I’ve just come out of the mountains in a faraway and beautiful place. Of that adventure, more on another day in our Travel section. My companions and I were on an expedition in snow, sun, rain, wind and hail; and I’ve spent six strenuous days picking my way over rocks.
In the long and mostly silent watches of each day’s march I have become absorbed — almost obsessively absorbed — in a human faculty of which I had hitherto been completely unaware.
It is the small matter of how we walk — how we choose where to place each footfall. Don’t laugh: on rough, boggy or rocky ground the faculty is critical. When walking over uneven terrain your eye (without your consciously knowing it) goes into high-frequency roving mode: flick-flick, flick, searching the next two or three paces ahead, darting from rock to tussock to puddle and to either side, measuring distances and relativities against your stride.
It’s an incredibly clever operation, but unwitting, and, like breathing, a function that doesn’t bear thinking about, or it all goes awry. Asked how many footsteps it is from here to there we’d say that we do not know — but our brain does, for we will accurately calibrate our stride to arrange footfalls in the optimal places; and do so many paces in advance.
Like Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who discovered with pride that he’d been talking in prose all his life, I ended my walk full of admiration for a brilliant bit of eye-and-brain human computer technology that I’ve been deploying, with only the rarest of malfunctions, for nearly 60 years. And without ever knowing it.
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The camera lies
Which leads me to a second train of thought that absorbed me as we wound our way through breathtaking terrain. What would the screenplay of a film look like if the eye of the camera really moved like the eye of a human being? Because the camera doesn’t, you know.
Nothing like it. In film, the camera pans slowly, focuses and holds steady on a shot for seconds at a time. It moves deliberately from shot to shot, leaving long intervals for the viewer to take each in. Every shot, meanwhile, is significant: something the director wants us to see because it helps to construct the narrative.
Real looking is nothing like this. Had we the technology to allow camera shots to mimic the human eye, the resultant film would be a constant, quick-fire and bewildering darting around, often almost randomly: checking and rechecking foreground, background and periphery.
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Most of the camerawork in this bizarre film would appear perfectly random and incidental to the matter in hand. Like life itself, there would be no narrative. We don’t even pan, as a camera does: we cannot — just try it: you can only jerk your eye from position to position in a circle around you, pausing momentarily to refocus each time.
So conventional cinema is not vérité at all, but must follow a slow, stylised sequence of shots, keeping to the narrative path and excluding all the extraneous observation that is real-life looking.
Oddly enough, so is written storytelling where, should the author include observations that turned out to be irrelevant and wholly incidental to the plot, we would accuse him of misleading the reader.
Games people play ...
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These were among the thoughts that occupied me on the long journey home: a journey that took 35 hours and involved four airports with much time at each. I’ve been whiling away the time in international transit lounges by playing a new people-watching game. It’s called Gay or Italian? Try it. Until they speak, it’s almost impossible to tell.
. . . if only we’ll let them
I returned in time to get to the lunch that precedes the Derbyshire town of Ashbourne’s annual Royal Shrovetide Football: a medieval game in which the pitch is the whole town, the players — more than a thousand — anyone who chooses, and the object to get a big, heavy leather ball into “goals” miles apart: on either side of the town, one for the Up’Ards (north of the brook) and one for the Down’Ards (south of the brook).
I watched as the ball was “turned in” (thrown to the crowd). The sudden violence of a mob of mostly hyped-up young men is a scary thing to witness. Accidents are inevitable and, although only volunteers are involved, the ancient tradition may be threatened (like cheese-rolling) by health-and- safety legislation. As we exempt listed houses and monuments from some of these laws’ strictures, couldn’t we exempt “listed” traditions too?