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Bach, the symbolists or Cezanne, were profoundly realizing their own time, but most of their contemporaries failed to see it.
I believe that most of our motion-pictures are sterile. Although one could not deny that they also automatically reflect their time, they fail to reveal it with insight. They resemble those fragments of utensils which help the archaeologist piece together the daily life of a past civilization, rather than the temples and sculptures which reveal vanished cultures to the historian.
The aspiration of every art form is simultaneously to realize and defeat the limitations of its technique. This should not be confused with technical virtuosity which, by consciously exercising the intricacies of the technique, ends up not by transcending its limits, but merely displaying them. A truly creative art achieves transcendency of its technique when its emotional and expressional impact overshadows the method by which it is accomplished.
To achieve this, the cinema, like all other art forms, should continually reexamine its own processes and tools. When, for instance, its processes were limited to the visual means, before the advent of synchronized sound, the creative effort to exploit the available visual elements resulted, in a few films, in creating a self-sufficient and inimitable cinematic reality.
When, finally, recorded sound came, the easy use of word to convey drama or narrative absolved the visual element of most of its creative responsibility. Now the camera became cumbersome and often resembled an uninvited guest. It has never quite recovered from that humiliation. If it seemed to make some progress, it was in a wrong direction: that of decorating rather than creating.
Photographic polish and virtuosity today know no limits. But those advances achieved in the silent period, such as the sharpening sense of the meaning of close-up, of the value of time and counter-point in cutting — those advances either disintegrated into decorative routines, or altogether disappeared. An appreciation of their intrinsic meaning was replaced by a commercial appraisal of them as so-called "production values."
Today, it is no longer the cinematographer, but the playwright
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