FILM AS ART

Film resembles painting, music, literature and dance in this respect- it is medium that may be used to produce artistic effects, colored picture postcards fro instance, are not art and are not intended to be. There are still many people who deny the possibility that film might be art. They say, "Film can not be art, for it does nothing but produce reality mechanically." Those who defend this point of via are reasoning from the analogy of painting. In painting, the way from reality to picture lies via the artist's eye and nervous system, his hand finally, the brush that puts strokes on canvas. The process is not mechanical as that of photography, in which the light rays reflected from the object are collected by a system of lenses and are then directed into a sensitive film where they produce chemical changes.

Thus, people who refer to the camera as an automatic recording machine must be made to realize that even in the simplest photographic reproduction of a perfectly simple object, a feeling for its nature is required which is quite beyond any mechanical operation. By the way, that in artistic photography and film, those aspects that best show the characteristics of a particular object are not by any means always chosen, others are often selected deliberately for the sake of achieving specific effects.

By its nature, the motion picture tends to satisfy the desire for faithful reports about curious, characteristics and exciting things going on this world of ours. The first sensation provided by the film in its early days was to depict everyday things in a lifelike fashion on the screen. People were greatly thrilled by the sight of a locomotive approaching at top speed or emperor in person riding a horse. In those days, the pleasure given by film derived almost entirely from subject matter. A film art developed gradually when the moviemakers began consciously or unconsciously to cultivate the peculiar possibilities of cinematographic techniques and to apply them towards the creation of artistic production. To what extent the use of these means of expression affects the large audiences remains a subject to debate.  Certainly box-office success depends even now much more on what is shown than whether it is shown artistically. The film producer himself is influenced by the strong resemblance of his photographic material to reality.

When film art was in its infancy, nobody paid much attention to the subtleties of these problems. The camera was stationed well in front of the people to be photographed in order that their faces and movements might easily seen. Later on, scenes were broken into several fragments (shots), changed camera angles, light and shadows in lighting, sound was added and art of imagination prevailed.

This curious development signifies to some extent the climax of that striving after likeness to nature which has spread throughout the whole history of the visual arts. At the same time, a reproduction that is true to nature object. Nevertheless, there has always been the artistic age not simply to copy but to originate, to interpret, to mold.

(This article was published in The Kathmandu Post in November 13, 2009)