Film as Art

Rudolf Arnheim – 1932

Film as Art, by the great German-American scholar of psychology and art Rudolf Arnheim, is one of the seminal texts of film aesthetics, and one of the earliest; coming just barely as the medium was emerging from its infancy.  Eisenstein’s writings and this book are our Pentateuch.  At least for cineastes, (though not for the rest of the world), Arnheim’s book gave validation to the fledgling art form that was generally regarded as a crass vehicle of mass entertainment fit for nickelodeons, the equivalent of pulp fiction and comics.  So, things haven’t changed much, despite the coming and going of an international art film culture, but for those who have what François Truffaut called a “cinematic mind,” Film as Art is an inspiring study on how and why cinema works.  Arnheim’s position is not critical; he doesn’t make lists of what makes films good or bad, but his observations have the effect of making you realize that in formalist or pure cinema, nothing can be arbitrary, because every option with regard to the image, the framing, the duration and the exchange of shots has meaning and produces a psychological response.  Arnheim argues a point that is contrary to predominant feelings in the film industry; he says that technological advances don’t strengthen an art form but weaken it, and therefore progress inevitably corrupts the purity of an art form.  In the case of film, there are several basic elements that a newcomer might mistake for weaknesses but are actually what he terms “de-limitations.”  They are the following:

• the projection of solids upon a plane surface
• reduction of depth
• lighting and the absence of color
• delimitation of the object and distance from the object
• absence of the space-time continuum
• absence of the nonvisual world of the senses

Of course, at the time of his writing, sound and color were new intruders into the purity of the cinema as it then existed.  Before such elements that brought movies closer to resembling our real experience of the world, film was a truly democratic art form that knew few boundaries; it was on the verge of becoming a new universal language.