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

THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART Fig. 73. — Caricature I Daumier of the Photograph, Nadar : " Nadar raising phot graphy to a high art." All photography of beast or man represents a series of complicated caricatures [add N. N. Karazin].1 J So photography was not an art. It was dead, lifeless, and it distorted reali . In the best case it was accused of passive ' reproductionalism ', in the worst t was declared dangerous, but bearable to the extent that it satisfied the aesthe: demands of the ' crowd '. And here we find the true explanation of the negative attitude to photograph adopted in bourgeois aesthetics. It hands over this ' cheap ' art to the crov, and then treats it as not genuine art. Typical bourgeois hypocrisy this, whii accuses the people of lack of culture, and with all its powers, including ideolo^, — the gutter press and gutter art — deliberately keeps that people from cultu . Whereas true art exists only for the select few of the ruling class. The bourgeois aesthetics of the period marking the close of industrial capitism regarded photography inimically, as a mechanical art, just as it had machine; and industry. In modern society art is a commodity. It is valued for its rarf and uniqueness. Commodity fetishism and its way of thinking regards only the hand-mac, craft-produced, unique and unrepeatable production as art. During the epoch of imperialism the bourgeoisie's attitude to the machi' and to industrialism changed considerably, owing to a number of reasons whii we need not consider here. The attempt was made to create a new style on t; basis of machine technique, an ' aesthetics of the machine ', of technical co 1 Proceedings of the First Congress of Russian Artists and Amateurs of Art, 1894, Moscc, 1900, pp. 15, 42, 43. 142