Flicker and Shutter: Exploring Cinema’s Shuddering Shadow

A rotating shutter interrupts the light of a projection device, breaking up the succession of image movement and creating the appearance of motion. This technology, essential to cinematic and even some pre-cinematic devices, creates an effect of flicker. In the early era of cinema, the flickering of cinematic images was claimed to damage viewers’ eyesight and even to produce psychological problems. In the 1960s, however, filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad and Ken Jacobs explored the flicker as an aesthetic device. This chapter traces the effects of flicker, focusing on the invention of the moving image in the latter part of the 19th century, its initial reception, and the use of flicker in experimental films and projections from the 1960s on.