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WHAT IS CINEMA?

by ANDRE BAZIN

essays selected and translated

by HUGH GRAY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London

What Is Cinema?

seen as .an ?bject and every object as an image. Hence photography r~ hIgh III ~e order of surrealist creativity because it produces an Image that IS a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting combines tricks of visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantiates this.

So, photography is clearly the most important event in the his- tory of plastic arts. Simultaneously a liberation and a fulfillment it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsessio~ with re.ali~m and. allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy. ImpreSSIOnIst realism, offering science as an alibi is at the opposite extreme from eye-deceiving trickery. OnlY' when form ceases to have any imitative value can it be swallowed up in color. So, .when form, in the person of Cezanne, once more regains pos- seSSIOn of the canvas there is no longer any question of the illusions of the geometry of perspective. The painting, being confronted in the mechanically produced image with a competitor able to reach

. out beyond baroque resemblance to the very identity of the model was compelled into the category of object. Henceforth Pascal's con~ demnation of painting is itself rendered vain since the photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other to ~dmire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to somethmg III nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence.

On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language.

THE MYTH OF TOTAL CINEMA

P ARADOXICALL Y enough, the impression left on the reader by Georges Sadoul's admirable book on the origins of the cinema is of a reversal, in spite of the author's Marxist views, of the relations between an economic and technical evolution and the imagination of those carrying on the search. The way things happened seems to call for a reversal of the historical order of causality, which goes from the economic infrastructure to the ideological superstructure, and for us to consider the basic technical discoveries as fortunate accidents but essentially second in importance to the preconceived ideas of the inventors. The cinema is an idealistic phenomenon. The concept men had of it existed so to speak fully armed in their minds, as if in some platonic heaven, and what strikes us most of all is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than of any help offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers.

Furthermore, the cinema owes virtually nothing to the scientific spirit. Its begetters are in no sense savants, except for Marey, but it is significant that he was only interested in analyzing movement and not in reconstructing it. Even Edison is basically only a do-it- yourself man of genius, a giant of the concours Lepine. Niepce, Muybridge, Leroy, Joly, Demeny, even Louis Lumiere himself, are all monomaniacs, men driven by an impulse, do-it-yourself men or

What Is Cinema?

at best ingenious industrialists. As for the wonderful, the sublime E. Reynaud, who can deny that his animated drawings are the result of an unremitting pursuit of an idee fixe? Any account of the cin- ema that was drawn merely from the technical inventions that made it possible would be a poor one indeed. On the contrary, an approximate and complicated visualiiation of an idea invariably precedes the industrial discovery which alone can open the way to its practical use. Thus if it is evident to us today that the cinema even at its most elementary stage needed a transparent, flexible, and resistant base and a dry sensitive emulsion capable of receiving an image instantly-everything else being a matter of setting in order a mechanism far less complicated than an eighteenth-century clock-it is clear that all the definitive stages of the invention of the cinema had been reached before the requisite conditions had been fulfilled. In 1877 and 1880, Muybridge; thanks to the imaginative generosity of a horse-lover, managed to construct a large complex device which enabled him to make from the image of a galloping horse the first series of cinematographic pictures. However to get this result he had to be satisfied with wet collodion on a glass plate, that is to say, with just one of the three necessary elements- namely instantaneity, dry emulsion, flexible base. After the dis- covery of gelatino-bromide of silver but before the appearance on the market of the first' celluloid reels, Marey had made a geriuine camera which used glass plates. Even after the appearance of cellu- loid strips Lumiere tried to use paper film.

Once more let us consider here only the final and complete form of the photographic cinema. The synthesis of simple movements studied scientifically by Plateau had no need to wait upon the in- dustrial and economic developments of the nineteenth century. As Sadoul correctly points out, nothing had stood in the way, from antiquity, of the manufacture of a phenakistoscope or a zootrope. It is true that here the labors of that genuine savant Plateau were at the origin of the many inventions that made the popular use of his discovery possible. But while, with the photographic cinema, we

The Myth of Total Cinema

have cause for some astonishment that the discovery somehow pre- cedes the technical conditions necessary to its existence, we must here explain, on the other hand, how it was that the invention took so long to emerge, since all the prerequisites had been assembled and the persistence of the image on the retina had been known for a long time. It might be of some use to point out that although the two were not necessarily connected scientifically, the efforts of Pla- teau are pretty well contemporary with those of Nicephore Niepce, as if the attention of researchers had waited to concern itself with synthesizing movement until chemistry quite independently of op- tics had become concerned, on its part, with the automatic fixing of the image.*

I emphasize the fact that this historical coincidence can appar- ently in no way be explained on grounds of scientific, economic, or industrial evolution. The photographic cinema could just as well have grafted itself onto a phenakistoscope foreseen as long ago as the sixteenth century. The delay in the invention of the latter is as disturbing a phenomenon as the existence of the precursors of the former.

