Film Culture on Film Art: Interviews and Statements, 1955-1971

Film Culture on Film Art: Interviews and Statements, 1955-1971

© 2023 R. J. Cardullo

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Hans Richter, 1955

Josef von Sternberg, 1955

John Huston, 1956

Robert Aldrich, 1956

Federico Fellini, 1957

Jules Dassin, 1958

Richard Leacock, 1961

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962

Luis Buñuel, 1962

Ernst Lubitsch, 1962

Dziga Vertov, 1962

Robert Breer, 1962-63

Stan Brakhage, 1963

George Cukor, 1964

Lewis Milestone, 1964

Jean-Pierre Melville, 1965

Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1966

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966

Roberto Rossellini, 1971

Boris Kaufman, 1955

Charles Spaak, 1957

Arthur Miller, 1963

Filmographies

Index

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the estates of Jonas Mekas and Adolfas Mekas for permission to reprint material from Film Culture. Thanks also to Victoria Schultz, the only surviving person among this book’s interviewers and interviewees, for permission to reprint her interview with Roberto Rossellini.

Introduction

The illustrious French film critic André Bazin once wrote that the

apparent contradiction or disagreement between the critic and the author should not trouble us. It is in the natural order of things, both subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, because artistic creation—even with the most intellectual temperament—is essentially intuitive and practical work: it is a matter of effects to attain and materials to conquer. Objectively, because a work of art escapes its creator and bypasses his conscious intentions, in direct proportion to its quality. The foundation of this objectivity also resides in the psychology of the creation to the extent—inestimable—that the artist does not really create but sets himself to crystallize, as it were, to order the sociological forces and the technical conditions with which he is confronted. This is particularly true of American films, in which you often find quasi-anonymous successes whose merit reflects, not on the director, but on the production system in which he toils. But objective criticism, methodically ignoring intentions, is also applicable to the most personal work imaginable, like a poem or a painting, for example.

This does not mean that knowing auteurs personally, or what they say about themselves and their work, may not clarify the critic’s conception, and such is proven by taped interviews we have published in Cahiers du Cinéma through the fifties. These confidences, on the contrary, are infinitely precious, but they are not on the same plane as the criticism I am discussing; or, if you will, they constitute a pre-critical, unrefined sort of documentation, and the critic still retains the liberty of interpretation. (Bazin, 158)

Bazin’s actual acceptance, in the above passage, of the director as author or auteur has long been typical of the French critical orientation toward the director as the sole creative artist of consequence in the cinema. Although the personal, poetic artistry of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini in their films of the early 1950s helped encourage a resurgence of serious interest in the cinema, it was not until the Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave, emerged that the role of the director became fully romanticized for young people around the world. Bergman and Fellini were, after all, mature artists and remote figures to most of their admirers. François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were young men in their twenties without practical experience. They were critics and enthusiasts who obviously loved movies with none of the dead chill of professionals. They also admired many of their predecessors, artists as disparate as Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock. Above all, Truffaut and Godard had resurrected many directors from the limbo of low regard and had popularized the politique des auteurs, a mystique for reviewing directorial careers rather than individual films.

And, overnight, the director became king. Truffaut expressed the lyricism of being a director simply by freezing Jeanne Moreau on the screen in Jules and Jim (1962), thus immortalizing her in a medium where montage implies mortality. Rouben Mamoulian did almost the same thing with Greta Garbo in Queen Christina in 1933, but he could never go the whole way to freeze her, not because he didn’t know how, but because the world of the 1930s was not interested in how Mamoulian felt about Garbo. Mamoulian had been hired simply to present Garbo to her public. By contrast, Truffaut felt empowered to tell the whole world how he felt about Moreau. The meaning of all the subsequent freezes, jump cuts, and zany camera speeds of the 1960s was simply that directors had found the courage at long last to call attention to their techniques and personalities.

Film directors’ tarnished professional image thereby regained its gloss after a long period of neglect and downright disrepute. In fact, the renewed awareness of the film director as a conscious artist was one of the more interesting cultural phenomena of the decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. This renewal can be described as a rise only in the most relative terms, however. The director had risen no more than the sun rises. As the latter is a figure of speech describing the diurnal rotation of the earth from the point of view of the fallible human eye, the pre-eminence of the director was a matter of public and critical fancy. Like the sun, the director was always out there on the set, and his turn to be worshipped had come full circle from the earliest days of his solitary pre-eminence behind primitive tripod cameras pointed at a world still visually virginal.

