01 1 Kracauer Basic Concepts Theory of Film

8/18/2019 01 1 Kracauer Basic Concepts Theory of Film

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SIEGIED KACAUEFROM THEY IL

BASIC CONCEPS

Lie the embro in the wob, photographic l develod fro dstnctly sep rate coponents.Its birh cae about fro a cobinaton f nsaous photography as used by Muybrdge and Marey with the older devices of the agic

lante and the phenaistosco.Added to ths later were the contrbutons of othernonphotographc eleents such as edtn and sound. Neverheless photography,escialy instantneous photography, has a legtate clai to top prorty aonthese eleents, for t undeniably s and reains the decisve factor n establshngl content The nature of photography survves in that of l.

Orginaly l was excted to brng the evolution of photography to an endsatsing t last the age-old desre to pcture thngs oving. hs desre alreadya �!t¢Jr ajor developents wthn the photographc edu tlf. As fark s 3 th rt uerreos and talbots apared, adraton

ned wth sappontent about ther desered streets and blurred landcas.And in the 'es long fore the innovation of the hand caera succfulattepts were ade to potraph ubjects n oton. he ver ipuls whchthus led fro te exposure to snapshot enendered dras of a furher etensonof photogrphy in the a detondreas that s of l. Abut 60 Cooand Bonnell, who had develod a devce called a photoboco predcted a"coplete revoluton of photographc ar... We will see .. landscas, theyannouned n whch the trees bow to the whs of the wind the leaves ripple andltter n h of th sun

Alon with the falar photographc letotf of the leaves such indred su

ects as undulating waves oving cloud, and changng facal expressons ranedhigh n ery propheces.Al of the conveyed the longing for an nstruent whchwoud capture t slghtest ncdents of the word about usenes that onwoud involve crowds whose incalculable oveents reseble soeow, tho


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10 Y

of waves or leaves. In a memorale statemet pulished fore the emergee ofisataeous photography, Sir Joh Herschel ot oly predicted the ic featuresof the m camera ut assiged to it a task hich it has ever sice disowed: hevivid ad lifelike repructio ad hadig don to the latest posterty of aytractio i real life-a battle, a deate, a pulic solemity, a puistic coict."Ducos du Hauro ad other forerue also looked forward to what we have cometo lal ewsreels ad doumetaries-ms devoted to the rederg of realifeevets This insistenc o rcordig wet had i had with the exctatio thatmotio pictures could aquint us with rmally imreptile or otherwisiduplicale movemetsashlike trasformatios of matter, the slow growth ofplats, etc. All i all, it was take for grated that lm would cotiue alog helies of photography.

PRPERTIES F THE MEDIUM

he prories of lm ca divided into asi nd tehni properieshe asic prories are idetica wth the proris of photoaphy Film, i

other words, is uiuely uipd to record ad reveal physia reality ad, hece,gravitates toward it.

Now there are dieret visile worlds. ake a stage rformace or a paitigthey too are real ad a reived But the oly reality we are coceed withis actualy eistig physical reaity-the trasitory world we live i(Physica reaitywil al call material reality" or physial existece, or actuality, or

loosly just ature" Aother ttg term might camerareaity.) ... heother visile worlds reach ito this world without, however, realy formig a parof it A theatrcal play, for isace suests a uiver of is ow which wouldimmediately crumle were it related to its reallife eviromet

As a repructive medium, lm is of cour ustied i reprucig memorleallets, oras, ad the like. Yet eve assumig that such repructios try to doustice to the scic reuiremes of the r, they asially amout to litlemore tha caig, ad are of iterst to us her. Presatio of rormaces whch lie outside physial reality pror is at st a sidelie of a medium so

particuarly suited to elore that reali. his is ot to dey that repructios, y, of stage pructio umrs may put to go ciematic u i certa feature lms ad lm geres

Of all the techia rories of lm the most geeral ad idisle is ediig It rves to estalish a meaigful coiuity of shots ad is therefore uthikale i photograpy.(Photomoage is a graphc art rather tha a scially photographic gere.) Amog the more scial ciematic techiues ae some whichhave take over from photography-e.g.the closup, sofus pitures, theuse of egatives, doule or muliple exposure, etc Others, such as the lapdissolve,slo ad quick motio, the reverl of time, certai scial ees, ad so forh,

ar for ovious reasos eclusively culiar to fhse aty hits will suce t is ot ecessay to elaborate o techi mat

ters which have dealt with i most previous heoretial wrtigs o lm.

