The transitional cinema matters because it is a competitive form consonant with epistemological changes in anthropology. This article focuses on competing aspects in Edward S. Curtis’ In the Land of the Head-Hunters (1914), a film that celebrates Kwakiutl culture in the consolidation of anthropology and cinema, attempts at making a subsequent phase of film history combined to the emergence of "documentary film." The filmic style in the Head-Hunters shows a conjunction between early cinema and modernism art in the 1920’s. The Head-Hunters involves imperialistic discourses, often embracing a tradition of expeditionary filmmaking. The Head-Hunters also has a phase of a composite art with Kwakiutl theatrical performance based on their legend and myth. The film is thus reminiscent of Wagner’s musical drama, or Italian historical spectacle films such as Cabiria (1914). Curtis negotiated dramatic representation with authentic representation in alliance with anthropological knowledge in the middle of a transformation at the turn of the century. The Head-Hunters is a prominent film in that it involves conflicts between actuality and narrative, anthropological and dramatic, realism and sensationalism, providing Curtis a distinct position in the era of transitional cinema.

This article considers the role of the cursor in the Graphical User Interface. We often look to the cursor as an expansion of our hand or the compliment of a pointing device like a mouse. However, although the cursor, and its place in a display, has been familiar with us since the origin of the “desktop” metaphor in computing itself, the form itself, ‘↑,’ has no correspondence with the “real” thing to which it points or merges, such as a file or folder. Moreover, the cursor does not obey physical laws because it is in cyber space. We are familiar with the cursor, but we don’t know anything about ‘↑’.

The art collective, exonemo explores this question, playing with the unidentifiability of the cursor and considering the cursor as a halfway being-the cursor is A, and also it is B―leading us to a new understand for the cursor. In this paper, I focus on their two works, DanmatsuMouse (2007) and ↑(2010) in order to explain what, in essence, the cursor is. These two works make clear that the cursor is a switchover entity, which creates the ‘between’ of the real world and the virtual world, switching from the real to the virtual, or vice versa.

The silent-era comedian, Harold Lloyd, more popularly known for his “human fly” character, also directed unique chases, which may be called “connected chases”. In this kind of chase sequences, Lloyd dashes toward a goal to save his heroine by changing various kinds of vehicles such as cars, buses, ambulances, bikes, street cars, and horses. The most representative of this kind is the 20-minutes chase sequence in one of his masterworks, Girl Shy.

His direction of this unique chase style is typical of his films. It is generally acknowledged that Sennett’s slapsticks were enjoyed by the working class and Lloyd’s films by the middle class. Lloyd created these connected chase sequences by improving on the slapstick chases by Sennett, Lloyd’s predecessor. Sennett presents violent and mechanical car chases in which people are represented as objects. Lloyd, on the other hand, humanizes Sennett’s chases. By employing different vehicles in a chase sequence, Lloyd establishes his character not as a man dominated by vehicles but as one controlling them. In this sense, Lloyd’s sophisticated improvement of Sennett’s chases can be interpreted as his attempt to appeal to the middle class audience, which prefers more human action.

The aim of this paper is to examine the image generation process in cinema mainly from the viewpoint of Henri Bergson’s critical discussion about the mechanism of perception in chapter 4 of Creative Evolution (1907).

Generally, moving images in cinema are described as "apparent motion" or "illusion" on the supposition that natural perception is "real" and perceives the movement "continuously." However, is this supposition really indisputable? When compared to such general views, Bergson’s arguments in Creative Evolution become clearer. According to him, natural perception has a tendency to fix the movements "intermittently" and to recompose them artificially; in other words, we cannot perceive "real movement" in the first place because of the cinematographical mechanism of perception that is based on practical needs in our daily lives.

Examining Bergson’s viewpoint in the context of various studies since the 1970s, mainly those based on psychology, physiology, and new media theories, we present the following proposal. Cinema as an image generation system is not a system that reconstitutes the movement with fixed images (photograms), but it is a system that generates perceivable movements (e.g., the transition of an object) from unperceivable ones (e.g., the repetition of flickers). The mechanism of natural perception that fails to capture the movement is, paradoxically, the very condition that generates the moving images in cinema.