We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2021
Abstract
A common outcome of acrobatics, and a motif often combined with it, is the fall. The chapter ‘Fall. Descent to equilibrium’ discusses the recurrence of the motif of the falling human body in contemporary cinema, taking as a starting point Oliver Pietsch's found footage film Maybe Not. Relying on Torben Grodal's application of the notions of telic and paratelic to the film experience, referring to the use of cinema as metaphor for the mind proposed by Antonio Damasio, and interpreting several experiments on the perception of movement in film sequences whose temporality is manipulated, this chapter describes the modality through which cinema ‘regulates’ the fall by adopting a homeostatic process that reduces its traumatic character and, at the same time, enhances its expressive effectiveness.
Keywords: Falling, Homeostatic equilibrium, Slow motion, Telic/Paratelic, Maybe Not
Our hopeless ambition to find the physiological equivalents of the items of consciousness.
—Rudolf Arnheim, Parables of Sunlight, 1989 (335)Maybe not
Maybe Not, a found footage video by German artist Oliver Pietsch (2005), opens with the final sequence of Takashi Miike's Graveyard of Honor (2002), a remake of Kinji Fukasaku's Jingi no hakaba (1975). After a sort of meditative dance atop a tower, the protagonist throws himself into the void. At this point a chain of cinematic falls (extracted from Western and, in part, Asian cinema) starts: the nightmare of Scottie and Madeleine/Judy's falls in Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958), Neo's first attempts to move in the world of The Matrix (L. & L. Wachowski 1999), the riding of the bomb in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick 1964), Peter Parker’s training as a superhero in Spider-Man (Raimi 2002), the dramatic suicide in Germany, Year Zero (Rossellini 1948) and other falls extracted from Oldboy (Chan-wook 2003), Lethal Weapon (Donner 1987), Strange Days (Bigelow 1995), and others.
Formally, Pietsch's video consists of a juxtaposition of several variations on the same motif: the fall of a human body. Each fragment is the link of a chain perceived as unitary; although varying in direction within the frame, speed (however, slow motion unites almost all the fragments), format (for each the original is preserved), photography (black & white or colour), and despite being performed by different characters, the fall is a unique flow of movement gestaltically perceived as continuous.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
