4 cenas favoritas de filmes: Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933); O Terror das Mulheres (Jerry Lewis, 1961), 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), e Gabbeh (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)

 

 

‘Who Is the Author of a Film?’ (1958) e ‘Art Today and the Film’ – por Rudolf Arnheim (1966, em inglês)

Rudolf Arnheim

Who Is the Author of a Film?

Film Culture, No. 16, 1958, pp. 88-95.

The identity of the true author of a film concerns the legislator and judge, for it is their professional duty to determine who is responsible for the content of a film, who has the right to decide what a film shall be like and what shall be done with it, and also who shall profit, and to what extent, from the money it earns. At the same time, the question arouses the passion of filmmakers and film theorists alike: the answer that is given to it clearly defines a person’s attitude towards film production and film art.

Specifically the controversy boils down to two points. First, is the scriptwriter or the director to be considered the real author? Second, is a film, and indeed a work of art, the conception of only one individual, or can it — and perhaps, should it — spring from the cooperation of a group of workers?

A clear decision in the case of scriptwriter vs. director might be of considerable practical importance. When, for instance, a director feels free to revamp a script completely, he assumes that the director is the sole responsible author of a film. Objection to such a procedure on the part of the writer may be based on the contention that the director is a mere executor of this work of art, which had its true birth on a writing desk.

The latter view carries little weight today. It derives from the theater, where the director will put on the stage a work created by the playwright as the true author. A good stage director will help the work, a bad one will harm it, but in no case has the director anything essential or indispensable to add to the written play. To apply the same notion to the new technique of the film is wrong not only in a relative but also in an absolute sense. It is more than a matter of giving too little importance to the director: this view ignores basic differences between the theater and the film. The theatrical play is a work of art produced by a writer in one medium, namely, the literary word, and made visible and audible secondarily by means of two other media. The performance — if it has been competently directed — will modify, but not essentially change, the work of the writer. A film, on the other hand, is conceived from the outset in the visual medium (plus that of sound, in the case of the sound film) and can either be produced directly, without the aid of a script, in the studio or described film in words on paper, just as all other things of this world can be described on paper.

This more recent conception implies an exaltation of the director, and since attitudes tend to sway from one extreme to the other, the director was proclaimed dictator. He alone was said to be the author of the film. He alone was truly able to give cinematographic shape the subject matter. The scriptwriter — unknown to the public, underpaid by his employer, and manhandled by the director — found that even the theoreticians of film art treated him as a negligible quantity.

From the very beginning of motion pictures there are examples of the type of film that is a mere staging of something thought up and written down beforehand; and there are also examples of the opposite, the film derived spontaneously and without written preparation from what happens to be available in front of the camera. The first type is found most clearly in sound films, even in those of the early Nineteen Hundreds when opera arias were sung into the horn of a recording machine and then synchronized with appropriate pantomime. The more elaborate sound film of today resembles its lowly predecessor in that it is based on pre-existent sound, that is, written dialogue, which is performed on the sound stage by actors under the coaching of the director. In such cases, the writer’s claim to authorship is well-founded — but then, are we dealing with a true film?

At the other extreme we find in the pioneer day the reporter-cinematographer, who takes pictures of whatever interesting things he can capture with his camera and afterwards assembles his material suitably, without ever having relied on a script. He is the grandfather of our newsreel producers and documentarists. There may be a script for such a documentary film, but it is essentially a working schedule. Often the theme and shape of the film will derive from the material that has been shot. Significantly enough, the term “director” hardly fits the documentarist if we think of a director as someone who uses actors to translate a script into pictures.

But even the narrative film cannot put up with a limited, theatrical conception of its maker. An illustration from the early years is afforded by Mack Sennett, who would gather his actors in front of the camera in order to think up for them and with them the cheerful “gags” that were the substance of his films. This procedure, which leaves room for a good deal of improvisation, is found also in the later masters of film comedy, notably Chaplin and Keaton, who invented plot and action for the characters they embodied. Today the tendency to draw the content of the film from the available performance material survives in the practice of planning a film for a particular actor or actress. The short dialogue films of Karl Valentin and Lisl Karlstadt, the Bavarian comedy team, derived from conversations between the two actors, which are reported to have usually started with the words: “Well, I am going to play a man and you play a woman!”

