Rogers' 1'

Truth, lies, and meaning in slow motion images

In A. Shimamura (Ed) Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies. Oxford

University Press.

Sheena Rogers, PhD

Professor of Graduate Psychology

Chair, Institute for Visual Studies

James Madison University

MSC 7401

70 Alumnae Drive

Harrisonburg

VA 22807

Email rogerssj@jmu.edu

Phone 434 249 2244

Fax 540 568 4747

Rogers' 2'

!

? ?

Slow motion images in film and video are often thought to truthfully represent events in

the real world, hence they are used in action replays and courts of law as evidence. While

such films preserve information about what, who, where and how often, a close look at a

variety of film and video images and empirical work from the author’s laboratory

demonstrate that some properties of the physical world are transformed. These

transformations could be considered lies in some contexts but they can also be the basis

of powerful aesthetic experiences when used artfully in film. The author’s three level

framework of image meaning is used to organize possible psychological responses to

slow motion images.

Art

Awe

Chills

Event perception

Film

Perception

Rodney King

Slow motion

Truth

Video

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? : : : : ? :

A pretty girl with scarlet hair walks alone in a London crowd. A sweet, sad song plays. A

young man walks toward her, oblivious. They are in slow motion, bouncing softly as they

step, inevitably approaching. Their eyes meet and lock: A story is about to begin. A love

story of course – the music, the connection across a crowd, the slow motion and soft

focus all prepare us to expect a sweet, romantic drama of the kind we have seen many

times before. The film is Mike Nichols’ Closer (2004). The set up is a con. In the few

minutes of the opening scene Nichols’ has put us where he wants us – in a state of

innocent, dreamy expectation – ready to be hurled along the emotional roller coaster of

the movie. Closer is anything but the corny, sappy drama the opening scene portends and

the contrast is powerful.

A bride struggles to run through grass, vines snaking around her legs. She is light, almost

floating, and no match for the tough cords that bind her and prevent her escape. Her face

is panicked. The scene is in slow motion and thus we know that it is not the bride’s

reality we see. It is an image in her head and the scene is a depiction of her desperate

state of mind as she sinks into a terrible depression. (Melancholia, Lars von Trier, 2011.)

Slow motion is common in film and video and is used to produce a wide variety of

effects from the narrative to the aesthetic to the purely descriptive. The scenes I just

described are typical in film. Think of Andrew’s (Zach Braff) apathy and depression in

Garden State (Braff, 2004), depicted memorably through a dream scene in which he sits

motionless staring straight ahead, a passenger in a plane that shakes and rolls in slow

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motion. The soda cans on the flight attendant’s cart wobble and fall lightly. The cart and

the doomed plane itself are flexing and no longer rigid: The laws of physics are

apparently suspended. Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1988) uses slow motion

and varied shutter speeds to put us inside the soldiers’ shell-shocked heads and to create

the jittery look of period news footage. Arthur Penn’s fatal ambush scene in Bonnie and

Clyde (1967) manages to be romantic (and relatively bloodless) and at the same time

intense and exhilarating through rapid-fire cuts and alternating slow and normal motion.

A sweating and bloodied boxer hitting the ground hard (Raging Bull, 1980; Rocky, 1976)

is now a cliché but nonetheless beautiful: gleaming muscled flesh floats to the ground,

softens on impact, bounces painlessly. An updated version in contemporary action

movies - The Matrix, 1999; Hero, 2002 - emphasizes the beauty of human movement (or

arrows, bullets, and yards of floating silks) through slow motion moments that carry the

other worldliness we saw in Melancholia and Garden State even further. Earthly physical

laws no longer apply, the characters are magical, and the depicted world clearly is not our

own. The potential of slow motion images to be profoundly beautiful has long been

realized in film. The climactic explosion in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), its

cinematic awesomeness matched frame for frame by Pink Floyd’s thrill inducing

soundtrack, is arguably over the top but still bringing in crowds on YouTube.

? ? :'Normal speed film is shot at 24 frames per second (Hz) and then projected with two or

three repeats of each frame to produce a visually smooth and continuous 48 or 72 Hz (see

Shimamura, this volume, p. X). The best quality slow motion image requires many more

Rogers' 5'

frames per second to be shot which, when played back at the standard frame rate, slows

time and reveals hitherto unseen mysteries. While entertaining us, such images also serve

to educate. “By varying the speed of the camera (assuming the projector speed remains

constant) we can make … a tool that can be applied to time in the same ways that the

telescope and the microscope are applied to space, revealing natural phenomena that are

invisible to the naked eye.” (Monaco, 1981, p. 76.) This tool has revealed the

deformation of a golf ball hitting a steel plate at 150 mph (USGA); the biomechanics of a

race horse galloping (Discover Magazine) and even the perfect golf swing of Tiger

Woods (Nike). (URL’s to these and all cited videos are listed at the end of the chapter.) A

search on YouTube for slow motion clips will reveal many more examples, some

professionally produced and some by amateurs. “Droplet collisions at 5000fps” (by the

Slow Mo Guys) at playback is 200 times slower than normal, but many startling images

are shot at 1000 Hz or less, and most current domestic HD palm camcorders will record

at satisfyingly high frame rates and produce smooth slow motion images.

? : : : : ? :

“It doesn’t take many viewings of slow and fast motion made with primarily scientific

purposes in mind before it becomes obvious that the variable speed of the motion picture

camera reveals poetic truths as well as scientific ones” (Monaco, 1981, p. 77).

