Arnheim and the Complete Film

In his essay "The Complete Film" Rudolph Arheim projects the technical development of film as it pushes, "the mechanical limitation of nature to an extreme." (212). He outlines how the addition of sound to film, the addition of color to film and the eventual push to stereoscopic film will stunt the growth of the silent film before it could even begin to truly explore its possibilities and in the process diminish film's ability to be art. He also believes this will be a continuous problem will film as technology develops at exponentially greater paces. He says so much when he writes, "We shall have color films and stereoscopic films, and the artistic potentialities of the sound film will be crushed at an even earlier stage (than the silent film) of their development." (212). This sentiment is delivered early in the essay, quickly establishing the thesis of the essay and at first read I felt a strong disagreement with everything Arnheim was saying mainly because I disagreed with the above quote. I felt he would feel differently about the artistic qualities of film if he could have seen Avatar, Gravity, or the upcoming Interstellar all of which feature stunning visuals best seen on a massive Imax screen (growing screens being another concern of Arnheim's). Film and movies made from it are much more narrative nowadays, especially in the public domain, which has resulted in a perceived diminishing importance of film form, something clearly important to Arnheim, with film form and its limitations being the source of film's art. But I still felt his pessimistic view on the future of film was way off base. Sure, movies are different now, but there is still a massive amount of attention paid to film form, it's just now focused on special effects. It was this thought that made me realize Arnheim was right. We live in a time in which film is dying and dying fast. Movies aren't dying. Movies will live much longer than we ever will, but the use of film to make movies is an art with one foot in the grave. Because of this it would be disingenuous to refer to nearly all contemporary movies as films. Sure, some stout supporters of film still use it, but the number of these types of people is shrinking. There is little reason to believe that soon nobody will use film to make movies. Then film will die. But we'll still have movies. Will all the things that do into making movies: the sets, actors, costumes, lighting, music, stories; will all of that be enough to consider movies, not films, as a new art? Wouldn't digital movies just be the next progression in the world of graphic art, much in the same way the film developed from the photograph?

Kracauer's Inherent Affinities

In Siegfried Kracauer's essay Inherent Affinities he lays out the five affinities of film and photography, examining, "their extended scope and their specifically cinematic implications." (299). Four of the five affinities, which seem to be characteristic of film should be identical with those of photography." (299). Those four affinities are as follows: The Unstaged: "film, notwithstanding its ability to reproduce, indiscriminately, all kinds of visible data, gravitates toward unstated reality." (300) The Fortuitous: Film and photography are attracted by the fortuitous, such as Keaton narrowly avoiding being crushed by the wall of his flimsy self-assembled house in One Week. Endlessness: Film and photography's ability to record almost everything put in front of it. The Indeterminate: The notion that what is being filmed or photographed transcends singular meanings, depending on context, culture or any other number of influences. The fifth affinity is what Kracauer calls The "Flow of Life" which is specific to cinema because of photography's inability to show movement. I am interested in how this "flow of life" truly distinguishes film from photography, aside from the obvious animation of pictures created when film is played. The four affinities listed above all factor into creating cinematic films that, "evoke a reality more inclusive than the one they actually picture."(304) He then talks about the "flow of life" in relation to the street, an idea both Kracauer and Eisenstein are quite fond of, with its numerous people, cars, signs, buildings and movement which make it "the scene of life." (305). In the background of a film (take your pick) a man walking down the street through throngs of people has an untold story of untold possibilities and that story will forever remain untold, which is an odd thing to think about. It's why a passerby completely uninvolved to the narrative of the film is what stuck with Eisenstein twenty years after last seeing Intolerance. This is what I understand to be "the flow of life" that cinematic films depict. My question is what really distinguishes the "flow of life" as being purely cinematic? Couldn't the same type of sentiment Eisenstein found so lasting in the passerby in Intolerance be attributed to somebody in the background of a photograph?

