The Art of Cinema and the Emergence of Video By Raymond Foery

Film is approaching its centennial. While there is considerable disagreement among international historians as to the actual birthdate of the medium (the French are more likely to cite the work of Louis Lumière while the Americans refer us to the seminal efforts of Edison, for example), there is a general sense of anticipation among film scholars that the passage into the second century is approaching; and there are those who seriously doubt whether film as we know it will ever mark its bicentennial. A good part of the reason for that appraisal is the explosive emergence of video, a form that is related in many superficial ways to film but whose distinct characteristics have already given it a history of its own. Ironically, video has been far more quickly accorded the status of "art" by those institutions -- educational, archival, and journalistic -- that rule on such matters than film ever was. There are, I think, several reasons for this, and in examining them we might come to a better understanding of the nature of art itself as expressed by these two contemporary forms.

First, we must look at the curious status of the "art of cinema." Fifty years after the first publication of the essays that came to make up Rudolf Arnheim's influential book on the subject, the fact must be clearly stated that only a very small percentage of those who go to films, those who write about films, those who collect films, and those who teach others about film have any fundamental interest in the medium as a pure art form.[1] If this supposition seems too broad, I suggest that we investigate how film is generally treated in our society and compare these results with how, for example, painting is treated. Let's begin with educational institutions -- colleges and universities specifically -- since so many of them have incorporated some approach to "film studies" into their curricula during the past two decades.

Even a random examination of college catalogs reveals that these courses in film have been appropriated by a variety of academic departments. Many are offered by departments of literature, some by departments of drama or theater, some within general programs in the humanities, and, most recently, some by newly created departments of "communications." These latter simply recognize film as one of many "mass media" and almost never treat it as an art form. Interestingly, where one least finds film courses offered is in departments of art. With the rare exception of specialized schools of studio art (the Chicago Art Institute, the Rhode Island School of Design, among others) where filmmaking is offered as a sister medium to painting and sculpture, the cinema has been generally ignored by the academic art world, that is, by the art historians. There are, in fact, precious few departments of art history in the United States that offer even basic "survey" courses in the history of cinema. What, then, is the message, not so deeply encoded, that the academic establishment is sending regarding the nature of film studies in the United States? Basically it is this: that film can occasionally be studied within the context of its relationship to literature; it can also be viewed as an adjunct to theater (i.e., the filmed play); it can even be examined as a sociological and historical indication of the "pulse" of the people (i.e., "the movies" tell us something about our general culture); but what seems to be excluded from this realm is any serious consideration of the medium as an art form, as something analogous to painting and to sculpture and to poetry and to fiction, something, in short, created by an artist as a means of personal self-expression.

Before predicating the reasons for this exclusion, it might be helpful to look at some of the other institutions mentioned earlier to see how they handle film and its aesthetics. The archival institutions -- museums and galleries -- offer instructive examples. Only one major museum in the United States -- New York's Museum of Modern Art -- can claim a significant historical commitment to collecting works of cinema. It has really been only within the last two decades that other museums have made attempts to catch up, most notably the Whitney in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Walker Center in Minneapolis. While anyone who has seriously studied cinema must feel an enormous sense of gratitude to the vision that has characterized the Museum of Modern Art over the years, there is, even on this level, an irony. For while it is important that the Museum has managed to preserve so much of the heritage of the medium, it is also revealing to discover what they have saved and what the curatorial bias might be. Even a cursory study of, say, one week's programming at the Museum suggests to me at least, that the list is eclectic at best, conventional at worst. To be specific, it is more likely than on any given day one would see a typical Hollywood film at the museum rather than a film by a personal film artist, more likely, for example, that one would see a film by Stanley Kramer than one by Stan Brakhage. Because the museum's collection is so large and because their programming -- now for two theaters -- changes daily, one would eventually be able to see many of the great works of film art, but any calculation of a year's programming will clearly demonstrate the emphasis I have mentioned. Far more films made by "committee" are shown than are films made by individual artists. (To be fair, I should mention that the excellent "Cineprobe" series has provided a forum for personal cinema for several years now). Is this not a somewhat problematic stance for a museum to adopt, especially a museum dedicated to 20th century art, the age, despite all else, of the individual? Once again, the message hardly needs decoding: films, even when collected by the premier museum of contemporary art in the country, are not generally considered to be personal works of art, but are, rather, more often seen as interesting cultural artifacts, like posters or comic strips.

As for the realm of journalism -- that is, the reviewing of films -- the situation hardly demands explication. The function of most film critics in the United States continues to be quite analogous to that of the theater critics. Here indeed is where the distinction between theater and film is least palpable. For it is still the case, now nearly three-quarters of a century after gifted thinkers like Hugo Munsterberg and Sergei Eisenstein elaborated upon the fundamental differences between film and theater, that the overwhelming majority of film reviews read exactly like theater reviews, and if fewer than ten words in any of them were changed, one would not be able to tell the difference between them.[2] Almost never in these pieces is the medium treated as the visual form that it truly is, as the moving canvas that can be analyzed with the same kind of sensitivity that is brought to a Matisse or a Picasso. "Moving Pictures." That is what it first was called, this new medium. And that is what it still is in many ways: moving images. And it is important that the basic nature of the medium be understood if it is ever to break the false umbilicus that continues to connect it, in the eyes of virtually every film reviewer in the United States, to the stage.

