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Manifesto - Film Is Art
Films are artworks in flow.
Paintings are set in Frames, and so are Motion Pictures. Within those spaces, the artist or the film director, alongside the camera-man and a creative team, compose the scene.
As Rudolf Arnheim noted in his Film as Art, "The art of the moving image is as old as the other arts, it is as old as humanity itself, and the motion picture is but its most recent manifestation."
"The lens of the camera," Pudovkin wrote, "replaces the eye of the observer." Yet the brain behind the retina selects the scenes in your sightline, while in the cinema, you see the images that the director chose for you to see. The same is true of mental pictures, after reading the work of a great author.
Joseph Conrad wrote that, through the power of the written word, he wanted to "make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see." And so too, the filmmaker for over fifty ears, John Ford: "I believe movies are primarily pictures, so I play them that way. Let the pictures do the talking for you."
Indeed, the first universal language was the silent film. The incredible movements of Charlie Chaplin were instantly translated across the world, whether he was making boots or bread rolls dance on forks, or getting magic tricks wrong in a pantomime, or unbalancing on a trapeze in a circus.
With the talkies, however, film joined literature. For many of its creators, from Eisenstein to Orson Welles, their influences ranged from Homer and Shakespeare to James Joyce. As if in the theatre, their art was to make the mind see an acted scene within a frame rather than on a stage set. All were shows of the imagination. To the critic Herbert Read, the film as a work of art ranked with great drama, great literature and great painting.
The composition of many illustrations was often an inspiration to film-makers. The rounded Chatsworth landscapes of Turner resembled the vision of the eyeball, large at the edges, curving into a distant focus. The triptychs of Francis Bacon ran in lines off the sides of the canvas as did those on Japanese porcelain saucers. The space could not contain the design. And as Eisenstein noted in The Dynamic Square', the sketches by Degas of modistes and ballet dancers trapped motion, as if in a cinematic still of a performance.
Eistenstein dwelt on the size of the frame, from square to widescreen, from the vertical to the horizontal. A pioneer culture of discovery, as in the American Westem, demanded the spread horizons of prairies and deserts and landscapes, while an industrial revolution looked to the straight upward lines of smokestack and skyscraper.
Even so, cinema was the only art based on dynamic and speed, phenomena, and yet everlasting as a cathedral or a temple, because it remained always as it was made in time. It existed, free from the creative effort that gave it birth, unlike the theatre or the dance or music, the other dynamic arts, which were subject to new interpretations throughout the ages.
Cinema was also a synthetic art, built from the collaboration of a group, comprising the screenwriter and the director, the cameraman and the sound-recordist, the composer of the musical score, the art director and the location manager, and the inspired manoeuvres of the actors. Technique was the basis of film production.
For me, montage and cutting and camera action are as the mounting and hanging of paintings or collages in an exhibition. Eisenstein also found the principles of film composition, the linking of three or four sequences, to be the same as the joining of scenes within an Act in a drama. Indeed, cinemas were originally called theatres, and that is what museums and some pioneer galleries are now presenting in their art shows - brief tasters about the creators.
In the Tate and the Louvre and the Museum of Modem Art, a short trailer explains the life of the artist, be it Rembrandt or Picasso, also why he painted that way at that time.
These are the newsreels and biopics of the world of images. They inform and educate the viewers. They make the mind see more intently. The artists may also be discovered and marketed on IPhone and YouTube and website, broadcasting their messages and images to all who want to know across the whole world.
The digital revolution has put an end to pilgrimage. The moving picture is the modem transporter across space and time. Why visit, in choked and controlled crowds, the supreme painting of Genesis in the Sistine Chapel, when the Vatican has recorded its minute details in crystal-bright photography? And the various genres of fantasy cinema, from monsters to vampires, from robots to aliens, have recalled the ancient myths and demons, which once infused our thinking - Cyclops and Grendel, and on to Frankenstein and Dracula and King Kong. From our couches we easily wander the wildernesses of our dreams and nightmares.
Now we travel by stroking a small screen, not by trekking through a jungle or surviving on a motorway. Yet the original work of art still seduces us into a far joumey. To begin at the beginning, that is the craft of the creator, and may it ever be so.
