There are four basic kinds of movement in motion pictures, each contributory to the semiotic structure of any cinematic text. The first, earliest, and most obvious is the movement of living beings and objects within the projected image commonly, if problematically, called subject movement. The second, most singled out for its part in the constitution of cinematic meaning, is the movement between projected images called editing. The third, usually explored in a specific manifestation such as the 'zoom', is the optical or visual movement of the camera lens from a fixed position. The fourth, and perhaps the most difficult for the viewer to foreground, is camera movement, the bodily motion of the camera itself, evidenced on the screen by a mobile frame and shifting spatial perspective (Jacobs 1970). Although it is possibly the kind of movement most central to our primary understanding of the cinema as a semiotically expressive form of human communication, camera movement has unfortunately seemed to elude the descriptive and interpretive grasp of traditional and contemporary modes of theoretical reflection. Recognizing camera movement as significant and signifying, film scholars have not been able to account for it as such, or to describe it in terms that speak to our experience as viewers. The particular aim of my essay is to describe and account for the phenomenon of camera movement on the screen as it is originally experienced and understood by us as viewers prior to the rather lame, objective, and static reflections upon it found in most film theory. In that original experience, I suggest, the motility of the camera is prereflectively understood as always meaningfully-directed, as intentional: the unifying embodied activity of a human consciousness as it is situated in and inhabits the world. Further, I suggest that such understanding arises because camera movement echoes the essential motility of our own consciousness as it is embodied in the world and able to accomplish and express the tasks and projects of living. The directedness with which we actively, perspectivally, and finitely inhabit the natural space of the world