When a camera moves, it constantly changes the status of the objects within the frame – things, spaces, characters – from on-screen to off-screen. This is a fact of film form rather than an argument about the intention, significance, or expressive capacity of camera movement. Something is present and perceptible at one moment, and then the camera moves in a way that renders that something off-screen and out of the frame. In other words, camera movement is intrinsically related to off-screen space. While this has hardly gone unnoticed by scholarship in film studies, discussions of this relationship as it pertains to narrative film have predominantly focused on issues of spatial organization and narrative information.
Focusing on two illustrative cases from Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Advise & Consent (1962) where camera movement is used to alter the status of characters as they transition from on-screen to off-screen figures in ways that invite the audience to reflect on its relationship to the world of the film, I describe these respatializing camera movements as ‘on-screening’ and ‘off-screening’ their subjects. By proposing to use these terms as verbs, this article emphasizes the significance of behind-the-camera decision-making on the configuration of how the audience relates to and engages with a film’s worldhood on a more complex level than that of narrative and spatial coherence. In both examples, the camera movements momentarily prohibit the audience from seeing something or someone that they want to see, generating, I argue, a sense of reflexive frustration that calls into question the audience’s attitude towards both the characters and the film’s world at large.
