An excerpt from a longer paper:

Research in Experimental Cinema

The most formative development in the evolution of my research occurred in the mid 1970‟s

when I first began to think deeply about the mechanisms and technology of motion pictures. My

attention was particularly drawn to the movie projector and the nature of intermittent projection.

The so-called „illusion of motion‟ in cinema is generated out of a mechanical process in which

individual frames (still pictures) are pulled into the projector gate and held for 1/48th of a second

while the beam of projector light passes through them out on to the screen. A rotating shutter then

passes in front of the light, blocking the light for another 1/48th of a second. It is during this brief

moment of darkness that the frame in the gate can be pulled out and the next frame pulled in

without the audience seeing the change. This is precisely where the “magic of cinema” pulls its

machine-based sleight of hand. The aspect of this sequence that suddenly seemed ripe with

implications for me was the realization that the duration of the dark moment was of equal

duration to the time the screen was illuminated. This meant that a viewer watching a one-hour

movie was actually sitting in total darkness for half an hour. The question that seized my interest

then and has preoccupied me ever since was, what is happening in the viewer‟s mind during the

dark half of the movie?

Pursuing this question led me into a study of visual perception and on to the more general

question of how the brain constructs our moment-to-moment visual experience of the world,

whether those experiences be motion picture images bouncing off of silver screens or the more

fundamental ability to construct a three-dimensional visual world out of the two-dimensional,

upside down images that form on the retinas of the eyes. How are we able to coordinate our eyes

and hands to be able to tie our shoes in the morning or drive our cars at high speeds amidst packs

of other fast-moving cars? These investigations into perception and neuroscience led me to the

general notion that cinema, as a technology, modeled in a material and accessible form, many of

the most basic brain processes that underlie conscious experience. My interest in the ontology of

cinema was not just a curiosity as to how the movies worked. What really interested me was how

this technology might be harnessed to purposes other than realism or naturalism. I had a strong

intuition that streams of individual images passing through movie projectors could do things other

than recreate the appearance of some activity that occurred in front of a movie camera lens at

some other time and some other place.

Beginning in the mid-seventies, I began making short, silent 16 mm films that explored

arrangements of images along the film strip that were not based on the continuity laid down by

movie cameras. These films were fast moving works that attempted to work with the projector‟s

inherent “flicker” to fuse small numbers of individual frames into continuously evolving motion

pictures. My primary interest in all these films was to create perceptually ambiguous visual

experiences that would force the conscious mind and the pre-conscious mind (where perceptual

“decision making” occurs at speeds faster than thought) to move towards each other. This was not

to be a cinema of ideas but rather one of direct experiences. This interest in the perceptual and

optical possibilities of cinema has remained consistent throughout my filmmaking career.