This intimation of lost innocence is invoked in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) when Erich von Stroheim commands the newsreel cameras to turn on Gloria Swanson as she descends the staircase to utter madness. There is more than the numbing nostalgia for a burned-out star in this sequence; there is also the evocation of an era when moviemaking was more individual, less industrial. It is immaterial whether there ever was such an era of directional enlightenment. Many film historians have testified to the existence of a Golden Age merely in order to create a frame of reference. The gold may have turned to brass before 1925 or 1920 or 1915, but somewhere along the line, the legend persists, the film director lost all his freedom and integrity to some monstrous entity known as the motion-picture industry—code name: Hollywood.

Confirmation of this legend of directorial decline and decadence was provided by veteran Hollywood director George Stevens: When the movie industry was young, the filmmaker was its core and the man who handled the business details his partner. When the director finally looked around, he found his partner’s name on the door. Thus the filmmaker became the employee, and the man who had the time to attend to the business details became head of the studio (Phillips, 1999: 99). Studio head Samuel Goldwyn put the matter somewhat more brutally when a reporter had the temerity to begin a sentence with the statement: "When William Wyler made Wuthering Heights [1939] … The reporter never passed beyond the premise. I made Wuthering Heights, Goldwyn snapped. Wyler only directed it" (Phillips, 1998: 65).

Only directed is more precisely defined in the appendix of The Film Till Now (1949), by Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith: Director—(a) In feature films the director is usually the technician who directs the shooting of the film, that is, he tells the players what to do and the cameraman what to shoot, and usually supervises the editing. Most feature films are directed from scripts written by the script department or by an independent scriptwriter. The editing is carried out by a department under a supervising editor working in consultation with the director and producer. (b) In documentary films the director usually writes his own script after first-hand investigation of the subject, although sometimes he may employ a dialogue writer. He not only directs the action of the film, but controls it through all stages of editing, music, dubbing, etc. (Samuels, 64).

The most interesting aspect of this duplex definition, devised during the 1940s, is its ingrained bias in favor of the documentary director. Directors of feature or story films were presumably less artists than artisans not only because they were more closely supervised, but also because feature films were considered more frivolous than documentary films. Thus, most movie directors were doubly denigrated in the scholarly texts of the period. On the one hand, these men were charged with having too little control over their movies, and on the other, their movies were not considered worth doing in the first place.

Film criticism tended to diverge into two conflicting camps, with the poor film director caught in the middle. First and foremost, we had the literary establishment, which relegated visual style to subordinate paragraphs in reviews. Then we had the visualists, who disdained plots and dialogue as literary impurities. Since most directors worthy of note work in the impure realm of the dramatic sound film, it is still difficult to isolate their personal contributions to the cinema. The literary critics prefer to synopsize the plot, discuss the theme (if any), evaluate the performances, comment on the photography as well as the editing (maybe the costumes and music, too), and credit the director only for pacing, usually in the three speeds—fast, deliberate, and most often, too slow. Conversely, the visual critics concentrate on landscapes and abstractions as pure cinema, and castigate dramatic scenes as talky, stagey, or literary.

That is why the coming of sound was such a traumatic experience for serious film aestheticians of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and why much of what we once called film history was actually the thinly disguised nostalgia of elderly film historians for the mute movies of their youth. Through the haze of selective recollection, the silent film had apparently flown to an extraordinary elevation in the twenties, only to crash through the sound barrier with a screech and a squeak. It became fashionable for scholarly texts to mourn the tragedy of talkies until well into the 1940s, and after to talk about the cinema in terms of artistic decline until well into the 1950s.

Not that these academic texts, or their professorial authors, had any appreciable influence on the motion-picture industry. Like so many other products of capitalism, movies were designed for immediate consumption and rapid expendability. Once a movie became old, it was returned to the vaults, never to be shown publicly again. Thus, even if there had been any interest in directorial careers, the necessary research materials were not available. To make matters worse, film history was split in two by the aforementioned advent of sound in the late 1920s. People who grew up in the thirties were completely unaware of the cinema of the twenties except for infrequent, custard-pie two-reelers or an occasional revival of the foreign repertory—from The Cabinet of Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene) to Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein). By about 1934, censorship had placed many movies of the early thirties out of bounds, a condition that existed until the 1940s and 1950s when television (followed, in subsequent decades, by videotape, DVDs, and the Internet) made it lucrative for studios to open their vaults.