But if we examine their work more closely, the direction of their research is manifest in the instruments themselves, and, even more undeniably, in their writings and commentaries we see that these precursors were indeed more like prophets. Hurrying past the vari-

* The frescoes or bas-reliefs of Egypt indicate a desire to analyze rather than to synthesize movement. As for the automatons of the eighteenth century their relation to cinema is like the relation of painting to photography. What- ever the truth of the matter and even if the automatons from the time of Descartes and Pascal on foreshadowed the machines of the nineteenth cen- tury, it is no different from the way that trompe-l'oeil in painting attested to a chronic taste for likeness. But the technique of trompe-l'oeil did nothing to ad- vance optics and the chemistry of photography; it confined itself, if I can use the expression, to "playing the monkey" to them by anticipation.

Besides, just as the word indicates, the aesthetic of trompe-l'oeil in the eighteenth century resided more in illusion than in realism, that is to say, in a lie rather than the truth. A statue painted on a wall should look as if it were standing on a pedestal in space. To some extent, this is what the early cinema was aiming at, but this operation of cheating quickly gave way to an onto- genetic realism.

What Is Cinema?

ous stopping places, the very first of which materially speaking should have halted them, it was at the very height and summit that most of them were aiming. In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief.

As for the latter, the film historian P. Potonie6 has even felt justified in maintaining that it was not the discovery of photogra- phy but of stereoscopy, which came onto the market just slightly before the first attempts at animated photography in 1851, that opened the eyes of the researchers. Seeing. people immobile in space, the photographers realized that what they needed was movement if their photographs were to become a picture of life and a faithful copy of n~ture. In any case, there was not a single inventor who did not try to combine sound and relief with anima- tion of the image-whether it be Edison with his kinetoscope made to be attached to a phonograph, or Demenay and his talking por- traits, or even Nadar who shortly before producing the first photo- graphic interview, on Chevreul, had written, "My dream is to see the photograph register the bodily movements and the facial ex- pressions of a speaker, while the phonograph is recording his speech" (February, 1 ~87). If color had not yet appeared it was because the first experiments with the three-color process were slower in coming. But E. Reynaud had been painting his little figurines for some time and the first films of Melies are colored by stencilling. There are numberless writings, all of them more or less wildly enthusiastic, in which inventors conjure up nothing less than a total cinema that is to provide that complete illusion of life which is still a long way away. Many are familiar with that passage from L'Eve Future in which VilIiers de l'Isle-Adam, two years before Edison had begun his researches on animated photography, puts into the inventor's mouth the following description of a fantastic achievement: " ... the vision, its transparent flesh miraculously photographed in color and wearing a spangled costume, danced a

The Myth oj Total Cinema

kind of popular Mexican dance. Her movements had the flow of life itself, thanks to the process of successive photography which can retain six minutes of movement on microscopic glass, which is sub- sequently reflected by means of a powerful lampascope. Suddenly was heard a flat and unnatural voice, dull-sounding and harsh. The dancer was singing the alza and the ole that went with her fandan- go."

The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of Qie artist or the lrfevimibttity orO'me. If cii1eniam-UsCraaf;laciced all the attribtrtes~e-cille~me, it was with reluctance and because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however much they would have liked to.

lf the origins of an art reveal something of its nature, then one may legitimately consider the silent and the sound film as stages of a technical development that little by little made a reality out of the original "myth." It is understandable from this point of view that it would be absurd to take the silent film as a state of primal perfec- tion which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and color. The primacy of the image is both historically and technically accidental. The nostalgia that some still feel for the silent screen does not go far enough back into the childhood of the seventh art. The real primitives of the cinema, existing only in the imaginations of a few men of the nineteenth century, are in complete imitation of nature. Every new development added to the cinema must, para- doxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented!

It would be a reversal then of the concrete order of causality, at least psychologically, to place the scientific dis.coveries or the indus- trial techniques that have loomed so large in its development at the

What Is Cinema?

source of the cinema's invention. Those who had the least confi- dence in the future of the cinema were precisely the two industrial- ists Edison and Lumiere. Edison was satisfied with just his kineto- scope and if Lumiere judiciously refused to sell his patent to Melies it was undoubtedly because he hoped to make a large profit out of it for himself, but only as a plaything of which the public would soon tire. As for the real savants such as Marey, they were only of indirect assistance to the cinema. They had a specific purpose in ' mind and were satisfied when they ,had accomplished it. The fanatics, the madmen, the disinterested pioneers, capable, as was Berard Palissy, of burning their furniture for a few seconds of shaky images, are neither industrialists nor savants, just men obsessed by their own imaginings. The cinema was born from the converging of these various obsessions, that is to say, out of a myth, the myth of total cinema. This likewise adequately explains the delay of Plateau in applying the optical principle of the persistence of the image on the retina, as also the continuous progress of the syntheses of move- ment as compared with the state of photographic techniques. The fact is that each alike was dominated by the imagination of the century. Undoubtedly there are other examples in the history of techniques and inventions of, the convergence of research, but one must distinguish between t~ose which come as a result precisely of scientific evolution and industrial or military requirements and those which quite clearly precede them. Thus, the myth of Icarus