The contrast between my examples of slow motion in movies and slow motion in the

short clips found on YouTube is revealing. Hero and The Matrix use slow motion to

Rogers' 6'

create the feeling that the action takes place in other worlds, other realities. Garden State

and Melancholia attempt to infect us with their characters’ depressed mood state. Closer

opens with a (misleading) cue to a genre. What the film examples have in common is that

truth, in the scientific sense, is not a concern. We would never react to the legendary

scene in The Matrix where Neo (Keanu Reeves) dodges a bullet by saying “That could

not have happened”. Instead, we suspend disbelief and take note of the clue that we are

not in Kansas anymore (and conclude that Neo is indeed the Chosen One). Andrew’s

apathy and alienation (Garden State) and Justine’s clinical depression (Melancholia)

slow down the workings of their minds but the representation of this interior state in the

movie through slow motion images presents poetic truths not scientific ones. On the other

hand, the point of the scientific and educational slow motion images is the display of

truth – especially previously unknown truths. You think a golf ball is hard? Look how it

flattens like a pillow against the wall. And a pricked water balloon? Who knew the water

would hold its global form for a moment once the rubber walls are gone?

Truth in the context of this chapter will refer to the extent to which a slow motion film

captures reality and, by reality, I mean the specific real world events being recorded by a

film or video camera, even if these events are themselves part of a fictional narrative. I

consider that such truths are foundational to our more elaborated experience of a film. I

propose that there are three levels of meaning possible in our experience of film and other

moving images. First we must understand what is there and what event is unfolding (at a

very elementary level), then we can go on to make sense of the event with higher level

psychological processes involving thought, ideas and inferences, sometimes using

Rogers' 7'

knowledge drawn from outside the film itself, concerning the narrative, style and form,

socio-historical context, and so on. Ultimately, after we have achieved these two levels of

understanding and appreciation, our encounters with film (and other art forms) sometimes

generate additional meaning and insights that result in profoundly affecting aesthetic

experiences.

To distinguish these levels of meaning in film it is helpful to think of the foundational

level of viewers’ film experience (Level I), where the subject matter of this chapter

largely resides, as based on sensory and perceptual processes that do not require any

special experience with motion pictures. Filmmaking techniques such as continuity

editing and the careful deployment of the variable speed settings on a motion picture

camera are devices filmmakers use to create a sequence of moving images that direct our

attention and feed meaningful information about objects and events in the world of the

film to our perceptual systems (see Smith, in press, and the responses to his target article

in the same volume for more on attention, perception, and continuity editing). Once this

sensory foundation is laid, the filmmaker can proceed to help us build additional layers

rich in meaning, drawing on our experience of film and of the world, and on our ability to

think, to reflect and to evaluate (Level II). As human beings, our emotions are

inseparable from our perceptual and cognitive processes but emotions, too, have a

foundational level tied closely to basic sensory and bodily processes, and a higher level

that is more reflective and exploratory. A full appreciation of a film requires our

engagement at this second level where sensation, perception, knowledge, thoughts, ideas,

evaluations, and emotions come together to produce (hopefully) a memorable aesthetic

Rogers' 8'

experience. Occasionally, film viewers (and consumers of other art forms) report peak

aesthetic experiences that seem qualitatively different from our daily enjoyment of

movies. These experiences seem to indicate a third level of meaning is possible, and

indeed, some film and video artists actively pursue it in their work, as we will see later

(Level III). For now, we will focus on Level I meaning in our discussion of truth and lies

in slow motion images. (For more on attention, perception, and the levels of meaning

possible in our experience of motion pictures, see Rogers, in press.)

Moving images inherit, and perhaps enhance, the property of apparent truthfulness from

their still cousins: photographs. “Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear

about, but doubt, seems proven when we are shown a photograph of it… A photograph

passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but

there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what is in

the picture.” (Sontag, 1973, 1977, p. 5). Slow motion images, by giving us time to look,

by revealing brief details, appear to give us even more access to the truth than normal

moving images, and these in turn are potentially more truthful than still images as they

carry incrementally more information about objects and events. (See Rogers, 1995, 2000,

and 2007 for extended accounts of the information available in still and moving images,

stereoscopic images, and virtual reality).

When I ask students and colleagues to talk to me about slow motion images they

invariably claim that such images are more truthful than moving images at normal speed.

They bring up sports examples, particularly action replays, which are intended to show us

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“what happened”. Sports and news footage both have the authority of scientific slow

motion images. Their ability to depict the truth is taken for granted and we expect to trust

the evidence of our senses. Which horse’s nose crossed the line first? Was the ball over

the line? Did the player’s hand touch the ball? And sometimes, What was the player’s

intention? For a startling example of this last question, see the online video, “Football

blooper –slow motion-” for replays of the moment when one soccer player mistakes the

head of another for the ball. A head is, after all, about the right size and shape and in this

case it was on the ground about where the ball would have been. The slow motion image

allows us to see exactly WHO, touched exactly WHAT, WHERE, WHEN and HOW

OFTEN. We will see later that the question WHY? And, With how much force? And

other aspects of our understanding of the nature of the event are not entirely a matter of

inference and interpretation but are supported by rather basic perceptual processes.

? : : ? :

Amateur video of newsworthy incidents is now commonplace. Almost everyone carries a

cell phone and many cell phones are capable of video recording. When we see these

videos on the television news we believe we are seeing a record of the events as they

unfolded. It seems to us as viewers that the camera is an optical instrument separating us

from the depicted events in the same way our binoculars separate us from a bird in a tree.

