Technical revolutions
Printing, engraving, photography, cinema, those news tools revolutionize the art.
Some inventions change the ways to make art, to create, whether by developing schemes to minimize the impact of these new technologies of the image, or to adopt them bodily. Walter Benjamin rightly speaks of it in his essay The Artwork at the Time of its Technological Reproducibility 1.
If, as he indicates, the work of art is in itself always reproducible, the serial production did not exist or only occasionally. This could indeed correspond to the dominant idea throughout the centuries, search for an ideal, a perfection; thus, the fact of the singularity of the work could be more relevant: rare, it is more precious, unique, it is more worked. If a painter would reproduce his canvas, would it be the reproduction of his first work, a copy?
Produce in number constrained to compose with specific technical means, even simple, requiring material. In the middle of the 14th century, Gutenberg developed a modern and elaborate printing process and thus introduced typography, through the manufacture and use of lead type. The printing press will make increase the place of writing and help to cultivate the world, because the production of books leads to a desire of a widespread literacy. It spreads religious texts and theories through the printing of the Bible or Lutheran theses and later allows the birth and diffusion of the literary genre of the novel.
But Benjamin tempers the printing’s impact on the scale of history and arts 2. He insists on lithography, invented in Germany at the very end of the eighteenth century. More direct and faster than engraving on wood or copper, it permits to spread the drawing on a large scale and, as the author specifies, always in new forms, and thus to illustrate everyday life.
The most important of visuals revolutions is the photography. It can potentially potentiellement supplant the drawing or the painting in the representation field.
Benjamin mentions a “crisis of art”, inseparable from its context, a growing socialism. The debate was to determine if photography was an art, when it should have studied how it transforms the character of art.
However, it is for and by painters that the camera obscura, (ancestor of the camera) was created, used as an aid for their sketches. The Dutch of the XVIIth century, those same of the painting of genre, used it a lot, as well as the Italians. Later, Nicéphore Niepce will use lithography in his research to fix the image, what is the element missing in the camera obscura. After several experiments using chemical processes, he succeeded his first shot, a fixed image of part of his property, in 1826. He then associated with Louis Daguerre, who continued his work after his death, and marketed the daguerreotype, very quickly acquired by a large number of people. Gradually, the process evolves and is replaced by more sophisticated and less voluminous devices.
Photography receives a favorable reception in the world of painting where it is put at the service, just as was the camera obscura, the resolution of formal problems, related to perspectives, volumes, lights … Yet, photography does not significantly change the way of painting, nor the themes: it is finally here only a help to the realization, a means. In addition, photographers are inspired by pictorial compositions to create stagings, as in the case of the portrait where the person photographed was in a scenography that, by the choice of fabrics, objects, decorative components could illustrate his social class, his job, his hobbies …
However, photography frees the painting of its requirement of perfect representation of reality and encourages it to re-invent. In response to this underlying demand for renewal, Impressionism and Symbolism will emerge.
New challenge for arts : the unic art piece’s statut
The photography, reproduction’s tool, question about the piece’s authenticity, designated by Benjamin refering to the « hic et nunc » 3, means « here and now ». The authenticity runs away from any reproduction. But if in the painting leaves full authority to the original, it is not the same for photography. It captures the image of an object, a landscape, a person, and reveals details imperceptible by the eye, which gives the reproduction an additional quality.
On the other hand, now everyone can have a cathedral in his living room, or at least his image, the work — or at least the knowledge of its existence — would be more accessible. But what is the image of a cathedral, if it could not be appreciated in reality, if it was captured by another eye than that one of the spectator?
A depreciation — involuntary — takes place. The value of the work, the construction work of this cathedral and the precision of its sculptures do not change anything, but its “hic et nunc” loses its strength. Benjamin reminds that artworks have “an origin, a material duration, a power of historical testimony.” Through reproduction, information can be lost, the appreciation is not the same, the work loses its aura. The loss of the aura, according to Benjamin, would be because of several things, the common denominator of all is the growing importance of the masses in society. In the first place there is a desire to possess the object, or if it can not acquire (too bulky, too expensive, too rare) its reproduction. Then, a dialectic is created between the alignment of the reality on the masses and the alignment of these on the reality. In other words, do we face masses enslaved to the mercantile, political and artistic regimes or are these defined by the ambitions of this mass? Here, there are many sociological and philosophical questions — what is make society? -, — how do we do politics? -, notions of revolution, of power. Although it’s take us beside our purpose, just note Benjamin specifies that if the principle of the authenticity no longer governs the production, then it would be necessary to art a new function: this one would be policy 5.
The second visual revolution is the cinéma.
