what is'nt cinema

8/3/2019 What is'nt Cinema

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What Isn't Cinema?

Gerald Mast

THE LOGICIAN: You have got away from the problem which in-stigated the debate. In the first place, you were deliberatingwhether or not the rhinoceros which passed by just now was thesame one that passed by earlier, or whether it was another. That isthe question to decide.... Thus: you may have seen on two occa-sions a single rhinoceros bearing a single horn ... or you may haveseen on two occasions a single rhinoceros with two horns. .... oragain, you may have seen one rhinoceros with one horn, and thenanother also with a single horn .... or again, an initial rhinoceroswith two horns, followed by a second with two horns .... Now ifyou had seen ... if on the first occasion you had seen a rhinoceroswith two horns ... and on the second occasion, a rhinoceros withone horn. .... That wouldn't be conclusive either. .... For it ispossible that since its first appearance, the rhinoceros may have lostone of its horns, and that the first and second transit were stillmade by a single beast. .... It may also be that two rhinocerosesboth with two horns may each have lost a horn. .... If you couldprove that on the first occasion you saw a rhinoceros with one horn,either Asiatic or African ... and on the second occasion arhinoceros with two horns ... no matter whether African or Asiatic... we could then conclude that we were dealing with two differentrhinoceroses, for it is hardly likely that a second horn could growsufficiently in a space of a few minutes to be visible on the nose of arhinoceros.... That would imply one rhinoceros either Asiatic orAfrican ... and one rhinoceros either African or Asiatic. .... Forgood logic cannot entertain the possibility that the same creature beborn in two places at the same time ... which was to be proved.

BERENGER: That seems clear enough, but it doesn't answer thequestion.373


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CriticalInquiry December1974 375theorists raise. That has been done elsewhere.3 Of the two most impor-tant issues that have occupied the theorists, the first assesses the relation-ship between the film art and nature. Since a film photographs reality(an invalid major premise, but so the theory goes), what is its relationshipto that which it photographs? Film "contains" nature in a way that noother art (except perhaps still photography) contains nature itself. Theoverwhelming weight of theoretical argument (Bazin, Cavell, Kracauer,Metz) lies on the side of nature (since film photographs nature, its busi-ness is nature itself ). The dissenters (Eisenstein, Arnheim), who arguethat celluloid and the cinematographic process are as artificial as thematerials and methods of any other art, are in theoretical disfavor today.Their views, however, seem surprisingly close to the cinema practice ofthe last decade. Even Bazin's disciples-Francois Truffaut and Jean-LucGodard-use bizarre, intrusive, and artificial cinematic tricks (freeze-frames, accelerated and retarded motion, shockingly disruptive editing)that have more to do with the artifice of the recording and constructingprocess than the rendering of nature.

The weakness, however, of this nature-nurture controversy in thecinema is that a film does not necessarily photograph reality at all (forexample, those animated films I mention above). In fact, one can make afilm without photographing anything (both Man Ray and Len Lye drewor designed directly on the celluloid itself and printed the results). I haveseen "scratch films" that have been made by scratching lines into theemulsion of black leader with a sharp pin and then coloring the scratcheswith a '"Magic Marker" (a "Technicolor" scratch film, no less). Thephotographing of nature is an inherent trait of some kinds of cinema(admittedly of most kinds and of most films), but it is not an inherenttrait of cinema itself.The other central issue in the theory of film is the attempt to distin-

guish the uniqueness of the film art (or medium) from that of any otherart (or medium). This kind of discussion gives rise to the term "cine-matic," by which the writer vaguely means, "that which pertains to theunique and best qualities of the cinema art." But this issue also drowns ina sea of nondefinition and invalid assumption. First, because the "cinemaart" has not been defined, it is difficult to assess its inherent qualities(unique, best, or otherwise). Second, because so much attention has beengiven to the conflicting claims of art and nature, most enumerations ofthe cinema's "unique and best" qualities are deductions of its displaying

3. See the introductory essays for each of the sections in Mast and Cohen. There is also adevastating summary (and refutation) of these theories in an article by Francis Sparshott,"Basic Film Aesthetics," originally published in theJournal of AestheticEducation, vol. 5, no.2 (April 1971), but reprinted in Mast and Cohen, pp. 209-32.


