Theory of film : the redemption of physical reality (1960)

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50 I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS the more significant if they keep close to the real-life material from which they stem; only then can they be expected to assume the revealing functions peculiar to the medium. In its preoccupation with the small the cinema is comparable to science. Like science, it breaks down material phenomena into tiny particles, thereby sensitizing us to the tremendous energies accumulated in the microscopic configurations of matter. These analogies may well be related to the nature of film. It is quite possible indeed that the construction of the film image from shots of minute phases of movement favors the reverse tendency toward decomposing given wholes. Is it really surprising that a medium so greatly indebted to nineteenth-century concern for science should show characteristics inherent in the scientific approach? Incidentally, the very ideas and impulses responsible for the rise of film have also left their imprint on Proust's novel. This would account for its parallels with film— especially the sustained use Proust makes in it of the close-up. In truly cinematic fashion he magnifies throughout the smallest elements or cells of reality, as if prompted by a desire to identify them as the source and seat of the explosive forces which make up life. The big Among the large objects, such as vast plains or panoramas of any kind, one deserves special attention: the masses. No doubt imperial Rome already teemed with them. But masses of people in the modern sense entered the historical scene only in the wake of the industrial revolution. Then they became a social force of first magnitude. Warring nations resorted to levies on an unheard-of scale and identifiable groups yielded to the anonymous multitude which filled the big cities in the form of amorphous crowds. Walter Benjamin observes that in the period marked by the rise of photography the daily sight of moving crowds was still a spectacle to which eyes and nerves had to get adjusted. The testimony of sensitive contemporaries would seem to corroborate this sagacious observation: The Paris crowds omnipresent in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal function as stimuli which call forth irritating kaleidoscopic sensations; the jostling and shoving passers-by who, in Poe's Man of the Crowd, throng gas-lit London provoke a succession of electric shocks.21 At the time of its emergence the mass, this giant animal, was a new and upsetting experience. As might be expected, the traditional arts proved unable to encompass and render it. Where they failed, photography easily succeeded; it was technically equipped to portray crowds as the accidental agglomerations they are. Yet only film, the fulfillment of photography in a sense, was equal to the task of capturing them in motion. In this case the instrument of reproduction came into being almost