The cinema is, as the photography, the result of many years of researsh and experimentation around the picture’s movment. In 1891, thanks to the first camera, the Kinétrographe, Thomas Edison made the first animated shots, then from 1893, Dickson, the first movies, which the curious persons look individually through the viewer, named Kinetoscope. The French Auguste and Louis Lumière rework these two devices, adapting format, film form and way of exploitation, and thus allow the projection for an audience. Encouraged financially by Charles Pathé and other entrepreneurs, cinema is becoming a thriving industry.
If painting helped with photography, it would seem that the cinema uses painting and maintains a close link with it.
Alain Bonfand 6 notes that cinema raises of painting and that painting raises the cinema when it intervenes on it 7. Vancheri 8 adds, according to him “the cinema intensifies the painting by opposing to it means of which it is deprived […] 9”.
Painting: a visual catalog for cinema aesthetics
The painting appears as a documentation and an inspiration for the cinema (just as the theater could also be one), if the photograph captures what is and already has its working material: the real, the cinema has everything to invent. Scenarios can of course be inspired by stories and real facts, adapting novelistic or theatrical texts, but visual vocabulary and cinematographic grammar need to be thought out: questions of frame and framing, of light, of color, how to show the details, to generate emotions.
As early as the 1930s, some filmmakers explicitly made painting their theme of cinema, to tell with more or less truly the life of painters or their works with: Rembrandt Alexander Korda in 1936, Van Gogh Alain Resnais in 1948, Frida by Julie Taymor in 2002 (about Frida Kahlo), The Girl with the Pearl Peter Webber in 2004 (story of the eponymous painting painted by Veermer).
Some artists will also try the seventh art: Man Ray with for example The Return to Reason in 1923, What girls are dreaming of in 1924 etc., Duchamp in 1926 with Anemic Cinema, Dalí proposes his scenario to Buñuel who realizes An Andalusian dog in 1929 …
From the 1910s, definitively considered as a full-blown art, the seventh 10, the cinema raises questions related to aesthetics in an extent exponentially bigger than photography, stresses Benjamin. He says that the cinema was greeted with incomprehension, and quotes Abel Gance, who later becomes a prolific moovies director, who declares: “Here we are by a prodigious step back, back on the plan of expression of the Egyptians […]. The language of images is not yet developed because our eyes are not made for them. There is not enough respect and worship for what they express. 11” Indeed, the public has a priori no reference, no benchmark to apprehend this new art.
François Jost 12/13 informs: fiction in the cinema discipline would be built according to old topics, from stories or popular iconography. It is also by this that the cinema would be subjected to the genres inherited from the painting but also from the living spectacle without being able to bring the same assets as the latter.
In addition, Benjamin notes that the film actor has no public face to him for build his game. Pirandello reveals that because of this, “film actors feel like in exile 14 ». Benjamin opposes the figure of the actor to the theatre comedian’s one, who has the opportunity to adapt his character and his performance according to the spontaneous reactions of the audience. The aura of the theatre character is undoubtedly linked to that of the comedian, who is in a composition of the moment while in the cinema, the character whose actor plays the role is created through the montage of discontinuous performances. The actor presents himself to the camera, to the machine, and must act, living, but renouncing his aura, because it does not dissociate itself from the “here and now”.
On the other hand, the special effects are more permissible and therefore numerous in the cinema (understudies, re-enactments of sets …) whereas in the theatre, they will be more easily detected by the spectators. The cinema would be an art where the reality is only illusory. However, it can reveal gestures, details invisible to the naked eye, just because the camera is paying attention, by close-up, slow motion, etc., on such natural or common acts and actions that we do not see anymore.
To create a new aesthetic, or to redefine the meaning of this one, Aragon would like this camera to take a position of revealing things and objects. He explains: “Before the appearance of the cinematograph, some artists had scarcely dared to use the false harmony of machines and the haunting beauty of commercial inscriptions, capitals evocative of really ordinary objects, of everything which sings our life, and not some artificial convention, ignorant of corned beef and wax boxes.15” The poet wants to see in cinema the means — finally? — to celebrate the plastic (art) qualities of images and writings stemming from the popular vocabulary and from a certain poetics of the banal. Does not he suggest here creative ways that the future artists of Pop-art and New Realism will take over?
In addition, for him, the cinema must get rid of its link with the theatre and the photographic reproduction to break with the stereotypes of the narration; what he would like to wear as the first subject of cinema is not “the spectacle of eternally similar passions nor — as one would have liked to believe — the faithful reproduction of a nature” but “the magnification of such objects as that without artifice our weak mind could not arouse the higher life of poetry.16” Cleraly, he sees cinema as a tool that can suggest the idea of banality and its physical context (through objects) as poetry.
Aragon: photography as a creative medium
Jost emphasizes that Aragon considers that painting and narrative should be considered as supports, not to reduce cinema and photography to mere reproduction, but to allow them to have inspirations and creative media. As we have already seen, this is the link between painting and photography.
