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

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84 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS fantasy may be established technically and to determine, in each stage of this inquiry, the influence of the two "relational" alternatives.* Fantasy established in a stagy manner The first stage of the inquiry into the "technical" factor centers on films which represent the fantastic by way of bizarre settings, contrived accessories, unusual make-up, and the like. Whether or not their outspoken staginess marks such creations as uncinematic depends on the manner in which the "relational" factor asserts itself in their representation. first alternative (Fantasy pretends to the same aesthetic legitimacy as actuality) From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on, films or film sequences forgo the natural world in favor of an imagined one which cannot deny its origin in the studio. True, in some such films— e.g. Fritz Lang's old Destiny or Red Shoes— spectacles of stagy fantasy mingle with renderings of real-life material, but the mixture is effected in a way which clearly points to the film makers' underlying belief that nature has no title to preferential treatment and that theatricality is as valid as is camerarealism. Incidentally, even D. W. Griffith occasionally turns into a naive visionary: one of the final shots of his Intolerance unabashedly portrays the heavens, with a chorus of veiled angels intervening in an earthly prison riot.9 Obviously screen fantasies which rely on staginess and at the same time claim to be valid manifestations of the medium run counter to the basic aesthetic principle; they pass over the specific potentialities of the medium for the sake of objectives which the cinema is not particularly fit to fulfill. Griffith's veiled angels would be a natural for religious painting; and the fantastic worlds in Destiny or Stairway to Heaven are efforts to expand and cinematize what is essentially stage illusion. Small wonder that this strikes a responsive chord in all those who yearn for Art on the screen. Caligari is the prototype of films of fantasy which are a "leap into the world of art," to use a phrase coined by Monk Gibbon in his eulogy of the Red Shoes ballet.10 Yet if Caligari is an admirable achievement in more than one respect,11 it is so not because of its aspiration to art in the traditional sense. * The subsequent inquiry covers, on principle, fantasy in all types of film. Yet it should be noted that the dream-like imagery of many experimental films requires special comment. This imagery which often serves to project inner-life processes, especially the contents of the subconscious, will be dealt with in chapter 10.