. had to wait on the internal combustion engine before descending from the platonic heavens. But it had dwelt in the soul of everyman since he first thought about birds. To some extent, one could say the same thing about the myth of cinema, but its forerunners prior to the nineteenth century have only a remote connection with the myth which we share today and which has prompted the appear- ance of the mechanical arts that characterize today's world.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA

BY 1928 the silent film had reached its artistic peak. The despair of its elite as they witnessed the dismantling of this ideal city, while it may not have been justified, is at least understandable. As they followed their chosen aesthetic path it seemed to them that the cinema had developed into an art most perfectly accommodated to the "exquisite embarrassment" of silence and that the realism that .sound would bring could only mean a surrender to chaos.

In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution. In other words, did the years from 1928 to 1930 actually witness the birth of a new cinema? Certainly, as regards editing, history does not actually show as wide a breach as might be expected between the silent and the sound film. On the contrary there is discernible evidence of a close relationship between certain directors of 1925 and 1935. and especially of the 1940's through the 1950's. Compare for example Erich von Stroheim and Jean Renoir or Orson Welles, or again Carl Theodore Dreyer and Robert Bresson. These more or less clear-cut affinities demonstrate first of all that the gap separating the 1920's

What Is Cinema?

and the 1930's can be bridged, and secondly that certain cinematic values actually carryover from the silent to the sound film and,

_ .. J.~w above all, that it is less a matter of setting silenclL over against

~'t ~U?~0an 9f '<-QE~~ting~~!t~il:j~m:ru~St~ertain basic!lllx -;;11 diffe!:.<:-l!Lc.Qncepts 9f, ci?~m':3.tographic expr~~~ion.

Aware as I am that the limitations imposed on this study restrict me to a simplified and to that extent enfeebled presentation of my argument, and holding it to be less an objective statement than a working hypothesis, I will distinguish, in the cinema between 1920 and 1940, between two broad and opposing trends: those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality. By "image" I here mean, very broadly speaking, everything > that the represent~ on the screen~:Qhli!l there repre- sented. This is a complex inheritance but it can be reduced essen- tially to two categories: those that relate to the plastics of the image and those that relate to the resources of montage, which, after all, is simply the ordering of images in time.

Under the heading "plastics" must be included the style of the sets, of the make-up, and, up to a point, even of the performance, to which we naturally add the lighting and, finally, the framing of the shot which gives us its composition. As regards montage, derived initially as we all know from the masterpieces of Griffith, we have the statement of Malraux in his Psychologie du cinema that it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.

The use of montage can be "invisible" and this was generally the case in the prewar classics of the American screen. Scenes were broken down just for one purpose, namely, t9 analyze an episode according to the material or dramati:l!~£l~£e.P~. It ~- tltis"" logic which conceaIS-iliefa:cfofthe""analysis, the mind of the spec- tator quite naturally accepting the viewpoints of the director which are justified by the geography of the action or the shifting emphasis of dramatic interest.

But the neutral quality of this "invisible" editing fails to make use of the full potential of montage. On the other hand these poten-

The Evolution of the Language of Cinem4

tialities are clearly evident from the three processes generally known as parallel montage, accelerated montage, montage by at- traction. In creating parallel montage, Griffith succeeded in convey- ing a sense of the simultaneity of two actions taking place at a geographical distance by means of alternating shots from each. In La Roue Abel Gance created the illusion of the steadily increasing speed of a locomotive without actually using any images of speed (indeed the wheel could have been turning on one spot) simply by a multiplicity of shots of ever-decreasing length.

Finally there is "montage by attraction," the creation of S. M. Eisenstein, and not so easily described as the others, but which may be roughly defined as the reenforcing of the meaning of one image by association with another image not necessarily part of the same episode-for example the fireworks display in The General Line following the image of the bull. In this extreme form, montage by attraction was rarely used even by its creator but one may consider as very near to it in principle the more commonly used ellipsis, comparison, or metaphor, examples of which are the throwing of stockings onto a chair at the foot of a bed, or the milk overflowing in H. G. Clouzot's Quai des orfevres. There are of course a variety of possible combinations of these three processes.