The bird is really there, really singing, and we see it. A cop calmly sprays seated student

protesters with tear gas, and we see it, but through the lens of someone else’s cell phone

camera. The grieving father of a two-year old boy killed in an attack on his neighborhood

by Syrian government forces was really there, really weeping, and we see it. We see it

Rogers' 10'

with our own eyes and we reject the claim by Zouheir Jabbour, the Charge d’Affaires at

the Syrian Embassy in Washington DC, that the image is a lie. "In the time of

computers,” Jabbour said in an interview with Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things

Considered, “you can fabricate whatever you like and go to Al Jazeera and go to Al

Arabiya and you can see all that fabrication." He does not deny that someone filmed a

crying man holding his toddler. Jabbour wants us to treat the horrifying news images

coming out of Syria as I write as if they were fiction – with actors, pretend emotions,

props, special effects, and even directors, cinematographers and editors contributing to

the construction of a story. The realism of the photographic and video images is not in

question – the truthfulness of the story being told is.

Almost everyone believes that the camera itself doesn’t lie. Philosopher Kendall Walton

argues that a photographic image (still, video, or film) is transparent (Walton, 1984). He

means that photographic images have a special status compared to, “paintings, drawings,

and other “hand-made” pictures” (ibid, p. 246). While the photograph is not the same

thing as the thing depicted – this takes realism too far – Walton’s claim is that it is

possible to see the thing depicted with the aid of the photograph.

“Photography is an aid to vision also, and an especially versatile one. With the

assistance of the camera, we can see not only around corners and what is distant

or small; we can also see into the past. We see long deceased ancestors when we

look at dusty snapshots of them. … Photographs are transparent. We see the

world through them. I must warn against watering down this suggestion, against

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taking it to be a colorful, or exaggerated, or not quite literal way of making a

relatively mundane point. I am not saying that the person looking at the dusty

photographs has the impression of seeing his ancestors – in fact, he doesn’t have

the impression of seeing them “in the flesh”, with the unaided eye. I am not

saying that photography supplements vision by helping us to discover things we

can’t discover by seeing. … My claim is that we see, quite literally, our dead

relatives themselves when we look at photographs of them.” (Walton, 1984, p.

251-252.)

Walton’s transparency claim appears to provide a solid basis for our use of still and

moving photographic images to decide whether a ball is in or out, whether a soccer player

was offside, or fouled another player. It allows us to trust that scientific images of water

droplets colliding, golf balls flattening, or seeds germinating (in time lapse, or ‘fast

motion’ images) show us the unseen truth about these processes. Indeed, the transparency

claim encourages us to take our amateur street images beyond the court of public opinion

(and the news media) and in to a court of law, to use them as evidence of wrong-doing.

Objections to their use as truth-sayers seem to be restricted to arguments like Zouheir

Jabbour’s – that they could be fictional (faked, posed) or tampered with (Photo-shopped,

edited). It is hard to resist Walton’s claim that photographic images are transparent, that

the camera is a device to assist us in seeing what is really there, but I will propose here

that slow motion images provide a challenge to our intuitions about the inherent

truthfulness of photographic moving images.

Rogers' 12'

By ‘truthfulness’ I mean that the image can show us what really happened; that our

perception of the event shown in a moving image matches the reality of the event in all

relevant ways. In a slow motion image, of course, the speed of the event will be

misrepresented and viewers understand this and are aware of it if the frame rate is far

enough from normal. What they may not be aware of is that while slowing the image

maintains some aspects of the original event and simply allows us a better look, it also

changes some aspects of the event for us perceptually and these changes can result is a

change in the meaning of the event. Changes in meaning are exactly the effects that

filmmakers are interested in of course. If we think of the raw material of the filmmaker’s

art as the subjective experience of the viewer, and not the physical stuff of cameras, film,

pixels and so on, then frame rate, shutter speed, and continuity editing are the tools by

which our experience while watching the film is shaped (see Rogers, in press, for a

discussion of the idea of continuity editing and the filmmaker as cognitive scientist).

And, to be clear, if the filmmaker can readily shape our experience of events, then we

should begin to worry about the use of film and video in high stakes situations such as

courts of law, and we should especially worry about any decision by the defense or

prosecution to show such images in slow motion in the supposed interest of greater

veracity.

I would like to draw your attention to an interesting side effect of watching an event in

slow motion images. In the movie examples at the beginning of the chapter, I noted how

Alice and Dan in Closer (Natalie Portman and Jude Law) bounced softly as they walked.

The depressed bride Justine in Melancholia (Kirsten Dunst) appears light, almost

Rogers' 13'

floating. Soda cans fall lightly in the shuddering plane in Garden State. And we laugh

when the blue-shirted soccer player’s boot connects with the yellow-shirted player’s

head: His head is oddly light, the kick mysteriously gentle. The perceived weight of

depicted objects has changed – slow motion seems to make things appear lighter. Objects

drift rather than plummet to the floor. The force with which feet hit the ground, or with

which objects collide, seems reduced. The magical ‘other-worldly’ feeling produced by

slow motion battles in The Matrix, Hero, and other films in their respective genres is the

result of our awareness that Earthly laws of physics have apparently changed. In fact, one

YouTube commentator remarking on Neo’s dodging-bullets scene writes, “i like how

moving so fast also means you can lean backwards and wiggle your arms around....and

not fall over. coz f*** gravity (sic).” (“Bullet time” comment).

