What makes a film an art?
When we use the term ‘art’ what we mean might be something that is worthy and serious of consideration. In the hierarchy within films, blockbusters caped superhero movies might be dismissed as theme park entertainment for the mass medium; meanwhile, foreign-language and experimental films are more ‘high art’.
Some might consider blockbuster films as ‘business’ than art, in that they are tailored to be sold to a mass audience. Money, of course, can corrupt any process. But I don't think that necessarily makes the artist or their works less of an art. As I will argue below, a film's artistic possibility makes it an art form in its own right.
But before I consider whether contemporary films are art itself, I will first consider film as a mechanical recording device. In my last post, I discussed how theorist like Bazin was championing realist films that ‘objectively’ depict reality. This claim has the underlying assumption that film is just a mere recording device, which made critics such as Roger Scruton to argue that films aren’t art because they are merely depicting reality. Is that argument true? are there no creative possibilities in a recording device?
I will structure this blog as follows
- Scruton’s argument against film as art
- Arhehim & Sesonske’s argument of film as art
- Is digital film an art form?
Against film as art
As Bazin notes, film has its basis in the photographic image, which he argues satisfies our desire for the imitation of reality. Noel Caroll reconstructs Bazin argument into “transparency thesis”, meaning, photographs directly portray reality, unlike say, painting, which is representational.
This debate over whether photography is ‘presentational’ has led Roger Scruton to argue that neither photography nor cinema is an art because they lack the artistic intention that art (like painting) demands.
According to Scruton, a painting like Mona Lisa is representational because it shows us how the artist saw the subject; the painting is the product of artistic intentions, and the subject need not to even have existed for the painter to produce the painting. In comparison, a photograph showing a woman dressed and made up to look like Mona Lisa only portrays the subject as it is; the camera simply records how an actual subject actually looked at a certain moment in time, and the resulting image has no aesthetic interest as an artist’s interpretation.
This critique formulated by Scruton advocates intentionality in artform; painting is art because it reflects everything the artist intended to portray, while film is just a recorded dramatic representation.
In this regard, concerning the photographic nature of film, we can see Scruton and Bazin draws radically different conclusions.
Film as art
One way to refute Scruton is to say, well, photography is actually just as complex as painting; the photographer has just as many options for presenting her subject as the painter. For example, if I and someone else are given a task to photograph a woman by the beach, I bet we will come up with different results, no?
Another way to refute Scruton’s criticism is to turn what Scruton considers to be the limitation of film and turn it into film’s aesthetic significance. For Rudolf Arhehim, it is precisely in the limitation of film as an automatic recording device that possibilities for artistic expressiveness emerge.
For example, due to the limited display of the flat screen, cinematic techniques can help draw our attention to things that we would miss in real life. In film, we cannot turn our heads to see what is beyond the frame; unlike in real life, in which there is a continuous panorama of our surroundings. In this sense, artistic expressiveness can emphasise ‘the true nature of things by employing cinematic techniques, such as close-up, low angle shot, or low light hiding a character’s face can indicate the imposing nature of the character, etc. In other words, the flat screen limitation can express in other ways how you might feel in real life.
Employing editing techniques can challenge the claim of ‘objective-ness’ of a recording by changing the way we perceive the passage of time, space, as well as experience. For example, the four-way call scene in Mean Girls (2009) employ a split screen technique to give viewer a sense of continuity of actions between all characters. It also enhance the comedy as well; we can see the girls doing their thing, while gossiping on the phone at the same time.
Alexander Sensonske, on the other hand, considers why film itself is unique in relation to other art forms to justify its artistry. He first begins by articulating the affordances of the medium that no other artform has: space, time and motion.
Space
Film shares the spacial quality with paintings, for example, which have a two-dimensional surface. But unlike painting, film has three-dimensional representational depth which creates the impression of depth of action and motion in space. We can sit while experiencing continuous space and the impression of motion.
Time
When we watch a film, we seemingly can jump from one point in time to another. The film can give us a chronicle of a character’s life from birth to death, yet we experience it in the span of two hours. This highly controlled nature of time and continuity reveals a new way of representing and experiencing time. Literature has this quality too of course, but film’s audiovisual nature provides us with everyday perception that space and time in film do not feel that different to ‘real-life’.