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376 Gerald Mast What Isn't Cinema?a proper amount of nature (Bazin, Kracauer) or artifice (Arnheim,Eisenstein).

Third, and perhaps most critical in enumerating the cinema's "uniqueand best qualities," there is a difference between the unique and thebest-what may be distinguished as the pragmatic and the puristic posi-tions. The pragmatic theorist defines the cinema's "unique and bestqualities" as those which the cinema does particularly well. A film is"cinematic" if it does something that the cinema does well (or best). Forthe purist, however, the cinema's "unique and best qualities" are thosethings which the cinema, and only the cinema, can do. The "cinematic" isthat which is absolutely unique to the cinema. In this view, a novel oughtnot to include dialogue (for the drama does that), a play ought not toinclude narration (for the novel does that), and a film ought not toinclude plot, character, dialogue, still life, or any other ingredient of anyother art.

The purist would have the Logician on his side; his use of the term"cinematic" is certainly a valid consequence of the term "unique," whichhe uses in its proper sense. Unfortunately, the traditions and practices ofthe other arts are against him; novels use conversation, plays use narra-tion, operas and ballets use stories and characters, sculptures have usedcolor, paintings have told stories. Indeed a ballet of "pure" dance (MerceCunningham, for example) is merely one kind (or use) of ballet, just asthe film of "pure" cinema is only one kind or use of cinema.

On the contrary, the pragmatist certainly has pragma on his side.Unfortunately, in shifting the definition of the "cinematic" from theunique to that which cinema does well ("the best"), he has also shiftedaway from definition and toward evaluation and personal preference(for example, Kracauer's view that dancing and the chase are cinematicbecause cinema does them well, but dialogue is not because it does not).As a result, the terms "cinematic" and "uncinematic" are more oftensynonymous with good and bad-what the theorist likes or does not likein the cinema-than with unique characteristics of the cinema medium.In the sloppiest and most familiar film criticism, when the critic calls afilm uncinematic he means it was boring and he didn't like it.

No clearer example of the confusion inherent in the word "cinematic"exists than in its application to the films of Charles Chaplin. Chaplin is,by consensus, one of the top dozen (at least) filmmakers in everyone's"Pantheon," an "auteur"whose rich and long canon of films serves as itsown testament. But in acknowledging Chaplin's genius, critical opinionis also quite unified in finding him "uncinematic"-not dependent onany of the cinema's visual devices such as editing, costumes, decor, light-


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CriticalInquiry December1974 377ing, or anything to do with the visual image except his own hypnoticperformances. And those performances could (in fact did) exist on thestage as well as the screen. The critics "solve" the apparent contradictionby evading the issue and making Chaplin another of those convenienttheoretical exceptions-a genius of a performer who just happened torecord those performances on film. His films are brilliant but uncinemat-ic. If so, of what value is the concept of the cinematic if it is irrelevant tothe value of the cinema?

On the other hand, a few critics (Arnheim, who is particularly goodwith Chaplin, and myself)4 try to show how carefully but unobtrusivelyChaplin manipulated the unique devices of the cinema (camera angles,intimacy of composition, deliberate restraint with the editing process).But this approach is another kind of evasion; it merely shows that Chap-lin could manipulate the stylistic possibilities (the "rhetoric") of his art soas to make himself coherently and effectively communicative. But onecould say that all successful artists in all arts manipulate the stylisticpossibilities of their art so as to make themselves coherently and effec-tively communicative. This pragmatic defense of Chaplin's stylistic com-petence in no way aids the definition of the cinematic art and its uniquestylistic possibilities.

Perhaps no film has attracted as much and as unanimous theoreticalabuse as The Cabinetof Doctor Caligari. Bazin, Kracauer, and Panofskyagree that it is merely painting made to move (but so is animation; so arethe ballet sequences ofAn American n Paris and Singin' in theRain), that itis more a stylistic trick with the brush and canvas than with the camera andediting scissors, that it "prestylizes reality" rather than shoots reality insuch a way that it has style.5 Yet The Cabinetof Doctor Caligari still con-tinues to entertain, mystify, and captivate audiences over fifty years afterit was made. Can an effective piece of cinema be an illegitimate piece ofcinema? If illegitimate cinema can be good cinema, its legitimacy and allthe reasons for it are irrelevant. The commonsensical position is thatgood films must be examples of good cinema, and good cinema mustnecessarily be "cinematic." As Francis Sparshott states in the conclusionof his thorough and systematic refutation of cinema theories, "The sa-lient feature of film is the enormous range of its specific effects. . .. Inview of this inexhaustible flexibility of the medium, it is ludicrous to laydown general principles as to what is a good film. Those critics who do soare in most cases obviously fixated on the kind of film that was aroundwhen they were first moved by movies. ... take care of the facts and thevalues will take care of themselves."'