YouTube comments on extreme slow motion video of objects deforming on impact with

other objects (a very popular genre including lots of punched or slapped faces) show that

viewers often doubt the veracity of the images. See the comments on the online video

“Golf ball hitting steel super slow mo” for examples, most of which are not polite enough

to be quoted here but, paraphrasing, they strongly insist the images are faked. Some

videos loudly cite their scientific bona fides in order to counter our tendency to reject the

truth revealed in extreme slow motion images as lies and special effects (see the USGA

version of the golf ball event, and the Discovery.com show, “Time Warp”). Viewers

struggle to believe that a golf ball or a human face can undergo the wildly elastic

deformations under very forceful impacts that are visible in extreme slow motion images

(5000 Hz, 7000 Hz and up). It is not visible at normal speed, we have never seen it in real

Rogers' 14'

life, and hence it cannot be true. Even at relatively moderately increased frame rates, that

only slow events a little, we are often aware when watching the image that something is

not quite ‘right’, even when the slowing is not itself detectable. In the movies, such

scenes tempt film scholars to view them over and over, perform a shot-by-shot analysis,

and to study interviews with the filmmakers in order to figure them out. (The Omaha

beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan and the ambush scene in Bonnie and Clyde

are popular examples.) The occasional awareness that something is not quite right in a

movie does not mean that viewers always know exactly what is not right, nor does it

mean that they notice every single time reality has been altered. Most of the time viewers

see the version of reality the filmmaker has presented to them and accept it. The viewers’

perception of the event no longer matches the event itself: The slow motion film has lied

about something. Of course, if the filmmaker’s intent is to communicate a poetic truth

about the beauty of athletic movements, or about the mood state of a character, the loss of

scientific truth about the weight of objects, or about the force of an impact matters little.

There are situations where such truths matter, however, and they are important enough to

demand that we develop a better understanding of the possibility of truth and lies in the

meaning of slow motion images. The empirical methods common in research on visual

perception can help us with this enterprise, and are part of the new field of

Psychocinematics. In the following example we will see how the scientific method

illuminates questions previously tackled only by humanities scholars, bringing additional

insights to society’s understanding of how images work and when they can be trusted.

Rogers' 15'

: : ? ? : : ? : A

One night in March 1991, George Holliday pulled out his new home video camera to

shoot a drama unfolding in front of him in the dark. The California Highway Patrol had

pulled over a speeding motorist following a high-speed chase. The LAPD arrived to assist

in the arrest. The motorist was Tasered and beaten with steel batons. Other police officers

stood by and watched. Holliday’s footage of the beating quickly hit television news

channels around the world and Rodney King, a Black American motorist, became a

household name in a story of White American police brutality. (A link to a clip of the

video is provided in the list at the end of this chapter.) A year later, four police officers

were acquitted of using excess force in the arrest and Los Angeles burst into riot-fueled

flames. News reports of the case focused on issues of race, civil rights, brutality, and

police training (Gray, 2007). Soon after, academic circles were abuzz with concern about

a little discussed fact in the news media: The jury that acquitted the four cops had been

shown Holliday’s footage in slow motion with the sound removed. Cultural studies

scholars attempted to explain how manipulation of the footage allowed the defense to

build a narrative of their choosing, taking advantage of the jury’s human tendency to trust

that the camera showed them what really happened that night.

“In the courtroom … lawyers for the defense slowed down the video and removed

the sound. Frame by frame, they used the tape to illustrate a narrative in which the police

perceived King as a PCP-crazed threat who fully controlled his own beating; King, they

argued, could have ended the beating merely by lying still on the ground.” (Bernstein,

2000, p. 121.)

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Defense lawyers froze the images, wrote on them, and circled a raised foot.

Grossberg, Radway and Olson (1995) examined the effect of these interventions and of

slow motion in particular in distancing King’s erratic behavior from the Tasering event.

The film’s “slowed motion stretched the links between action and reaction until they

could be broken.” (ibid, p. 515). Grossberg et al and Bernstein have had an important

insight. While it might appear at first glance that these scholars are making a case similar

to Jabbour’s – that the images were manipulated to such a degree that they amount to a

fabrication – experimental research in my own laboratory suggests that slowing the image

leads to the irresistible perception of a different reality than the one Holliday encountered

that night. One of the jurors who acquitted the officers admits as much in an interview

with Ted Koppel of ABC News. The unidentified juror first gives the defense version of

the story, but then makes a crucial addition:

'The cops were simply doing what they'd been instructed to do,' the juror was quoted as

saying. 'They were afraid he was going to run or even attack them.'

Mr. Koppel said the juror criticized the video as unsteady and out of focus, and

questioned the seriousness of Mr. King's injuries.

'A lot of those blows, when you watched them in slow motion, were not connecting,' the

juror was quoted as saying. 'Those batons are heavy, but when you looked at King's

body three days after the incident, not that much damage was done.' (Seth Mydans,

New York Times, April 29th, 1992. Emphasis added.)