Having said all this about how film has been treated by the various institutions that shape our view of the medium, it is important to address the question of why film has been so considered. For this, it is convenient to reverse the order of the preceding analysis and begin with journalism. As historians of early cinema have ably demonstrated, film from the beginning was exhibited as part of the general vaudeville and dance hall milieu that characterized the middle class entertainment offerings of the late 19th century. [3] As such, it was only natural that it should be reviewed by journalists as an "extension" of theater, as a more life-like, more realistic representation of the dramatic arts. And while it is true that from the beginning there has existed a tradition of artists from other medial experimenting with film as a form of personal expression, these efforts were always sporadic and never very well-publicized. Film quickly became "theater for the masses" and that it has remained ever since to the majority of those who deal with it. This, then, makes it easier to understand why educational institutions, when called upon by their students some fifty years later to offer courses in the subject, responded by delegating the teaching of the courses to those professors who had some knowledge of theater or dramatic literature.

What is a bit more complicated is the attitude of the art world. Many of the well-known artists of this century have worked in film. One need only think of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali to get a sense of the range, and there is a rich tradition in this country as well that includes such personal filmmakers as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Ernie Gehr. Generally speaking, the art world, rather than seeking to include film as a genuine sister art to the more established forms, has instead accepted the conventional wisdom that the "movies" are for the "masses" and therefore outside the ken of curators and critics. There is, of course, one reason (among others) that should be acknowledged, and that is an economic one. We no longer live in an age of the patron in terms of the financing of works of art; we live instead in the age of the collector. This has effected changes in the structure of the art world since the late Renaissance, of course, but it is particularly relevant to the question of film's relationship to that world. Unlike a painting or a piece of sculpture, film has not been considered a collectible item. It is hard to imagine a serious art collector making room in her collection for all the necessary accoutrement involved in the presentation of a film. It is far easier and more convenient to usher the dinner guests into the study to have them gaze admiringly at your collection of Degas prints than it is to arrange a projection facility to show an early work by Robert Bresson. Film is, let's face it, a cumbersome medium. It is difficult, even under the best of circumstances, to achieve a professional screening situation, and the idea of adding films to a personal art collection has just seemed too impractical to most connoisseurs. This simple reason, while purely economic and pragmatic, has had a lasting effect upon the way film has been viewed by the art establishment. (Practical matters have also played a major role in film studies as well; many colleges do not offer serious film courses simply because it is so difficult to actually study the material. The proper equipment for analytic projection, for example, is quite expensive, usually beyond the budgetary capabilities of all but the wealthiest institutions.)

Video is changing all that. When one thinks of possibilities of video, one realizes that many of the encumbrances that have afflicted film over the years simply do not exist with video. Clearly, the technology is far more manageable. While video is by no means a simpler medium (in fact, it is just the opposite), it is certainly far more user-friendly than film, and this technological difference has already begun to affect the way it has been received by those very institutional forces that have been so reluctant to embrace the art cinema. For example, video can easily be a collectible item. It has, in fact, already become one. And while it is true that most of what has been collected can hardly be called art, the opportunity is there for dealers and gallery owners and individual artists themselves to enter that marketplace and to offer their pieces to an audience that I think will in a very short time express a desire for them. In places like Manhattan, this is beginning to happen. Specialized video stores have already opened that offer tapes made by artists, musicians, and poets. Video stores are rapidly becoming analagous to book stores; that is, while any bookstore owner will tell you that the profits come from the romance novels and the "how to slim your left thigh" treatises, poetry and philosophy and modern novels are nevertheless carried and displayed. The same is becoming the case with video: at least the poets and philosophers and the modern artists of the new medium are able to show their work. This was simply never the case with film, and the main reason is a technological one.

While private galleries have not yet resopnded enthusiastically to these new developments, museums have clearly begun to view video as holding the possibility, at least, of artistic expression. New York's Whitney has collected video for over a decade now, and other museums are beginning to do so. It is, in fact, becoming more and more common these days to visit a museum outside New York and come across a small room devoted to continuous video viewing. Once again, because of the nature of the technology (and the need for a projectionsist), this was simply never practical with film.

Video, then, has become a commodity like painting -- something that can be bought and sold -- and it is this aspect of the medium, perhaps more than anything else, that has made it acceptable to an art world that functions quite naturally and usually unquestioningly within a capitalistic economic system. Economics has thus joined with technology to transform cinema, at least as we have known it, into a somewhat endangered species. And as with all endangered species, we come too late to a full appeciation; our only recourse is to try to preserve a few examples for posterity.

