The cinema as a graphic art : on a theory of representation in the cinema (1959)

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THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART scene designer,1 and the unity of their collective creation constitutes the theatrical production as a whole. The technique of expression in theatrical art relates to a spectacle consisting of numerous component elements, and so demands a corresponding division of labour, in other words, a distribution of the creative function among the various participants in the creative process. In the theatre that process is considerably modified from the direct, simple example provided by pictorial art, and here the line of construction of the art-image must run unbrokenly from the playwright's and producer's treatment of the production to the treatment individually accorded by each actor. The cinema introduces yet another, new quality, alien to the schematic process of constructing the art-image in the theatre. Although still frequently exploited only for the documentation of the object photographed and its simple mechanical fixation on the film, cinema technique possesses such various means of constructing and expressing an artimage that it cannot be regarded as inevitably merely an instrument of recording, of making for example, the pictorial record of a theatrical expression. The possibilities of expression at the disposal of cinema technique, still far from fully realised, in fact represent a new sphere of formal art methods, unavailable to either pictorial or theatrical art. In film art the process of constructing the art-image is by no means ended with the working out of the script and the director's and actor's treatment of the scene. In the cinema it is not enough to incarnate it in director's and actor's treatment. What the spectator sees on the screen is not the real action of the scene as it took place in front of the lens at the moment of shooting, but its optical interpretation as fixed on the film. We use the term " interpretation " deliberately, for the cinematic representation is never absolutely identical with the reality subjected to transmission. In all cases it is a specific optical treatment of the object, more or less modifying its character and even its content significance. Even those films we are accustomed to call ' documentaries ' really give us only a greater or lesser degree of approximation to simple transmission of the true geometrical relationships and physical qualities of the object photographed. A photograph is by no means a complete and whole reflection of reality. The specific properties of the two-dimensional plane of the picture enable it to transmit the aggregate of qualities of a real phenomenon only in a very one-sided fixation. Quite apart from the exclusion of natural-colour transmission 2 the photographic picture represents only one or another selection from the sum of physical attributes of the object photographed, and the character of that selection depends not only on the laws of optics, but, principally, on the methods used in composition of the picture. In so far as we have hitherto discussed the special transmission of the object photographed, the foregoing remarks are equally applicable to simple static photography. As soon, however, as we turn to the second quality of cinema portrayal, the possibility of reproducing an object not only in its spatial but in its temporal relationships, we immediately realise the decisive influence of such factors as speed and rhythm on the character of the perception of a film picture. The technical resources available to the cinema enable it not only to modify the spatial relationships of the object, not only to create new forms of vision of the real environment, but, within broad limits, to change the speed at which the real dynamic processes occur. 1 In cinema, the art director. — Ed. 2 At present the limited number of organic colours available to cinema technique does not make possible fully natural colour transmission. — N. 16