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

CREATIVE PROBLEMS OF THE ART OF THE CAMERA-MAN auction. And photography also achieved partial recognition as an art. Attempts ere made to recreate artistic photography on new principles. Along this road reat, yet purely formalistic, intrinsically emasculated achievements stand to the -edit of individual artistic photographers of post-war years. (Moholy-Nagy, Ian-Ray and others.) This attempt to create a new art was unsuccessful, and >r the same reasons as those which led to the failure of attempts to create a new lachine-technique style : the complete bankruptcy of all bourgeois culture and leology, which during the period of disintegration of the capitalist system has ot itself into a blind alley. In the ' modern ' style, and even more in construcvism, the artist, instead of creating a new organic style, occupies himself with ylising machinery, with the self-sufficing aesthetics of play with new materials. ' Engine-ism ' and ' machine-ism ' are means of emasculating the ideological Dntent of art, of reducing it to an empty trickery and ' divertissement ' and xasionally to meaningless irrationalism, to idealist abstractionism, to the ' mas:ry of the material ' and so on. In such conditions, naturally nothing significant, o serious and valuable art has been able to emerge from the attempts to create i artistic photography. To what extent photography's miserable lot is not inevitable, to what extent tiotographic technique provides every possibility of constructing a genuine art i its basis is shown by the practice of Soviet photography. Photography has nly to be transferred to the fruitful soil of art of a rising socialist society, it has nly to be given a social trend, and it is at once transformed into genuine art. nd here the distinction between photo-reporting and so-called artistic pho>graphy is lost, for in such conditions both of them are justified in claiming the tie of genuine art. Is photography an art ? [asks a writer in the Express Poranny, reviewing an exhibition ' Soviet photo-reporting in Warsaw]. Let those who have even a grain of doubt on the lestion visit the exhibition of Soviet photography. . . . Every one of the photographers »ntributing to the exhibition is an artist, if only in the sense that he is in love with the orld, that he always looks at it with the wondering gaze of the eternal discoverer of new uths, seeing it always for the first time. Looking at the world through his eyes, in other ords through the lens of his camera, we also see this world for the first time. . . . The ost faithful expressers of the now officially proclaimed socialist realism in Soviet art, hich is primarily a thematic trend, are undoubtedly the photo-reporter artists. Here is another report which emphasises the striking difference between (Dviet photo-art and the degenerate, aestheticising Western ' artistic ' photography. In the works of the Soviet photographers [writes a member of the Union of Polish iiotographers, the engineer Dederko], we do not see scattered collars, ash-trays with cigar id cigarette ends, or scraps of paper, but we see factory chimneys, machines, tractors, ientific expeditions, all the world, incommensurably more important than the glass of sltzer water of the superrefined people of Western Europe. The portraits are also jstinguished from those we are accustomed to seeing. The expression is strong, the |solute gaze reveals people firm, simple, and markedly different from us. ... A charteristic feature of the exhibition is joy — tremendous, unrestrainable, sometimes simply ^intelligible to us people of the West.1 The foregoing extracts call for no comment. At this stage we end our brief xursion into the history of photography and come to the first stages of the birth cinema. The cinema, which first saw the light in the last decade of the nineteenth tttury, was originally not invented as a means of cheap mass amusement. During e second half of that century the development of experienced scientific know1Volsky: " Exhibition of Soviet photographs in Warsaw". Izvestia, June 9, 1934 143