Whatever these may be, one can say that they share that trait in common which constitutes the very definition of montage, namely, the creation of a sense or meaning not proper to the images them- selves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition. The well- known experiment of Kuleshov with the shot of Mozhukhin in which a smile was seen to change its significance according to the image that preceded it, sums up perfectly the properties of montage.

Montage as used by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, or Gance did not give ~e eveiITJit alluded to it. Undouptedly they derived at least the

( ·great~r. part of the const~tu~nt elements from the reality they were descnbmg but the final slgmficance of the film was found to reside

\ in the ordering of these elements much more than in their objective I, content. \

The matter under recital, whatever the realism of the individual

What Is Cinema?

image, is born essentially from these relationships-Mozhukhin plus dead child equal pity-that is to sayan abstract result, none of the concrete elements of which are to be found in the premises; maidens plus appletrees in bloom equal hope. The combinations are iniinite. But the only thing they have in common is the fact that they suggest an idea by means· of a metaphor or by an association of ideas. Thus between the scenario properly so-called, the ultimate object of the recital, and the image pure and simple, there is a relay station, a sort of aesthetic "transformer." ~_meaning is JiCltJ!l. the ~\t;!--",-i!.~iE .. _.ilift.§h~gQYL.QUhe ... 4na£~1?f?jec!~4._by_mQP.tag~...Q~ !l,1e_fi,~ . .9tS<Q.n~giQ\}ime§§.,QfJ:h.~ .. ~p'~.£!~!9X.

Let us sum up. Through the contents of the image and the resources of montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby t2. il1!QQ§.~;mi~'fu'.t~;;pi~laff9.!i~:~Iai.i}i~gI)Qll the_ sp'~_ct?,tor. By the end of the silent film we can consider this arsenal to have been full. On the one side the Soviet cinema carried to its ultimate consequences the theory and practice of montage while the German school did every kind of violence to the plastics of the image by wayef sets and lighting. Other cinemas count too besides the Russian and German, but whether in France or Sweden or the United States, it does not appear that the language of cinema was at a loss for ways of saying what it wanted to say.

If the art of cinema consists in everything that plastics and montage can add to a given reality, the silent film was an art on its own. Sound could only play at best a subordinate and supplemen- tary role: a counterpoint to the visual image. But this possible enhancement-at best only a minor one-is likely not to weigh much in comparison with the additional bargain-rate reality intro- duced at the same time by sound.

Thus far we have put forward the view that expressionism of montage and image constitute the essence of cinema. And it is precisely on this generally accepted notion that directors from silent days, such as Erich von Stroheim, F. W. Murnau, and Robert Flaherty, have by implication cast a doubt. In their films, montage

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

plays no part,unless it be the negative one of inevitable elimination where reality superabounds. The camera cannot see everything at once but it makes sure not to lose any part of what it chooses to see. What matters to Flaherty, confronted with Nanook hunting the seal, is the relation between Nanook and the animal; the actual length of the waiting period. Montage could suggest the time in- volved. Flaherty however coniines himself to showing the actual waiting period; the length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true object. Thus in the film this episode requires one set- up. Will anyone deny that it is thereby much more moving than a montage by attraction? / /

Murnau is interested not so much in time as in the reality of dramatic. space. Montage plays no more of a decisive part in Nosferatu than in Sunrise. One might be inclined to think that the plastics of his image are impressionistic. But this would be a super- ficial view. The composition of his image is in no sense pictorial. It adds nothing to the reality, it does not deform it, it forces it to reveal its structural depth, to bring out the preexisting relations which become constitutive of the drama. For example, in Tabu, the arrival of a ship from left screen gives an immediate sense of des- tiny at work so that Murnau has no need to cheat in any way on the uncompromising realism of a film whose settings are completely natural.

But it is most of all Stroheim who rejects photographic ex- pressionism and the tricks of montage. In his films reality lays itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police. He has one simple rule for direction. Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness. One could easily imagine as a matter of fact a film by Stroheim composed of a single shot as long-lasting and as close-up as you like. These three direc- tors do not exhaust the possibilities. We would undoubtedly find scattered among the \works of others elements of nonexpressionistic cinema in which montage plays no part-even including Griffith.

(

What Is Cinema?

But these examples suffice to reveal, at the very heart of the silent film, a cinematographic art the very opposite of that which has been identified as "cinema par excellence," a language the semantic and syntactical unit of which is in no sense the Shot; in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it. In the latter art the silence of the screen was a drawback, that is to say, it deprived reality of one of its elements. Greed, like Dreyer's leanne d'Arc, is already virtually a talking film. The moment that you cease to maintain that montage and the plastic composition of the image are the very essence of the lan- guage of cinema, sound is no longer the aesthetic crevasse dividing two radically different aspects of the seventh art. The cinema that is believed to have died of the soundtrack is in no sense "the cinema." The real dividing line is elsewhere. It was operative in the past and continues to be through thirty-five years of the history of the lan- guage of the film.

