ABSTRACT
In setting up the lecture series that was the seed for this book, this chapter discusses the issue of film space, how it differs from architectural space and how it deals with the question of movement. It gets the film off to a thrilling start, but the view of the camera is not the view of a potential observer, its movement not the possible path of a pedestrian. Some films have more than one camera subject, but most have a single subject which persists throughout. It might be somebody singing a song or doing a comic turn, but is as likely to be some sort of topographical actuality. The reality of film-making seemed to have got the better of Moholy-Nagy, but it did not necessarily do the films any harm. Most of the people who made the early films had by then given up, often returning to their original professions as instrument makers, electrical engineers and so on.