Pantomime and documentary films are prime examples of genuine film since they stem from the means of representation rather than merely transmit the content of a script. These authors are not writers; they are “organizers” — to use a characteristic term of the Russian filmmakers — of the material collected by and for the camera. The conception of authorship that is implied here gains weight as the artistic use of the camera and of montage increases the difference between what was acted out in front of the camera and what finally appears on the screen. The more definitely film shapes up as a distinct and integrated art form, the more tempting it is to suggest that the scriptwriter is nothing but a furnisher of raw material.

Discussions of this problem have often been misled by the understandable assumption that two different jobs, distinguished by the names of “scriptwriter” and “director,” must stand for two different occupations; since the director is in charge of making the picture, the writer’s task must he purely literary. Actually, there is no room for any un-filmic work in the creation of a film.

Even the very germ cell of a film, the elementary idea, must suit the medium. The particular human problem or setting that is chosen as the theme may also be suitable for a novel or a stage play, but it must contain filmic possibilities. A film biography of Immanuel Kant, for example, would be a poor idea from the start since the subject, while rich in thought material, is deficient in external events. From the beginning, the effort is filmic, not literary, although the preparatory ideas can be put down and worked out in writing. Even the so-called “treatment,” which may use the technique of the literary narrative to present the content of the film, is not a short story or novella but a blocked-out film. The writer must conceive the story visually and in some detail. It would be a mistake to assume that there is a translation into the film medium beginning with the shooting script. The creative process in films is visual from the start although stages of increasing concreteness can be distinguished.

The use of typewriters, desks, and paper must not mislead us. It is only for technical reasons that the preparations for the studio work are done in writing. The early miniature movies could do without them whereas the technical, organizational, and also artistic complexity of a modern film required careful planning. The number of collaborators became larger and larger, a detailed estimate of the cost was necessary, memory could not retain all the data — hence the need for written outlines. The film manuscript developed as a strictly filmic part of the production process.

As long as scriptwriting is considered a literary occupation, its intimate relation to montage is hardly realized. Montage is no more a matter of scissors and celluloid than scriptwriting is one of words. Both operations refer, rather, to the same visual object: the moving picture on the screen. The true meaning of montage becomes clear only if the rough overall grouping of the subject matter as sketched in the “treatment” is considered a part of it. Montage is the combination of events that are not contiguous in space and time, and in this sense, even the scenario of a stage play involves montage. A good deal of the work involved in editing individual scenes is done already in the shooting script although the actual print may suggest certain changes and determine the precise rhythm of the sequence and the harmonious coordination of black-and-white values and movements. The main point to be made here is that the operation of montage does not suddenly start when the scissors go into action but determines the structure of the film throughout the preparation.

It appears then that the work of the scriptwriter and that of the director are actually the same even though the two individuals work with different tools. Would this not suggest that the work should be done by one person only, namely, by the director? Should he not write his own script? Indeed, this is a reasonable request, and we may want to know how the profession of the scriptwriter ever originated since the nature of the work does not seem to call for any splitting up of function.

In practice, few directors write their own scripts although the great masters are almost invariably among the exception: Chaplin, Stroheim, Eisenstein, Clair. And in general, the better directors will often collaborate on the script to some extent. Historically, the curious division of labor developed because the director could not quite live up to all the demand that faced a film-maker. To create a film meant to find a good story, to develop it according to the rules of dramatic art, to make the reactions of the characters psychologically accurate — Aristotelian tasks that were hard on the average director. He was a man who knew how to guide his actors or to select a suitable lighting scheme or to indicate an attractive perspective or movement; but more often than not he was basically a photographer tossed by circumstance upon the shores of dramatics. His education, his cultural level, and his human sensitivity were not such as to equip him for tasks requiring more than a mere familiarity with what the eye could see.

The thing to do was to call in the intellectuals, the literary men, experts of the theater, explorers of the soul, able verbalizers, and owner of large bookshelves that abounded with suitable novels and plays, not easily did these men of literature come to feel at home in the studios — it was safer, actually, to keep them out lest they notice in time the “slight changes” that had been made in their conceptions. Even so, they learned the métier and perfected the technique of scriptwriting. By working out shooting schedules that prescribed every move of camera and actor, they became concerned with the very heart of the filmic process. They anticipated the activities of the director and definitely had a share in the authorship. Hence the many frictions between writer and director.

Undoubtedly the author of the shooting script is, to a considerable extent, the author of the film. Sometimes the writer’s contribution is less explicit: he may have made no more than an outline or may have even limited himself to suggesting a certain subject. But whatever his share, he partially creates the film, and there is no difference in principle between his work and that of the director.

