Film Theories

Formative Theories

Contributions to the body of thought that comprises film theory predate the term itself. Practically as soon as the moving picture appeared (c. 1895), there began a discourse on its nature and purpose. The first phase of theoretical thought concerning cinema came as a response to many in the intelligentsia of the day who dismissed the moving picture (the term used in the early days of cinema to designate what we now call movie or film) as a mere recording, with no intrinsic value of its own. Any significance, they claimed, was to be found only in the subject recorded. The earliest theorists of film argued to the contrary that cinema constituted a new art form—the Sixth Art as it was referred to by French writers at the beginning of the 20th century. They drew analogies between film and the traditional arts, noting their shared characteristics. (The exception to this process of positive comparison was in regard to theatre: Reacting to the charge that cinema was, at best, canned theatre, the commentators were at pains to catalogue the differences between theatre and film.) Moreover, some theorists posited the idea of cinema as a synthesis of attributes found in the older art forms. For example, a painting is a visual composition, and one of the primary aspects of music is rhythm, but a film, due to movement within the frame as well as the beat of cutting from shot to shot, provides a rhythmic flow of visual images, thus synthesizing attributes of music and painting into a new aesthetic experience.

Furthermore, the early theorists disputed the notion that a movie was a mere recording, a mechanical reproduction of actuality, first of all by cataloguing all the ways a cinematic image (at that time) differed from its subject—for example, an actual event that was in color, three dimensional, and included sound was, in cinema, rendered in black and white, two dimensions, and silent. Rather than being a simple mechanical reproduction of whatever happened or was staged before the camera, the formative theorists demonstrated that the raw material was altered, manipulated, and shaped by the cinematic processes. Rudolph Arnheim, for example, pointed to the [Page 401]transformative potentialities of the filmmaker's choices in areas such as framing, camera angle, and lighting. But while many theorists made reference to various aspects of mise en scene (the overall creation of the visual image within the frame) and cinematography under the control of the filmmaker, the processes of editing came to predominate early theoretical thought.

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