Ulike the, which ivarialy devote a great deal of spae to editig devices, mes


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BS OS I

olighting, varous eects of the clo-up, etc., the present book conces itlf withcinematic techniques ony to the extent to which they b on the nature of lm, asdned by i baic proies and their various implications. The interest lies notwith editing in itlf, regadless of the purs it serves, but with editing as a means

of implemeningor deing, which amounts to the mesuch potentialities ofthe medium a ae in accordance with i substanive characterisics. In otherword, the sk is not to survey all poible meths of editing for their own ke;rather, it is to deterine he contriutions which editing may make to cinematicalysinicant achievements Problems of lm technique wil not neglected however, they wi diud only if isues going yond technica considerations calfor the investigaton.

Ths remark on proedures impes what is fairly obvious anyway: that the baicand techni proes dier subtantialy from each other. As a ule the former

take preedence over the laer in the n that they ae responsible for the cinematic qaiy of a m. Imane a m which, in keeping wth the baic prories,records interesting acts of phya reality but does so in a technically imrfectmanner rhaps the lighting is awkward or the ediing uninspired Neverhelesssuch a m is more scialy a lm than one which utilizes brilliantly all the cinematic devices and trcks to pruce a satement disgarding camerareality. Yetthis should not lead one to undesimate the inuence of the technical prories.It wll n that in eain cases the knowing u of a variety of techniques mayendow otheise nonrealstic lms with a cinematic avor

THE TW TEENCIES

f lm grows out of photoraphy the realistic and formative tendencies must oratve in it Is it by sheer accident that the two tendencies manifested themselves side by side immediately aer the ri of the medium? As if to encompass thewhole ange of cinematic endeavo at the outt each went the limit in exhaustingits own ssibies. hei prototys were Lumie, a strict realist and Mlis,who ave rein to hs arisic imanation The ms they made emby, so tosak, theis and anithesis in a Hegeian sen . · "' -

Lumr and

Lumire's lms conained a true innovation, a compared with the reroire ofthe zootros or Edsons p oxes they pictured eveyday ife aer the mannerof photoaphs. Some of hs early pictures, such a Bay's Breakfas (Le jeuerde e) o Te Card Players ( Pae d'ae) tesi to the amateur photographers delight in family idyls and genre snes. And there wa Teasg e Gardeer (L rroseur arrose) which enjoyed immense popularity ause it elicitedfrom the ow of eveyday life a pror stoy with a funny climax to boot. A gardener

is watering owers and as he unsusctingly preeds an impish boy steps on the· ho, reling it at the ey moment when s lexed victim examines the d�ed

up nozzle Water uits out and hts he gardener smack in the face The denouement is tue to style, with the adener chasing and spanking the boy This lm, the


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2 M A AY

germ cell and archety of al m comedies to come, reprent an imanaiveattempt on the part of Lumire to develop photoaphy into a means of story telling. Yet the story was just a rea-life incident. And it was precly it photoaphicveracity which made Maxim Gorki undergo a shk-like exrience. "You thnk,

he wote about Tasg he Gardeer "th pray is goin to ht you too, and instinc tively shrink backOn the whole, Lumire ems to have realiz that story telng was none of his

business it involved problems wth which he apparently did not care to co Whatever story-tellng ms he, or hi company, mademe more comies in the veinof hs rst one, tiny hstorica scenes, etc.are not characeristic of hi pructon.The bulk of his lms record the world about u for no other purp than to present it. Ths i in any ca what Muich, one of Lumire's "ace cameramn, felt

to their mesge. At a time when the talkies were already ll swng he epitomized the work of the master as follows: A I it, the Lumire Brothers hadestablished the true domain of the cinema in the right manner. The nove, the heater, suce for the sudy of the human heart. The cinema is the dynamism of ife,of nature and its manifetations, of the crowd and its des A hat s ilf through movement dends on it. It le o on the world.