The proliferation of old films had, and continues to have, its effect on contemporary criticism. A greater awareness of the past, a sense of stylistic continuity in the works of individual directors, a cyclical pattern of period mannerisms—these are some of the dividends of the improved distribution of movies, starting in the 1960s. The most hard-headed businessman in the movie industry must now be at least marginally concerned with the burgeoning scholarship in the medium. By the same token, the most serious-minded scholar can no longer avoid taking movies more seriously than heretofore, particularly once it became possible—again in the sixties—to trace links between the Marx Brothers and Ionesco, between Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett.

Unfortunately, most directors are still subordinated to both the producers and the stars that allegedly enslave them. Indeed, most directors have always been considered less as creators than as decorators of other people’s scenarios. That the majority of directors do not write their own scripts is itself enough to discredit these directors in the eyes of the literary establishment. Such discredit is often unjustified even on literary grounds—because many directors decline to take credit for collaboration on the writing of their films. Furthermore, screenwriting involves more than mere dialogue and plot. The choice between a close-up and a long shot, for example, may quite often transcend the plot.

To wit: if the story of Little Red Riding Hood is told with the Wolf in close-up and Little Red Riding Hood in long shot, the director is concerned primarily with the emotional problems of a wolf with a compulsion to eat little girls. If Little Red Riding Hood is in close-up and the Wolf in long shot, the emphasis is shifted to the emotional problems of vestigial virginity in a wicked world. Thus, two different stories are being told with the same basic anecdotal material. What is at stake in the two versions of Little Red Riding Hood are two contrasting directorial attitudes toward life. One director identifies more with the Wolf—the male, the compulsive, the corrupted, even evil itself. The second director identifies with the little girl—the innocence, the illusion, the ideal and hope of the race. Needless to say, few critics bother to make any distinction in the visual strategy, proving perhaps that direction as creation is still only dimly understood.

On the whole, then, directors were penalized more by critical indifference than by critical captiousness. Few people cared to read about directors; a volume of interviews with them would have been inconceivable, say, in the early 1950s. If the role of the director has now long been taken more seriously, it is because the cinema itself is taken more seriously. Nonetheless, the director never really had any serious rival in the creative process. No one, least of all the serious scholar, was ever taken in by the pufferies of the producers. Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Irving Thalberg did exercise great control over their productions, but few of their contributions were regarded as genuinely creative. Mostly, they maintained a certain level of technical quality in their output, but production control without creative responsibility falls generally under the heading of artistic interference.

Which is why progressive attitudes in America relied on the foreign art film for intellectual authority. The Germans and the Russians were particularly fashionable in the 1920s, before Hitler and Stalin stultified experimentation. Movies like The Last Laugh (1924, F. W. Murnau) and Variety (1925, E. A. Dupont) dramatized the expressive potentialities of the moving camera along with downbeat subjects considered too grim for Hollywood, but it was Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin that galvanized a whole generation of intellectuals and aesthetes into wild enthusiasm over the creative possibilities of montage, a term that reverberated through the twenties and thirties the way mise-en-scène reverberated through the fifties and sixties. Normally, montage is merely a fancy word for editing or cutting, but Eisenstein gave montage a mystique by linking it to the philosophical processes of dialectical materialism. As Eisenstein conceived of filmmaking, images equaled ideas, and the collision of two dynamically opposed images created a new idea.

Eisenstein’s montage theory was ideal for describing the collisions of the Russian Revolution, but there did not seem to be many other plots for which incessant montage was appropriate. The great majority of movies developed a dramatic style of expression to enhance audience identification with star personalities. Since in world cinema the mystique of montage was thereafter honored more in the breach than in the observance, film histories turned sour with acid critiques of alleged betrayals of the medium. As the gap widened between what was popular and what was intellectually fashionable, Eisensteinian aesthetics became supplemented by Marxist politics. Movies were not merely vulgar; they were instruments of capitalism in the never-ending class struggle. Film directors were thus presented with two choices: fight the establishment, or sell out.

