WAP Walkshop, Prespa, Greece, June 7, 2025

‘le travelling est affaire de morale’ (‘tracking shots are a question of morality’)
— Jean-Luc Godard

Thinking about the morality of the cinematic tracking shot, Godard asks to what extent does aesthetic form determine ethical meaning? Artists and philosophers have talked about the relation between aesthetics and ethics, or the beautiful and the good, stretching back to the ancient Greeks. Can beauty prepare us for moral action by revealing its structure through form?

In this 3 hour workshop we will use the tracking shot as an analogy to contemplate the ethical dimensions of walking in the Prespa landscape. The cinematic tracking shot is the camera, filmmaker and viewer walking together. It is movement in time, constantly transforming and revealing changing perspectives, sound, light and objects. Its duration can reveal multiple temporalities as movement in the present often reveals other moments in time. History.

We will ask: What are the ethics of moving through a space? How is the space transformed into a point of view as it is becomes an image? Who sees it and how is it understood? What does it mean to create a point of view by walking through a place one has no relation to or has never been, knowing little of the History and geography of the place to make Art? Is this another colonialist project that artists and Ethnographers have been engaged in for centuries, or does it hold the capacity to reveal something which has otherwise been overlooked? These are at once ethical and formal questions that the tracking shot constantly raises.

The workshop invites 10-12 people, and will begin by discussing these questions while viewing selected tracking shots from the cinema. Using our own smart phones and digital cameras, the group will “cinemawalk” in the Prespa landscape in pairs and make tracking shots thinking about the ways the camera produces different perspectives on what is revealed through movement, time and vision.

CINEMA:
Cinema as movement.
Space transformed through movement
Cinema as time
Duration as perception
Change over time. What is revealed in time?

THE TRACKING SHOT:
Camera as INTERFACE, rather than simply a recording device
Interface between BODY and Camera, Between BODY and VIEWER.

–It is mobile composition–always changing, Always in flux
–Conscious of being in motion and being in time
–Awareness that one is moving through space as a perceiving body.
–Awareness of the boundaries of the frame.
–The tracking shot is a series of part, partial views, the image is never a totality, always a piece of something larger.
–Flatness of the image. Awareness of photographic perception
–What is seen behind subject? What is seen in front of subject?
–Periphery that is constructed, From periphery to center and then periphery.

SO why is the tracking shot a question of Morality? What does Godard mean?

The TRACKING SHOT raises questions:
How is the viewer positioned in relation to the space that is being presented?
Is this an exploration, a presentation of something that is being directed by the Filmmaker?
How does the VIEWER understand their position in relation to what they are seeing,?
how does the VIEWER understand the FILMMAKER’S relation to what they are seeing?

FORMS OF TRACKING SHOT.
Camera moving through space as its own entity – – surveillance.
Subjective camera – – through the eyes of the Filmmaker, walking through space as a seeing body.
walking on the ground
Gimbal track, moving on a Gyro, balanced, gimbal, smoothing out the movement as a floating in space (drone cinema.
Point of view: Tracking shot through the eye of a character rather than the Filmmaker.

EXAMPLES OF TRACKING SHOTS SHOWN IN CINEMAWALKING WORKSHOP:
• Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard (1967)
• “Malni: Toward the Ocean, Toward the Shore.” (2020) Sky Hopinka
• “Sea Ranch” CA (2025) Lynne Sachs
• “25 Sites” Joshua Bonnetta (2020) Outer Hebrides islands off the coast of Scotland,
• “Let Each One Go Where He May” Ben Russell, Paramaribo Surinam
• “Athens Park Track” (2025) Jeffrey Skoller
• Examined Life” with Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor (2008) by Astra Taylor

SEE SOME OF THE TRACKING SHOTS MADE BY WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS HERE:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g1T2VRt-UJn86jpefVrJGbqxjoVewcsn/view?usp=sharing