I attended Barbara Nicolosi’s book signing and presentation this past Monday (thank you Dell, for organizing, and Warren for hosting).  As is my usual habit when listening to a good speaker who has a lot of articulate, thoughtful points to make, I found myself nodding in agreement to most of the ideas she presented.  Now, on more careful reflection, I still can’t say that I have found reason to definitely disagree with her on any points, but maybe I have just come around to some healthy skepticism. 

First of all, I was almost floored by what she said about cinema being the new art form that is a composite of the old ones (in that it consists of dramatization, text/dialogue, music, and visual imagery).  I thought, “Yea, of course!” But it almost seems like too grand a claim to be justifiable.  Is it possible that cinema includes all these features, but does so only minimally, so that instead of having the potential for becoming a great, all-inclusive new artistic medium, cinema might actually be guilty of taking, and in some way cheapening, the defining features of the traditional media?

Text, for instance, in cinema becomes mostly just dialogue (with the rare monologue, or the narrative “over voice").  But isn’t there something in the experience of the written art forms that demands a printed text?  The movie portrays everything directly to the senses of sight and hearing, whereas the written word portrays nothing to the senses, but relies upon the reader’s imagination to conjure all that the words evoke.  That--the provocation of the audience’s imagination--seems to be what the movie medium leaves out, and if that’s the case, it’s a pretty huge omission. 

I’m not sure of any of this, but like I said, just fearing that it might be the case.  If anyone can set me straight--disabuse me of my skepticism--I’d be grateful.  I would really like to believe that cinema has the potential to be a vehicle for our artistic Renaissance, but...it could be wishful thinking.

Jessica

Hi Jessica.  I agree that you should beware of such sweeping statements, as you should also beware of anyone who wants to disabuse you of a critical eye (or ear!).  While it might be true that film as a medium makes use of components of other art forms, to suggest that somehow film _substitutes_ for them (if I understand the claim correctly; I wasn’t there), as though in this case the sum of parts is greater than any whole, seems misdirected.  But then it also diminishes what film as a medium can do, which deserves/demands its own critical and aesthetic understanding. 

One way I would understand such a claim is that it’s more a descriptive social critique than a prescriptive critical one.  If I’m teaching a room full of young students, I mean, even in a literature course I can make certain stylistic points (especially about character and narrative) more easily understood by appealing to narratives we most share, which is film.  That’s simply working with what is.  But in the normative realm of what I think should be, I certainly wish we all read more.  I’ve read poets who portray poetry as THE paradigm for, or epitome of all the arts, and novelists who do it for their medium as well.  While these statements are dramatic (and occasionaly instructive) they seem also unhelpful in doing what criticism can do, which is inform taste and educate apprehension.  One problem I see with thinking that, say, a film score is somehow equal to a symphony is that the music in a film is an instrument of something else (typically an emotive cue); one thing that distinguishes art from most of experience is its integrity as an end in itself (which I don’t mean to say a film can’t have, but I’m not sure about its parts.) You make a similar point about dialogue, and while I would add words in film have the same power to reveal character as they do in a novel, our attention is not drawn to the language, which is partly what only literature can do.  Art should, at the very least, resist reduction.

In all fairness to film, though, it can do what a text or painting cannot; it’s not necessarily a worse or better kind of imaginative and plastic medium, just a different one.  But then most of the films most of us watch are not good films; they are concerned more with thrilling the senses (entertaining) than provoking them.  A challenging film can require as much inner work as a book; defining that work would supply us with a superior gauge for evaluation I think.  Imagination is largely recollective, and a great film’s images, characters and stories stick in the mind and are as readily, even usefully, accessed as a text’s.  I agree with you that reading is a singular kind of private experience, though, and we don’t need any more reasons for not reading.  I’m all for diversity in the uses of leisure, and wish I made better use of my own.

John

John, I might have misrepresented what Barbara said, or at least not provided a full enough context for the comment in question.  I don’t think she exactly meant that film can become a substitute for all other artistic media, as some of her other comments did demonstrate a pretty profound appreciation for those media, especially for the visual arts (painting and sculpture, specifically).  But she does seem convinced that the traditional media are largely in stasis (or have simply been kitschified) in our culture, and she seems to find hope for a rebirth in film.  I would like to share her optimism, but I remain skeptical for many reasons, among which are some of the items you pointed out. 
I have used film in the classroom too in an effort to reach out to group of students for whom poetry and fiction are difficult, even foreign. Film is much more accessible for this generation.  In fact, it is probably more easily accessible than poetry for all generations, but for that very reason I am suspicious of it.  It just seems too easy to be the bearer of “high culture” (I should say “high art,” because in most cultures, “high culture” is oxymoronic, and probably wrong-headed, but I digress). 

