What are films made of? A short answer is that they are made of images; sequences of shots and frames, which in their digital form are made of mil lions of pixels. A more comprehensive answer would be that they are made of meanings; expressions, representations, and emotions, that are elicited by these images and arise as inter- subjective experiences when films enter into contact with their audiences. Films are moving images that move us; they are in this way moving in two senses: as technical artefacts in and of motion, and as the meanings and affects that these images structure in their viewers. In the artefactual sense, we can easily point to the series of material transformations that film underwent over the past few decades, from celluloid reels to digital video and data streams. In the meaningful sense, we tend to treat films as aesthetic objects; heaps of pixels that when put together in certain ways, can move our minds and spirits beyond what their technical trappings appear to afford.

In a version of the sorites paradox, we could ask: at what point and under which conditions does a heap of moving pixels become a moving image, moreover, an image that moves us? Where exactly does this transition occur, and how can we see or understand this transformation? Today we can access every pixel of every frame of Tokio Story (1953), manipulate them and analyse these digital moving images as data using a variety of increasingly complex computational techniques.