Why Cinema Is Not Art
Personal Thoughts and a little bit of Cinema History.
DISCLAIMER
The following article contains a few bits of Cinema history. The information reported is rather simplistic and approximated so that a wider audience can enjoy this writing. I am not an expert on Cinema history and I do not claim to be one, If there are any errors in the article please report those without being aggressive and understanding my limits on the subject. Enjoy!
PRELUDE
Since the dawn of time, humans have always had a fixation on representation, an innate desire in the soul of each of us to convince ourselves of our existence through the objectification of our actions. Over time, art has taken on various forms and nuances and the artistic exercise has become fundamental in the evolution of the human being and an integral part of it. In the 1900s, however, the feeble gap between art and industry broke down: Cinema arrived, the magic of moving pictures which claims to be considered an art form. Art is an industry but industry is not art, a contradiction, of course, but valid in many respects. But is Cinema an industrial art or an artistic industry? Cinema is not freedom, Cinema, often, does not allow the author’s complete vision to be presented to the consumer, Cinema only exists to make rich people even richer, many would say. Cinema was not born with the intent of being an artistic form of expression, Cinema… is it really Art?
Fly me to the Moon
It was 1902 when Georges Méliès, the father of special effects in Cinema, first projected his masterpiece “A Trip to the Moon”(“Le Voyage dans la Lune” in French). The impact the film had on the industry of the time cannot be described in words. Whenever we see special effects in films we must remember that without Méliès, Cinema as we know it, wouldn’t exist. Also, this was the first film that made clear the potential that Cinema had. As time went by, more and more money was being spent on movies, mostly great historical epics, and the movie industry started getting bigger and bigger. However, this was not a progression that many people would’ve expected at the time. After the Lumiére brothers showed off their new invention(or magic trick), Moving Pictures were mainly used in theatres(not movie halls) to entertain the audience while waiting for the upcoming play. Most of those short films were animated and didn’t really tell a story, it was experimentation at its finest. At the time, a lot of the individuals behind films were magicians and illusionists and among them, there was also Mr. Méliès.
Art VS Industry
In 1910, Italian film theorist Ricciotto Canudo coined the term “6th Art”, referring to Cinema. In fact, the Italian found Cinema to be the ultimate form of artistic expression as it combined all the previous ones: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. He then renamed cinema “the 7th Art” in 1921 as he considered Dance to be an art as well, and since it came way before Cinema he considered Dance to be the 6th Art. By then the film industry was growing non-stop. In that decade we’ll see the birth of Hollywood, the first steps of The Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers, Charlie Chaplin would make one masterpiece after another, and near the end of the Roaring ’20s, came out one of the most important films in Cinema history, crucial for the evolution of the medium: Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927). Oh, and the Oscars also had their first ceremony. That was the period that made things clear: it was impossible to separate that art from the industry. Nobody could’ve ever produced their own movie as they could’ve made their own painting, their own little wax sculpture, written their own book, or learned the basics of dance. During the course of history, artists have always been subjugated by a client, an industry, or a political force (that includes the Pope). But this was different. Not only did the artist have to respect all the terms set by the industry and the expectations of the public, but he also didn’t have any chance of going independent as the “working tools” of the art of Cinema were too expensive to buy and nobody was up to just giving away thousands worth of cameras and all the other stuff.
Color, Sound, and Television
In 1927, Warner Bros. releases “The Jazz Singer” (1927). Some experiments in sound in film were conducted even before the previously cited motion picture was released, but this was the first feature film to actually include (brief) sequences of dialogue. The audience was mesmerized by hearing the actors' voices and after that the trend continued, and by the early 1930s, the “talkies” were a global phenomenon. Another important event in film history was the introduction of color. We could make a whole book about how and when color was first introduced to film, but that’s not the point so I’ll keep it short: color in cinema has always existed. From the Lumiére brothers’s first presentation to 1908, to make a film appear colored, it was common to hand-color each frame but then the Kinemacolor revolution came in, just to be abandoned in 1914. After that year lots of experiments were conducted on color in movies, but the first film that actually made color popular was “The Wizard Of Oz” (1939), which is now erroneously seen as the father of color in film. Now, let’s take a huge step and go to the 1950s. By then, Television was in almost everyone’s home and fewer and fewer people started to go to the theater. The Cinema Industry was at war with an almost unbeatable opponent. But, after some years of moderate crisis, the biggest innovation in Cinema since the introduction of color joined history: anamorphic lenses. The view range and the field depth that those lenses offered were way superior to the television’s small screen. Cinema regained a boost and theaters got out of the crisis. This is where, while reading these events, I started questioning myself about the concept of Cinema as an Art. The truth is that the Art of Film cannot exist without an economic return on the expenses. If people lost interest in Cinema, the latter would just disappear. No one wants to lose millions on a movie that nobody wants to watch. One may argue that all other forms of Art need a monetary return to exist. But you don’t need money to dance, you absolutely can afford to buy colors and a brush, we can’t live in a world without architecture, sculptures are essential to please our eyes, and without books we’d be doomed. Now what? Is Cinema an art form? Is it? Is it?
My thoughts on the matter
I have to admit that the title is really provocative, but no, I do not think that Cinema is not an art. I love Cinema, I really do, and I would never say such a thing. But I also have to be honest with myself. I don’t like the Cinema Industry. I find the obsession with box office utterly disgusting and the way most of the workers are treated is rather embarrassing and inhuman (the ongoing strike proves it). But we can’t separate Cinema from the Industry. We can’t have big-budget movies without the industry giving the filmmakers that budget. I think that the reason most people don’t perceive Cinema as an art is due to the impossibility for us to replicate it by ourselves. Also, Cinema now more than ever is following the audience’s demands to create its products. And that’s not what an artist should do, an artist should be free to do whatever he wants, whenever he feels like to and however he wants to do it. That, in Cinema, is just not possible. We can argue about how hard it is to get a book published, about how difficult it is to come out as a new talented painter, and about how competitive Dance is, but that’s not the point. To actively engage with the art of Cinema as a creator of films is not difficult. It’s just impossible. You need money. Lots of money. And by the way, I’m well aware of the existence of short films, but I’m talking about feature films here. But even if I think about these problems a lot, I’m still mesmerized by Cinema because the final results of those Industry efforts always manage to look like works of art and, for some directors, even authorial works of art. To conclude, I think that until the team behind the creation of a movie is made of humans, actual people, I’ll be able to call Cinema an Art, partially ignoring that voice in my head that likes to scream all the bad things that the Industry has done, is doing, and will do. But if, in the future, we lose our control to A.I., then I’m out. Machine-generated art is not art and will never be.
Thanks for reading my new article, My gratitude goes to everyone that was patient enough to read all of this brainstorm of mine. Make sure to follow It’s Only A Movie, our new publication, and to check out our latest project: 1994 In Film. Also, I’m working on a review of Oppenheimer so stay tuned. Have a great day!
