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EXPERIMENTS IN COUNTERPOINT
HERBERT READ
Ever since sound became a practical adjunct of the films, the commercial producers seem to have had no other desire than to use it in the interests of an ever faithful naturalism. Indeed, naturalism is the unintelligent standard of all the arts still controlled by people other than artists. In the arts of painting, sculpture and poetry, where the artist is an individualist in supreme control of the process of production, the bourgeois ideals of the nineteenth century are a thing of the past. It is only in industrial art, and in arts like the theatre and the film, in which the control is financial or capitalist, that the creative activity is inhibited or distorted in the interests of ideals and policies external to art.
The comparison of the film with the art of painting is particularly instructive, because in so far as both are visual arts, and both arts which use a two-dimensional surface for their projection and presentation, their problems are to that extent identical. Naturally the complete difference of technique soon puts an end to the value of such comparisons, but even in technique it is worth insisting on the actual plasticity of the camera's material (not so very far removed from the plasticity of paint) ; and even, on the other hand, on the concreteness of the painter's materials. Both arts, we might say, are concerned with the arrangement of solids in relation to light.
Painting, in the last fifty or sixty years, has completely liberated itself from the naturalistic convention ; it is safe to say that there is not a living painter of distinction in the world to-day who regards the exact imitation of natural effects as the aim of his art. Even the Academicians pay their tribute to some mild form of impressionism ; whilst at the other extreme the most talented painters in Europe have completely divorced their art from any conventional notion of reality, and attempt to create a new order of reality. That new order may be suggested by the natural world, or may be of an intuitive or hallucinatory origin ; but essentially it is a reality parallel to the existing order of things. Some painters call it a super-reality (surrealite) , but admittedly that is rather an arrogant assumption ; it is sufficient to call it another order of reality.
The potentiality of the film (once it becomes the mode of expression of the artist) is already great purely as film ; but the
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