Rogers' 17'

The juror is telling us what he or she saw in the slow motion video: the blows ‘were not

connecting’, the steel batons were known to be heavy but ‘not that much damage was

done’. News reports detail broken bones and numerous cuts and bruises resulting from

the 56 baton strikes, and images of a battered Mr King are readily found on the internet

(The Los Angeles Daily News has a timeline, an image gallery, transcripts, and numerous

news stories). The juror’s experience of the slow motion images of forceful impact events

as gentle, as barely or not connecting, should sound familiar. Alice and Dan’s footfalls in

the opening scene of Closer land softly. Justine is so light as she runs in Melancholia it

seems the encircling vines tether her like the string on a balloon. The heavy soda cans

look light and empty as they fall slowly to the ground. And remember we laughed when

the soccer player’s boot connected with the head of an opponent, partly out of surprise

and empathy, but also because the blow seemed barely to connect, the kick looks rather

gentle in the slow motion action replay. We have also noticed how soft and elastic even

quite hard objects can appear when they are struck forcefully and the event is viewed in

slow motion (the golf ball, and people’s heads and other body parts). No close ups of

Rodney King’s head being struck by a heavy steel baton exist, but his body bounces

gently with each blow. In slow motion the baton wielding arm is raised and lowered in

what seems to be a careful, controlled way and the strikes fall softly. At normal speed the

strikes appear frenzied, vicious, hard.

? : : ? ?'Experiments in my laboratory demonstrate the key perceptual effects of forceful impact

events viewed in slow motion. My students and I videotaped a variety of events using the

Rogers' 18'

maximum frame rate on a Sony HD Handycam video recorder, a high-end domestic

camera (240 frames per second stretches a 3 second event to 12 seconds in playback).

The events include hands clapping, people jumping, a boxer pounding a punch bag, Jello

dropping on to a tabletop, a light plastic and a heavy metal baseball bat striking a pillow

topped with loose leaves, or with flour, and a hammer striking one light bulb gently till it

breaks, and another more forcefully. Each of these images was edited to play back at

normal speed, slightly fast (about twice normal speed), slightly slow (about half normal

speed), and slow (about a fourth normal speed), and trimmed to a similar length (just a

few seconds for each event). Twenty observers watched five films at all four speeds in a

random order, and they were asked to rate the events on a variety of dimensions. How

forceful was the impact (from very gentle to very forceful on a 7-point scale)? How soft

or hard was the material (from very soft/flexible to very hard/rigid)? How much effort

was exerted in the blow (from very little effort to a great deal of effort)? And finally, how

natural did the image appear (from very unnatural/fake to very natural/no special

effects)?

The results of these laboratory studies showed that the amount of force observers

perceived in each impact event was directly controlled by the speed of the playback. The

slower the motion the more gentle the impact appeared to be. Similarly, the amount of

effort the unseen actor appeared to put in to the act of striking an object, clapping, and so

on, also varied directly with the speed of the playback. At faster playback speeds, more

effort was perceived, at slower playback speeds, less effort was perceived, as we had

predicted. All materials that deformed visibly on impact were perceived as softer in slow

Rogers' 19'

motion, firmer in fast motion. The exception was the light bulb, which shattered and was

always reported as brittle, although the slow motion versions of this event often raised a

laugh as the bulb was hit the first time and, not breaking, bounced unnaturally before

exploding with a subsequent blow.

What is important about these laboratory findings is that the degree of perceived force,

perceived effort, and the perceived rigidity of the material varied smoothly with the

change in the speed of the image motion. The smooth functional relationship between the

pairs of variables suggests that image characteristics are entirely responsible for

perception. Observers are not decoding a visual trope – a slow motion image does not

signify a gentle impact event. Perception was not categorical so that slow motion images

were perceived and grouped one way, normal or fast motion images another way. Instead,

we can infer that the dynamics of the moving image are perceived in the same way a

directly-witnessed, real event would be perceived if the objects were moving at the

speeds depicted in the video clips. Faster impact events in real life are, after all, more

forceful than slow ones. Rigid materials give way more slowly than soft ones. Extreme

deformations of an object could indicate extreme forces but the “Golf ball hitting a steel

plate at 150 mph” video suggests that we are more likely to perceive the material as

unexpectedly soft, than to perceive the true degree of the force that caused it.

We can conclude from the study that some aspects of events shown in slow motion

images, such as the force of an impact, are not decoded or consciously interpreted by the

Rogers' 20'

viewer; they are perceived directly and they are irresistible1. Within the range of speeds

we used in the study reported here, images rarely looked unnatural. (An extension of the

research could consider conditions when images are slowed to the point that slow motion

is detected and foul play suspected.) Observers could not readily say whether a particular

image was slowed, speeded, or normal. After all, hand claps and baton strikes can be

slow or fast. These were not the extreme slow motion images that raise cries of disbelief

on YouTube. They were subtle, believable, and powerfully misleading. Each brief event

was perceived as truthful. Observers responded as though they were witnessing events

just as they had occurred. If these video clips had been evidence in a courtroom observers

might have said, as did the juror interviewed by Ted Koppel, “a lot of those blows …

were not connecting… not much damage was done”. The jurors in the trial of the police

officers who beat Rodney King were lied to when they were shown George Holliday’s

home video in slow motion. A video of an event is presented as truthful, as transparent to

use Walton’s term (Walton, 1984). Jurors had no reason to suspect that they were not

seeing “quite literally” (Walton, p. 252) the events as they happened and, indeed, we have

no reason to doubt that the video is a truthful record of much of what happened that night

even when shown in slow motion. The video truthfully depicts 56 baton blows, identifies

the individuals who delivered them, and the location of each impact on King’s body. It

truthfully shows the order of events, and the location of the people present. In slow

motion, however, blows appear less forceful, the receiving body appears softer, more

cushiony, the assailants appear less frenzied, somewhat gentler, more purposeful. For a

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''1'The'idea'that'images'are'systems'of'codes'or'symbols'that'must'be'read'like'a'language'rather'than'carriers'of'natural'meaning'that'can'be'perceived'directly'is'popular'among'many'film'scholars,'and'has'its'origin'in'the'work'of'linguist'Ferdinand'de'Saussure'(Monaco,'1981).'

