Cinema, the art from of film-making, is the most powerful prominent art form of contemporary culture. Is this a good thing? Or have we moved away from more edifying art forms? To answer this, we must consider the nature of cinema.
The term ‘cinema’ implies an endeavor that is distinct from video-making. Just as songwriting is different from the act of simply making sounds and as storytelling is different from merely speaking words, so cinema is an art distinct from merely creating moving images through the technology of a camera. We might use a video camera to record a birthday party or news footage of a street riot, but neither of these could qualify as cinema until some filmmaker gave them an intentional form as he prepared them for a community audience.
A highly interdisciplinary art, cinema comes nearest to a total re-creation of our unmediated experience of the world. Through its nearly magical properties, cinema has surpassed theater in its ability to imaginatively transport an audience into another world. A theater audience, sharing the same three dimensional space as the actors, is more aware their separation from the story playing out on the stage. We are accustomed to knowing that other people in our physical world are “not me.” In contrast, the overwhelming sensory environment of a dark cinema seizes the viewer’s imagination with its powerful sound and overwhelming images, transporting us into its unique and immersive representation of reality. For about two hours we can nearly forget our separateness from the story being told on screen. Forgetful of the movie medium itself, we can become live Narcissus and loose ourselves in contemplation of the image before us.
Like all art, cinema provides us with an experience that is both different from unmediated reality as well as a mirror to reality. Our artistic representations both change reality and reveal more of it. In one sense, there is no such thing as ‘realism’ in art. As soon as we begin to co-create and craft the material of this world into something human-made, we have invested it with our own intentions, meaning, and “un-real” form.
And yet, we have created from the things of reality and so our creations continue to reflect something of the ‘real’ nature of our world. Even our most abstract art still testifies to the fact that the world is made of points, lines, and circles; of red, blues, and yellows; and of sound waves and silences. Our attempts to break the embedded forms of reality – visual or narrative – only reinforce the fact that such structures exist. Just as our attempts to defy gravity only affirm the power of its existence so our attempts to bend the “monomyth” of the universal plot structure only prove it to be the true human story. Every movie that opens in media res speaks of an implied beginning and every open-ended conclusion compels us to imagine the ending ourselves.
This is why formalists and realists will continue quibbling over the nature of cinema indefinitely; cinema, and art in general, draws us into both the ‘real’ and the imagined. It is a bizarre modern abstraction to consider human creative activity as “outside reality.” Our films and our dreams are as real as our chairs and our popcorn. Like Dumbledore, I think it is worth asking this important question: just because art provokes an imaginative experience, “why on earth would that mean it isn’t real?”
In the next post, we will consider whether it is a good or bad thing for contemporary culture to be dominated by this powerful art form…