ANDREW SINCLAIR 2015
Films are artworks in flow.
Paintings are set in Frames, and so are Motion Pictures. Within those spaces, the artist or the film director, alongside the camera-man and a creative team, compose the scene.
As Rudolf Arnheim noted in his Film as Art, "The art of the moving image is as old as the other arts, it is as old as humanity itself, and the motion picture is but its most recent manifestation."
"The lens of the camera," Pudovkin wrote, "replaces the eye of the observer." Yet the brain behind the retina selects the scenes in your sightline, while in the cinema, you see the images that the director chose for you to see. The same is true of mental pictures, after reading the work of a great author.
Joseph Conrad wrote that, through the power of the written word, he wanted to "make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see." And so too, the filmmaker for over fifty ears, John Ford: "I believe movies are primarily pictures, so I play them that way. Let the pictures do the talking for you."
Indeed, the first universal language was the silent film. The incredible movements of Charlie Chaplin were instantly translated across the world, whether he was making boots or bread rolls dance on forks, or getting magic tricks wrong in a pantomime, or unbalancing on a trapeze in a circus.
With the talkies, however, film joined literature. For many of its creators, from Eisenstein to Orson Welles, their influences ranged from Homer and Shakespeare to James Joyce. As if in the theatre, their art was to make the mind see an acted scene within a frame rather than on a stage set. All were shows of the imagination. To the critic Herbert Read, the film as a work of art ranked with great drama, great literature and great painting.
The composition of many illustrations was often an inspiration to film-makers. The rounded Chatsworth landscapes of Turner resembled the vision of the eyeball, large at the edges, curving into a distant focus. The triptychs of Francis Bacon ran in lines off the sides of the canvas as did those on Japanese porcelain saucers. The space could not contain the design. And as Eisenstein noted in The Dynamic Square', the sketches by Degas of modistes and ballet dancers trapped motion, as if in a cinematic still of a performance.
Eistenstein dwelt on the size of the frame, from square to widescreen, from the vertical to the horizontal. A pioneer culture of discovery, as in the American Westem, demanded the spread horizons of prairies and deserts and landscapes, while an industrial revolution looked to the straight upward lines of smokestack and skyscraper.
Even so, cinema was the only art based on dynamic and speed, phenomena, and yet everlasting as a cathedral or a temple, because it remained always as it was made in time. It existed, free from the creative effort that gave it birth, unlike the theatre or the dance or music, the other dynamic arts, which were subject to new interpretations throughout the ages.
Cinema was also a synthetic art, built from the collaboration of a group, comprising the screenwriter and the director, the cameraman and the sound-recordist, the composer of the musical score, the art director and the location manager, and the inspired manoeuvres of the actors. Technique was the basis of film production.
For me, montage and cutting and camera action are as the mounting and hanging of paintings or collages in an exhibition. Eisenstein also found the principles of film composition, the linking of three or four sequences, to be the same as the joining of scenes within an Act in a drama. Indeed, cinemas were originally called theatres, and that is what museums and some pioneer galleries are now presenting in their art shows - brief tasters about the creators.
In the Tate and the Louvre and the Museum of Modem Art, a short trailer explains the life of the artist, be it Rembrandt or Picasso, also why he painted that way at that time.
These are the newsreels and biopics of the world of images. They inform and educate the viewers. They make the mind see more intently. The artists may also be discovered and marketed on IPhone and YouTube and website, broadcasting their messages and images to all who want to know across the whole world.
The digital revolution has put an end to pilgrimage. The moving picture is the modem transporter across space and time. Why visit, in choked and controlled crowds, the supreme painting of Genesis in the Sistine Chapel, when the Vatican has recorded its minute details in crystal-bright photography? And the various genres of fantasy cinema, from monsters to vampires, from robots to aliens, have recalled the ancient myths and demons, which once infused our thinking - Cyclops and Grendel, and on to Frankenstein and Dracula and King Kong. From our couches we easily wander the wildernesses of our dreams and nightmares.
Now we travel by stroking a small screen, not by trekking through a jungle or surviving on a motorway. Yet the original work of art still seduces us into a far joumey. To begin at the beginning, that is the craft of the creator, and may it ever be so.
ANDREW SINCLAIR 2015