Lumire's lens did on on the world in this n. Take hs immortal rs reels Luh our a he Lumre Fao Sore des uses Lumre A"al ofa TaL rre du ra La Plae des Cordelers Lyo: thei themes were publicplas, wth throngs of ople moving in diver directions The crowd strtcaptured by the steogahi photoaphs of the late 'ies thu reaped on the

pimitiv en. t was life i least controllable and most unconscious moment, jub o tranient, forever disolving pattes accessible only to the camera. Themuch-mitat shot of the ralway staton, ith it emhass on the conion ofarriva and departure, eectively illustrat th fortitf the pattes; and theirfragmentary character was exemplif b the clouds of smoke whch leisurelydied upard. Signicntl, Lumire ued he motif of smok Q casion. nd he smd anxious to avoid any rsona interferenc wt thg- ata.Detahed reords, his shot rembl the imanary shot of the andmoherhich Proust contrast with the memory image of her.

Contemporaries praid the ms for the very qualties which the prophet andoreunners had singled out i i iion of the mium. t isinevitable tha, in th comments on Lumire the ripple of leaves stirred by the wnd should rred to enthuiastically. The Paris joualst Henri de Pe, who ud themag o the trembling leaves, aso identied Lumire's over-all theme as naureught in the act Others pointed to the net which science would derive omumire's invention In America his camera-realsm defeat Edin's knetoowith it staged subjects.

umire's hold on the ma ephemera. In not more tn two yearsaer he had begun to make lms, his popularity subsided. The nion had wo

o the heyday was over. Lac of interest caud Lumire to ruce his pruionGeorges Mis took over where Lumire le o, renewng and intensiing themedium's waning apal This is not to y that he did not ionally follow thelatter's example. In his nnings he too treat the audience to sighteing tours


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he wo endencies: umie's Worker Leavng te Lumre Fatory ( 5) and lisTe W ( "umire;s ens did on on the wold ... lis ignod the workings ofnatue ou o he ais's deligh in sheer fantasy (KAAU, pages


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4 FILM AND REALITY

or he dramatized, in the fahion of the r, realistically stged topicl events.Buthis �i �pn

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ma lay i sbsituting staed illusion for unstagedreaty, nd g>n p1os tor veday cden

The two pioneers were aware of the radical dierenes in their approach

Lumire told Mlis that he considered lm nothng more than a "scientic curiosity, thereby implying that his cinematogrph could not possibly rve atisticpupos In 97 Mlis on his pa published a prosctus which took issue withLumire: Messrs Ms and Reulos scialize mainly in fantastic or atisticscenes, repructions of theatrical senes, etc .. thus creating a scial genrewhich diers entirely from the customary views supplied by the cinematographstreet scenes or scenes of everyday life

Mis's tremendous suwoud em to indicate that he caterd to demandsleft untised by umires photographic realism umire apled to the n

of obvation, the curosity abou nature caught in he act; Mlis ignor theworkings of nature out of te aists delight in sheer fantay The train in Arral ofa Trai is the real thing, whereas its contep in lss VVoyag rars /imossil is a toy tain a unreal the er through whichit moving nstead of picturing the random moveents of phenomena, Mlisry inerlined iagned event accordng to the requireents of his chaing :\ryale plotHad not media very clo to lm oered simila gratications? Thearis-photoraphers prefeed what they considered aesteicaly attractive compositions to arching explorations of nature And immediately fore the arrivalof the motion picture camera magic lnte rforances indulged in the projec