It remained for the Frenchman Bazin to eliminate much of the confusion arising from Eisenstein’s half-digested montage theories. Bazin pinpointed psychological and physical situations in which montage disrupted the unity of man with his environment. In fact, it was French criticism in the late 1940s and early fifties that introduced the mystique of mise-en-scène to counterbalance that of montage. The more extreme of Eisenstein disciples had reached a stage of absurdity in which what was actually on the screen was secondary to the rhythm of the film. The montage maniacs had thus enthroned punctuation at the expense of language; at times, it seemed that the camera was merely an excuse to get into the cutting room. Mise-en-scène, with its connotation of design and décor, reintroduced pictorial values to a medium that had become obsessed with the musical rhythms of images flashing by, slashed into obedient conflict on the Moviola.

Because French critics were less awed by montage, they tended to be more appreciative of Hollywood than their cultivated counterparts in America and England. Most Hollywood directors of the 1930s were disqualified from serious artistic consideration because they did not supervise the final editing, or montage, of their films, for editing was then understandably considered, by the aestheticians, to be the supreme function of cinematic creation. With the collapse of the montage mystique, however, many directors of the thirties were rediscovered as undeniably personal artists. Not only do the best movie directors continue to cut in the mind rather than in the cutting room, but montage is only one aspect of a directorial personality.

Nevertheless, the Hollywood director was still taken less seriously than his foreign counterpart, and, in interviews, he generally regarded himself with the same lack of seriousness. Part of his problem was the Hollywood ethos of the team; part was the tendency of Hollywood movies to conceal the inner production workings for the sake of popular illusionism. Audiences were not supposed to be conscious that a movie was directed; the movie just happened by some mysterious conjunction of the players with their plot. Quite often, Hollywood directors labored in obscurity to evolve an extraordinary economy of expression that escaped so-called highbrow critics in search of the obvious stylistic flourish. Consequently, there was a tendency to overrate the European directors because of their relative articulateness about their artistic angst, and eventually a reaction set in against some of the disproportionate pomposity that ensued.

Indeed, some of the early cults for Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni created the impression that the cinema was born sometime between 1950 and 1960. Not that European directors were entirely to blame for occasionally appearing pretentious. They were merely playing the role that was expected of them, just as Hollywood directors had been conditioned to pretend that they were all hard-headed businessmen. But ultimately the gap narrowed as Hollywood directors ventured to be more explicit about their artistic intentions and European directors dared to be more candid about commercial or professional problems. Even into the 1960s, however, the film director faced massive obstacles to critical recognition. Producers, actors, writers, and otherwise lowly technicians challenged him at every turn.

Also, the analogous yet anomalous relationship with stage directors tended to confuse the issue. It was fashionable to say that the screen was a director’s medium and the stage a writer’s medium, but it remained difficult to demonstrate that a Broadway-to-Hollywood-and-back director like Elia Kazan was any less in command in one medium than in another. To some extent, of course, the role of the director, on stage or screen, depended on the person playing it. Until the early 1970s, many, if not most, film directors were little more than glorified stage managers charged with maintaining a schedule for the execution of the preordained plans of the studio, the stars, the producer, the technicians, the distributors, and the vulgar public—even the writer.

I say even the writer because the latter was less a serious challenge to the director than might be expected. Although the director was shackled to some extent by the studio system through the 1930s and 1940s, the writer was virtually deprived of his identity. As far as studios were concerned, there was never a question of too many scribes spoiling the script. Quite to the contrary, most producers believed strongly in the safety of numbers, and the multiple writing credits on the screen made it difficult for screenwriters to be taken seriously as screen authors. By contrast, directors almost invariably received sole credit for their efforts, however craven and controlled those efforts may have been considered. In addition, the director’s credit almost always appeared last on the screen—or almost always, as Goldwyn was a producer with a passion for having his name follow the director’s. Nevertheless, the director’s position, even in Hollywood, had always been strategically superior to the writer’s, even if, at his least or his worst, the director was reduced to the level of a technician without the technician’s pride in his craft. Such directors were like absolute despots compelled to act as constitutional monarchs, but lacking the style to conceal or circumvent their subservience.

