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28 I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
movements resemble, somehow, those of waves or leaves. In a memorable statement published before the emergence of instantaneous photography, Sir John Herschel not only predicted the basic features of the film camera but assigned to it a task which it has never since disowned: "the vivid and lifelike reproduction and handing down to the latest posterity of any transaction in real life— a battle, a debate, a public solemnity, a pugilistic conflict."5 Ducos du Hauron and other forerunners also looked forward to what we have come to label newsreels and documentaries— films devoted to the rendering of real-life events.0 This insistence on recording went hand in hand with the expectation that motion pictures could acquaint us with normally imperceptible or otherwise induplicable movements— flashlike transformations of matter, the slow growth of plants, etc.7 All in all, it was taken for granted that film would continue along the lines of photography.* To summarize: the preceding statements about photography also hold true of the cinematic medium; but they do not apply to it mechanically or go far enough to exhaust its potentialities. Elaborations and extensions are needed. They will be provided in the first three chapters, which represent an attempt to account for the general characteristics of the medium. The present chapter concentrates on the basic concepts underlying the subsequent analyses. The next chapter details the recording and revealing functions of film. The third deals with its particular affinities. This conceptual framework will later be filled in by inquiries into specific areas and elements of film and problems of film composition.
PROPERTIES OF THE MEDIUM
The properties of film can be divided into basic and technical properties.
The basic properties are identical with the properties of photography. Film, in other words, is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and, hence, gravitates toward it.
Now there are different visible worlds. Take a stage performance or a painting: they too are real and can be perceived. But the only reality we are concerned with is actually existing physical reality— the transitory world we live in. (Physical reality will also be called "material reality," or "physical existence," or "actuality," or loosely just "nature." Another fitting term might be "camera-reality." Finally, the term "life" suggests itself as an alter
* Mr. Georges Sadoul, L'Invention du cinema, p. 298, sagaciously observes that the names given the archaic film cameras offer clues to the then prevailing aspirations. Such names as vitascope, vitagraph, bioscope, and biograph were undoubtedly intended to convey the camera's affinity for "life," while terms like kinetoscope, kinetograph, and cinematograph testified to the concern with movement.