tion of religious themes Water Scott novels, and Shakesarean dramasYet even thoug Mis did not ake advanage of the meas abiiy to recordand reveal the physical world, he increaingly created hs illusions wth the aid oftechniqus culiar to the mu Some he found by accdent When takng shotof the Paris Place de !Ora he had to discontinue the shooting cau the celluloid strip did not move as it should the sU risng result was a lm in which, forno reon at all, a bus abruply transformed itlf into a hear.Tue, uie alsowas not disinclined to have a quence of event unfold in reve, but Mlis wasthe st to exploit cinematic devices systematicallyDrawng on boh photogrphy

and the stage, he innovated many techniques which were to play an enorous rolein the futureamong them the use of masks, uliple exposure surimposition a means of summoning ghost the lapilve, etc nd oug his ingnuiyin using the technique_s he added a touch of cinea to pafu naativ andmagc tric Sae traps ceased to indsnble; sleighofhand yielded toincredible metamorphoses whch lm alone was able to accomplish. Illusion produced in this climate dended n another kind of crasmanship than the magcians It was cinematic illusion, and as such went far yond heatrical makelieve Mliss T aud Casl L Maoir du dial "is conceivable onlyin the cinema and due to the cinema ys Henri angois, one of the t con

noisseurs of the primitive eraNowithstanding hs lm n howver, Mlis still remained the theater director he had enHe us photography in a prephotographic spitfor the repro


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BSIC CONCEPS 15

duction of a papier-mach univer inspired by stage traditions. In on of his greatest lms, A Trip to Moo oyag as a /u th moon harbors agmacing man in the mn and the stars are bull's-yes studded with he ettyfaces of muic hall grls. By the me tokn, his acto bowed to he audic, as ifthey rfored on the stag Much as his lms dered from the theater on a technica pane, they faied to tranend its sco by incorporating genuiney cinematicsubjects. Ts ao explans why Mlis, fr hs inventiveness, never thought ofmong his amera; he statonay cmera tuated the scttors relation tothe stage. His ideal sctator was the taditiona theatergoer, child or adult. hereems to some truth in the obvation that, a ople grow older, they nstinctively withdraw to the positions from which they t out to struggle and conquer

hi hs later yer Mlis more and more tued from theatrcal lm to med theater, producing which recaed the Pars Chteet pageants.

e ealstc edey

n ollowing the realstic tendency, lms go yond photography in two resct.Fist, they picture movement itelf, not only one or another of it phases But whatnds of movement do they picture? n he pmitive er when the amea wasxed to the ground, it wa natua for lm make to concentrate on moving materia phenomena life on the screen was fe only if it manfested itlf through external, or "objectve, motion. As cinematic techniues develod, lms increasingly

drew on camera mobility and editing devices to deliver their messages. Althoughtheir strenh sti lay in the renerng of movement inaccesible to other mediathe movement were no longer n y objeive n the technicaly maturelm subjective movementmovement, that is which the sctator is invitedto executenstantly comte with objectve ones. The stator may have toidenti himlf wth a tting, pannng, or traveling camera which insist on brnging moionless a well as moving object to his attenton. Or an appropriate arrangement ofshot may rush the audience through vast expanses of time and/or pace as to make it witness, almost simultaneously, event in dieret ris andplaces.

Nevertheless the emphasis is now fore on objective movement the mediumems to partal to it. As Ren Clair put it: f there is an aesthetics of the cinema . it can summazd in one word movement. The exteal movement of theobjects rceived by the eye, to which we are tay adding the inner movemet ofthe action. The fact that he assigns a dominant role to exteal movement eects,on a theoretical plane, a marked feature of his own earlier lmsthe ballet-likeevolutions of their charactes

Secod, l m ay e pon physical reawth all i aniold mveentb mens f an inte procedure wch would em to less nispensabe

in photographystaging n order to narrate an ingue, the m maker is oteobged stage not ony the action but the suroundings as well. Now this recourseto sagng is most cetainly legtmate if the stged world is made to apar as afathl repructon of the real one. The impoant thing is that studio-built set-


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6

M AN EAI

tings convey the impreion of actuality s that the spectator feels he is watchingevents which migt have occurred in rea life and have n photographed on thespot.