Well, all that has changed, or in some cases been re-visioned. Still, the interviews in Film Culture on Film Art do not in any sense constitute a definitive critical evaluation of the directors involved. The interviews are instead a kind of supplementation to the evidence on the screen. The film is still the thing, say what its director will, and it still takes more than giving a good interview to make a good film. The most articulate director in the world can also be the most inept filmmaker, and, needless to say, the great master can be made to sound like a blithering idiot. In addition to the age-old barrier between the artist and the critic, there is the problem of describing a largely, though not entirely, visual art form in words, words, words. A somewhat frustrated film critic therefore once observed that the only adequate critique of one film is another film. An extreme position, granted, but conversation under even the most ideal circumstances must remain secondary to creation. There will always be more (or less) on the screen than the most artful interview can express. More if the art is superior to its articulation, less if the articulation is revealed on the screen as mere rationalization.

The interviews in this volume were all commissioned for the legendary American movie journal Film Culture, founded by Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas in 1954—only three years after Cahiers du Cinéma. Best known for exploring the avant-garde cinema in depth, Film Culture also published articles on other aspects of cinema, including mainstream Hollywood movies. (Film Culture ceased publication in 1996; during its existence the magazine produced 79 issues. [Issue 80 was published shortly before Jonas Mekas’s death in 2019.]) A formalist (and romantic) poet in his native Lithuanian language, Jonas Mekas discovered the cinema in New York. In his initial editorial, he outlined the vision of a publication that would combine the interests and needs of filmmakers and film viewers:

Today, the need for a searching reevaluation of the aesthetic standards obtaining both among filmmakers and audiences, and for thorough revision of the prevalent attitude to the function of cinema, has assumed more challenging proportions than ever before. Cinematic creation tends to be approached primarily as a production of commodities, and large sections of the public—to whom film-going is still merely a mode of diversion—remain unaware of the full significance of filmic art. (Mekas, 1)

Although it was oriented toward European cinema, Film Culture, from its very first issue, focused critical attention on the embryonic experimental (as it was then called) cinema in America. Although it may have been a harsh critic of the avant-garde, Film Culture was the one place where the avant-garde was taken seriously. Indeed, in the eleven issues from 19 to 29, Film Culture gradually became the apologist of the New American Cinema (Mekas’s term) of which it had once been so critical. As the magazine became the forum for an emerging avant-garde cinema (and for ideas of economic alternatives to commercial production and distribution), to which most other magazines (including Cahiers du Cinéma) had been and continue to be hostile or indifferent, it turned, simultaneously, from reviewing European films with an academic or intellectual viewpoint to demanding (like Cahiers du Cinéma) serious attention for the traditional output of the Hollywood studios.

All three venues are represented in the interviews included here: traditional Hollywood (Lubitsch, Cukor, Milestone), the European art cinema (Buñuel, Melville, Dreyer, Rossellini), and the American as well as European avant-garde (Richter, Brakhage). Conducted in Film Culture’s famously critical and committed style, the interviews catch each director (together with one screenwriter and one cinematographer) at a crucial juncture in his development as an artist, and stand as a historical record of the dominance of the Western tradition in cinematic art, whether of the narrative or experimental kind. The relationship between the director and the idea of the auteur is itself fundamental to the history of Euro-American cinema. Hence, the interviews in this book are full of rich insights into the position of the auteur caught between the rigors of an economic system driven by popular demand and the personal desire to express himself artistically.

That said, as film scholarship has become more sophisticated, the facile distinctions between so-called art films and so-called commercial films have become less meaningful. Out of the sifting and winnowing has emerged a new division of good art and good commercial films, on one side, and bad art and bad commercial films, on the other. Not only do art and commerce intersect, they are intertwined with the muddled processes of filmmaking. Even art films have to make money, and even commercial films have to make some statement or have some theme. To put it another way, more and more critics are demanding that there should be more fun in art, and more art in fun. The post-Marxist pop and camp movements of the 1960s perhaps overreacted to the socially conscious solemnity of the past, but the increasing skepticism about mere good intentions was a healthy sign of higher standards.

Unfortunately, the pendulum has occasionally swung from the extreme of sobriety to the extreme of silliness. In the process, however, it became possible to speak of Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni in the same breath and with the same analytical terminology. Amid the conflicting critical camps, both Rays, Nicholas and Satyajit, gained a respectful hearing. Suddenly every director was, and is, entitled to equal time in the international press where reviewers are compelled to abandon many of their cherished prejudices and snobberies. In such a more open-minded atmosphere of critical recognition, it is only natural that film directors should abandon some of their defensive attitudes toward their roles.