Having challenged the aesthetic unity of the silent film and divided it off into two opposing tendencies, now let us take a look at the history of the last twenty years.

From 1930 to 1940 there seems to have grown up in the world, originating largely in the United States, a common form of cine- matic language. It was the triumph in Hollywood, during that time, of five or six major kinds of film that gave it its overwhelming superiority: (1) American comedy (Mr. Smith Goes to Washing- ton, 1936); (2) The burlesque film (The Marx Brothers); (3) The dance and vaudeville film (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the Ziegfield Follies); (4) The crime and gangster film (Scarface, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Informer); (5) Psychological and social dramas (Back Street, lezebel); (6) Horror or fantasy films (Dr. lekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, Frankenstein); (7) The western (Stagecoach, 1939). During that time the French cinema undoubtedly ranked next. Its superiority was gradually manifested by way of a trend towards what might be roughly

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

called stark somber realism, or poetic realism, in which four names stand out: Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, and Julien Duvivier. My intention not being to draw up a list of prize-winners, there is little use in dwelling on the Soviet, British, German, or Italian films for which these years were less significant than the ten that were to follow. In any case, American and French production sufficiently clearly indicate that the sound film, prior to World War II, had reached a well-balanced stage of maturity.

First as to content. Major varieties with clearly defined rules capable of pleasing a worldwide public, as well as a cultured elite, provided it was not inherently hostile to the cinema.

Secondly as to form: well-defined styles of photography and editing perfectly adapted to their subject matter; a complete har- mony of image and sound. In seeing again today such films as lezebel by William Wyler, Stagecoach by John Ford, or Le lour se leve by Marcel Carne, one has the feeling that in them an art has found its perfect balance, its ideal form of expression, and recipro- cally one admires them for dramatic and moral themes to which the cinema, while'it may not have created them, has given a grandeur, an artistic effectiveness, that they would not otherwise have had, In short, here are all the characteristics of the ripeness of a classical art.

I am quite aware that one can justifiably argue that the original- ity of the postwar cinema as compared with that of 1938 derives from the growth of certain national schools, in particular the daz- zling display of the Italian cinema and of a native English cinema freed from the influence of Hollywood. From this one might con- clude that the really important phenomenon of the years 1940- 1950 is the introduction of new blood, of hitherto unexplored themes. That is to say, the real revolution took place more on the level of subject matter than of style. Is not neorealism primarily a kind of humanism anfi only secondarily a style of film-making? Then as to the style itself, is it not essentially a form of self- effacement before reality?

What Is Cinema?

Our intention is certainly not to preach the glory of form over content. Art for art's sake is just as heretical in cinema as elsewhere, probably more so. On the other hand, a new subject matter de- mands new form, and as good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it.

Thus by 1938 or 1939 the talking film, particularly in France and in the United States, had reached a level of classical perfection as a result, on the one hand, of the maturing of different kinds of drama developed in part over the past ten years and in part inherited from the silent film, and, on the other, of the stabilization of technical progress. The 1930's were the years, at once, of sound and of pan- chromatic film. Undoubtedly studio equipment had continued to improve but only in matters of detail, none of them opening up new, radical possibilities for direction. The only changes in this situation since 1940, have been in photography, thanks to the in- creased sensitivity of the film stock. Panchromatic stock turned visual values upside down, ultrasensitive emulsions have made a modification in their structure possible. Free to shoot in the studio with a much smaller aperture, the operator could, when necessary, eliminate the soft-focus background once considered essential. StilI there are a number of examples of the prior use of deep focus, for example in the work of Jean Renoir. This had always been possible on exteriors, and given a measure of skill, even in the studios. Anyone could do it who really wanted to. So that it is less a ques~ tion basically of a technical problem, the solution of which has admittedly been made easier, than of a search after a style-a point to which we will corne back. In short, with panchromatic stock in cornman use, with an understanding of the potentials of the micro- phone, and with the crane as standard studio equipment, one can really say that since 1930 alI the technical requirements for the art of cinema have been available.

Since the determining technical factors were practically elimi- nated, we must look elsewhere for the signs and principles of the evolution of film language, that is to say by challenging the subject matter and as a consequence the styles necessary for its expression.

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

By 1939 the cinema had arrived at what geographers call the equilibrium-profile of a river. By this is meant that ideal ma~he matical curve which results from the requisite amount of eroSIOn. Having reached this equilibrium-profile, the river flows effortlessly from its source to its mouth without further deepening of its bed. But if any geological movement occurs which raises the erosion level and modifies the height of the source, the water sets to work again, seeps into the surrounding land, goes deeper, burrowi~g and digging. Sometimes when it is a chalk bed, a new pattern 1S ~ug across the plain, almost invisible but found to be complex and wllld- ing, if one follows the flow of the water.