Falling prey to an interesting misconcepton, Emile Vuillermoz champions, for

the ke of "realism, ttings which reprent reality as en by a rceivpainter To his mind they are more real than real-life shots cau they impat theessence of what such shots are showing Yet from the cinematic point o(ew thealegedly realstic ttings are no le stagy than would , y, a cubist or abstractcomposition Instead of staging the given raw material itlf, they oer s to sak,the gst of it In other words, thy suppress the very camereality which lm aimsat incoporating For this reason the nsitive moviegr will feel dsturd bythem. The problems pod by ms of fantasy whch, as such show little confor physical reality will considered later on)

Strangely enough, it is entirely sible that a staged real-life event evokes astronger illusion of reality on the screen than would the original event if it had enaptured directly by the camera. The late E Metzner who devied the ttingsfor the studio-made mining dsaster in Pabst's Kameradscha-n epise wth thering of stark authenticityinsisted that candd shots of a real mining dster wouldhardly have produced the me convincing eect

One may ask, on the other hand, whether realty can staged so accurately thatthe camera-eye wil not detect any derence tween the original and the copyBlai Cendra touches on ths iue in a neat hypothetical exriment He imagines wo lm scenes which are completely identical except for the fact that one has

en shot on the Mont Blanc the highest mountain of Euro) while the other wasstaged in the studio is contention is that the former has a quaity not found in thelatter. There are on the mountan ys he cetan "emanations luminous or otherwi which have worked on the lm and given it a . Presumably large partsof our envonment, natural or manmade, resst dupcation

e oatve edecy

The lm maker's formative faculties are oered opportunities far exceedin

tho oered the photographer. The reason is that lm extends into dimensonswhich photography ds not cover. These der from eah other according to areaand comsition With resct to areas m mae have never ned themlves to explong ony physcal reality in front of e camera but from he outt,rsistently tried to netate the realms of htory ad fanasy Rememr Mlis.Even the realistic-minded Lumire yielded to the popular demand for hstoricascenes As for composition, the wo most general ty re the story lm and thenonstory lm The later can broken dow nto the exrimental m a thelm of fact, which on its pa comprs, partay or totally, such subgen as

the lm on art, the newsreel, and the documentary prorIt is easy to see that soe of the dimensions are more likely than others torompt the lm maker to express hs formative aspiratons at the exn of therealistic tendency As for areas consider that of fanasy: movie directo have at alltimes rendere dreams or visions wth the ad of ttings which are anyhing but

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BSIC ONCES 17

realistic. Thus in Red Sho Moira Shearer danes, in a omnambulistic trancethrouh fnsti wrl vowly inended to prjt hr coniou mindaomerts o landa-like fos nr-abstract sh lscios colorscheme which hve a te trait sg imr Dined crivit ths dr

awa rom the bic conces o the mdm Sveral dimesions o compositioavor the me preerences Most exrimenta ms are not even desined to ocson phsica existence; and practica a ms oowin the ines o a theatricastor evove naratives who iniance ovhado$!o the raw material onatre ued r their imple1io For the rst, the lm aker's ormativedeavo a also impin on is ralistic loaities in dimsions which, ao their emphasis on phsical realit do not normall invite ch ncrahmntthere are enoh docmenaries with real-ie shots which mere rve to illusratesome l-conained oral commenar.

