Inner Space and Outer Space: Old and New in Cinematic Frontiers

Early cinema produced its visual history through exploring inner space, or the frontier of the mind, and outer space, or the physics of movement, of matter and motion. The first was often non-representational, whereas the latter produced effects through events happening in spaces, a parallel universe, or reality.

Now inner space and outer space are mixed together: the principally non-representational uses of film, such as a montage transposing two discontinuous elements, creates a space, that is, in sum, a space: interchangeable with verisimilar spaces, or spaces produced by conventions of realism. Similarly, spatial metaphors can be used to describe action between filmic references in a space of montage.

In contemporary cinema, the play between inner and outer spaces, like a similar play following perception and perceiving beings, cinema creators and users thoroughly explore. If the Lumière's frontal assault by train was a mechanical procedure for simulating depth through fear of the familiar but rare, then Tarkovsky's omissions in the film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris start with the inner although they have figures and objects in a space.

While spaces can be commodified or equalized through the production of ideas through metaphors of space, the conversion of inner to outer relies on a sequence of events in either representational or non-representational space. And it could be impossible for a true conversion of an atomistic schema of the local into the vast expanse of universes of meaning.

Inner space and outer space at once commodifiable, but not completely interchangeable, filmic moments become a negotiation of balances of inner/outer, distributed to all similar dialectical or binary oppositions/couplings. In The Naked Time of the original Star Trek Series, the starship crew is infected with a psychosis, which provides their inner struggles for the episode. In Star Trek, inner and outer are negotiated with the intent of looking at the conditions of human values within larger contexts of extra-planetary travel. Through the outer, we explore the inner.

On the other hand, in the Surrealist film, Un Chein Andalou, the inaugural scene of razor to eyeball is an inner metaphor that has a destination in the outer realm of more completely global ways in which vision had become dependent on the invisible orchestrations of artists/subjects acting to order the material world by destroying its visual basis. The world of objects, the properties of vision, and the behavior of social collectives, stem from a physiology of the eye.

Therefore, the focus on character animation in feature length and short animation is a similar negotiation of object and world, agent and environment. But the technology of character animation delegates the control of bodies to the puppeteer or animator, the inner space becomes technologized as a feat of programming and animating capability. Now expression, feeling, and human qualities are not simply actors using their own bodies to mimic "real life", but actors using an avatar to present a second self: a character they put their heart into, and embody with their thoughts, and concerning animation applied to the human condition.