4. Mast, The ComicMind: Comedyand the Movies (New York, 1973), pp. 65-67.5. Erwin Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," in Mast and Cohen, pp.151-69.6. In Mast and Cohen, pp. 231-32.


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378 Gerald Mast WhatIsn't Cinema?This position is so obvious, the weight of evidence so heavily on itsside, that the interesting theoretical question that emerges from it is, whyhasn't it been so obvious to those theorists, who are neither blind norstupid? The answer lies partly in the complexity of what cinema is and

partly on the emotional commitment of audiences (both theorists andlaymen) to it. The difficulty lies both in the thing itself and in ourfeelings about the thing. In order to get at these difficulties it is necessaryat least to pose the problem correctly.

Film, Cinema,MovieThe accepted distinction between the terms "movie," "film," and"cinema" is merely connotative. We accept the terms as synonymous,assuming that their usage simply reflects the toneyness, chicness, or

pretentiousness of the critic. "Movie" is the most American of the three,the most "pop," the lowest brow. The term itself is a healthyAmericanism, a slangy contraction for moving picture that caught on inthe late teens and early twenties. Critics who use this term imply that amovie is fun, entertaining, enjoyable, easy, pleasant, trashy, silly,"camp," anything but "deep"-as in Judith Crist's classic description of Zas "a real movie movie." Significantly, America's most outstanding moviecritic-the critic who consciously thinks of film works as movies andinsists that they be discussed solely as an enjoyable, fun, entertaining,low-art form-is Pauline Kael. (The animus for her lengthy piece onCitizenKane was to demonstrate that the revered "art film" was actually agreat piece of low-art trash.) Appropriately, she called her first volumeof collected reviews I LostIt at theMovies. 7

A "film,"however, is more cultured, more intellectual, more genteel, amore distinguished work of "high seriousness." Significantly, America'soutstandingfilm critic-the critic who is consciously devoted to discuss-ing film works in terms of other serious works of art, using the criteriaand standards of those other arts-is John Simon. He appropriatelycalled his most significant collection of reviews Movies into Films.8"Cinema," for the American at least, is also a far more genteel andrespectable term than "movie," perhaps even classier than "film.""Cinema," however, tends to have a more generic meaning-for exam-ple, a film, but a piece of cinema; a movie, a film, but the movies, thecinema. Significantly, America's outstanding cinemacritic-the critic whoconsciously devotes himself to elevating popular American movies into aunique class of works of art that possesses a unique set of criteria and

7. Boston, 1965.8. New York, 1971.


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CriticalInquiry December1974 379categories of its own-is Andrew Sarris. He appropriately titled his mostimportant work on the subject The AmericanCinema.9 I might mention,parenthetically, that my decision to call my general history A ShortHistoryof theMovies1owas a calculated attempt at lightness. My colleagues, how-ever, often refer to the book as "your short history of cinema."

But there is a potential denotative difference in the terms as well. Thisdifference becomes clearer if one examines the specific object to whichthe term originally referred, in effect tracing the word back to its roots.Film is the material on which a moving picture is recorded. Its literalsynonym is celluloid, not "movie" or "cinema," for which "film"is a morepopular and less technical term. The film on which motion pictures arerecorded can be distinguished by (1) its width (8, 16, 35, 55, 65, and 70mm); (2) its length (number of feet, number of reels); (3) its ability torecord or reproduce colors (orthochromatic, panchromatic, the varioustwo- and three-color Technicolor processes, the various Eastmanmonopacks-Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Warnercolor, Metrocolor,etc.-as well as miscellaneous other colors and shades, many of whichhave thankfully come and gone-Sepiatone, Cinecolor, Prizmacolor,Trucolor, Tohocolor, etc.); and (4) its speed (ranging from very fast-requiring little light-to very slow-requiring a lot of light).

