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

THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART Fig. 85. — Lighting plan for the filr " The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ". ! treatment of such a film as " Secrets of the Soul " has only to be studied attentive! for one to observe the signs of a definite method, organically bound up with th philosophy of the camera-man, and expressing his ideology. In Zeber's worl we find shots compositionally treated so as to provide a kind of hint, an indication of an event occurring somewhere beyond the frame limits, intensifying its mystic ism by this apparent allusiveness. A shadow or reflection running over th gloomy broken flight of an unlighted staircase, a monstrously enlarged hand, face hyperbolically growing in non-natural camera-angle, in a painful distortioi emphasised by the harsh treatment of the texture and the contrast lighting, ar all methods which have as their purpose to symbolise a ' state of the soul ', in thi case the pathology of a perverted psyche. In this case, as in that of certain othe camera-men, the representational treatment does not arise out of the content o, the shot, conditioned by reality, not out of what we see in reality, but out o| some abstract idea symbolically revealed by the active modification of the visua image, by the optical distortion of the object filmed. Such features forbid ou: attributing them merely to directorial influence, still less to superficial imitatior of expressionist pictorial art, and compel us to assume that the camera-mar himself possesses that outlook which in pictorial art and literature is described a; expressionism. Expressionism, which reached the height of its development during th( years of German inflation, undoubtedly had a profound influence on the development of cinema art. Despite the decadence and injurious quality of its creative attitude, it played a definite, positive role in the camera-man's art, albeit a purely 162