Eisenstein's Montage Trope

Eisenstein covers a ton of ground in his essay "Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today," but for my IQ I'm going to focus on the sections in which he critiques the montage in films made by D.W Griffith and uses it to explain the differences between Soviet and American montage. After acknowledging Griffith as one of the, "genuine masters of the American cinema." (234) he begins to criticize Griffith's idea of montage by saying, "The structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith montage is the structure of bourgeois society." (234). He then compares his montage to bacon with lines of red and white, representing the haves and have-nots respectively, running parallel to each other; never coming in conflict. And we all know how important conflict is to Eisenstein's montage. He then gets into the differences between the American close-up and the Soviet large scale shot, claiming that "Among Americans the term (close-up) is attached to viewpoint. Among us (Soviets)- to the value of what is seen." (238). Essentially Americans use it to show something and Soviets use it to give meaning to something. He then goes on to write what I'm going to assume is his most important sentence in the chapter, "To the parallelism and alternating close-ups of America we offer the contrast of uniting these in fusion; the MONTAGE TROPE." (240). This montage trope is the key to obtaining new understandings through juxtapositional metaphors; the path to a higher ideological form of film. My question is very simply, what is the montage trope? How is it achieved? Is it simply through the effective juxtaposition of two montage cells (shots) to the ultimate goal of a profound metaphor?

Eisenstein: It's All Montage

In his essay "The cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," Eisenstein claims that montage is specifically the result of and characterized by the "collision" of two opposite pieces. We know this because he says, "By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell-the shot? By collision." (37). So montage is conflict and as we discussed on Tuesday, art is conflict. If we are to believe the transitive property of equality (and I'm sure Eisenstein, a man of science does) the montage must equal art. So montage is art. It would be too simple to classify montage as strictly the physical editing of a film: the cuts, dissolves, tints, etc. but that is the literal definition of the word, so making that assumption wouldn't be totally out of line. Eisenstein clarifies (remember, montage is conflict), "the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film. Conflict within the frame." (38). What he is doing here is comparing montage to an engine in that they both push their devices (film and a tractor) forward. He then describes the numerous types of conflicts that take place within the frame in every single shot. So these shots are full of conflicts, whether they be literal conflicts in the dialogue, conflicts in lighting, conflicts in blocking of the actors and other aspects of the mis-en-scen, which to me would indicate that these shots, the conflicts within them and the meanings derived from it all are indeed montage. But Eisenstein started this whole spiel off by saying, Conflict within the shot is potential montage," (38) which seems to rebuff the claim I just made. So I'm wondering what the difference is? Wouldn't the moods, tones and emotions established by the culmination of the entire diegetic world have to be, by Eisenstein's logic, montage?

A Close-Up on the Close-Up

In Bela Balazs's essay "The Creative Camera; The Close-Up; The Face of Man," he breaks down different aspects of film having psychological effects on the viewers and how that distinguishes film from other arts. In the portion specific to "The Face of Man" he first argues that the close-up pulls the viewer out of the world in which they are identifying with space and inserts them into a world in which they are identifying with the emotions of the person in the close-up. He writes, "Facing an isolated face takes us out of space, our consciousness of space is cut out and we find ourselves in another dimension: that of physiognomy." (131).  Because these emotional elements are not perceived in space, (happiness can't be described as big or small) us as viewers are able to have a more emotional response to the close-up. We are honed in on the subtleties the actor is expressing. He later relates this to Dulac's Jeanne d'Arc by explaining the way these close-ups, specifically between Joan and her accusers, give way to major, emotional battles that take place solely in the emotions of the actors. This is as opposed to literal battles that take place in space, such as a scene displaying a fistfight. He also notes that the effectiveness of these silent battles stems from the fact that they take place in silent film. He notes, "We saw conversations between the facial expressions of two human beings who understood the movements of each others' faces better than each other's words," (134). This made me wonder if this belief behind that quote came solely from the fact that it was a silent film. Or Is it possible for a film with dialogue to wage these silent battles solely through close-ups?

Jean Epstein on Photogénie

In Jean Epstein's critical essay "On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie," he attempts to define photogénie and the use of it in cinema as art. At the time of writing, cinema was a "mere twenty-five years old . . . a new enigma." What exactly it would become was a complete unknown, but Epstein argues that true cinema, cinema that could be considered art, must be completely cinematic, which is where photogénie comes in. Loosely defined as anything whose moral compass being enhanced by filmic reproduction, photogénie, according to Esptein is the key to cinema being cinematic. He furthers his argument by exploring the mobility of certain objects as they relate to photogénie, most notably the camera itself. But does this mean that simply filming an object with a free-wheeling camera, for example a tracking shot or handi-cam, make that object photogénie? Or do the object and shot need to have some other significances outside of the camera movement? If this were to ring true, then wouldn't any film shot completely on the move be considered completely cinematic and thusly the highest form of art in the medium? Or does there need to be a purpose behind the movement? What about films that employ a mix of stationary and mobile shots? How much photogénie is really needed?