It is desirable, however, to discourage the practice of having the shooting script written by someone who is not the director of the film. If a man can write a good shooting script, he is a visual artist, capable of learning how to direct a film successfully — he should be given access to the studio. On the other hand, a director who only knows how to execute the filming of a script and is incapable of inventing a film and giving shape to ideas is likely to be more of a routine technician than a creative artist, even in his specialty. In the interest of film art, the union of the scriptwriting and directing functions in a single person should be advocated. This does not preclude the use of specialists who would not interfere with the work of the creative film-maker but would serve, rather, in advisory capacities. An explorer or an author of stories about seafarers could help to provide accuracy and local color; a skillful playwright might assist the film-maker with the dialogue. Such collaborators could hardly claim a substantial share of the authorship but they would have well-defined tasks, not interfering with other men’s work.

Even though the various creative tasks do not overlap, is it really possible for an artist to do his work in partnership with someone else? Here we touch upon the second fundamental question mentioned above — the controversy between the individualists and the collectivists. Individualists maintain that solitary creation is demanded by the very nature of the work of art, which undertakes to reveal the world from a new, personal perspective. Also the necessary unity may well be achieved only when all the work is done by one mind. Since every person, and particularly every artistically gifted person, looks at reality in his own way, what a babel of confusion would arise from the work of a group of collaborators! At best there would be a frustrating compromise. Those who hold the opposite view, the collectivists, point out that no effort of the mind is isolated and that the artist’s withdrawal from the society of thought will result in his producing works that are of no interest to anybody but himself. Thus, some disputants call for the dictatorship of the director, while others recommend collective teamwork.

There is no point, however, in mechanically applying these philosophies of life to methods of film production. Instead we need to find out which method is best suited to the nature of the task. Practically speaking, almost every film requires the cooperation of many people, most of whom serve distinct functions. There is the producer, the director and scriptwriter, the actor, the cameraman, the set designer, the musician — to mention only the most important. Experience has shown again and again that such a group can work harmoniously. Indeed, the value of teamwork derives precisely from the difference of perspective that comes with the difference of function, as well as from the variety of personal temperaments and outlooks. If the partners are well-chosen, they may do truly unified work, just as two parents can successfully educate the same child. Only the atomistic thinking of the dogmatic individualist could deny that a new, homogeneous whole rather than compromising patchwork may be the result. As a necessary condition, however, there must be a clear distribution of functions, not the kind of ambiguity that characterizes the relation between scriptwriter and director.

It is a mistake, on the other hand, to believe that only teamwork will produce great art. Granted that a genuine artist draws his feeling and thinking from the community, but precisely because this is so, he need not do his work in actual cooperation with others. Who would deny that a novel written behind locked doors may express the attitude of an epoch to perfection, and that, conversely, a collective work produced by a group of extravagant “outsiders” may be most esoteric? Instead of judging the procedure by the number of participants, we need to realize that even the product of a large group of people may actually be the personal work of an autocratic director; and we should also recognize that there is a difference between decision by unanimous consent or majority rule and the kind of hierarchy in which free but responsible people form a pyramid of dependencies, thus providing unity of conception at the top and maximum use of contributions from the various levels of the structure.

Our conclusion seems to be that the question of who is the author of a film cannot be answered in the desirable apodictic fashion. There are films that are actually the work of one person alone, although dozens of helpers were employed. Other films have two, three, four or more authors, who contribute in varying proportion. We remember that there are operas whose authorship we ascribe to the composer alone because the libretto has all too little substance; yet, what would Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Salome be without the words of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Oscar Wilde?

The perusal of Carl Mayer’s shooting scripts for films which he did not direct shows that even then he often came close to being the real father of the film. There are films where any given actor’s performance is not an essential component: in other cases, the personality of a performer is a central feature of the work. What would Chaplin’s films be without the figure of Charlie, or The Blue Angel without Marlene Dietrich, or The Champ without Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper? In the German and French versions of Anna Christie, three of the leading parts were played by other actors and even the director was changed, yet the film remained more or less what it was in the original. But had Greta Garbo been replaced, it would have been a totally different film. In this case, therefore, we have indirect experimental proof that the leading actress was the main author of the film. (In the movies it is incorrect to consider the cast a secondary addition to the “play”; there is no play, only the performance, and the important question is who contributed what to it.)

What would The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari be without the set designers, Warm, Reimann, and Roehrig? Or Clair’s A nous la liberté without the music of Georges Auric, or Lubitsch’s The Love Parade without that of Victor Schertzinger? And did not a number of Paramount products acquire a family resemblance through the photography of cameraman Lee Gannes, although some of them were directed by Josef von Sternberg and others by Rouben Mamoulian?