Rogers' 21'

jury asked to consider whether excessive force was used, these alterations to the truth

matter. Both a filmmaker who employs slow motion in a movie, and a defense lawyer

who chooses to present slow motion images as evidence in a courtroom are shaping the

subjective experience of an audience. Both are in a sense deceptive but when we bought a

ticket for the movie theater we signed on to an expectation of fiction and any technique

the filmmaker employs to create that fiction is fair. It should go without saying that

different standards should be in place in a courtroom.

A : : : ? : : A

Our diversion to a Californian courtroom and to my laboratory might leave some readers

impatient to return to a discussion of film. There is clearly much more to film than its

ability to mislead us about the weight of a baton, or the force of an impact. These

alterations to the physical properties of the world we perceive are intentional in

filmmaking, but they are subservient to greater aesthetic goals. As we have seen, the

filmmaker uses the slow motion images to create an experience and to deliver meaning. I

suggested at the beginning of the chapter that it is useful to organize our experience of

meaning in the appreciation of film into three levels. Most of our discussion of slow

motion images in the present chapter concerns the first of those levels. So that we don’t

lose sight of the bigger picture, however, and to avoid the risk of giving the impression

that I underestimate the complexity and richness of the film viewer’s experience, I will

place this work in the context of an organizing framework of psychological aesthetics,

Rogers' 22'

and consider how slow motion images can be the source of additional layers of meaning

at the second and third level in my proposed hierarchy.

A : :

The name I give to this foundational level is intended to remind us that Level 1 concerns

natural meaning (which some might argue is barely ‘meaning’ at all) detectable through

basic psychological and physiological processes. Most film research in sensation,

perception and attention fits here given that it is concerned with universal processes that

require no particular experience with film and other moving images. In the present

chapter I have considered how slow motion images can irresistibly alter the meaning of

an event, specifically the perceived weight of objects, their rigidity, the forces with which

one object strikes another, and the effort with which a person applies such force in a

striking action. Additional research is needed to explore these and other aspects of the

perception of slow motion in film. Variables that influence perceived cause and effect,

actors’ intentions, mood states, and the emotional impact of a film sequence, are all

amenable to laboratory investigation. Grossberg et al (ibid, p. 515), for example,

suggested that slow motion severed the links “between action and reaction”. The exact

point that such a causal link is perceptually broken is an empirical question, readily tested

in a laboratory. Manipulation of purpose-made or pre-existing film sequences is likely

to be the most informative strategy. A researcher could shoot planned sequences for

varied playback speeds, re-edit a movie sequence or systematically change the playback

speed of the sequences that comprise strongly affecting scenes such as Bonnie and

Clyde’s death scene, and then study film viewers’ perceptual, cognitive and emotional

Rogers' 23'

responses. I caution against reductionist strategies such as the simulation of slow motion

through computer generated imagery (CGI): While CGI has potential to improve control

over selected variables, better psychophysics can come at the expense of better

understanding, and then we have not done good science. The risk of excluding key

dynamic information from the sequence, even unintentionally, is huge and it is costly.

Human perception evolved to discover meaning in complex arrays of informative

variables in natural environments. To the extent that filmmakers attempt to capture these

complex arrays in order to shape our experience, we should do our best to study this

process as it operates with real film and video footage as far as possible. (See Epstein &

Rogers, 2003, for a discussion of the larger theoretical issue of the perception of

complexes of visual variables).

Our judgements about perceptions of weight, force, rigidity and so on color our

understanding of the nature of the world they belong to, and the intentions and mental

states of the people in it, but as soon as we reflect on these percepts we have left Level I

behind and entered Level II. Level I meanings are available in all moving images

whether they are made as art, science or documentary reports. Level I is not devoid of

emotional or aesthetic experiences, however, and we can experience an emotional or

aesthetic response to slow motion images made for reasons other than art. One viewer of

Nike’s “Tiger Woods’ perfect swing” on YouTube left the following comment. “Every

time I watch this I get goosebumps”. The extreme slow motion image is professionally lit

and shot, Tiger’s movements are elegant and flawless. The visual perfection of the image

itself could produce the commentator’s reaction but it is notable that the image is

Rogers' 24'

accompanied by stirring music that rises to a crescendo at the peak of the swing.

Empirical work by neuroscientist Oliver Grewe and his colleagues has demonstrated that

carefully constructed music with certain dynamic patterns, including crescendos, can

trigger goose bumps, spine tingles and aesthetic ‘chills’ (Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez, and

Altenmüller, 2007). The slow motion explosion scene in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point

certainly benefits from Pink Floyd’s understanding of the power of music to stimulate the

sympathetic nervous system and thrill our bodies as well as our minds. I believe that

Grewe et al’s work provides us with an important clue about the nature of Level I

aesthetic experiences: they are bodily or somatic reactions to some physical properties of

the work, just as the perception of the weight of objects and the forces affecting them can

be perceived from the dynamics of a moving image. Similarly, conscious understanding

of the meaning of the experience of chills is not necessarily present but can come later

with experience and reflection.

