The Gesture of Panning

Despite the plethora of books about film, surprisingly little work has been done on the phenomenon of camera movements.

Perhaps because, as David Bordwell put it, “Camera movement has usually been considered too elusive to be analyzable”. Using the example of the horizontal pan, film scholar Volker Pantenburg will propose some thoughts about theway the camera pan structures space and time into the semantic worlds proposed by documentary and fictional films. In particular, he addresses the special ability of panning shots to juxtapose and contrast a controlled form of portrayal with the contingency of what is being depicted.

Event in German with simultaneous interpretation