The Friday Fillip

At the end of a hectic week like yours, it’s time to slow things down. Way down. Way, way down. As only film can. Slow motion has been around since the early 1900s, when it was invented by an Austrian physicist and priest August Musger, who used mirrors (but no smoke). (Incidental law note: Musger patented his invention in 1904; but in 1914 failed to pay the fees and lost his patent.)

How is slow motion done? It’s easy to say but harder to understand, because the illusion of motion derived from a series of still images results from really complex events in the eye and brain. The simple explanation of slow motion is that it comes from “overcranking” the camera — filming motion at a higher speed than “necessary” — and then playing the film back at a lower speed. But the whole business of tricking the eye-brain into thinking it’s seeing motion is way to complicated for a Friday fillip, so I’ll just direct the impossibly curious among you to this (good) explanation.

What’s it for — besides Chariots of Fire? (It’s really hard for people who saw that flick in 1981 to get the slo-mo running to the Vangelis theme out of their minds. Da da da da dee da…) Well, kung fu movies, of course, the mainstream classic being Crouching Tiger, Crashing Bore Hidden Dragon. Well, obviously, since it slows down motion, it can reveal action that is otherwise too fast to register on our brains. One of my favourite examples is a lightening strike: here, expanded to 20 seconds, is a bolt from the heavens that in real time might have taken all of a second.

There’s a lyrical quality that slow motion imparts to some things, arising, I suppose, from the fact that the motion is itself beautiful to the human eye and slow motion simply gives us more — more of the motion, more time to appreciate it. Perhaps, too, it has to do with some intrinsic link between beauty and time — much as Einstein speculated in his stove-top/beautiful girl explanation of relativity — such that time slows down for us when we’re captivated by beauty, and when time is slowed down for us it evokes a beauty reaction. Whatever the case, look at this video of a giant surfer wave and the tiny surfer rushing through the tunnel it makes: it’s beautiful.

Apparently, slow motion techniques and equipment are still being developed. It has something to do, I think, with trying to increase the definition of the images while still creating the illusion of motion, ordinarily enhanced, I gather, by blurriness. Here’s a video of shots taken by an insanely expensive piece of equipment, capturing at 1,000 frames per second some more sports-related activity. I’m particularly fond of the part where the guy boots the Crenshaw melon, a still of which you see below. I think it’s a Crenshaw.