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.