Motion
Movement in real life and film can be quite different too. In film, motion can be composed, edited, and framed by the camera in a way that heighten an event the magnitude it lacks in real-life.
But even if we justifies film itself as an artform, do we need to adjust our appreciation in the digital age?
Is digital film art?
Here’s Tarantino entertaining remark on Roger Deakins who shot on digital.
“[On digital film and Roger Deakins] he doesn’t have four trucks full of lighting equipment just trying to get an image. It’s easier for him he can do it all later. It’s all a paint box set, you can do literally anything you want…But i guess where i’m coming from is in a world where you can do anything, nothing means anything. If you were gonna create something that could not be — that film is incapable of doing — well that would be something that is legit. But, you know, trying to take digital and then add a shutter effect, grain, speckling or anything like that, what the fuck you doing man all right, just shoot on film.”
Arrival of digital cinematography in the late 80s has revolutionised filmmaking in a way that save huge amount of costs, time, and many many logistical challenges.
Shooting on film is almost an extinct practice, but some filmmakers still do it for the sake of capturing the more ‘authentic’ and richer look. For the untrained eyes, it might make no difference to us. But just like how audiophiles swear that vinyl “just sounds better,” filmmakers also swears that film just looks better.
Indeed, the high degree of automation with a digital video camera, along with increasingly high image resolution make it seem as though digital images are too easily achieved. There are now also endless possibilities for editing or correcting the final image. The shift to digital thus allows filmmakers to focus on the look and sound of the film without worrying about technical difficulty.
Film is now no longer grounded on the photographic image; filmstrips are a living thing; data on a digital bank is not a material. Although that has their own philosophical implications, I won’t discuss it here (see more).
The point is, the argument goes that since digital cinema has made everything easier, it is thus less of an ‘art’. Where Terrence Malick only had 25 minutes window of the magic hour to shot his film, now filmmakers can just edit those lighting in post-production.
However, some philosophers such as Berry Gaut argues that because there is more potential for expression in digital cinema, it thus provide a more compelling argument for film as art. The increase in choice in digital photography means that they have exponentially more ways to experiment and extend the boundaries of their medium.
So, the number of options available for Tom Hopper to make how the cats will look like in CATS (2019) means filmmakers have more opportunities to express their true intentions. If the medium is no longer limited, so does the expression.
But increased technical efficiency also brings creative risks. Even though Tom Hopper arrived at his film by eliminating far more options, it is also a process that can easily become overwhelming and therefore more error-ridden.
Hence, Thomson-Jones reminds us that to properly appreciate a digital movie, we need to appreciate any scenes looking the way it does, as they could have, so easily, looked so many other ways. This applies too to anything digital — video games, for example, are undeniably unappreciated. In this sense, digital cinema is perhaps useful to start off the appreciation of digital art in general.
Reflection on the significance of choices available to art, in general, contributes to a full appreciation of their work.
For any artwork, appreciation usually begins by recognising that it is a product of artistic activity of some kind, and thus deserves to be appreciated because it is an achievement by the people who made it.
We usually understand this achievement in terms of the aesthetically significant effects achieved by the artist. The harder it seems to execute, the more we appreciate it. But achievement is always relative to the artistic medium (realism in painting is difficult to achieve; realism in photography is a given). Similarly, what used to be hard to achieve is now easy to achieve in the digital medium, it’s understandable some would deem it as ‘less artistic’.
Hence, one of the concerns with digital art is that it relies heavily on the computer, both manual and cognitive, traditionally involved in making art. The effects achieved by the computer cannot be compared in the same way as those achieved by traditional “hands-on” methods. The terms of our appreciation, therefore, need to be adjusted in the digital age.
Arnheim, R., 1957. Film as Art: 50th anniversary printing. Univ of California Press.
Gaut, Berys, 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McGregor, R., 2013. A New/Old Ontology of Film. Film-Philosophy, 17(1), pp.265–280.
Sesonske, A. (1974), ‘Aesthetics of Film, or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Movies ‘ , Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 3 3 . 1 , 5 1 -7 .
Thomson-Jones, Katherine and Shelby Moser, “The Philosophy of Digital Art”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/digital-art/>.
Thomson-Jones, K., 2008. Aesthetics and film. A&C Black.
