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

THE COMPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SHOT Fig. 23. — Compositional scheme in Hobbema's picture. specific to the cinema, which confront us when we apply to cinema the laws of linear perspective governing the graphic arts. Although linear perspective as a method of seeing and representing was known as early as the fifteenth century, almost every artist from that day to this has used compositional constructions which modify the true relationships between the actual dimensions and the position of the represented objects. These modifications are the result of the artist's attempt to present his personages in the most impressive and outstanding form possible, in other words, to represent them as being at a comparatively close distance while the architectural and landscape background is represented as being at a greater distance, so enabling him to reproduce as large a section as possible of the seen world on the small field of the picture. In his work Mathematics and Painting Georg Wolff made mathematical investigations into a number of the best-known productions of the greatest masters of the Renaissance, and came to the conclusion that in many cases there was deliberate violation of the laws of linear perspective. These violations, which in the artist's own days were called ' errors ', came about as the result of the artist's attempt to convey his artistic intention as expressively as possible, and to reveal that intention in his compositional construction. Wolff writes1: Schilling and Viner noted that Paul Veronese, the brilliant representative of pictorial art of the Renaissance, adopted, in his large picture " Marriage at Cana ", painted as early as the latter half of the sixteenth century, seven vanishing points and five horizons. A closer study of this picture would reveal many more. . . . 1 George Wolff, Mathematik und Malerei. — N. 51