My student Sarah Gottleib and I have been gathering first person reports about a wide

variety of aesthetic experiences. One report we found illustrates how chills come first,

and can precede a later, more developed, Level II experience:

“It was my favorite thing and least favorite thing to do at the same time. The first

time I remember ‘feeling’ music, Tamoko (after a few years of taking lessons)

played some piece she had been working on, but I remember sitting and watching

her and having complete physical sensations running through my body. These

chills, these Goosebumps, this electricity and butterflies in the stomach, and I

thought, ‘Wow, that’s cool,’ and I didn’t really know what to make of it at the

Rogers' 25'

time. But then it happened again when I saw her or someone else play or listened

to music that was that emotional, and I said, ‘I think that feeling happens to me

from listening to music; I think it happens when I hear music that I really like.”

(Musician and performance artist Andrew W-K, 2006.)

Andrew W-K was able to describe the chill experience he had while listening to music

but, while it was exciting, it was not a profound experience, it had no intellectual content

and it did not immediately have any emotional content. It did, however, act as an

incentive to begin a life in music and we can imagine that his experiences with music are

now much richer.

A ? ? : ,: ? : :

Noticing a crescendo in music or seeing that walking characters bounce and sway lightly

on their feet in a slow motion sequence are both experiences of Level I perceptual

meanings. Feeling chills in response to the former, of feeling unhurried, relaxed,

expectant in response to the latter are experiences of Level I emotional meaning: Both are

irresistible, involuntary, universal. Level I meanings by themselves would not hold our

interest for long, however, and they are not why we choose to go to the movies. There are

much richer meanings to be had from film and video and not surprisingly most film

scholarship is focused on them. Knowing that the slow motion approach in the opening

scene of Mike Nichols’ Closer signifies the commencement of a sweet romantic drama is

an example of a Level II meaning. Familiarity with the genre and with the trope of the

slow motion encounter shot are essential to understanding the scene. Enjoyment of the

Rogers' 26'

discovery that the drama will not be sweet is an example of a Level II emotional meaning

– it requires reflection and conscious thought. Level II meanings include all the times we

interpret a symbol, make sense of style or form, infer an actor’s intent, connect what we

see to what we know, or understand a filmmaker’s larger thesis. If Lars von Trier did his

work well on Melancholia, viewers will not only begin to really feel Justine’s darkening

mood and share her foreboding that the end of the world is coming but they will also

consider his proposal that it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s all pointless. Depressed people

have a much more realistic understanding of the meaning of life than the rest of us: No

point panicking. Let’s just make a magic cave, hold hands and accept the inevitable. If

the cataclysmic final scene leaves you shaking and struggling to make sense of the film,

then you are wrestling with and perhaps reveling in the best of Level II meanings. If you

experience in addition, or perhaps instead, a moment of intense clarity, a profound insight

into the true nature of the universe, however briefly, then von Trier has given you more –

he has given you an opportunity to access Level III meaning.

A ? : : : :

The experience of Level III meanings is rather rare and should not be thought of as the

ultimate goal of all film viewing or all filmmaking. Most filmmakers are aiming to

produce a satisfying story, a good laugh (or a scare), some thrills, or perhaps an exposé or

commentary on contemporary culture. Profoundly moving aesthetic experiences are often

beside the point. I place the peak aesthetic experiences that characterize Level III at the

top level of my framework not because they are a goal but because, on the rare occasions

Rogers' 27'

that they happen, they seem to happen to prepared minds, following the appreciation of

Level III meanings.

While Level III experiences should not be considered a goal for all film viewers or all

filmmakers, they are in fact the goal of some filmmakers and video artists. The

transcendental style in film explicitly pursues the kind of experience I have in mind. The

work of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu is a case in point, and I have described his work in

this context elsewhere (eg Rogers, in press). Paul Schrader’s Transcendental style in film:

Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer provides an excellent introduction to the style in the work of three

filmmakers (Schrader, 1988). Video artist Bill Viola frequently uses slow motion images

to create breath-taking moving image artwork that explores perception, memory and

subjective experience. We will examine one of these works to see how a single slow

motion sequence can potentially generate all three levels of film meaning.

On first encounter, Viola’s Quintet of Remembrance (2000) appears to be a vibrantly

colored, still photograph on a large video screen. Five actors stand close to each other,

shot from the waist up, each one is in his or her own world. Lingering, the viewer notices

that each character’s expression has shifted subtly. A patient viewer who waits longer

discovers that each face slowly transforms through a range of emotions: “compassion,

shock, grief, anger, fear, and rapture” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.) The five

were filmed in extreme slow motion - just one minute of action is stretched out over

sixteen minutes in play back. Like many of Viola’s works, the Quintet series that includes

the present work is an expression of his study of Zen Buddhism. Slow motion is used as a

Rogers' 28'

device to encourage the viewer to settle fully in to the moment of the encounter with the

work, to take time, to notice the smallest detail and value it. In this case we are given the

gift of time to notice the fleeting micro-expressions in another’s face and bring to

conscious awareness our own instinctive reaction to the emotions of others: A surge of

empathy as we see the beginnings of grief in one character, a spike of fear and an urge to

retreat as we see anger set the tiny muscles in the face of another. Level I meanings are

sensory and bodily: we see the slowly transforming faces, feel the actors moving through

treacle-thick air like trapped flies, and our bodies and brains involuntarily respond. The

recognition of emotional states, and our instinctive urge to approach or avoid them, are

Level I experiences because they involve no reflection, no thought or ideas on our part as

viewer. We might experience a physical chill, or goose bumps. As soon as we begin to

examine our own reaction, to evaluate the work, to notice that it is a riff on Hieronymus

Bosch's Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns) (ca. 1490–1500, National Gallery,