Bazin again summed up the situation admirably:

There are, occasionally, good directors, like René Clément or Alberto Lattuada, who profess a precise aesthetic consciousness and accept a discussion on this [critical] level, but most of their colleagues react to aesthetic analysis with an attitude ranging from astonishment to irritation. Moreover, the astonishment is perfectly sincere and comprehensible. As for the irritation, this often springs from an instinctive resistance to the dismantling of a mechanism whose purpose is to create an illusion, for only mediocrities gain, in effect, from malfunctioning mechanisms. The director’s irritation springs also from his resentment at being placed in a position that is foreign to him. (Bazin, 157)

The lesson in this is that, as instructive as the relatively newfound frankness of some directors may be, interviews with them cannot usurp the role of critical analysis—as André Bazin and Jonas Mekas well knew and we should all remember.

Works Cited

Bazin, André. The Critic as Thinker: American Cinema from Early Chaplin to the Late 1950s. Trans. & ed. R. J. Cardullo. Rotterdam: Sense/Brill, 2017.

Mekas, Jonas. Editorial. Film Culture, 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1955): 1.

Phillips, Gene D. Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1998.

----------. Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema. Rev. ed. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1999.

Samuels, Charles Thomas. A Casebook on Film. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970.

Hans Richter

Hans Richter was a German Dadaist painter, graphic artist, avantgarde film director, and art historian. From Expressionism through Dadaism, Constructivism, and Neoplasticism, he was one of the major figures of avant-garde art in the 1910s and 1920s—a catalyst for intellectuals and artists from many disciplines.

Throughout his career, Richter claimed that his 1921 film, Rhythmus 21, was the first abstract film ever created, but in fact it was preceded by Italian Futurist films by Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna, as well as by the work of fellow German artist Walter Ruttmann, who produced Lichtspiel Opus 1 in 1920. Nevertheless, Richter’s Rhythmus 21 is considered an important early abstract film. Along with the Italian Futurists, Ruttmann, and the Swede Viking Eggeling, he thus produced an entirely new kind of artwork. Developed out of his theorization of a universal language of forms, Rhythmus 21 and Rhythmus 23 introduced the element of time into the abstract work of art. The films show geometric shapes moving and interacting in space and set to a musical score. Richter’s 1928 film Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts before Breakfast), which he developed from Dadaist ideas, itself shows everyday objects in rebellion against their owners: derby hats, potent symbols of bourgeois propriety and stability, take on lives of their own, parodying their inept masters.

As a Jew, a modern artist, and a member of the political opposition, Richter was forced to leave Germany in the early 1930s and eventually immigrated to the United States. There he directed two feature films, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) and 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1955) in collaboration with Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. In 1961, Richter finished a film entitled Dadascope with original prose and poems spoken by their creators: Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Kurt Schwitters. About this time, Richter returned to painting, about whose relationship with film he once wrote the following:

I conceive of the film as a modern art form particularly interesting to the sense of sight. Painting has its own peculiar problems and specific sensations, and so has the film. But there are also problems in which the dividing line is obliterated, or where the two infringe upon each other. More especially, the cinema can fulfill certain promises made by the ancient arts, in the realization of which painting and film become close neighbors and work together.

Richter, Hans. The Film as an Original Art Form. Film Culture, 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1955): 19-23.

The main aesthetic problem in the movies, which were invented for reproduction (of movement), is, paradoxically, the overcoming of reproduction. In other words, the question is: to what degree is the camera (film, color, sound, etc.) developed and used to reproduce (any object that appears before the lens) or to produce (sensations not possible in any other art medium)?

This question is by no means a purely technical or mechanical one. The technical liberation of the camera is intimately interrelated with psychological, social, economic, and aesthetic problems. They all play a role in deciding to what use technique is put and how much it is liberated. Before this fundamental matter, with its manifold implications, is sufficiently cleared up, it is impossible to speak of the film as an independent art form, even as an art form at all, whatever its promises might be. In the words of Vsevolod Pudovkin: What is a work of art before it comes in front of the camera, such as acting, staging, or the novel, is not a work of art on the screen.

Even to the sincere lover of the film in its present form, it must seem that the film is overwhelmingly used for keeping records of creative achievements: of plays, actors, novels, or just plain nature, and proportionately less for the creation of original filmic sensations. It is true that the commercial entertainment film uses many of the liberating elements, discovered since 1895 by Georges Méliès, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and others, leading toward an original cinematic form. But the general tendency of the film industry, as an economic institution, is the distribution of each film to a maximum number of people. This institution has to avoid moving away from the traditional forms of storytelling to which the maximum number of people are conditioned: the theater, with the supremacy of the actor, and the novel or the play, with the writer. Both traditions weigh heavily upon the film and prevent it from coming into its own.