The Evolution of Editing since the Advent of Sound

In 1938 there was an almost universal standard pattern of editing. If, somewhat conventionally, we call the kind of silent films based on the plastics of the image and the artifices of montage, "ex- pressionist" or ,"symbolistic," we can describe the new form of story- telling "analytic" and "dramatic." Let us suppose, by way of review- ing one of the elements of the experiment of Kuleshov, that we have a table covered with food and a hungry tramp. One can imagine that in 1936 it would have been edited as follows:

( 1) Full shot of the actor and the table. (2) Camera moves forward into a close-up of a face expressing

a mixture of amazement and longing. (3) Series of dose-ups of food. (4) Back to full shot of person who starts slowly towards the

camera. (5) Camera pulls slowly back to a three-quarter shot of the

actor seizing a chicken wing. Whatever variants one could think of for this scene, they would all have certain points in common:

(1) The verisimilitude of space in which the position of the

What Is Cinema?

actor is always determined, even when a close-up eliminates the decor.

(2) The purpose and the effects of the cutting are exclusively dramatic or psychological.

In other words, if the scene' were played on a stage and seen from a seat i:1 the orchestra, it would have the same meaning, the episode would continue to exist objectively. The changes of point of view provided by the camera would add nothing. They would present the reality a little more forcefully, first by allowing a better view and then by putting the emphasis where it belongs.

It is true that the stage director like the film director has at his disposal a margin within which he is free to vary the interpretation of the action but it is only a margin and allows for no modification of the inner logic of the event. Now, by way of contrast, let us take the montage of thy stone lions in The End of St. Petersburg. By skillful juxtaposition a group of sculptured lions are made to look like a single lion getting to its feet, a symbol of the aroused masses. This clever device would be unthinkable in any film after 1932. As l?-te as 1935 Fritz Lang, in Fury, followed a series of shots of women dancing the can-can with shots of clucking chickens in a farmyard. This relic of associative montage came as a shock even at the time, and today seems entirely out of keeping with the rest of the film. However decisive the art of Marcel Carne, for example, in our estimate of the respective values of Quai des Brumes or of Le Jour se ieve his editing remains on the level of the reality he is analyzing. There is only one proper way of looking at it. That is why we are witnessing the almost complete disappearance of opti- cal effects such as superimpositions, and even, especially in the United States, of the close-up, the too violent impact of which would make the audience conscious of the cutting. In the typical American comedy the director returns as often as he can to a shot of the characters from the knees up, which is said to be best suited to catch the spontaneous attention of the viewer-the natural point of balance of his mental adjustment.

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

Actually this use of montage originated with the silent movies. This is more or less the part it plays in Griffith's films, for example in Broken Blossoms, because with Intolerance he had already intro- duced that synthetic concept of montage which the Soviet cinema was to carry to its ultimate conclusion and which is to be found again, although less exclusively, at the end of the silent era. It is understandable, as a matter of fact, that the sound image, far less flexible than the visual image, would carry montage in the direction of realism, increasingly eliminating both plastic impressionism and the symboliC? relation between images.

Thus around 1938 films were edited, almost without exception, according to the same principle. The story was unfolded in a series of set-ups numbering as a rule about 600. The characteristic proce- dure was by shot-reverse-shot, that is to say, in a dialogue scene, the camera followed the order of the text, alternating the character shown with each speech.

It was this fashion of editing, so admirably suitable for the best films made between 1930 and 1939, that was challenged by the shot in depth introduced by Orson Welles and William Wyler. Citizen Kane can never be too highly praised. Thanks to the depth of field, whole scenes are covered in one take, the camera remaining mo- tionless. Dramatic effects for which we had formerly relied on montage were created out of the movements of the actors within a fixed framework. Of course Welles did not invent the in-depth shot any more than Griffith invented the close-up. All the pioneers used- it and for a very good reason. Soft focus only appeared with montage. It was not only a technical must consequent upon the use of images in juxtaposition, it was a logical consequence of montage, its plastic equivalent. If at a given moment in the action the direc- tor, as in the scene imagined above, goes to a close-up of a bOWl of fruit, it follows naturally that he also isolates it in space through the focusing of the lens. The soft focus of the background confirms therefore the effect of montage, tllat is to say, while it is of the essence of the storytelling, it is only an accessory of the style of the

What Is Cinema?

photography. Jean Renoir had already clearly understood this, as we see from a statement of his made in 1938 just after he had made La Bete humaine and La Grande illusion and just prior to La RegIe du jeu; "The more I learn about my trade the more I incline to direction in depth relative to the screen. The better it works, the less I use the kind of set-up that shows two actors facing the cam- era, like two well-behaved subjects posing for a still portrait." The truth of the matter is, that if you are looking for the precursor of Orson Welles, it is not Louis Lumiere or Zecca, but rather Jean Renoir. In his films, the search after composition in depth is, in effect, a partial replacement of montage by frequent panning shots and entrances. It is based on a respect for the continuity of dra- matic space and, of course, of its duration.

