Film and Theatre

Extract

The big question is whether there is an unbridgeable division, even opposition, between the two arts. Is there something genuinely “theatrical,” different in kind from what is genuinely “cinematic”?

Almost all opinion holds that there is. A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judgment and canons of form. Thus Erwin Panofsky argues, in his celebrated essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1934, rewritten in 1946), that one of the criteria for evaluating a movie is its freedom from the impurities of theatricality. To talk about film, one must first define “the basic nature of the medium.” Those who think prescriptively about the nature of live drama, less confident in the future of their art than the cinéphiles in theirs, rarely take a comparably exclusivist line.