (only it's usually involving people who have suffered injury of some kind and can thus provide a case study without any ethical difficulty). Let's go to this Gary Beydler. I've never heard of him. But the description lends itself to what goes for "experiment" in film. And that would belong also to what we encounter in psychological research that subscribes to the same philosophical orientation. That orientation, if I'm not mistaken, is rejected by Deleuze. For one thing, it fails to recognize the conception of movement and time that we find in Bergson. But we're all pretty versed in these effects, and so (as I see it) we present these as the philosophy of relevance. Deleuze isn't easy. But he's damn interesting, and this is in part because he'll formulate all these notions of images to talk about changes over the history of narrative cinema (he's selective, and says this history doesn't include all the screen work we might be paying for). (And I signed on to open a thought about the avant-garde.) Bernie - - - - -
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