To anybody with eyes in his head, it is quite evident that the sequence of sh(}ts used by Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons is in no sense the purely passive recording of an action shot within the same framing. On the contrary, his refusal to break up the action, to analyze the dramatic field in time, is a positive action the results of which are far superior to anything that could be achieved by the classical "cut."

All you need to do is ccimpare two frames shot in depth, one from 1910, the other from a film by Wyler or Welles, to understand just by looking at the image, even apart from the context of the film, how different their functions are. The framing in the 1910 film is intended, to all intents and purposes, as a substitute for the missing fourth wall of the theatrical stage, or at least in exterior shots, for the best vantage point to view the action,. whereas in the second case the setting, the lighting, and the camera angles give an entirely different reading. Between them, director and cameraman have converted the screen into a dramatic checkerboard, planned down to the last detail. The clearest if not the most original exam- ples of this are to be found in The Little Foxes where the mise-en~ scene takes on the severity of a working drawing. Welles' pictures are more difficult to analyze because of his over-fondness for the baroque. Objects and characters are related in such a fashion that it

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

's impossible for the spectator to miss the significance of the scene. ~o get the same results by way of montage would have necessitated a detailed succession of shots.

What we are saying then is that the sequence of shots "in depth" of the contemporary director does not exclude the use of montage -how could he, without reverting to a primitive babbling?-he makes it an integral part of his "plastic." The storytelling of Welles or Wyler is no less explicit than John Ford's but theirs has the advantage over his that it does not sacrifice the specific effects that can be derived from unity of image in space and time. Whether an episode is analyzed bit by bit or presented in its physic~l entirety cannot surely remain a matter of indifference, at least III a work with some pretensions to style. It would obviously be absurd to deny that montage has added considerably to the progress of film language, but this has happened at the cost of other values, no less definitely cinematic.

This is why depth of field is not just a stock in trade of the) cameraman like the use of a series of filters or of such-and-such a style of lighting, it is. a capi~al gain in the field of direction-a dialectical step forward m the hlstory of film language.

Nor is it just a formal step forward. Well used, shooting. in depth is not just a more economical, a simpler, and at the sarr:~ time a more subtle way of getting the most out of a scene. In addltiO~ to affectin cr the [structure of film language, it also affects the relatlOn- ships 0; the minds of the spectators to the image, and in conse- quence it influences the interpretation of the spectacle.

It would lie outside the scope of this article to analyze the psychological modalities of these relations, as also thei: aesthetic consequences, but it might be enough here to note, m general terms: .

(1) That depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation ":'l~ the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality. Ther~fore It .IS correct to say that, independently of the contents of the Image, Its structure is more realistic;

(2) That it implies, consequently, both a more active mental

What Is Cinema?

attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribu- tion on his part to the' action in progress. While analytical montage only calls for hitn to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should see, here he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the mean- ing of the image in part derives.

(3) From the two preceding propositions, which belong to the realm of psychology, there follows a third which may be described as metaphysical. In analyzing reality, montage presupposes of its very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event. Some other form of analysis is undoubtedly possible but then it would be an- other film .. I~_~~~~ by its very nature rules ou~mbigui'!y of expr~~. Kuleshov's experiment proves this per absurdum in giving on each .. occasion a precise meaning to the expression on a face, the ambiguity of which alone makes the three successively exclusive expressions possible.

On the other hand, depth of focus reintroduced ambiguity into . ,,~"',.. the structure of the image if not of necessity-Wyler's films are

~~'?;)/ never ambiguous-at least as a possibility. Hence it is no exaggera- / tion to say that Citizen Kani is unthinkable shot in any other way

but in depth. The uncertainty in which we find ourselves as to the spiritual key or the interpretation we should put on the film is built into the very design of the image.

