Perspectival Movement

This chapter examines the use of perspectival movement (or camera movement) in animation practice. In particular, it argues that the ambiguity of the out-of-field space that perspectival movement creates entails a suppression of another kind of ambiguity: the graphic ambiguity of marks on a surface. Thus, much of the history of animated space can be seen as a history of trade-offs between the possibilities of camera movement and those of graphic metamorphoses. However, two films—Norman McLaren’s Blinkity Blank (1955) and Caroline Leaf’s The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977)—manage to combine these possibilities, creating spaces that seem to transform themselves as the camera moves through them.