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DELIVERED AT THE N.Y. FILM FESTIVAL, 1965. REPRINTED FROM ART JOURNAL, XXV 3 '66
RESOURCES:
Film Culture in UbuWeb Papers
Presented in partnership with Anthology Film Archives
If the various arts of our time share certain traits and tendencies they probably do so in
different ways, depending on the character of each medium. At first glance, the
to fit modern art badly—a theoretical prediction not borne out, however, by some of the
recent work of photographers and film directors. In the following I shall choose a key
notion to describe central aspects of today's art and then apply this notion to the film,
thereby suggesting particular ways in which the photochemical picture responds to some
In search of the most characteristic feature of our visual art, one can conclude that it is the
attempt of getting away from the detached images by which artists have been portraying
physical reality. In the course of our civilization we have come to use images as tools of
contemplation. We have set them up as a world of their own, separate from the world they
depict, so that they may have their own completeness and develop more freely their
particular style. These virtues, however, are outweighed by the anxiety such a detachment
arouses when the mind cannot afford it because its own hold on reality has loosened too
much. Under such conditions, the footlights separating a world of make-believe from its
counterpart and the frame which protects the picture from merging with its surroundings
become a handicap.
In a broader sense, the very nature of a recognizable likeness suffices to produce the
frightening dichotomy, even without any explicit detachment of the image. A marble
statue points to a world of flesh and blood, to which, however, it confesses not to belong
dwelling-place only by insisting that it is more than an image, and the most radical way of
accomplishing it is to abandon the portrayal of the things of nature altogether. This is, of
course, what modern art has done. By renouncing portrayal, the work of art establishes
But once this radical step has been taken, another, even more decisive one suggests itself
developments in painting. When the abstractionists had abandoned the portrayal of natural
objects, their paintings were still representing colored shapes dwelling in pictorial space,
that is, they were still pretending the presence of something that was not there. Painters
tried various remedies. They resorted to collage, which introduced the "real object" into
the world of visual illusion. They reverted to trompe l'oeil effects of the most humiliating
They fastened plumbing fixtures to their canvases. None of these attempts carries
conviction, except one, which seems most promising, namely, the attachment of abstract
painting to architecture. Abstract painting fits the wall as no representational painting ever
has, and in doing so it relinquishes the illusion of pictorial space and becomes, instead, the
sculpture has always been settled. Even so, sculpture, as much as painting, has felt the
need to get away from image-making. It replaces imitative shape with the left-overs of
industrial machinery, it uses plaster casts, and it presents real objects as artifacts. All
by the spectacular aesthetic success of industrial design. The machines, the bridges, the
tools and surgical instruments enjoy all the closeness to the practical needs of society
which the fine arts have lost. These useful objects are bona fide inhabitants of the physical
world, with no pretense of imagemaking, and yet they mirror the condition of modern man
To complete our rapid survey, we glance at the performing arts and note that the mimetic
theatre, in spite of an occasional excellent production in the traditional style, has sprouted
few shoots that would qualify it as a living medium. Significantly, its most vital branch has
been Brecht's epic theatre, which spurns illusionism in its language, its style of acting, and
its stage setting, and uses its actors as story-tellers and demonstrators of ideas. Musical
comedy, although so different from the epic theatre otherwise, owes its success also to the
playing down of narrative illusion. The spectacle of graceful and rhythmical motion
addresses the audience as directly as do Brecht's pedagogical expositions. And the modern
dance can be said to have made its victorious entrance where the costumed pantomime
left off. The most drastic move toward undisguised action seems to have been made by
the so-called happenings. They dispense the raw material of thrill, fear, curiosity, and
If we have read the signs of the times at all correctly, the prospect of the cinema would
seem to look dim—not because it lacks potential but because what it has to offer might
appear to be the opposite of what is wanted. The film is mimetic by its very nature. As a
branch of photography, it owes its existence to the imprint of things upon a sensitive
surface. It is the image-maker par excellence, and much of its success derives from the
mechanical faithfulness of its portrayals. What is such a medium to do when the artificiality
Ironically, the motion picture must be viewed by the historian as a late product of a long
development that began as a reaction to a detachment from reality. The motion picture is
a grandchild of the Renaissance. It goes back to the birth of natural science, the search for
techniques by which to reproduce and measure nature more reliably, back to the camera
obscura, which for centuries was used by painters as a welcome crutch, back to the
tracings of shadow profiles, which created a vogue of objective portraiture shortly before
photography was invented. The moving photograph was a late victory in the struggle for
the grasp of concrete reality. But there are two ways of losing contact with the World of
perceivable objects, to which our senses and feelings are attuned. One can move away
from this world to find reality in abstract speculation, as did the pre-Renaissance era of the
Middle Ages, or one can lose this World by piercing the visible surface of things and finding
Thus our very concern with factual concreteness has led us beyond the surfaces to which
our eyes respond. At the same time, a surfeit of pictures in magazines and newspapers, in
the movies and on television has blunted our reactions to the indiscretions and even the
horrors of the journalistic snapshot and the Grand Guignol. Today's children look at the
The cinema responded to the demand for concreteness by making the photographic image
look more and more like reality. It added sound, it added color, and the latest
