From the graphic methods to the cinematics as a means of analysing movement on film

• Grant number: 10/20884-2
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: April 01, 2011
• End date: March 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Cristian da Silva Borges
• Grantee: Cristian da Silva Borges
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project focuses on a study of movement in film - its function, its sense, its rate of recurrence, its variations etc. -, with the aim of identifying some types of movement, in relation to certain parameters of what I call Cinematics or Science of the Ephemeral. For such a study, I took inspiration on Paul Valéry's writings on Aesthetics, and more precisely on the crossover between his ideas concerning the Poietics (the 'Science of the Beauty') and the Aesthesics (the 'Science of the Senses').Eadweard Muybridge's and Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotographies, as part of their extensive research on 'graphic methods' for recording movement (originated as far as in the eighteenth-century) and on the movement of fluids (in particular, Marey's smoke machine) - will be extremely useful for the conception and application of Cinematics as a means of exploring and analysing movements generated by a sort of 'fleeting cinema'. By the end of that stage, I intend to approach an unconventional way of analysing films (or at least a kind of film), not through its story, but rather through the comprehension of its construction, in favour of an 'alternative narrative', pointed by the bodies and forms in motion.It is the natural sequence of a process launched in 2008, as a post-doctoral research financed by FAPESP, under the supervision of Prof. Ismail Xavier, at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo. (AU)