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

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

INHERENT AFFINITIES 61 requires qualification. Experience shows that the uncinematic effect of staginess is mitigated in at least two cases. For one thing, take all the films which, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to the Japanese Gate of Hell, are palpably patterned on paintings: it is true that they ignoie unadulterated reality, reality not yet subjected to painterly treatment, but at the same time they meet Hermann Warm's request that films should be ''drawings brought to life."* Now their compliance with his request is of consequence cinematically. One will remember that in the preceding chapter movement as contrasted with motionlessness has been identified as a subject of cinematic interest. Films bringing "drawings ... to life" may be considered an annex to this group; if they do not contrast motion with a state of rest, yet they picture the birth of motion out of that state. In fact, we experience the sensation of nascent movement whenever seemingly painted figures and objects take on life in spite of their inherent immobility. The experience is all the more stirring since they cannot help preserving the character of drawings. As the protagonists of Caligari— Dr. Caligari himself and the medium Cesare— move through expressionist settings, they continue to fuse with the motionless shadows and bizarre designs about them.2 And some scenes of Gate of Hell are nothing but scrolls set moving as if by a magic wand. What attracts us in these films is the miracle of movement as such. It adds a touch of cinema to them. As for the other case, a similar effect may be produced with the aid of specifically cinematic techniques and devices. This is in keeping with what has been said about the relationships between the basic and technical properties of film in the second chapter. According to the rule advanced there, even a film with stagy settings— to mention only this one aspect of staginess— may acquire a cinematic quality provided its technical execution testifies to a sense of the medium; whereby it is understood, though, that such a film is under all circumstances less cinematic than a film devoted to camera-reality. In Olivier's Hamlet the camera is continually on the move, thus making the spectator almost forget that the interiors through which it travels and pans are intended to externalize the mood of the play rather than impart that of anything external; or to be more precise, he must divide his attention between two conflicting worlds which are supposed to merge into a whole but actually do not blend well: the cinematic world suggested by camera movement and the deliberately unreal world established by the stage designer. In the same way Fritz Lang manages to imbue the flood episode of his Metropolis, a film of unsurpassable staginess in many respects, with a semblance of cinematic life. The fleeing crowds in that episode are staged veraciously and rendered * See p. 39.