developments of photography promise us a new technique that will not only produce
genuine three-dimensionality but also abolish the fixed perspective, thus replacing the
image with total illusion. The live television show got rid of the time gap between the
pieture and the pictured event. And as the painters took to large-size canvases in order to
immerse the eye in an endless spectacle of color, blurring the border between the figment
and the outer world, the cinema expanded the screen for similar purposes. This openness
longer presented a closed and detached entity but seemed to emerge briefly from real life
The extreme attempt of capturing the scenes of life unposed and unrehearsed, by means
of hidden cameras was received with no more than a mild, temporary stir—somewhere
between the keyhole pleasures of the peeping Tom and those of the sidewalk
superintendent. For the curious paradox in the nature of any image is, of course, that the
more faithful it becomes, the more it loses the highest function of imagery, namely, that of
synthesizing and interpreting what it represents. And thereby it loses the interest. In this
sense, even the original addition of motion to the still photograph was a risky step to take
because the enormous enrichment gained by action in the time dimension had to be paid
with the loss of the capacity to preserve the lasting character of things, safely reomoved
Following the example of painting, the cinema has tried the remedy of abstraction. But the
experiments, from Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling to Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren
and Len Lye, have amounted mainly to a museum's collection of venerable curiosities. This
may seem surprising, considering the great aesthetic potential of colored shapes in
motion. But since abstract painting is also on the decline, my guess is that once the artist
surface, that is, to the twilight area between image-making and object-making. Hence the
The film cannot do this. There seems to be general agreement that the cinema has scored
its most lasting and most specifically cinematic successes when it drew its interpretations
of life from authentic realism. This has been true all the way from Lumière to
Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Robert Flaherty and more recently de Sica and Zavattini. And I
would find it hard to argue with somebody who maintained that he would be willing to give
the entire film production of the last few years for Jacques-Yves Cousteau's recent
flashes of unnatural light, a complete suspension of the familiar vertical and horizontal
animals and dehumanized humans, floating up and down without effort, emerging nowhere
and disappearing into nothingness, constantly in motion without any recognizable purpose,
and totally indifferent to each other. There is an overwhelming display of dazzling color
and intricate motion, tied to no experience we ever had and performed for the discernible
benefit of nobody. There are innumerable monstrous variations of faces and bodies as we
silence, most unnatural for such visual commotion and rioting color, and interrupted only
by noises nobody ever heard. What we have here, if a nasty pun is permissible, is the New
For it seems evident that what captures us in this documentary film is a most successful
although surely unintentional display of what the most impressive films of the last few
years have been trying to do, namely, to interpret the ghostliness of the visible world by
means of authentic appearances drawn directly from that world. The cinema has been
making its best contribution to the general trend I have tried to describe, not by
withdrawing from imagery, as the other arts have, but by using imagery to describe
reality as a ghostly figment. It thereby seizes and interprets the experience from which the
other visual arts tend to escape and to which they are reacting.
In exploiting this opportunity, the cinema remains faithful to its nature. It derives its new
nightmares from old authenticity. Take the spell-binding opening of Fellini's 8½, the scene
of the heart attack in the closed car, stared at without reaction by the other drivers, so
near by and yet so distant in their glass and steel containers, take the complete paralysis
of motion, realistically justified by the traffic jam in the tunnel, and compare this
frightening mystery with the immediately following escape of the soul, which has all the
ludicrous clumsiness of the special-effects department. How much more truly unreal are
the mosquito swarms of the reporters persecuting the widowed woman in La Dolce Vita
than is the supposedly fantastic harem bath of the hero in 8½ And how unforgettable, on
the other hand, is the grey nothingness of the steam bath in which the pathetic movie
The actors of Alain Robbe-Griilet move without reason like Cousteau's fishes and
way of life and they cohabit across long distances of empty floor. In their editing
technique, the directors of the Nouvelle Vague destroy the relations of time, which is the
dimension of action, and of space,. which is the dimension of human contact, by violating
all the rules in the book—and some readers will guess what book I am referring to. Those
rules, of course, presupposed that the film maker wished to portray the physical continuity
The destruction of the continuity of time and space is a nightmare when applied to the
physical world but it is a sensible order in the realm of the mind. The human mind, in fact,
stores the experiences of the past as memory traces, and in a storage vault there are no
time sequences or spatial connections, only affinities and associations based on similarity
or contrast. It is this different but positive order of the mind that novelists and film
directors of the last few years have presented as a new reality while demolishing the old.
By eliminating the difference between what is presently perceived and what is only
remembered from the past, they have created a new homogeneity and unity of all
experience, independent of the order of physical things. When in Michel Butor's novel, La
Modification, the sequence of the train voyage from Paris to Rome constantly interacts with
a spray of atomized episodes of the past, the dismemberment of physical time and space
creates a new time sequence and a new spatial continuum, namely, those of the mind.
It is the creation and exploitation of this new order of the mind in its independence of the
order of physical things which, I believe, will keep the cinema busy while the other visual
arts explore the other side of the dichotomy—the world of physical things from which the