Certain films resemble animals and plants in that they have only one father. Others have a more intricate genealogy — which may be deplored by devotees of tidy setups and welcomed by anybody who enjoys the natural splendor of manifold creation.

______________________

Rudolf Arnheim

Art Today and the Film

Film Culture, No. 42, 1966, pp. 88-95.
DELIVERED AT THE N.Y. FILM FESTIVAL, 1965. REPRINTED FROM ART JOURNAL, XXV 3 ’66

If the various arts of our time share certain traits and tendencies they probably do so in different ways, depending on the character of each medium. At first glance, the photographic image, technically committed to mechanical reproduction, might be expected to fit modern art badly—a theoretical prediction not borne out, however, by some of the recent work of photographers and film directors. In the following I shall choose a key notion to describe central aspects of today’s art and then apply this notion to the film, thereby suggesting particular ways in which the photochemical picture responds to some aesthetic demands of our time.

In search of the most characteristic feature of our visual art, one can conclude that it is the attempt of getting away from the detached images by which artists have been portraying physical reality. In the course of our civilization we have come to use images as tools of contemplation. We have set them up as a world of their own, separate from the world they depict, so that they may have their own completeness and develop more freely their particular style. These virtues, however, are outweighed by the anxiety such a detachment arouses when the mind cannot afford it because its own hold on reality has loosened too much. Under such conditions, the footlights separating a world of make-believe from its counterpart and the frame which protects the picture from merging with its surroundings become a handicap.

In a broader sense, the very nature of a recognizable likeness suffices to produce the frightening dichotomy, even without any explicit detachment of the image. A marble statue points to a world of flesh and blood, to which, however, it confesses not to belong—which leaves it without a dwelling-place in that world. It can acquire such a dwelling-place only by insisting that it is more than an image, and the most radical way of accomplishing it is to abandon the portrayal of the things of nature altogether. This is, of course, what modern art has done. By renouncing portrayal, the work of art establishes itself dearly as an object possessing an independent existence of its own.

But once this radical step has been taken, another, even more decisive one suggests itself forcefully. It consists in giving up image-making entirely. This can be illustrated by recent developments in painting. When the abstractionists had abandoned the portrayal of natural objects, their paintings were still representing colored shapes dwelling in pictorial space, that is, they were still pretending the presence of something that was not there. Painters tried various remedies. They resorted to collage, which introduced the “real object” into the world of visual illusion. They reverted to trompe l’oeil effects of the most humiliating dullness. They discredited picturemaking by mimicking its most commercialized products. They fastened plumbing fixtures to their canvases. None of these attempts carries conviction, except one, which seems most promising, namely, the attachment of abstract painting to architecture. Abstract painting fits the wall as no representational painting ever has, and in doing so it relinquishes the illusion of pictorial space and becomes, instead, the surface-texture of the three-dimensional block of stone.

In this three-dimensional space of physical existence, to which painting thus escapes, sculpture has always been settled. Even so, sculpture, as much as painting, has felt the need to get away from image-making. It replaces imitative shape with the left-overs of industrial machinery, it uses plaster casts, and it presents real objects as artifacts. All these characteristic tendencies in the realm of objectmaking are overshadowed, however, by the spectacular aesthetic success of industrial design. The machines, the bridges, the tools and surgical instruments enjoy all the closeness to the practical needs of society which the fine arts have lost. These useful objects are bona fide inhabitants of the physical world, with no pretense of imagemaking, and yet they mirror the condition of modern man with a purity and intensity that is hard to match.

To complete our rapid survey, we glance at the performing arts and note that the mimetic theatre, in spite of an occasional excellent production in the traditional style, has sprouted few shoots that would qualify it as a living medium. Significantly, its most vital branch has been Brecht’s epic theatre, which spurns illusionism in its language, its style of acting, and its stage setting, and uses its actors as story-tellers and demonstrators of ideas. Musical comedy, although so different from the epic theatre otherwise, owes its success also to the playing down of narrative illusion. The spectacle of graceful and rhythmical motion addresses the audience as directly as do Brecht’s pedagogical expositions. And the modern dance can be said to have made its victorious entrance where the costumed pantomime left off. The most drastic move toward undisguised action seems to have been made by the so-called happenings. They dispense the raw material of thrill, fear, curiosity, and prurience in a setting that unites actors and spectators in a common adventure.

