Page 48 - summer 22

was a synthesis of the three ancient “plastic” arts (architecture, sculpture and

painting) and those of “time”, music and poetry. In 1911 he wrote a manifesto called
“The Birth of the Sixth Art”, calling cinema “a superb conciliation of the Rhythms of
Space, (the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms of Time (Music and Poetry)”. Confusingly,
he later added dance as another art of time, making film the seventh art. Thus, he
called it “the total art form”. Another critic called it “the arts in motion”. The rather
wonderfully named critic Hugo Munsterberg said that the way the eye of the camera
selects what is significant and the use of close-ups, special effects and sudden
changes of scene, all gave the merely visual an inner psychological, and thus artistic,

significance. Others tried to define film in terms of other art forms, such as “sculpture
in motion” or “music in light”. Modernists began to see that it was an ideal art form
to portray the essence of their vision, the speed, simultaneity and multiple images of
modern urban life. The Surrealists also believed it was ideal to portraying the “non-
linguistic, non-rational” unconscious mind. To many, these possibilities combined
with its new technology made film the only truly modern art form.

What cinema history is about
By 1915 the release of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation showed that film had
evolved a visual grammar for telling stories, including close ups and filming an
incident from multiple angles then editing them together. Close-ups made a deep
impression on people until they (we) grew accustomed to them. A French critic Jean
Epstein called them, “The soul of the cinema” – “I will never find the way to say how I
love American close-ups. Point-blank, A Head suddenly appears in screen and drama,
now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary

intensity. I am hypnotised.” (Bonjour cinema 1921, quoted by Robert Stam).

In fact, the great theme of cinema history was whether it could, or wanted to, move
beyond mere story-telling. As we have seen, the early Soviet avant-garde film-makers
used the Modernist technique of montage, splitting the screen into different
simultaneous shots. Eisenstein was the master of this. He wasn’t interested in using
film to follow a linear, cause-and-effect plot, but to show an often disrupted,
disjunctive and fractured series of images, later reinforced by discordant sound, to
build tensions which remain unresolved, and to reflect the fragmentation and
th
dislocation of human perception and 20 century life. This was not narrating a story,
but “thinking through images”. The on-screen montage was designed for maximum
emotional and aesthetic effect; here, in the both shooting and the editing, lay the art
of the avant-garde film-maker.

A fellow avant-garde Russian film-maker, Dzige Vertov, gave a succinct account of
film history. The exciting potential of the film-camera was innovatory and