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PREFACE ix
and elsewhere; also, scattered movichouses occasionally cultivate revivals or resort to them as stopgaps. If there were more such opportunities, people would be less inclined to mistake for a "new wave" what is actually an old story— which is not to say, of course, that new waves do not rise from time to time: think of the neorealistic movement in postwar Italy.
As for my approach to film, I shall certainly not attempt to outline it in advance. Yet I feel I should at least point here to some of its distinguishing features so that prospective readers will get a rough idea of what is awaiting them. My book differs from most writings in the field in that it is a material aesthetics, not a formal one. It is concerned with content. It rests upon the assumption that film is essentially an extension of photography and therefore shares with this medium a marked affinity for the visible world around us. Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality. Now this reality includes many phenomena which would hardly be perceived were it not for the motion picture camera's ability to catch them on the wing. And since any medium is partial to the things it is uniquely equipped to render, the cinema is conceivably animated by a desire to picture transient material life, life at its most ephemeral. Street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions are its very meat. Significantly, the contemporaries of Lumiere praised his films— the first ever to be made— for showing "the ripple of the leaves stirred by the wind."
I assume, then, that films are true to the medium to the extent that they penetrate the world before our eyes. This assumption— the premise and axis of my book— gives rise to numerous questions. For instance, how is it possible for films to revive events of the past or project fantasies and yet retain a cinematic quality? What about the role of the sound track? If films are to confront us with our visible environment, a good deal obviously depends upon the manner in which the spoken word, noises, and music are related to the pictures. A third question bears on the character of the narrative: Are all types of stories indiscriminately amenable to cinematic treatment or are some such types more in keeping with the spirit of the medium than the rest of them? In answering these and other questions, I am bringing out the implications of my assumption about the photographic nature of film.
It is two different things to espouse an idea and to realize, let alone endorse, all that is implied by it. Even though the reader will presumably agree that the cinema is engrossed in the physical side of life in and about us, he may not be prepared to acknowledge certain consequences of its preoccupation with externals. Consider the issue of story types: a majority of people take for granted that everything that can be staged in