If we have read the signs of the times at all correctly, the prospect of the cinema would seem to look dim—not because it lacks potential but because what it has to offer might appear to be the opposite of what is wanted. The film is mimetic by its very nature. As a branch of photography, it owes its existence to the imprint of things upon a sensitive surface. It is the image-maker par excellence, and much of its success derives from the mechanical faithfulness of its portrayals. What is such a medium to do when the artificiality of the detached image makes the minds uneasy?

Ironically, the motion picture must be viewed by the historian as a late product of a long development that began as a reaction to a detachment from reality. The motion picture is a grandchild of the Renaissance. It goes back to the birth of natural science, the search for techniques by which to reproduce and measure nature more reliably, back to the camera obscura, which for centuries was used by painters as a welcome crutch, back to the tracings of shadow profiles, which created a vogue of objective portraiture shortly before photography was invented. The moving photograph was a late victory in the struggle for the grasp of concrete reality. But there are two ways of losing contact with the World of perceivable objects, to which our senses and feelings are attuned. One can move away from this world to find reality in abstract speculation, as did the pre-Renaissance era of the Middle Ages, or one can lose this World by piercing the visible surface of things and finding reality in their inside, as did post-Renaissance science—physics, chemistry, psychology. Thus our very concern with factual concreteness has led us beyond the surfaces to which our eyes respond. At the same time, a surfeit of pictures in magazines and newspapers, in the movies and on television has blunted our reactions to the indiscretions and even the horrors of the journalistic snapshot and the Grand Guignol. Today’s children look at the tears of tragedy and at maimed corpses every day.

The cinema responded to the demand for concreteness by making the photographic image look more and more like reality. It added sound, it added color, and the latest developments of photography promise us a new technique that will not only produce genuine three-dimensionality but also abolish the fixed perspective, thus replacing the image with total illusion. The live television show got rid of the time gap between the pieture and the pictured event. And as the painters took to large-size canvases in order to immerse the eye in an endless spectacle of color, blurring the border between the figment and the outer world, the cinema expanded the screen for similar purposes. This openness of form was supplemented by an openness of content: the short-story type of episode no longer presented a closed and detached entity but seemed to emerge briefly from real life only to vanish again in the continuum of everyday existence.

The extreme attempt of capturing the scenes of life unposed and unrehearsed, by means of hidden cameras was received with no more than a mild, temporary stir—somewhere between the keyhole pleasures of the peeping Tom and those of the sidewalk superintendent. For the curious paradox in the nature of any image is, of course, that the more faithful it becomes, the more it loses the highest function of imagery, namely, that of synthesizing and interpreting what it represents. And thereby it loses the interest. In this sense, even the original addition of motion to the still photograph was a risky step to take because the enormous enrichment gained by action in the time dimension had to be paid with the loss of the capacity to preserve the lasting character of things, safely reomoved from their constant changes in time.

Following the example of painting, the cinema has tried the remedy of abstraction. But the experiments, from Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling to Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Len Lye, have amounted mainly to a museum’s collection of venerable curiosities. This may seem surprising, considering the great aesthetic potential of colored shapes in motion. But since abstract painting is also on the decline, my guess is that once the artist abandons image-making he has no longer a good reason to cling to the two-dimensional surface, that is, to the twilight area between image-making and object-making. Hence the temporary or permanent desertion of so many artists from painting to sculpture and, as I said, the attempts to make painting three-dimensional or attach it to architecture.

The film cannot do this. There seems to be general agreement that the cinema has scored its most lasting and most specifically cinematic successes when it drew its interpretations of life from authentic realism. This has been true all the way from Lumière to Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Robert Flaherty and more recently de Sica and Zavattini. And I would find it hard to argue with somebody who maintained that he would be willing to give the entire film production of the last few years for Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s recent under-water documentary, World Without Sun.

However—and this brings me to the main point of my argument—Cousteau’s film creates fascination not simply as an extension of our visual knowledge obtained by the documentary presentation of an unexplored area of our earth. These most authentically realistic pictures reveal a world of profound mystery, a darkness momentarily lifted by flashes of unnatural light, a complete suspension of the familiar vertical and horizontal coordinates of space. Spatial orientation is upset also by the weightlessness of these animals and dehumanized humans, floating up and down without effort, emerging nowhere and disappearing into nothingness, constantly in motion without any recognizable purpose, and totally indifferent to each other. There is an overwhelming display of dazzling color and intricate motion, tied to no experience we ever had and performed for the discernible benefit of nobody. There are innumerable monstrous variations of faces and bodies as we know them, passing by with the matter-of-factness of herring or perch, in a profound silence, most unnatural for such visual commotion and rioting color, and interrupted only by noises nobody ever heard. What we have here, if a nasty pun is permissible, is the New Wave under water.

