A birthday or a funeral?

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1995 by Krzysztof Zanussi

Unlike cinema, none of the traditional arts presided over by the nine muses of Antiquity owes its birth to an instrument or an invention. This explains why a doubt has hovered over cinema ever since its birth: is it really an art? The doubt stems not only from cinema's suspect relationship with a piece of machinery, but from its social and artistic origins.

Right from the start, the cinema recorded objective facts (as in the first films made by the Lumiere brothers, "Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory" and "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station") but it also told a story (as in the "The Gardener and the Cheeky Imp"[L'arroseur arrose]). From the aesthetic point of view, the second aspect of cinema was already more advanced, or, as is usually said, more creative.

Fiction, whose origins are rooted in literature and whose visual expression is in theatre, has played a dominant role in the history of the cinema. But since the cinema remained silent for the first thirty years of its existence (a rather prolonged babyhood!), it would be more accurate to compare it to pantomime, which, like motion pictures, was often accompanied by music. So in the light of its genealogical tree, cinema might be described as literature without words, or as a form of theatre, but one far removed from literature, supported by music and provided with subtitles. With such origins it was difficult to find a place on Mount Parnassus.

Humble origins The cinema's social origins were even less glorious. It is a child of the fairground. Popular appeal is its birthright: it took root among the people at a time when the other muses were hobnobbing in salons. It cannot even be compared with other forms of popular art, with folklore, the memory of bygone days.

The cinema was born at the end of a century that saw an extraordinary artistic flowering and regarded art as its crowning glory. Artists have never been so highly regarded as they were in the nineteenth century. Never has such pride been felt in art which, in the eyes of the European elites of that time, was a testimony to human progress and evolution in its highest form. But those elites believed that the opera was the synthesis of all contemporary art forms. Great opera-houses were the temples of the late nineteenth century. The cinema could only appear to them as an insignificant novelty.

Running out of steam In point of fact, the birth of cinema was a turning point for the culture of our century. The age of Gutenberg was drawing to a close. We left behind the culture of the word for the culture of image and sound, and entered a new cultural era. By now we have put that turning point behind us. The modern world is inundated with audiovisual signs. Yet the cinema, which is responsible for this upheaval, seems to be in decline.

It is easy, but only half true, to say that by moving out of movie-houses and onto television and VCR screens films win ground for the cinema. While we can see that the output of the audiovisual sector is growing, we are less apt to notice the decline in its artistic potential, its aesthetic regression, the spiritual poverty of what it offers, and the increasing vapidity of the ideas expressed. One need only compare the cinema today with that of twenty years ago when year after year film-makers like Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovski, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman were opening up new aesthetic, moral and intellectual perspectives and taking part in an extraordinary blossoming of art that was comparable to the explosion of Renaissance Florence or Flemish oil painting.

The cinema is losing ground today in the same area as that where other art forms are in retreat. In the late twentieth century people no longer expect art to do what it has done for centuries. They no longer ask it to describe the world in terms of a clearly defined scale of values. They no longer expect answers because they no longer ask the questions that were once thought to be intrinsic to humanity, about the meaning of life, suffering and, death, about the nature of love and happiness. Can art survive without these questions? I am convinced it cannot. And without them, can humanity itself survive?

As useless as Mozart Art has always been a diversion, a gratuitous, disinterested act. In the nineteenth century people sometimes said that a beautiful object was "useless, like Mozart." I have nothing against art as a diversion because it is through diversion and through disinterested, unproductive acts that thinking about life, happiness and death is expressed. In the past this kind of thinking was found in popular culture as well as among the elite. The difference lay in the language, not the message. The culture of ordinary people also asks the basic questions. A person who watches a mindless television film or an episode of Dynasty today is no less educated than the film-goers of thirty years ago who would queue to see the latest Fellini or Bergman. So what has happened since then?

I attribute the decline of the cinema to a change in the role of culture. The language of moving pictures still has some strings to its bow, but the questions that could be discussed in this language have gone. Thus the centenary of the cinema is linked to its funeral.