lases Betwee te wo edees

Fims whch combine two or more dimensions are ver requent or instance,man a move eaturin a everda-ie incident includes a dream quence or a documenar passae Some such combinations ma ead to overt clashes tweenthe reaistic and ormative tendencies This hapns whenever a lm maker nton creatin an imainar universe rom ree staed material aso eels nder anobiation to draw on camera-reait In his Hamlet Laurence Olivier has the castmove aut in a studio-buit conspicuous sta Esinore who labrnthine

architecture seems cacuated to reect Hamet's unathomable in Shut o romour rea-ie environment ths bizar structure woud spread over the whole o thelm were it not or a sma otherwi insinicant ene in which the real oceanoutside that dream orbit is shown But no sooner ds the photoraphed oceanapar than he sctator exriences omthin ike a shock He cannot hep reconizin that this itte scene is an otht intrsion that it abruptl introduces anelement incompatibe with the rest o the imr How he then reacts to it dendsupon his nsibiities Tho indierent to the culiarities o the medim andthereore unuesoninl acceptin the staed Esinore are likel to rent the

unexcted emerence o crude nature as a letdow, while tho more nsitive tothe prorties o m wi in a ash reaize the make-lieve character o the castle'smthica spendor Another c in point is Renato Castellani's Romo ad Jult.Ths atempt to sae Shakesare in natral sroundins obviousl rests n theie that camera-realit and the poetic realit o Shakesare verse ca madeto u into each other. Yet the diaoue as we as the intriue esablish a niverso remote rom the chance word o real Verona streets and ramparts that al thescenes in which the two disparate word are en merin tend to aect oe as anunnatura aliance tween conictin orces

Actual cisions o tis kind b no means h rule Rather there is ampl

evidence to ses that the two tendencies which


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18 LM AN RAL

TE CIEMATIC APPRAC

It follows from what has en id . that lms may claim aesthetic validity ifthey buld from their basic prorties; like photographs, that is they must record

and reveal physical reality One might argue that too exclusive an emphais on he medium's prmary relation to phyical realty tends to put lm in a strat jacketThis objection nds support in the many exsting ms which are completelyunconceed about the representation of nature There is the abstract exrimenallm There is an unending succesion of"photoplays or theatrcal lms whch do

not picture real-life materal for its own ke but use it to build up action after themanner of the sage And there are the many lms of fanasy whch neglect theexteal world in freely compod dreams or visions The old Geman expresionistlms went far in this direction one of their champions the Geman a crtic Herman G Scheauer even ulogzes expressionism on the sreen for its remotenessfrom photographic life

Why then, should these genres called less cinematic than lms concentrating o physical istence? he answer is o our that it is the later alone whichaord insight and enjoyment otheise unatainable Tre, in view of all the genrswhich do not cultivate outer reality and yet ar here to say this answer soundssomewhat dogmatic But rhaps it will found more justiable in the light of thefollowing two considerations

Firt favorable response to a genre need not dend upon is adequacy to themedium from whch it issues As a matter of fact, many a genre has a hold on e

audience cau it caters to widespread social and cultura demands it is andremains popular for reasons whch do not involve uestions of aeshetic legtmacyThus the photoplay has succeeded in rtuang ielf even though most responsible crtics are agreed that it gs against he grain of m Yet e public whichfeels attracted for insance by the sreen version of Deah ofa Salesma, likes thisversion for the very virtues which made the Broadway play a hit and does no in theleast care whether or not it has any specically cinematic merts

Second, let us for the sae of argument assume that my denition of aethecvalidity is actualy onesided that it resuts from a bia for one paicular, if mportant ty of cinematic activities and hece is unlikely to ake into account y theposbiliy of hybrd genres or the inluence of the medum's nonphotographc componensBut ths does not nece�ly ak ainst the proprety of that deitionIn a strategc interest it is oen more advible to loosen up iniial one-sidednes (

provid it is well foundedthan to start from all too catholic premises and thentry to make them scic The later alteative rns the rsk of blurrng dierencestween th media cause it rarely leads far enough away fom the generaltiespostulated at the ouset; its danger is that it tends to enail a confuion of the artsWhen Einstein the theoretician gan to stress the similaties tween the cin-ema and the traditional art media identiing lm a their ultimate fullment

Eisenstein the artist increasingly trespassed the oundares that separate lm fromelaborate thetrcal scacles: think of his Alexader Nevsky and the oraticascts of his Iva he Terrbl _