For it seems evident that what captures us in this documentary film is a most successful although surely unintentional display of what the most impressive films of the last few years have been trying to do, namely, to interpret the ghostliness of the visible world by means of authentic appearances drawn directly from that world. The cinema has been making its best contribution to the general trend I have tried to describe, not by withdrawing from imagery, as the other arts have, but by using imagery to describe reality as a ghostly figment. It thereby seizes and interprets the experience from which the other visual arts tend to escape and to which they are reacting.

In exploiting this opportunity, the cinema remains faithful to its nature. It derives its new nightmares from old authenticity. Take the spell-binding opening of Fellini’s 8½, the scene of the heart attack in the closed car, stared at without reaction by the other drivers, so near by and yet so distant in their glass and steel containers, take the complete paralysis of motion, realistically justified by the traffic jam in the tunnel, and compare this frightening mystery with the immediately following escape of the soul, which has all the ludicrous clumsiness of the special-effects department. How much more truly unreal are the mosquito swarms of the reporters persecuting the widowed woman in La Dolce Vita than is the supposedly fantastic harem bath of the hero in 8½ And how unforgettable, on the other hand, is the grey nothingness of the steam bath in which the pathetic movie makers do penitence and which transfigures the ancient cardinal.

The actors of Alain Robbe-Griilet move without reason like Cousteau’s fishes and contemplate each other with a similar indifference. They practice absent-mindedness as a way of life and they cohabit across long distances of empty floor. In their editing technique, the directors of the Nouvelle Vague destroy the relations of time, which is the dimension of action, and of space,. which is the dimension of human contact, by violating all the rules in the book—and some readers will guess what book I am referring to. Those rules, of course, presupposed that the film maker wished to portray the physical continuity of time and space by the discontinuity of the pictures.

The destruction of the continuity of time and space is a nightmare when applied to the physical world but it is a sensible order in the realm of the mind. The human mind, in fact, stores the experiences of the past as memory traces, and in a storage vault there are no time sequences or spatial connections, only affinities and associations based on similarity or contrast. It is this different but positive order of the mind that novelists and film directors of the last few years have presented as a new reality while demolishing the old. By eliminating the difference between what is presently perceived and what is only remembered from the past, they have created a new homogeneity and unity of all experience, independent of the order of physical things. When in Michel Butor’s novel, La Modification, the sequence of the train voyage from Paris to Rome constantly interacts with a spray of atomized episodes of the past, the dismemberment of physical time and space creates a new time sequence and a new spatial continuum, namely, those of the mind.

It is the creation and exploitation of this new order of the mind in its independence of the order of physical things which, I believe, will keep the cinema busy while the other visual arts explore the other side of the dichotomy—the world of physical things from which the mind seems so pleasantly absent.

fonte: http://ubuweb.com/papers/arnheim_rudolf-author_film.html e http://ubuweb.com/papers/arnheim_rudolf-art_today.html

I Would Like to Make the Case For The Crime of Art por David Cronenberg (12 de junho de 2018, em inglês)

David Cronenberg is a writer and director whose films include The Fly, A History of Violence, Crash and Videodrome. The following is adapted from a speech by Mr. Cronenberg on receiving an honorary degree from OCAD University on June 12.

I would like to make the case for the crime of art. For the criminality of the artist. For the artist as criminal. Let us turn to Sigmund Freud for clarity.

In the Freudian formulation, civilization is repression. That is to say that without the repression of subterranean destructive human impulses, such as violent tribalism, sexual triumphalism and so on, human society as a coherent, functioning community could not exist. But the appeal of art is exactly to those repressed desires and instincts, to what Freud called the subconscious, and so in that sense, all art is subversive of civilization. If art by its nature is subversion, then artists are by their nature subversives. Because we think now in terms of civil society rather than grandiose concepts of civilization, I believe we can characterize art as essentially criminal. And yet at the same time, the case has been made that art provides a contained, safe outlet for these destructive, anti-social impulses, and in that way is, paradoxically, supportive of society and its demands for conformity and repression. A conundrum.

But is it contained? Is art ever truly contained? Is it ever safe? Art is not a toy, a fashion statement, a decoration. Art is inherently disruptive. Art is dangerous. It can explode in your face. Not that art can be a crime; art must be a crime. In my formulation, there is a need for art to be under the radar, criminal, subliminal. Constant as the society above it changes. Art is Notes from Underground. That is the strategy of criminal art.