Now, when I say that film is easy, I betray the truth of your statement that “most of the films most of us watch are not good films; they are concerned more with thrilling the senses (entertaining) than provoking them.” Agreed.  But even in the more challenging films (Magnolia comes to mind, or, more recently, Crash), which require a lot of the viewer’s attention and memory, are we really being presented with high art?  Is our imaginative involvement in the movie leading us to discover something truly true and beautiful?  or are we simply being asked to keep up with the images and storylines thrown at us, as if we were trying to solve a riddle?  I use the question form not rhetorically, but sincerely.  I don’t know, but like I said, I’m skeptical. 

I hope I’m not coming across as too much of a purist here.  Really, I would like to embrace cinema as an art form with just as much potential for “alethea” as the “canonical” ones, but--well, at the least, I’m sure I’ve never seen a movie that struck me with as much force as many poems have. 
Hmm…

Jessica

It is imperative, when criticizing any medium, to understand its singular nature - what it is that differentiates that medium from the others. Film utilizes all those elements in question, but it is primarily a medium of moving images. Like those media mentioned - the novel, poetry - films are of great variety and of varieties of greatness. For many, a great film is nothing more than - as John notes - a solid entertainment. But there are many good films that aspire to something beyond entertainment, which aim to compel the mind and spirit of the audience.
The best argument for the value and glory of film as an art form is film itself. The best way to disabuse yourself of your skepticism about the actual potential of film is to watch good films, paradigmatic films. Since you suspect that film might simply be a composite of elements which are far more effective in other environments, but impotent in cinema, I would suggest watching some silent films. This would allow you to engage film in its most essential force - an unadorned moving image. To twist a phrase, ‘Go and see!’ -

The Gold Rush by Charles Chaplin
The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer
The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein
Metropolis by Fritz Lang
The Birth of a Nation by D W Griffith

These are all available on DVD, and will provide an intense introduction to the roots of modern cinema, for all of them, though made years ago, were not only films in their day, but were very influential. The shortest ones are the first three.
If you want to skip that historical exploration and watch some sound films that are challenging and that will provoke faith in the medium, watch the films of Tarkovsky, Bresson, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Ozu, Welles, to name a few. If I were to suggest just one film that might persuade you - disabuse you, as you say - it would be Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. It is a little more than three hours long, in black and white, in Russian, and about as compelling a work of art as you will ever encounter in film.

Andrew

Ah hell!  These sound difficult.  I was really just hoping someone would corroborate my suspicions about film so I could abandon the medium all together.

Seriously though, thanks for the suggestions.  I will look into them, eventually.

Funny coincidence: yesterday, probably about the time you were writing your post, I was ransacking bookshelves and boxes in search of nothing other than my old copy of Brothers K.  Bizarre, no?

Jessica

Here’s what “renown phenomenologist” Roman Ingarden, writing in The Literary Work of Art (3rd ed. 1965), has to say on silent film, chosen so as to remove any textual elements of the medium and best isolate what film as moving images can do.  Emphasis is his.  “Irzykowski” refers to Polish critic Karol Irzykowski.  And I should add that his use of the word “aspects” is a technical term he’s devised to mean (as near as I can so far tell, anyway) perspectives or sense-elements that the work of art amplifies (or can with the aid of criticism) by directing and intensifying attention.

“The fact is, however, that the cinematographic drama depicts only a different segment of existence, namely, all events (not merely ‘movements,’ as Irzykowski erroneously maintained) and things that can be depicted in visual aspects.  At the same time, the concreteness of reconstituted aspects, as well as the possibility of making more accessible and more apprehendable through appropriate technical devices (e.g. enlarging the given “images") aspects which almost disappear in the normal course of perception, causes the various purely physical or bodily modes of behavior (or modes directly based on the bodily) of the objectivities (people, animals, things) which partake in the events represented to be depicted more distinctly than is possible with purely liteary means.  It is only that in a cinematographic drama the emphasis must be place on visual events; if possible, the entire represented story must be developed only in them.  Otherwise, as Irzykowski rightly stressed, the movies can lead only a parasitic existence with regard to the theater and to literature” (325).

"if possible, the entire represented story must be developed in them”
This is the crux of what illuminates the work of Hitchcock; he was known to be guided by this principle.  Not only discrete scenes of conflict or action, but entire passages of narrative are conveyed in his better films through moving images without dialogue (music emphasizes the image, true).  Vertigo and Psycho are illustrative of this.  The famous shower sequence in the latter being the quintessential use of image and editing and music to achieve an impression on the viewer that is actually not shown at all (that of a woman being stabbed to death). 
The quote, John, is useful for answering Jessica’s topical question, indeed.  Cinema should not strive to be an “all-inclusive” art form; it should do what it does singularly, first, utilizing those other devices to enhance the moving image.  Then cinema is at its best.