Assessment blog #4. Does a painting style translate to the cinema?

In the 1920's artists whose genre was the painted image turned to the cinema.  The results were mixed.  Why was that?

Essentially photography of all kinds produces an image of something else.  This is even the case for film animations where an image is produced of the underlying drawings.  Unless an image is produced directly on to the film itself by hand, as with the films of Ruttman and Richter, the act of photography is that of recording.

The Cabinet of Der Caligari suceeds in giving the look and feel of German Expressionism because it is recording images that relate to the paintings of the time by way of scenery, costumes, facial expressions etc which reflect the painting style of the time.  The physical film itself does nothing more than record.  The same effect could have been achieved in the theatre but no lasting recording would have been created as with film.  The film's success also depends on the story line which is typical horror which has been part of German tradition since the Brothers Grimm and before.  Without the storyline the visual effect of the film alone would be insufficient to hold the interest of the viewer for long.

The art of the cinema must make use of the unique properties it possesses.  The temporal, the cut, the shot,the mise-en-scene, motion itself and where it can, colour.  An artist from another medium usually cannot transfer his art directly to film.  Leger in Un Ballet Mechanique and Dali in Un Chien Andulou may have come close but in reality they used the cinematic features noted above rather than the techniques they were employing on canvas in their paintings.

Richter and Ruttman in their direct marking of the film tried to replicate the essence of abstract paintings but with movement.  However the imposition of viewing time for each set of images takes away control the viewer may have when considering those images.  A viewer of an abstract canvas can contemplate the whole or parts of it in his or her own time.  The very quality that the cinema has of temporal action takes away this ability.  Also when the timing and sequences are imposed on the viewer monotony soon arises.  How many times can Ruttmann's films be viewed before boredom sets in.  This can be compared with the repetition of a many times of a simple melody which soon becomes tiresome.  A complex piece of music such as a symphony can be listened to many times with pleasure owing to the vast quantity of aural information being presented to the senses.  The limitations of the cinema and visual cognisance prevent an equivalent complexity being imparted.  This may explain the failure of Corra's chromatic musical experiments.

My conclusion is that cinema is a distinct medium which has its its own merits but also limitations as with all artistic mediums.  The art of the cinema uses those merits to create its unique art form.  As with all visual arts there will be overlap but any direct transpostion will usually be unsatisfactory.

Assessment blog 3

What is the experience for the viewer of the avant garde cinema?  For example "Ballet Mechanique".  There is no story just a series of images.  The images are of recognisable objects, people and pure shapes presented in unusual ways.  There is a lot of repetition and the scenes vary in length from sometimes overlong approaching tedium to the subliminal momentary flash.  Why does the overall compilation retain the interest of the viewer?  

My view is:

• At first curiosity is aroused.  In the opening scene of the swing, although nothing much is happening there is a sense of anticipation that something might happen.  Actually it doesn't.  
• The juxtaposition of familiar objects in unusual positions will retain interest for a period but the interspersing of short flashes of other objects helps to continue the viewer's sense of expectation and surprise.
• The shapes presented to the viewer's eye whether by the use of camera angle or the shapes themselves have some fascination.
• Again interspersing of faces, parts of faces and whole bodies again raises a sense of anticipation only for again no resolution of the scene to happen.
• The whole film stimulates the visual senses and mental processes of the viewer but had the film been any longer it would probably have become boring.
• In 1924 it would have been exciting new exploitation of a comparatively new medium.   In 2010 it is a bit of a clunky cinematic curiosity. 

How does the experience compare to viewing a modern painting such as Leger’s own abstract canvases?  Can they be compared?  The biggest difference is that a viewer of a painting can take his own time but in a film time is imposed by the film maker and if a scene is missed it is gone.  Also the film maker is generally constrained to capturing on film some kind of reality (except for animated films) and reliance must be placed on manipulation of the image to create art.  A painter is limited only by imagination and manual skills.    Probably there is much less overlap in experience than one would think at first.

Anyway these are my views for what they are worth.

ASSESSMENT BLOG #2




“Ïf you want to send a message call Western Union”, so said Sam Goldwyn (or maybe Jack Warner or somebody completely different. Hollywood movies post World War 1 catered for popular public taste and stuck to the staples of comedy, romance and westerns to fill cinemas. Contrast to earlier American movies such as A Corner in Wheat which could have come directly from the Marxist instruction book. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation had a strong message, unpalatable today, for the audience. Perhaps the commercial failure of Griffith’s next epic Intolerance scared the industry. In the end maybe it was the consolidation of the movie industry with the biggest studios being controlled by movie theatre owners (eg MGM) that dictated what films were made in Hollywood. As the saying goes, nobody ever lost money by underestimating public taste. In the end the movie industry, from production through distribution to showing is just another highly capital intensive business that needs predictable returns which means lots of bums on seats not just the cultured ones. Contrast this with the great Russian movies of Eisenstein which notwithstanding their quality were really government directed and subsidized propaganda. However Russian audiences may have preferred Charlie Chaplin to the triumph of the workers if they had been allowed a choice.



By the way did anyone notice the Day for Night scenes in the Battleship Potemkin. That is scenes shot in daylight but processed to portray night by use of filters and underexposure. Infra red film may also have been used to give this effect. It was used frequently (and still is) in Hollywood but I don’t recall seeing it in such an early movie. In France it is called La Nuit Americain (American Night) and Truffaut made a film of that name in 1973 about the movie industry.

Did sound ruin the movies?

When watching the early silent narrative movies we are often somewhat confused as to what is actually happening because we are used to the additional explanatory information that come from the dialogue of the sound track. We are used to the full presentation of information to enable us to read the movie. In the old days with limited information frames the viewer reads almost all of the action from the picture alone. Although the director can make up a lot with action, gestures and facial expressions a certain amount must be left to the viewer’s imagination. Does this increase or decrease the enjoyment of the cinema experience? Two viewers may have two quite different takes on the story which can be a rich topic for discussion and argument. Additionally the lack of full information should leave a lasting impression of the movie in the mind of the viewer owing to viewer’s own creative input in the same way that a painting can be more memorable than a photograph. Some modern movies still use this lack of information to enhance the impact eg the final scene at “Picnic at Hanging Rock” which is frustrating to the viewer who is used to all loose ends being tied up by the end of the movie but an ending that sticks in the mind. Others may think it is just a lazy way of making a movie.