An art and an industry

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1995 by Peter Schepelern

All through its first century, cinema has enjoyed an immense following, but it has also been feared and scorned. Both the educated bourgeoisie and the working-class public were excited by the Lumiere brothers' Cinematographe shows in Paris and Edison's Kinetograph shows in New York at the end of the last century. Soon, however, the cultural establishment became concerned about the enormous popularity of the new medium and began to dismiss it as a vulgar and even harmful symptom of modernity.

"Cinema materializes the worst popular ideal," wrote the French writer Anatole France (1844-1924). "It is not the end of the world, but it is the end of civilization." His opinion was echoed by his fellow Nobel Prize-winner, the German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), who said: "It seems to me that film has very little to do with art". The French novelist Georges Duhamel (1884-1966) and many other critics saw film as a symptom of "Americanization", a vulgarization of the European spirit.

As recently as 1961, the American historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote that "Even at its best, the movie remains a simplifying medium," and in the present decade, the outstanding film director Krzysztof Kieslowski has said, "The goal is to capture what lies within. But there's no way of filming it. Literature can do this, cinema can't. It can't because it doesn't have the means. It's not intelligent enough."

How far are these criticisms of cinema justified?

Stories from the dream factory At the Lumiere brothers' first public show in Paris on 28 December 1895, a short film was shown about a boy who teases a gardener. The naughty boy makes the gardener spray himself with water and eventually gets his deserved retribution. This early short, L'arroseur arrose, marks what was to become the main attraction of film, its capacity to tell stories in a powerful and popular way.

The medium started out mainly as a form of expression based on imitation of theatre and painting, but gradually it developed a language and aesthetics of its own. A peak of cinematic story-telling was reached in 1915, with the great American director D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a monumental demonstration of the technical and stylistic possibilities of the new art form (although, with its racist depiction of the American Civil War, it also showed the medium's controversial potential).

In the 1920s, film developed in relative isolation from the other arts. While Marcel Proust and T.S. Eliot revolutionized literature, Picasso, Kandinsky and Duchamp showed new ways for painting, and Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bartok broke up the tonal system of classical music, the cinema was mainly trying to establish techniques of logical storytelling rooted in Dickens' novels and nineteenth-century popular fiction and melodrama.

Avant-garde cinema did exist in the 1920s nonetheless. French experiments in Surrealism and Dadaism, German Expressionism and the Russian montage style were attempts to explore new approaches to cinema as an art. Films like Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin are considered as landmarks of cinema and are widely admired for their originality. But they had little influence on the mainstream of films.

Meanwhile Hollywood was building an enormous entertainment industry and, despite important European counter-currents such as French Poetic Realism in the 1930s and Italian neorealism in the 1940s, soon gained worldwide dominance. The period from the 1930s to the 1950s was the era of classical Hollywood storytelling, with the "star system", the "genre system" and the "studio system" as the main pillars of the dream factory.

Challenging the system The cinema, more than any other artistic medium, depends on acceptance by and money from the economic system, since the production costs of a film are so much higher than those of a book, a painting or a piece of music. As a result, the "system" has always had more influence over the cinema than over the other arts. The history of the cinema records a continuous tension between the inertia of the system, geared to seeking easy money, and film-makers seeking to fulfil their artistic ambitions. There is film as art, created by individualist geniuses who quixotically challenged the system, and there is film at the service of prevailing ideas and values.

The popularity and fascination of film have been used for art and entertainment, but abused for manipulation and falsification. Lenin called film "the most important of the arts" (1922), and during the 1930s film became a political instrument of propaganda in the hands of the totalitarian regimes - Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Spain. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will alone, in spite of its repugnant deification of Hitler, stands out as an original work of art. Hollywood answered back with films glorifying the democratic countries, their values, their courage and resistance.

New waves and complexities The first decisive breakthrough made by cinema into the established culture came after the Second World War, when a new generation of film-makers gave form and feeling to the post-war experience, perhaps more effectively than their colleagues in the older arts. Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, Federico Fellini's La Strada, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Andrezj Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds and Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy dealt movingly with the search for humanism in an era of doubt and shaken beliefs. This was cinema of great drama and high artistic quality, but it was still largely conventional and based on the premises of a literary culture.