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

CREATIVE PROBLEMS OF THE ART OF THE CAMERA-MAN Fig. 91. — Drawing by the Japanese artist Ogat; Korin (1700). Fig. 92. — Photographs of a galloping horse, taken by Muybridge. [G. 93. — Drawing by the Japanese artist Hokusai, made at the beginning century. of the nineteenth Fig. 94. Photograph by Ottomar Anschutz, taken 1848. nd while in the early days of the cinema its expressive possibilities were created id developed out of the experience of the pictorial arts, now it is possible to point i) the converse influence of the cinema on the other representational arts. Even 1 the early days there were some most interesting examples of cinema photogiphy's influence on pictorial art. Man's visual culture, i.e. the character of his perception of surrounding ^ality, is not an absolutely fixed quantity : it changes and evolves. For instance, near perspective as a form of perception has not existed everywhere and always : fiere are entire epochs in the cultural development of various people in which near perspective as a form of perception was passed over. Our visual culture > also by no means free from a number of visual habits and fetishes, which deternine the forms of visual representation most customary to us. We perceive the urrounding environment under the influence of these visual habits, and not ^frequently those notions of objects which seem most in correspondence with eality far from correspond with it. A curious confirmation of this is found in apanese graphic art, which has compositional bases which the European percepion has to regard as abstract in many respects. Until the invention of photography, and sometimes, even, to this day, Euro 169