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SC ONPS 19

In strict analogy to the term "photographic approach the lm maker's approachis caled "cinematic if it acknowlges the basic aeshetic principle. It is evidentthat the cinematic approach materializes in all lms which follow te realistic tedency. This implies that even lms amost devoid of creative aspirations, such

newsreels scientic or educational lms, artless doumentaries etc., are tlepropositions from an �esthetic point of vew-presumably more so han lmswhich for all their artistry pay little attention to the given outer world But as withphotographic reportage, newsreels and the like meet only the minimum reuirement.

What is of the essene in m no ess than photography is the interention of them makers formative energies in al the dimensions which the medium has cometo cover. He may feature hs impressions of this or that gment of physical existence in doumentary fashion, transfer hallucinations and mental images to the

screen, indulge in the rendering of rhyhmical pattes, narrate a humanintereststory, etc. Al these creative eorts are in keeping with the cinematic approach aslong as they net, in some way or other, the mediums substantive conce wthour visibe ord As in photogaphy eveything dends on the right baanceween the realistic tendency and the foraive tendency; and the two tendenciesare well baanced if the latter ds not try to ovehelm the forer but eventuallyfollows its lead

OF

When caling the cinema an art medium ople usually think of lms whichresemble the rditional works of art in that they are free creations rather thaneplorations of nature. These lms organize the raw material to which they resortinto some selfsucient composiion instead of accepting it as an element in its ownright. In other words, their underlying formative impulses are so strong that theydefeat the cinematic approach with its conce for camerareality Among the lmtys cuomarly considered art are, for instance the abovementioned Germanepressionist lms of the years aer World War I conceived in a painterly spirit,they seem to implement the formula of Herann Warm one of the designers ofTe Caet f Dr Calgar settings: who claimed that lms must drawingsbrought to life Here also longs many an emental lm all in all, lms ofthis ty are not only intended as autonomous wholes but frequently ignore physical reality or eploit it for purposes alien to photographic veracity. By the metoken there is an inclination to classi as works of art feature lms which combineforceful artistic composition wth devoton to signicant subjects and values. Thiswould apply to a numr of adaptations of great stage plays and other literaryworks

Yet suh a usge of the ter at in the taditiona sense is miseading t endssupport to the lief that artstic qualities must attributed precisely to lms which

negect the miums recording oblitions in an atempt to rval achievements inthe elds of the ne the heater or literature. In conuence this uge tendsto obscure the aesthetic value of ms which ae really true to the medium If the


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20 ILM AND EALITY

term " is reed for pructions lke amle or Dah oa Salesma one willnd it dicult indeed to appreciate prorly the large amount of creativity that goesinto many a dumentary capturing material phenomena for teir own ke. TakeIvens's Rai or Flaherty's Naoo dumentaries turat with formative inten

tions: like any lective photographer, their creators have all the traits of the imaginative reader and curious explorer; and their readings and dioveries resul fromfull absorption in the ven material and signicant choices Add to this that someof the cras need in the cinematic processcially editing-repren taskswith which the photographer is not confront And they too lay claim to the lmmaker's creative powers

This leads straight to a terminolocal dilemma Due to its xed meaning, theconcept o art does not and cannot cover truly "cinematic lms-ms that iswhich incorporate ascts of physical reality with a view to making us exrience

them And yet it is they, not the ls reminiscent of traditional art works, whichare valid aesthetically If is an art at all, it certainly shoud not confud withthe established arts There may some justication in looly applying this fraleconcept to such ls as Naoo or Paisa or Poemi which are deeply seedin cameralfe But in dening them as , it must always kept in ind that eventhe most creative m maker is much less indendent onature in the w than thepainter or pt; that his creativity manifests itlf in letting nature in and netrating it

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01 1 Kracauer Basic Concepts Theory of Film

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Transcript of 01 1 Kracauer Basic Concepts Theory of Film