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

THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART pean artists have persisted in representing a galloping horse with both hind-le^ stretched backward, and both forelegs stretched forward (Fig. 90). Our visu; culture, by force of a certain inertia, never notices the deviation from reality i drawings of this kind. But the Japanese represented a galloping horse quit differently in their pictorial art, and our eye, trained in a certain habit of oercep tion, cannot reconcile itself to the Japanese construction. And so we call abstract. With the invention of photography, when Muybridge succeeded i fixing a galloping horse in a series of sequentially taken photographs representin the various phases of the movement, a simple comparison of one of them (Fi^ 92) with a drawing by the Japanese artist Ogata Korin, made in 1700 (Fig. 91 led to a quite unexpected discovery. It transpired that the eye of the Japanes artist, unfettered by the European's visual fetishes, had been able to catch th animal in a position, in a phase of movement which we Europeans cannot isolat from the general dynamic process. Thus, Japanese graphic art, which wa regarded as abstract in its composition, in a number of respects reflects realit more truly than European naturalistic painting. The same conclusion arise from a comparison of the drawing of a stork about to fly, made by the Japanes* artist Hokusai at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Fig. 93), with ai analogous photograph by Ottomar Anschutz, taken in 1894 (Fig. 94). Snapshot photography and, later, cinema sharply modified the manner ii which pictorial art transmits various phases of dynamic processes, because th< artist became provided with a new source of perception and observation of reality one more perfect than the human eye. In 1 82 1 Gericault was still drawing a galloping horse with legs spread ou symmetrically, two forelegs forward, two hind-legs backward (" Race for th< Derby at Epsom "), but in 1880 Speyer in his " Moroccan Fantasy " representee galloping horsemen with great approximation to reality, undoubtedly owing tc the influence of photography. In the same way the specific peculiarities of photographic perspective alsc have their reflection in painting, caricature, and the graphic arts generally. The perspective foreshortening which is achieved in photography by taking the object with a short-focus lens evokes imitation in painting, caricature, and especially in the poster. In Fig. 95 we give a photograph of a poster by the artists Mikhailik and Gershanik. Undoubtedly such a compositional treatment, based on the juxtaposition of two different foreshortenings, could have arisen only because of the influence of photography and the cinema. The sharp perspective diminution of the police and the characteristic cutting off of the figure in the foreground by the picture limits, are specific to the cinematographic construction of a shot taken with a short-focus lens. A fundamental influence has also been brought to bear on modern pictorial art by such forms of photographic art as photomontage.1 By the mutual enrichment of experience we get the specific tendencies of so-called ' pictorial photography ', in which it is difficult to separate the pictorial from the photographic elements. The cinema has enriched the pictorial arts primarily with a variety of new viewpoints, a new view of the object. Cinematographic foreshortening, manifested in the dynamics of a turn, has become an achievement of modern pictorial art. Not infrequently the cinema frame is directly imitated by the pictorial 1 It is particularly interesting to trace the influence on modern Western art of such photographer-artists as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy. — N. 170