Bridges-Go-Round

Shirley Clarke's early experimental.... well, I'm not sure that it's right to call it a motion picture, but that's ok. One of the purposes of experiments is to give us a chance to think about the results, and Miss Clarke's collection of images, optically printed and moving about purely through the editor's art, makes me think "is this a movie? Motion picture? Example of cinema?" That's a good thing, to force me to examine how I think about things, to understand how I fit in the equation of my own aesthetic.

Eventually there is motion within the frame: clouds move, birds fly, cars whizz by after the first minute. There's even the motion of the camera as some of the images of the George Washington Bridge are taken from a moving car. Those, however, are incidental. The real point of this short film is to ask "Does the motion imposed by editing techniques render a series of images a motion picture?"

My first impression is that no, it does not, but it's a potentially useful technique to have in the film maker's grasp. But I'll have to think about that some more.