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

THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART ising art productions. The positive value and exceptional possibilities of applil scientific and technical photography need no demonstrating. The positive aspects of the wholesale distribution of photography are | obvious that it would be a waste of time stopping to consider them. But i must consider certain results of a negative kind, which are directly connect I with our further conclusions. ' Professional ' photography always sought the greatest and most exact i semblance to the originals. The professional photographer took no trouble j reveal the characteristic peculiarities of the object photographed in artistic fori and endeavoured only to obtain a mechanical reproduction of the original, | make a copy void of any independent creative content, void of thought, whi only the artist, creatively perceiving reality, can introduce. It was evident these negative features of professional photography that Hippolyte Taine had mind when, in his lectures on " The Philosophy of Art ", he spoke on the incor patibility of painting and photography as " equal " representational arts. Photography is an art which, with the aid of lines and shadows in one plane, reproduc the outlines and forms of an object exactly and without error. Undoubtedly photograp' is a serviceable aid to painting ; sometimes it has artistic application in the hands of expei enced and capable persons, but none the less it does not think of placing itself on the sar level as painting. Professional photography was mechanically ' exact ' and ' without error But it was these very features that deprived it of its picturesque quality the chi and most valuable quality that Daguerre and Hill portrayed. As early as the 'sixties of last century professional portrait photography beg; to oust portrait painting, which became the property only of the most secu classes. The cheapness of the photographic portrait and the possibility of tl wholesale copying of photographs deprived the average portrait painter, who h; worked for the urban citizen, of a large ' market '. This was the basis of tl antagonism that developed between portrait painting and photography. Mar accusations were made against photography, all of them in the last resort amountir to a denial that photography was an art. But we must remark that undoubted there was formal reason for such an attitude, for at that time the artistic lev of the professional photographer was below all criticism. Based on the currer tastes of the middle-class citizen, ' salon ' photography was the very reverse ( artistic. Yet this was no reason for denying its role as a representational art i general, for the creative possibilities of artistic photography had been clear] demonstrated by Daguerre and Hill (Figs. 70, 71, 72). The real reasons for the denial that photography is an art were differen We shall deal with them later on. For the moment we note that, living miserabl in the vestibules of art, photography borrowed from it the naturalism ruling i the days of its own birth, and that in the most naive, vulgar and insipid forn While in ' salon ' photography this naturalism was hidden beneath an extern; abstract ' beauty ' of subject and detail, in photo-reporting and amateur photog raphy it was revealed in all its naked ugliness. The development of photographi technique, the improvement of the lens, also drove it in the direction of insipi naturalism. The anastigmatic lens with its exceptionally clear optical transmissio: and broad angle of vision came into use. A photograph taken with such a leni completely answered the needs of applied photography, but at the same tim this lens became a dangerous instrument in the hands of the unqualified pres and amateur photographer. The possibilities of the wide-angled anastigmati lens encouraged them to delight in the definition of detail, and in the extraordin 140