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x PREFACE
the theater or told in a novel can also be conveyed in terms of the cinema. Given a purely formal approach to film, this is a quite sensible expectation. Hence the widespread opinion that tragedy is not only as accessible to the screen as any other literary genre but belongs among the noblest pursuits of the medium— those raising it to the level of an art medium.
Accordingly, culture-minded moviegoers tend to prefer, say, Orson Welles's Othello or Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet to the crudeness of a Hitchcock thriller. No doubt these two adaptations represent ingenious attempts to translate Shakespearean tragedy into cinematic language. But are they films in the sense that they would make one see and grasp things which only the cinema is privileged to communicate? Decidedly not. While admiring them, the spectator cannot help feeling that the stories which they impart do not grow out of the material life they picture but are imposed on its potentially coherent fabric from without. Even with these products of consummate craftsmanship the tragic is an addition rather than an integral element.
I submit that film and tragedy are incompatible with each other. This proposition, impossible to a formal aesthetics, follows straight from my initial assumption. If film is a photographic medium, it must gravitate toward the expanses of outer reality— an open-ended, limitless world which bears little resemblance to the finite and ordered cosmos set by tragedy. Unlike this cosmos, where destiny defeats chance and all the light falls on human interaction, the world of film is a flow of random events involving both humans and inanimate objects. Nor can the tragic be evoked by images of that flow; it is an exclusively mental experience which has no correspondences in camera-reality. . . .
I should also like to mention here that all implications of my emphasis on the photographic nature of film converge toward the issue of art. Once you start from the assumption that the cinema retains major characteristics of photography, you will find it impossible to accept the widely sanctioned belief or claim that film is an art like the traditional arts. Works of art consume the raw material from which they are drawn, whereas films as an outgrowth of camera work are bound to exhibit it. However purposefully directed, the motion picture camera would cease to be a camera if it did not record visible phenomena for their own sake. It fulfills itself in rendering the "ripple of the leaves." If film is an art, it is art with a difference. Along with photography, film is the only art which leaves its raw material more or less intact. In consequence, such art as goes into films results from their creators' capacity to read the book of nature. The film artist has traits of an imaginative reader, or an explorer prompted by insatiable curiosity.
All this means that films cling to the surface of things. They seem to