"The Wind in the Trees" From Early Cinema to Pixar

Accounts of early film spectatorship often explain the viewer’s fascination with peripheral details—i.e. the wind in the trees of the Lumieres’ Repas de bebe—as an attraction to the “contingencies” indiscriminately captured by the camera. Rethinking the appeal of rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves in terms of unplannable movements rather than unplanned events, this video essay examines an unlikely sympathy between early cinema spectatorship and the recent attention to hyperrealistic details in computer-generated animation, such as the dust in Wall-E, the flowing hair in Brave, and the snow in Frozen.