Cinematic Motion by Hand

Within Cinema, animation always had an unclear relation with live-action recording since its very beginning. We learned – helped by ASIFA (International Animated Film Association) – that we should separate one from the other and we also realized that we (still) don’t have a general theory of cinema that embraces both. Yet, over the last years, animation and live-action footage became completely tangled in cinematic productions. Obviously, this means that each of them is just a technical strategy supported by its own specialists and as one became dominant, the other turned out to be marginal. But what if we could ascertain a specific ontology for animation within technology that would explain how its marginality is rooted to its essence at least in one of its forms? In this paper I will try to argue that, by overwhelming the cinematic technical standard workings with their hand, authors exposed its functional scheme to contingency, thus opening the production process to new unpredictable expressive and communicative possibilities. I will attempt to explain how this corresponds to a renewed way of comprehending technology by, simultaneously, revealing the human reality it contains and physiologically incorporating it. Special attention is given to authors such as Norman McLaren, Len Lye, and Pierre Hébert