It is not that Welles denies hinlself any recourse whatsoever to the expressionistic procedures of montage, but just that their use from time to time in between sequences of shots in depth gives them a new meaning. Formerly montage was the very stuff of cinema, the texture of the scenario. In Citizen Kane a series of superimpositions is contrasted with a scene presented in a single take, constituting another and deliberately abstract mode of story- telling. Accelerated montage played tricks with time and space while that of Welles, on the other hand, is not trying to deceive us; it offers us a contrast, condensing time, and hence is the equivalent

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

for example of the French imperfect or the English frequentative tense. Like accelerated montage and montage of attractions these superimpositions, which the talking film had not used for ten years, rediscovered a possible use related to temporal realism in a film

without montage. If we have dwelt at some length on Orson Welles it is because

the date of his appearance in the filmic firmament (1941) marks more or less the beginning of a new period and also because his case is the most spectacular and, by virtue of his very excesses, the

most significant. Yet Citizen Kane is part of a general movement, of a vast

stirring of the geological bed of cinema, confirming that everywhere up to a point there had been a revolution in the language of the

screen. I could sbow the same to be true, although by different meth-

ods, of the Italian cinema. In Roberto Rossellini's Paisa and Allemania Anno Zero and Vittorio de Sica's Ladri de Bidclette, Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism in its stripping away of all expressionism and in particular in the total absence of t..ne~of montage. As in the films of Welles and in SpIte of con:fl.icts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality. The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close- up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve· its mystery. We should not be misled by the fact that the evolution of neo- realism is not manifest, as in the United States, in any form of revolution in editing. They are both aiming at the same results by different methods. The means used by Rossellini and de Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality. The dream of Zavattini is just to make a ninety-minute film of the life of a man to whom nothing ever happens. The most "aesthetic" of the neorealists, Luchino Visconti, gives just as clear a picture as Welles

What Is Cinema?

of the basic aim of his directorial art in La Terra Trema, a film ~lmo~t entirely composed of one~shot sequences, thus clearly show- illg ~IS concern to cover the entire action in interminable deep-focus panrung shots.

However we cannot pass in review all the films that have shared in this revolution in film language since 1940. Now is the moment to attempt a synthesis of our reflections on the subject.

. . It seems to us that the decade from 1940 to 1950 marks a de- CISIve step forward in the development of the language of the film. I! we have appeared since 1930 to have lost sight of the trend of the silent film as illustrated particularly by Stroheim, F. W. Murnau, Robert Flaherty, and Dreyer, it is for a purpose. It is not that this trend seems to us to have been halted by the talking film. On the contrary, we believe that it represented the richest vein of the so- called silent film and? precisely because it was not aesthetically tied to ~ontage, but was indeed the only tendency that looked to the realism of sound as a natural development. On the other hand it is a fact .that the talking film ~etween 1930 and 1940 owes it virtually ~othmg save for the glOrIOUS and retrospectively prophetic excep- tion of Jean Renoir. He alone in his searchings as a director prior to La ~egle du jeu forced himself to look back beyond the resources proVIded by montage and so uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the :V0r1~ up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden mean- mgs ill people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them.

It is not a question of thereby belittling the films of 1930 to 1940, a criticism that would not stand up in the face of the number o~ ma~terpieces, it is simply an attempt to establish the notion of a dIalectIc progress, the highest expression of which was found in the films of the 1940's. Undoubtedly, the talkie sounded the knell of a certain .aesthetic of the language of film, but only wherever it had turned Its back on its vocation in the service of realism. The sound

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

film nevertheless did preserve the essentials of montage, namely discontinuous description and the dramatic analysis of action. What it turned its back on ~as metaphor and symbol in exchange for the illusion of objective presentation. The expressionism of montage has virtually disappeared but the relative realism of the kind of cutting that flourished around 1937 implied a congenital limitation which escaped us so long as it was perfectly suited to its subject matter . Thus American comedy reached its peak within the framework of a form of editing in· which the realism of the time played no part. Dependent on .logic for its effects, like vaudeville and plays on words, entirely conventional in its moral and sociological content, American comedy had everything to gain, in strict line-by-line progression, from the rhythmic resources of classical editing.

Undoubtedly it is primarily with the Stroheim-Murnau trend- almost totally eclipsed from 1930 to 1940-that the cinema has more or less consciously linked up once more over the last ten years. But it has no intention of limiting itself simply to keeping this trend alive. It draws from it the secret of the regeneration of realism in storytelling and thus of becoming capable once more of bringing together real time, in which things exist, along with the duration of the action, for which classical editing had insidiously substituted mental and abstract time. On the other hand, so far from wiping out once and for all the conquests of montage, this reborn realism gives them a body of reference and a meaning. It is only an in- creased rea]..s.m of the ima$0h~.~.~tl:tLabs!.9lct~1LQt wmrtage. The stylistic repertory o~ a direct~r such as tllicnc?~~ for example, ranged from the power Inherent in the basic~ent as such, to superimpositions, to large close-ups. But the close-ups of Hitchcock are not the same as those of C. B. de Mille in The Cheat [1915J. They are just one type of figure, among others, of his style. In other words, in the silent days, montage evoked what the direc- tor wanted to say; in the editing of 1938, it described it. Today we can s,~y",_!.~j!L_~LJ\'!,§.L~---ilirec~.E.~_~.jil-E!:. The i;n'age--·lt;·~·

What Is Cinema?

plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism-has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from with- in. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist.