Smooth movement/Frenetic motion/flicker – Vice Versa Et Cetera

This article reviews a variety of compelling motion effects in a series of canonical avant-garde films and experimental videos, with a view to contextualizing the author’s own recent digital video work Vice Versa Et Cetera. It begins with the smooth but perplexing movement in two key examples of video art drawn from the pioneering work of Woody Vasulka, in the 1970s, and David Larcher’s high-end video works of the late 1990s. These videos are contrasted with an account of the ‘flicker effect’ in films that span avant-garde films of the 1920s through to Paul Sharits’ films of the 1960s, in which striking optical/stroboscopic phenomena dominate movement. The third point of reference concerns the perception of ‘frenetic motion’ in a range of works where the illusion of movement seems to resolve itself, or break through, despite the radical discontinuity between frames. The discussion of these films and videos, which define three different models of time-based imaging, provides grounds for the account and description of the perceptual phenomena in the author’s own work.