Foreword

Summary

Abstract

Our distance now from ambitious early filmmaking allows for a newly critical analysis of both its historical and artistic significance. In certain broad aspects, early filmmaking, a new art made for a more inclusive public, recapitulates both the challenges and the accomplishments of Renaissance imagemaking, which began as craft and evolved to the status of liberal art, relatively little of which was privately owned in unique examples.

Keywords: cultural memory, genre, periodization, 20th century, Vasari

‘Cinema’ is what cannot be told in words.

I came to the art of cinema late. I cannot remember how I happened to watch my first Bergman, but it was on DVD (digital versatile disk); after having been raised on Hollywood films, it was a revelation. Similarly, my first Buster Keaton movie was on DVD, and a revelation. By the time I learned that Ingmar Bergman considered The Navigator (1924) ‘one of my favourite films’, I was hooked. Could this art of telling stories to the widest possible audience—sometimes with engrossing realism, sometimes ingeniously idealized or fantasized, a rapidly evolving tradition peopled by social upstarts rubbing shoulders with the powerful—not be taken as a recapitulation, in some ways, of Italian Renaissance art? Did it not thereby offer a chance to rethink that distant modernity called the Renaissance, as well as to recalibrate 20th-century modernity?

Vasari assembled the biographies of Italian Renaissance artists as Florence was in decline, and although the present project has more modest aims, some similarity may indeed be proposed between the flourishing of Renaissance art and that of cinema in the period between the 1920s and the mid-1960s. By the late 1960s, filmmaking had entered a new phase. A postwar generation for whom film was no longer novel was maturing, and the expectation was that films would be in color. The world had changed along with the business and style of films; budgets were bigger and the structure more corporate, not unlike what happened in the transition from Renaissance to Baroque. Michelangelo Antonioni wondered: ‘Perhaps we are the last to produce things so apparently gratuitous as are works of art’.