London), to note that we are enjoying it, we are building the richer layer of meaning that

typifies Level II in my framework. On a good day, when we encounter the work relaxed

and in a open frame of mind, and we allow ourselves time to fully engage with it, we

might be lucky and find that our experience takes on a new quality: it transcends the

moment itself and, however briefly, puts us in touch with the beginningless and endless

ebb and flow of human emotion, a timeless tide, the boundaries between ourselves and

others suspended. Psychologists identify this experience as awe (Keltner and Haidt,

2003). For 18th century philosopher, Edmund Burke, it is an experience of the sublime

(Burke, 1757/1958). I identify the experience with a third level of aesthetic meaning. The

truth experienced at these peak moments is a different kind of truth to that treated earlier

Rogers' 29'

in the chapter. It is not truth about the form a droplet takes when it hits the surface of a

puddle, or truth about the weight of an object, or the force of an impact. It is not even a

truth about the real objects and events that formed the scene before the camera. Level III

truths are a feeling that we have understood something important, something timeless,

perhaps for the first time.

? : : : : ? :

In this chapter I have attempted to show that slow motion images can be understood to

carry meaning at three different levels. Still and moving photographic images are widely

believed to be truthful, even transparent, presentations of the objects and events that were

the subject of the image. A close look at a variety of slow motion image sequences in

movies and videos, including footage of the police beating of Rodney King, together with

empirical evidence from my laboratory, reveal that some aspects of reality are

systematically transformed by slow motion. These transformations to the Level I

meanings of moving images, such as the physical properties of depicted objects and the

forces that act upon them, are deceptive and therefore in some settings (such as a

courtroom) could be considered to amount to visual lies. Level I meanings are

experienced below the level of conscious awareness and thus they are irresistible by the

viewer. They include both perceptual and emotional experiences that are often tightly

bound to each other, such as when we respond rapidly and intuitively with an emotional

response to an expression of emotion by another. Aesthetic chills are included in this

foundational level of aesthetic experience because there is evidence that chills can be

experienced without understanding of their origin or their relation to the artwork that

Rogers' 30'

produced them. The more complex Level II meanings of slow motion images arise from

the social and cultural context of the use of such images in film and video, and these

require conscious reflective processing involving both cognition and emotion. Very rich

and satisfying experiences are possible at this level. Finally, I described a very special

and rare category of experience at Level III that can on occasion be produced by a

carefully constructed moving image presented to a well-prepared mind. Slow motion

images are capable of transmitting great truths but the lesson of this chapter is that they

also have the potential to lie. These ‘lies’, however, can be the basis of powerful aesthetic

experiences when used artfully in film.

John G. Avildsen, Rocky (1976)

Mike Nichols, Closer (2004).

Lars van Trier, Melancholia (2011).

Martin Scorsese, Raging Bull (1980).

Stephen Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan (1988)

Andy and Lana Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)

Yimou Zhang, Hero (2002) (Ying Xiong Chinese title)

Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point (1970)

Rogers' 31'

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Bernstein, R. (2000). Rodney King, Shifting Modes of Vision, and

Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Journal of Dramatic Theory and

Criticism, 121-134.

Block, M. Interview with Zouheir Jabbour. All Things Considered. National

Public Radio. Aired February 24th, 2012.

A link to the story is on a related blog here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-

way/2012/02/24/147368559/syrian-official-army-is-protecting-syrian-people-from-

armed-groups

Burke, Edmund. (1757/1958). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our

Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London.

Epstein, W. and Rogers, S. (2003). Percept-percept couplings revisited. In U.

Savardi (Ed.) Festschrift in honore di Paolo Bozzi. Padova: Cleup.

Gray, M. (2007). The L.A. riots: 15 years after Rodney King. Time Specials.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/la_riot/article/0,28804,1614117_1614084_1614

831,00.html Retrieved February 23rd, 2012.

Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R. and Altenmüller, E. (2007). Listening to music

as a re-creative process: physiological, psychological, and psychoacoustical correlates of

chills and strong emotions. Music Perception 24(3), 297–314.

Grossberg, L., Radway, J. and Olson, M.J. (1995) Trials of the Post-Modern,

Cultural Studies 9(3).

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Monaco, J. (1977, 1981). How to read a film: The art,, technology, language,

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12(4) 335-343.

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worlds in movies, pictures and virtual reality. In J.D. Anderson and B. Fisher Anderson

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"Bill Viola: The Quintet of Remembrance (2001.395a-i)". In Heilbrunn Timeline

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realism. Critical Enquiry, 11(2), December, 246-277.

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the-wolf-howls.shtml Retrieved July 7, 2006.

!

: :

“Bullet time”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhxbYTMNMxo Retrieved February

23rd, 2012.

Discover Magazine. “Galloping horse in super slow motion”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcD1_jvhc_g Retrieved February 23rd, 2012.

“Rodney King beating video ©George Holliday”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZDrZDEqeKk Retrieved February 26th, 2012.

USGA, “REAL Golf Ball hitting steel in slow motion by the USGA”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00I2uXDxbaE&list=UUsZsn_S93Zs8JOdKMRbklmg

&index=10&feature=plcp Retrieved February 23rd, 2012.

Rogers' 34'

“Football blooper –slow motion-” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQBeNvAO7C0

Retrieved February 23rd, 2012.

“Golf ball hitting steel super slow mo”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMqM13EUSKw

Slow Mo Guys, “Droplet collisions at 5000fps”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNI-

LIVs-to. Retrieved February 23rd, 2012.

“Tiger Woods’ perfect swing”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcP6X7dEUo

Retrieved February 23rd, 2012.