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INTRODUCTION
CREATION AND TECHNIQUE IN THE CINEMA
THE film is a synthetic art. A cinematograph film is built up as the result of collaboration of a numerous creative group : scenarist, director, camera-man, sound-recordist, composer of the musical score, art director, and actor.
A highly complicated technical process is involved in cinematographic art. The modern cinema is not only a specific form of art, but a branch of industry, developed on a peculiar industrial basis.
Technique is the basis of cinema production. The development of productive forces at the beginning of the nineteenth century led to the creation of photographic technique, and this in turn became the source of cinema technique. Photography came into being as the result of man's desire to fix permanent pictures of the reality existing around him. The cinema provided him with such pictures, with the addition that they were capable of being reproduced dynamically. In fact — the ' moving picture.'
The cinema established a new profession, non-existent in any other form of art or branch of industry : the camera-man. For a long time his role consisted in the passive documentation of real objects, without any active intervention in the photographic process of recording. In those days the cinema was without dramaturgist or director, actor or art director. Only later, when the cinema's possibilities of expression had been sufficiently realised, when the cinema had taken its place in the arsenal of art-weapons influencing man, did the director, dramaturgist (scenariowriter) and actor appear, each deriving from closely related fields of art.1 But the one man who wields the special technique of the cinematic process, who must possess a knowledge of all the technical resources and special means involved in the peculiar ' shooting ' process of cinema, remains the cameraman.
What is the camera-man's profession ? What precisely does he do, and what role does he play in the ranks of the creators of the film ?
In view of the youthfulness of the film as a special art form, such questions may at first seem surprising. The functions of the various participants in shooting a film may at first sight seem so obvious as scarcely to call for definition. Broadly speaking, the camera-man's job is generally understood as the technical process of getting the given scene on to the film, by means of photographic and cinematographic technique.
None the less, this conception of his job, although the one generally accepted, particularly outside the U.S.S.R., does not provide an answer to the main question : Is his work creative ?
Certainly the purely technical functions of the camera-man are easy enough to define. The technique of film photography, built up on the basis of the pertinent facts of photo-chemistry, optics and mechanics, can be listed in six principal
1 Sound recording also derives from a related field. — Ed.