The international photographer (Jan-Dec 1935)

February, 1935 The INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER Three The Cinema and the Teaching of the Arts By Prof. Henry Focillon of the Paris Sorbonne [Reprinted from International Review of Educational Cinematography, Published by the League of Nations.] |S there not an incompatability between the plastic arts and the tendency towards movement ? Does it not seem that the essential quality of a masterpiece is due to its eternal immobility, since it appears before us as a fixed and definite result that has overcome time and our interior anguish? Does not moving it mean destroying it? Architecture is based on the earth, its mass condemns it to a stability which never changes. If it ceases to be fixed, if it tends to move, is it still architecture? The great images of man which sculptors have raised on the horizon of our humanity are especially characterized by the fact that they do not move or change. Baudelaire conceived beauty in this form, and raised the statue to a compact, radiant thing. If the masterpiece does not move, we do, however, and we feel the necessity of movement in order to grasp the statue's immobility. Our sight must take it in from all angles and in all its dimensions. We must step around it, and it is through this process alone, this walking round an object that we can possess it in a space not as a flat thing covered with designs but as a mass and a volume. When we do not have the work itself, but an image of it, cannot it be imagined that the latter, through a clever artifice, will move at our pleasure before us who remain motionless? If we discard the use of the motion picture, we condemn ourselves to consider works of art merely as a collection of figures. Other pressing reasons invite us to reflect on the matter. ( 1 ) A short while before his death — which deprived French art of a generous and elect spirit — Ruhlmann spoke to us about a film which he had prepared for his own amusement with an amateur's camera in the course of a trip in Southern Italy. He told us his delight in having learned how to see and re-examine with the aid of that wonderful optical memory, the lens, the masterpieces of ancient and modern architecture in classic lands. A work of art is not an abstract thing, but forms part of a natural center, and belongs to the light which colors it. A monument is only a large drawing surrounded on every side by human life which takes up diverse associations with it. The temples of Agrigentum and Selinunte preserve their intellectual beauty in an architectonic picture in a well made photograph, but one rich and substantial quality is missing in them. Their life in the photograph is sad and arid compared to their existence in nature and natural surroundings, where we walk under a changing sky, past shadows that tremble over a ground steeped in reflections. In order better to "understand" the cathedrals of old France, placed on their rustic acropoli on the heights of our old cities, we must retrace the old paths that lead up to them, pass through the narrow ways that cross the mountainside. This kind of thing does not imply any falsity nor the addition of any theatrical setting to the work of art ; it means rather giving a work of art its due space in which it can live ; it means associating it with history and modern life. The approach is made by a mazy path where the marks impressed by the passing centuries can be seen. The object of art is discovered bit by bit. We see it under various aspects. It is no longer a concrete crystalization preserved for us under the glass of a museum show-case. It is something alive that lives with us. The young folk will be especially sensitive to this progressive and multiform revelation of a thing of beauty. In this manner, it would be possible to make short "type" films for scholars, films which, while eliminating the merely anecdotical element, would preserve the living essence. (2) The motion picture is more precious still for research work. Photography has done an immense service to our research specialists, but it has exposed us to some dangers. In the three-dimensional arts, architecture and sculpture, we tend to believe that volume is only the super-imposition and concatenation of a number of profiles. We have endeavored to show that profiles can be innumerable, but even if we could fix and project many of them with stills, we should not obtain the fundamental mass feeling of the interdependence of the parts and the manner in which they accord with one another and make their equilibrium. I am convinced that the cinema is capable of showing us — through the powerful effect of moving light which is more revealing than our own sight — certain processes and effects of relief, clash, quick movement and roughness. Animated drawings can prove extremely useful in ornamental studies. The life of forms does not always proceed by way of sudden mutations, and still less through sudden creations ex nihil. Baltruisaitis has shown in his celebrated work on The Stylistic Ornamentation of Roman Sculpture that a strict and rigorous dialectic is capable of producing incalculable variations of the same motive which change under our eyes almost without our perceiving them. The rules laid down by the author already constitute elements of the film. A few intermediate inflections can make the innumerable metamorphoses of the Roman capital live again for us. This is not a secondary or special aspect of our inquiry. All the arts that are based on abstract formulae — like those of the Orient — will derive great benefit from such a technique. Finally, we should analyze the work of the artist's hands. Art is not a purely spiritual phenomenon, but is shaped out of raw material owing to certain concerted actions of our members. It is a triumph of man's hands. Admirable films have been made on the playing of the pianist. Could not an experiment of this kind be made on the hands of a painter or a sculptor ? The pianist's technique has certainly something quite definite about it, and is exercised on notes or keys which are always in the same position, while the painter or the sculptor move their keyboard about so that the variety of their attack is apparentlv quite free. This is onlv (Turn to 'Page 18) Please mention The International Photographer when corresponding with advertisers.