If Benjamin equated montage with the loss of the aura of the actor, Aragon associates it with the transfiguration of the object, which would take by the same another function and become a sign … However, Jost, explaining the thesis of Aragon, takes the example of a bottle that would become a weapon, a handkerchief that would become a clue, does this really belong to the assembly 17? The change of function of these objects can be scripted beforehand.
While the painting is apparently destined to be understood in an individual way and is understood in a hierarchical way, according to the artistic knowledges and the access to the art generally related to the place of the person within the society, the cinema intended to be seen by a large number of people, an art of entertainment to which the mass adheres, because it is more accessible : it does not require a multitude of cultural references.
This is denounced by some critics and thinkers, including Georges Duhamel 18, according to him, the cinema “is an entertainment of idiots, a hobby of illiterates, miserable creatures […] bewildered by their work and their worries […] , a show that requires no effort, […] does not seriously think about any problem, […] excites no hope, except the ridiculous one: be a “star” in Los Angeles 19".
A parenthesis about this last point: if the actor somehow loses his aura or that it can not be appreciated by the public, he must sell the movie in which he plays by promoting it. The cinema is mainly in a mercantile process; is gradually built the “cult of the star”, are emerging the starification of individualities from the cinema (and later other areas), the future Hollywood star system, the emergence of people who rose to the rank idol; and this will become one of the characteristics of the “mass culture”.
Finally, Benjamin summarizes: the sharp criticism is not so new: while art suggests contemplation, the masses seek to distract themselves. Distraction makes reception more direct, perception evolves. A historical process, of which the increasing proletarianization of modern man and the development of the masses are the two causes.
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notes
1.6 Benjamin, Walter The Artwork at the Time of its Technological Reproducibility; fr : L’œuvre d ’art à l ’époque de sa reproductibilité mécanique (1962), Paris, Folio plus, coll. Philosophie, 1990 see I, see II, see p. 42, see epilogue 6. Écrivain, docteur en philosophie et docteur en histoire,critique d’art français, spécialisé dans l’esthétique phénoménologique de la peinture et du cinéma. 7. Albera François, « Cinéma et peinture, peinture et cinéma », 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze [En ligne], 54 | 2008, mis en ligne le 01 février 2011 URL In this article Albera François quotes Bonfand Alain, Le cinéma saturé. Essai sur les relations de la peinture et des images en mouvement, Paris, PUF « Epiméthée », 2007 8. Professeur en études cinématographiques 9. Albera François, « Cinéma et peinture, peinture et cinéma », Ibid, Dans cet article Albera François cite Vancheri Luc , Cinéma et peinture, Paris, Armand Colin « Cinéma », 2007, p.172 10. L’expression « septième art » apparaît pour la première fois en 1911 dans un essai de l’italien Ricciotto Canudo, La Naissance d’un sixième art — Essai sur le cinématographe. Dans la classification des arts, le cinéma vient en septième position après l’architecture, la sculpture, la peinture, la musique, la poésie et le théâtre/la danse. 11. Benjamin, Walter L’oeuvre d ’art à l ’époque de sa reproductibilité mécanique (1962), Paris, Folio plus, coll. Philosophie, 1990, p.31. Benjamin, Walter cite Gance Albert « Le temps de l’image est venu », dans L’Art cinématographique, t. II, p. 100–101. 12. Professeur des universités en sciences de l’information et de la communication, directeur depuis 2012 du laboratoire Communication Information Médias de l’université Paris III. 13. Jost François, Le culte du banal, De Duchamp à la télé-réalité, Paris, Editions du CNRS, Collection Biblis, 2013, p.33 14. Benjamin, Walter L’oeuvre d ’art à l ’époque de sa reproductibilité mécanique (1962), Paris, Folio plus, coll. Philosophie, 1990, p.29. Ben- jamin cite Pierre-Quint Léon, Signification du cinéma (L’Art cinématographique, II, Paris, 1927, p. 14–15) qui cite Pirandello Luigi, On tourne, (1925) 15. Jost François, Le culte du banal, De Duchamp à la télé-réalité, op. cit, p. 34, Jost cite « Sur le décor », Film, 15 septembre 1918, repris dans Aragon, Chroniques I 1918–1932, édition établie par Bernard Leuillot, Stock, 1998, p. 24 16. Jost François, Le culte du banal, De Duchamp à la télé-réalité, Ibid. p. 34, Jost cite « Sur le décor », Ibid. p. 25 17. Benjamin, Walter L’oeuvre d ’art à l ’époque de sa reproductibilité mécanique (1962), Paris, Folio plus, coll. Philosophie, 1990, voir XV 18. Duhamel Georges, médecin, écrivain et poète, académicien français. 19. Benjamin, Walter L’oeuvre d ’art à l ’époque de sa reproductibilité mécanique op.cit. voir XV, Benjamin, Walter cite Duhamel Georges, Scènes de la vie future, Paris, Mercure de France, 1930, p. 52