Is this really what is happening to film? Is this once vital medium being reduced to the status of a museum piece and only that? Will screenings of film -- that is, with proper projection facilities and pristine prints -- become a novelty, something that will occur only under museum auspices and only then on special occasions? Will film as a technology go the way of the daguerreotype, used now only by those artists interested in replicating a kind of personal vision of the past? Will public screenings themselves be phased out as more and more people gather to watch videotapes in the solitude of their own homes? (Some of the statistics we have on this question are already startling. In Britain, for example, the country with the highest per capita ownership of video recording equipment, a very small percentage of the population ever sees a "first run" film in a movie theater. Over 90% see them at home.) [4]

What will happen, I think, is that film as we now know it will in time disappear. To be precise, the mechanical process based upon photography will in time be replaced by an electronic process based upon electrical conversion. There are those who lament this passage, seeing a great loss in the disappearance of the photographic medium. There is -- and let there be no doubt about this -- a great deal of difference between the two processes. With film, an image is projected by a beam of light onto a white screen and reflected back upon us. With video, an image is literally shot at us by an electron gun, a phosphorescent screen protecting us from the onslaught of the electrons while at the same time displaying to us the image. There is a quality -- what film lovers would call a luxurious and warm and singular and enduring quality -- to the light that is reflected off the screen in a dark room that simply cannot be even emulated by the electronic process that is video. That is no doubt true, but one should note that history is full of this kind of trade-off: something irrevocably lost for something seemingly gained. There are, after all, historians of photography who maintain that the daguerreotype as an image had a certain quality that has never been recaptured by modern photographic processes. Film itself offers a telling example. There has never been an image comparable in quality and scope to that of a process called "Vistavision." It lasted, however, only a few years in the 1950's because despite its technical superiority and the glistening images that the process produced (one of life's rare treats, for example, is seeing a Vistavision print of John Ford's The Searchers ), it was thought of as too expensive and too cumbersome for the average theater owner. The point to be made here is that if purity and perfection of the image were the only goal of those who make the decisions regarding the technological forms we as a society will use, video would still linger far behind film. There are, as we have noted, other goals, like cost and ease of operation, that make somewhat academic the question of which is the better image.

Many "movie fans" bemoan the possible loss of the movie theater as a forum for crowds to share an emotional experience will be lost. This fear is, I think, overstated. It seems clear that just as people continue to enjoy going out to the theater or to a concert, they will continue to want to "see images" together. What is likely to change is merely the system -- the technical method -- for showing them these images. Sony and other companies are already experimenting with projecting video images onto a screen large enough to approximate the present theater experience. Movie theaters themselves are getting smaller and smaller. It's only a matter of time before the image will be deemed acceptable enough by a large audience that the "screening" experience will be preserved even though the technology will be different. People will still be able to "go out to the movies." What they will be seeing on the "screen" will simply be a different kind of image. They will adjust, and we will be only mildly surprised at how quickly they do so.

But those millions of people going to the movies have not been my concern here. That is a matter, as I have suggested, best left to the sociologists. My concern has been with film as an art form, and it is as such that I see some renewed hope through video. Precisely because it is a commodity, precisely because it is less expensive and less cumbersome to deal with, precisely because it is user-friendly, and precisely because it can be personal and experimental, I see video as, ironically, redeeming film. It is a medium flexible enough to allow entrepreneurs to continue making pap for the masses -- home entertainment if you will -- while at the same time offering interesting challenges to individual artists. It is a medium that may force the art establishment to view cinema as the art form that it occasionally has been if only because films, once transferred to video will enhance the possibilities, allow for serious scholarship and archival evaluation. It is a medium that is growing and changing and developing its own aesthetic, and this will make it the subject of much analysis by journalists and critics who never seemed able to come to terms with film aesthetics. (What that aesthetic is, and how it may differ from film itself, is a subject, of course, for another essay.) Finally, it is a medium that young artists are using. They are simply not using film these days as they did in the 1960's and early 1970's. This may be the most telling signal of a revolution. Video is tomorrow's medium, and those who understand how to use it are, as artists always are, far ahead of those of us who wish to understand how it is used.

Footnotes

1. [back] See Rudolf Arnheim: Film as Art. University of California Press (Berkeley), 1957. Some of the essays published in this volume were written as early as 1933 .

2. [back] See Sergei Eisenstein: Film Form. Harcourt, Brace & World (New York), 1949; and Hugo Munsterberg: The Film: A Psychological Study, D. Appleton and Company (New York), 1916; reprinted by Dover Publications (New York), 1970.

3. [back] For information on this early period, see John L. Fell (ed.): Film Before Griffith, University of California Press (Berkeley), 1983.

4. [back] Scott Meek, Feature Films Office, British Film Institute, London; in an address at Yale University, February 18, 1984.

Raymond Foery is the Chairman of the Communications Department at Quinnipiac College, Connecticut; he edited and published the Downtown Review , an arts journal, from 1977 to 1982.

Last updated October 30, 2000. Version 5.0.

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