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

Inherent Affinities If photography survives in film, film must share the same affinities. Accordingly, four of the five affinities which seem to be characteristic of film should be identical with those of photography. Nevertheless they call for renewed discussion because of their extended scope and their specifically cinematic implications. The last affinity to be examined— for the ''flow of life" — is peculiar to film alone, since photography cannot picture life in motion. THE UNSTAGED As has been pointed out, everything reproducible in terms of the camera may be represented on the screen— which means that, for instance, the "canning" of a theatrical performance is in principle unobjectionable. Yet I have stressed that films conform to the cinematic approach only if they acknowledge the realistic tendency by concentrating on actual physical existence— "the beauty of moving wind in the trees," as D. W. Griffith expressed it in a 1947 interview in which he voiced his bitterness at contemporary Hollywood and its unawareness of that beauty.1 In other words, film, notwithstanding its ability to reproduce, indiscriminately, all kinds of visible data, gravitates toward unstaged reality. And this in turn has given rise to two interrelated propositions regarding staging: First, staging is aesthetically legitimate to the extent that it evokes the illusion of actuality. Second, by the same token anything stagy is uncinematic if it passes over the basic properties of the medium. There would be nothing to be added were it not for the last proposition about staginess. Although the general statement that the artificiality of stagy settings or compositions runs counter to the medium's declared preference for nature in the raw is certainly to the point, it nevertheless 60