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

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302 EPILOGUE realistic tendency, thereby at least meeting the minimum requirement of what has been called the "cinematic approach."* As for the feature films, they are the arena of both the realistic tendency and the formative tendency; yet in these films the latter never tries to emancipate itself from, and overpower, the former, as it does in any theatrical movie. Think of Potemkin, silent film comedy, Greed, several Westerns and gangster films, La Grande Illusion, the major productions of Italian neorealism, Los Olivdados, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Pather Panchali, etc.: all of them rely largely on the suggestive power of raw material brought in by the cameras; and all of them more or less conform to Fellini's dictum that a "good picture" should not aim at the autonomy of a work of art but "have mistakes in it, like life, like people."30 Does the cinema gravitate toward films in this vein? In any case, their prominent features tend to assert themselves throughout the body of films and often in places where one would least expect them. It time and again happens that an otherwise theatrical film includes a scene whose images inadvertently tell a story of their own, which for a transient moment makes one completely forget the manifest story. One might say of such a film that it is badly composed; but its alleged shortcoming is actually its only merit. The trend toward semi-documentaries is, partly, a concession to the virtues of dramatic documentaries.** The typical composition of the musical reflects the precarious, if not antinomic, relations that obtain in the depth of the medium between the realistic and formative tendencies.! More recently, attempts are being made, or rather, resumedtf, to get away from literature and rigid story construction by having the actors extemporize their lines. (Whether these attempts are likely to introduce genuine incident is quite another question.) All this does not imply that camera-realism and art exclude each other. But if films which really show what they picture are art, they are art with a difference. Indeed, along with photography, film is the only art which exhibits its raw material. Such art as goes into cinematic films must be traced to their creators' capacity for reading the book of nature. The film artist has traits of an imaginative reader or an explorer prodded by insatiable curiosity. § To repeat a definition given in earlier contexts, he is "a man who sets out to tell a story but, in shooting it, is so overwhelmed by his innate desire to cover all of physical reality— and also by a feeling See p. 138, and passim. * **Cf. pp. 259-60. t See pp. 148-9,213. ttCf. pp. 98 (reference to Pabst's mise-en-scene of his The Love of Jeanne Ney), 249 n. J See p. 16.