1 - The New and the Old in the Art of Cinema

Summary

Abstract

Alberti initiated the task of articulating goals for narrative visual art, thereby rebalancing the traditional Christian emphasis on word over image. When the choice wasn't made for them by a patron, Renaissance artists faced dilemmas about whether to appeal to a broader public (the faithful) or a more narrow one (collectors, humanists, and emerging connoisseurs). Film faced similar challenges and struggled to define its cultural place: art versus business, America versus Old World, capitalism versus Soviet communism. Hollywood specialized in romantic themes, often treated like fairy tales, though at other times addressing tensions of class and gender. Films were also used to present a version of war suitable for cultural memory, variously heroic or pacifist.

Keywords: Chaplin, Gance, istoria, realism, Varda, Vigo

Probably I identify with the Renaissance artist who takes a commission from the pope or the prince and if he fails to deliver will be sent to prison or worse.

Thinking involves images, words, or numbers. Words can be heard, unheard, or vaguely heard, in a language one knows, one knows somewhat, or not at all. Images can be static, moving, or suggestive of movement; at a realistic or an artificial rate; backward or forward; in some range of colors or tonalities; large or small; flat or three-dimensional; virtual or material. Numbers we shall largely relinquish to the realm of mathematicians and musicians, remembering all the while that, not for nothing, Goethe called architecturefrozen music, that since Leonardo—and especially since Whistler—painters have appealed to music as an analogous art, and furthermore, that in these digital times some images are essentially numeric. Cinema involves all three: images, words, and music, or put more abstractly, issues of visibility, audibility, and—pervasively—of rhythm. T.S. Eliot praised Chaplin for exactly that: ‘The egregious merit of Chaplin is that he has escaped in his own way from the realism of the cinema and invented a rhythm’.

To be alive is to process such semantic entities. To be making them also for posterity is the business of authors, artists, and composers, including those of the theater, opera, and ballet. Words and images have competed for priority across the length and breadth of Western art.