Griffith forced the stage actor, as early as 1909, into mosaic-acting and broke up, in that way, the uninterrupted scene-acting of the stage actor into hundreds of separately acted scenes that assumed continuity only in the cutting room. His innovations of the close-up and the crosscutting of simultaneous events were revolutionary steps toward a filmic style. But when he broke with theater acting, he gave, involuntarily, an overwhelming influence back to the actor in the creation of the star. As star, the actor immortalized reproduction and dominated the film form once again.

The novel, on the other hand, has adapted itself in the last fifty years to the film. It has become increasingly image-minded. But its technique of psychological character development, its style of storytelling—traditional properties of literature—dominate the film and make it, also, from this side, reproduction (of literary works, which were original art before they were produced in Hollywood, London, Paris, and Rome).

It does not concern us here that, in spite of dependency upon other art forms and in spite of the greater or smaller degree of reproduction, many films have shown exceptional qualities. It is known that the film industry has produced fascinating works, full of inventiveness, inspiration, and human values. The problem with which we are dealing is the film as an original art form. Good and bad have no meaning as long as it is not clear upon what aesthetic fundamentals the film is supposed to be built.

The uncertainty of whether film as such (that is, the entertainment film) is essentially theatrical, literary, or fine art ends with the doubt in the minds of many sincere film historians and critics as to whether the film is, or ever will be, an original art at all! There is also another school of thought that defies the present form of the film altogether, in spite of its overwhelming success and powerful influence; rejects its values as social compensator in offering paradises, complete with gods and goddesses; and sees in it a grandiose perversion of the medium.

Between the two schools, I would prefer to say that the fictional film in its present form is a reproduction of several art forms mixed with original cinematographic elements. But the fact is that there are at least two film forms besides the fictional film that, less spectacular than Hollywood, are more cinematographic in the proper sense of the word.

Several times in the history of the movies, a revolt has temporarily broken the hold of the two traditional arts over the entertainment film. To state the two most important revolts: the post-revolutionary silent Russian film (e.g., Battleship Potemkin) and, after the liberation of Italy from Fascism, the postwar Italian film (e.g., Paisan). In both cases, the fictional film has turned from fiction to history and from theater style to documentary style in the use of natural setting, people (not actors), and real events.

With the documentary approach, the film gets back to its fundamentals. Here, it has a solid aesthetic basis: in the free use of nature, including man, as raw material. By selection, elimination, and coordination of natural elements, a film form evolves that is original and not bound by theatrical or literary tradition. That goes, of course, as much for the semi-documentary fictional film (Battleship Potemkin, Paisan) as for the documentary film itself. These elements might obtain a social, economic, political, or general human meaning, according to their selection and coordination. But this meaning does not exist a priori in the facts, nor is it a reproduction (as in an actor’s performance). It is created in the camera and the cutting room. The documentary film is an original art form. It has come to grips with facts—on its own original level. It covers the rational side of our lives, from the scientific experiment to the poetic landscape-study, but never moves away from the factual. Its scope is wide. Nevertheless, it is an original art form only as far as it keeps strictly to the use of natural raw material in rational interpretation. The modern, more convenient technique of re-enacting factual scenes and events is sometimes not without setbacks, as it might easily introduce reproduction through the back door again: in reproducing enacted scenes.

The influence of the documentary film is growing, but its contribution to a filmic art is, by nature, limited. It is limited by the same token by which it has overcome the influence of the two old arts. Since its elements are facts, it can be original art only in the limits of this factuality. Any free use of the magic, poetic, irrational qualities to which the film medium might offer itself would have to be excluded a priori (as nonfactual). But just these qualities are essentially cinematographic, are characteristic of the film, and are, aesthetically, the ones that promise future development. That is where the second of the original film forms has its place: the experimental film.

There is a short chapter in the history of the movies that dealt especially with this side of the film. It was made by individuals concerned essentially with the film medium. They were neither prejudiced by production clichés, nor by necessity of rational interpretation, nor by financial obligations. The story of these individual artists at the beginning of the 1920s, under the name of avant-garde, can be properly read as a history of the conscious attempt to