Prologue

Summary

Abstract

Cinema began primarily as a folk art, and remained a popular art, so there tended to be a considerable gulf between film and fine art. The history of cinema often exhibits a casual attitude toward stylistic innovation, while the history of art has traditionally tended to emphasize exactly that. The combined effect has tended to exaggerate the difference between the two traditions. Yet they do not operate in total isolation. The makers of cinema, even if scarcely students of the history of art, have absorbed certain of its precepts and examples. The emotional life prompted and supported by the new narrative imagery was crucial to the development of Renaissance sensibilities; cinema constituted a new chapter in this kind of enhancement. In both cases, effusive delight was expressed for the new imagery.

Keywords: Calvino, City Lights, Fellini, Giotto, Surrealism, ut pictura poësis

Heraclitus it was who first perceived that all life consisted of, and tended towards, change: and change is the first principle of all cinematography.

The history of art has traditionally been conceived of as a history of style interacting with genre, or of patronage and markets, display practices, and critical reception, but only relatively rarely has the history of art been organized according to medium. Since films have seldom been made primarily for the sake of exploring style, and their critical reception has in large part been the stuff of ephemeral journalism, their history has often been considered to lie outside the bounds of the history of art. The gulf between fine artand cinema can seem immense. While Picasso was devising what came to be called Cubism, an art radically stripped of affect, early cineasts were Romantically gripped by pantomimes of love in dire circumstances (e.g., Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii, 1913), and while Pollock was daringly beginning to drip paint, Mr. Blandings, the adman, was building himself a house in rural Connecticut (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, 1948) and learning that country folk sometimes did things differently.

Early cinema comprised not only folk art that purveyed sophistication but also a modern, mechanized art that often portrayed pathetic poverty. In either of these guises, film may have been supposed to have had as little to do with high modernism as did art deco movie palaces.