Is the artist a complete anarchist, having no respect for society and the law? No, not at all. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, commenting on the thief and playwright Jean Genet, via Marx, said: “Our future burglar starts by learning absolute respect for property.” Must artists understand that they are criminals? To do that, they must understand the law, the conventions of social discourse. They must understand what is criminal.

Can one be arrested for committing the crime of art? Oh yes. Maybe not right here, today. But tomorrow morning. Very early. Oh, yes. Revolutionary art has always been criminal art in the eyes of the ruling class.

The pressure to rise to all expectations offered by your art form, whatever it is, can sometimes transform/mutate into pressure to conform to already established norms. That is civilization. But then where is the subversion? In the isolation, the pain, the loneliness, the hopelessness, the tears, the anguish. And the truth. The telling of truth. These will be there, and they must be acknowledged and expected.

In particular, technology-heavy art forms such as architecture are deeply embedded in their social, political and economic contexts. But when we collaborate, is there truly an ecstatic dissolution of the self into a perfect fluid composed of many selves? You are not writing poetry in your garret in Paris, alone, destitute and starving. Or are you? I suggest that you are, somewhere in there, that poet in that garret, alone, destitute and, yes, despite the commissions, starving, philosophically and emotionally, if not viscerally.

Sometimes, art is bad for the environment, despite progressive desire, despite visionary passion. Very often, perhaps inevitably, architecture is bad for the environment. What can we do about this? And should we do anything about this? Criminal art. Criminal architecture. The crime of art. The novelist Philip Roth warned against “the unforeseen consequences of art.” That’s the key. You cannot know what you’re really doing, not in the context of the universe, and so all notions of socially progressive work are basically delusions, and are to be realized accidentally, if at all.

Can such a thoroughly socially embedded art form as architecture be criminal? Even if it’s bad architecture, environmentally irresponsible architecture, socially hostile architecture, Stalinist, brutalist, Nazi architecture? Can a building be criminal in its essence? I say it must be, it is. We must be honest here. All human architecture is a crime against nature, even that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Maybe even especially, because he understood what he was doing.

Crimes against nature. What can they be? Ironically, the list is always socially determined, not naturally. Because nature itself is criminal in its essence. Laws of nature are necessarily broken – through mutation – in order that nature, in the form of evolution, can subsist through time. I mentioned human architecture. There is insect architecture. Insects create architecture. Mud dauber wasps create beautiful multilevel nurseries, larval high-rise apartments, which they fill with paralyzed spiders to feed their children. Are they artists? Do they break the laws of nature? Perhaps we are, in fact, mud daubers. Perhaps our buildings are not crimes against nature, but constitute nature itself. Perhaps we come full circle.

The painter Willem de Kooning said: “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” I say, the human body is the reason the cinema was invented. The face, the body, is its true subject, the most photographed object in cinema. Cinema is the body.

I’m here today because I’ve made some movies. But because of the internet, Netflix, streaming, cinema is dissolving, the big screen is shattering into many little screens, and this is causing much stress amongst movie-nostalgia hardliners. It doesn’t matter to me. In fact, it pleases me. Because the human body is evolving, changing, and since the cinema is body, it makes sense that the cinema is changing, evolving as well. If movies disappeared overnight, I wouldn’t care. The cinema is not my life. Your art form cannot be your life. To say that it is, to make it be that, is to evade life itself. But you won’t do that, will you? No, I’m sure you won’t.

fonte: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/opinion/article-the-crime-of-art/

Notas Sobre o Cinema – por Scott Barley (2018)

Por Scott Barley
Traduzido por Pedro Tavares

A escuridão sempre foi um pré-requisito para realmente entrarmos no mundo na tela, e sua importância na concessão de ressonância experiencial não pode ser exagerada. No cinema, as luzes se apagam. Nós esperamos em uma sala escura por um mundo de luz se abrir para nós, e enquanto nosso corpo pode permanecer em nosso assento, a essência incorpórea em todos nós caminha em direção à luz exuberante, assombrando-a, como nos assombra. Nossas almas investem, buscam na curiosidade e fome nas imagens e sons. O cinema é uma simbiose de assombrações. Entramos quando nos entra. Entrar no mundo de um filme é algo muito espectral. Realmente se submeter à experiência do cinema é como deixar as ondas do oceano baterem em você e não ter medo de se afogar. Estar nessa escuridão e deixar o filme nos envolver e penetrar é a própria definição de rendição. Para se entregar, para o outro.

