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CINEMA AESTHETICS
As we announced in our April number, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Barcelona has organized, under the direction of Professor Guillermo Diaz-PIaja, a series of conferences on the cinema. The conferences were inaugurated with a course of three lessons on " Cinema Aesthetics " by Professor Diaz-PIaja. A summary of those lessons may interest our readers.
I. The appearance of the cinema in the life of our epoch has constituted such an important and characteristic phenomenon as to admit the coming into being of a regular from of cinematographic culture.
II. What is the cinema? The cinema is the play of an animated plastique, expressive in itself, in which case it is identified with the documentary cinema. Or else it move in the field of elemental emotions, when it may be said to become an art cinema. A film is therefore not really cinematographic except in so far as it solves its problems of expression without abandoning an expressive plasticity, without concerning itself with secondary considerations of a moral or sentimental nature which have an extracinematographic importance.
III. Animated plastique, that is time and space. The work of the cinema is one of selection. The cinema director has at his disposal a) an inexhaustible material, namely the world we live in ; 2) a selective instrument, namely the cinema apparatus.
The cinema becomes in reality a kind of catalogue of the universe. It reveals the value of things and the perceptible world which surrounds us. In other words, it is the art which permits us to see the world in its various formations and gradations.
IV. In the history of humanity a certain moment of decisive importance should be remembered, which occurred when graphic signs were transformed into phonetic abstract
ions, the moment in which the concrete and plastic conception of things was transformed into an ideal or abstract conception.
At this movement, a definite culture of an intellectual and verbal character came into existence, which was in antithesis with every thing that could be called form. And this has been the condition of things up to today. It is the cinema's task to transform this tormented culture based on intellectualism into a direct culture by means of images.
V. This return of the image can be connected with a series of symptoms which characterise the crisis of the word. Such indications may be found in the writings of Goethe, Pirandello, Ors, Abel Gance, Waldemar George, Aldous Huxley, Gomez de la Serna, Remy de Gourmont, Maeterlinck, Bergson, Maragall, Breton, and Pierre Marcel Jousse.
VI. The cinema is an art of the present century, and consequently anti-romantic. It must be clear and exact, and loathe everything that is confusion or intuition.
Every film should be true to life except in the case of deformation of images the super-realist film, and animated designs.
VII. Beside being absolutely true to life and precise as a document, a minimum of beauty is necessary in every film. Clarity, nobility of intentions, intelligence should characterise the faces and bodies of the personages filmed. Deformations and ugliness are relics of romanticism and Russian