Luís Carlos Oliveira Júnior e o desafio da mise-en-scène (2018)

Fonte e imagens: http://janela.art.br/index.php/artigos/luiz-carlos-oliveira-junior-e-o-desafio-da-mise-en-scene/

Introdução:

O texto a seguir é a transcrição completa da palestra que o crítico, professor e pesquisador acadêmico Luiz Carlos Oliveira Jr. ministrou pelo Programa de Pós-graduação Interdisciplinar em Performances Culturais da UFG – Universidade Federal de Goiás, em 19 de junho de 2018.

Além da palestra, há também uma parte dedicada a perguntas e respostas, mais ao final. Entre os participantes, foi possível identificar os professores Lisandro Nogueira e Rodrigo Cássio, ambos integrantes do Programa da Pós e organizadores deste encontro; Fabrício Cordeiro e Luciano Evangelista, críticos da revista Janela; e Jarleo Barbosa, diretor, roteirista e produtor.

Psicodelia em 50 filmes (Supercut)

Artigo relacionado: http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/the-doors-of-reception-notes-toward-a-psychedelic-film-investigation/

Filmes presentes no vídeo (em ordem):

– Un Chien Andalou (1929)
– Metropolis (1927)
– Spellbound (1945)
– 8 1/2 (1963)
– Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
– Dumbo (1941)
– Liquid Sky (1982)
– The Wall (1982)
– Fantastic Planet (1973)
– Fruit of Paradise (1970)
– Lucifer Rising (1972)
– The Holy Mountain (1973)
– The Red Shoes (1948)
– Liquid Sky (1982)
– A Field in England (2013)
– The Doors (1991)
– Altered States (1980)
– 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
– Altered States (1980)
– Enter the Void (2009)
– Feherlofia (1981)
– Interstellar (2014)
– The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015)
– Dune (1984)
– Annihilation (2018)
– Altered States (1980)
– A Very Brady Sequel (1996)
– Yellow Submarine (1968)
– Alice in Wonderland (1951)
– The Lawnmower Man (1992)
– Across the Universe (2007)
– Head (1968)
– Mulholland Drive (2001)
– Dumbo (1941)
– Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
– The Big Leboswki (1998)
– Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
– Midnight Cowboy (1969)
– Barbarella (1968)
– Apocalypse Now (1979)
– Easy Rider (1969)
– The Trip (1967)
– The Tree of Life (2011)
– Taking Woodstock (2009)
– Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
– The Good Dinosaur (2015)
– Valhalla Rising (2009)
– Lucy (2014)
– Into the Wild (2007)
– It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
– Hanna Barbera Anti-Drug PSA (1970)
– Across the Universe (2007)
– Enter the Void (2009)
– Zabriskie Point (1970)
– Loving Vincent (2017)
– A Field in England (2013)
– Altered States (1980)
– Daisies (1966)
– Blueberry (2004)
– Vertigo (1958)
– Feherlofia (1981)
– Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
– 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
– Blueberry (2004)
– Lucifer Rising (1972)
– Feherlofia (1981)
– Vertigo (1958)
– Altered States (1980)
– A Field in England (2013)
– The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015)
– Lucifer Rising (1972)
– Blueberry (2004)
– Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
– Vertigo (1958)
– Interstellar (2014)
– Altered States (1980)
– Daisies (1966)
– Head (1968)
– Lucifer Rising (1972)
– Feherlofia (1981)
– 2001: A Space Oddysey (1968)
– Altered States (1980)
– Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
– The Holy Mountain (1973)

Ghost in the Shell (1995) – Montage Sequence – 3min30s (1080p)

Críticas (escritas entre 2016 a 2018) Aracati; Clarisse ou Alguma Coisa Sobre Nós Dois; Jovens Infelizes; A Noite Escura da Alma; Tropykaos; O Espelho; Santo Daime – O Império da Floresta; Nossa Irmã Mais Nova; Os Pensamentos que Outrora Tivemos; Os Incontestáveis; Baronesa; Lamparina da Aurora; Modo de Produção e Inaudito

Seguem as críticas que escrevi para o site janela.art.br nos últimos 3 anos, ainda não publicadas aqui. A maioria veio de cobertura do Festival de Tiradentes, 2016 e 2017.

Além dessas contribuições, Taxi Teerã (Jafar Panahi, 2015) e (Afternoon) – Tsai Ming-Liang (2015) se encontram aqui.