Film is also the material of still photography, but that material differsfrom the material of motion pictures in several ways. First, photographicfilm rarely comes in widths narrower than 35 mm. Since the clarity anddetail of the individual photograph is so important to still photography,it tends to use larger gauges of film which produce a sharper detail andtexture. A second major difference is that the length of film for stillphotography is irrelevant to the artistic effect of the results (it is ex-tremely relevant to the commerce of the photographic industry). Thelongest common length of film, thirty-six exposures, would run througha moving picture projector in 1 /2 seconds. A third major difference isthat the material of motion picture recording is also the identical mate-rial of motion picture viewing. The same kind of celluloid that runsthrough the camera runs through the projector. Although a still photo-graph was originally reproduced from the same material from which itwas made (when the original material was some form of glass or metalplate) and can still be so reproduced (when the photograph is mountedas a 35-mm slide), it is extremely common for the final result of the stillphotograph to be reproduced from some material other than the origi-nal celluloid (an 8 x 10 glossy photograph; a newspaper photo). But thematerial of motion pictures has always been made of the identical cel-

9. New York, 1969.10. Indianapolis, 1971.


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380 Gerald Mast WhatIsn't Cinema?luloid in both the creation and reproduction processes." This scientificfact will have aesthetic consequences.

To speak of a motion picture'sfilmic qualities, then, is to speak of itsspatial and compositional values which it shares with still photography,that other art whose material is film. This is precisely SiegfriedKracauer's subject in his Theoryof Film,12 a book which begins with alengthy section on the properties of still photography and which thenapplies those properties to motion pictures. The "inherent affinities"and "basic properties" that Kracauer finds in motion pictures are inevi-tably filmic (i.e., photographic) ones that also exist in stillphotography-the accidental, the unstaged, the big, the small, the cata-strophic, inanimate objects, etc. Kracauer does not include a chapter onediting (although he rather obligatorily plods through any number ofother subjects such as the actor, the script, etc.); one of his few refer-ences to the temporal dimension in cinema is a section discussing move-ment as inherently cinematic (which he handles in a way that implies thata moving picture is just that-a still photograph that you can get tomove). Although Kracauer includes a lengthy chapter on sound, hisexhaustive analysis is indeed exhausting without illuminating the poten-tial problems of creating a still photograph (which is complete in itself)that makes noise. The strength of thefilmic approach is its attention tospace; its inevitable weaknesses are the handling of time and sound-neither of which have anything to do withfilm. (That is why the lengthof film is relevant to motion but not still photography and why the widthof film is more important to still than to motion photography.)

Precisely the same is true of Rudolf Arnheim. His title, Film as Art,13is another (perhaps accidentally) apt one; Arnheim's interest is alsoprimarily in the filmic (spatial, photographic) elements (not surprisingfor an art historian who concentrated on the effects of the visual arts)and, secondarily, in the question of how a mechanical device that recordsnature can, by definition, be called an art (also not a surprising questionfor a German aesthetician of forty years ago-the work was originallywritten in 1933-but a fairly uninteresting one today). In developing hisview of the gap between film art (i.e., artifice) and nature, Arnheim'suniquely cinematic qualities are actuallyfilmic ones, as applicable to stillphotography as to motion pictures-the conversion of three-dimensional life into a two-dimensional, plane surface; the reduction ofthe appearance of depth; the use of tonal lighting and the absence of

11. I will dismiss as irrelevant any of those recording materials-particularly Marey'sglass plate and paper-roll film-in cinema prehistory. The striking discovery that suddenlyled to the invention of the cinema was George Eastman's celluloid, which W. K. L. Dicksonordered from Eastman for Edison's motion picture experiments in 1888.12. New York, 1965.13. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957.


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CriticalInquiry December1974 381color (1933); the use of lenses for altering relative distances; the absenceof all sensual stimuli except the visual. Arnheim devotes one section to auniquely cinematic property-the absence of the space-time continuum,by which he means the way that editing alters spatial and temporalcontinuity. He also worries more about the problem of combining soundwith a photograph than Kracauer (Arnheim's answer was that you don't;the picture is complete in itself and to add sound to that which is com-plete is necessarily a redundancy). Our Logician may have been pleasedby this theoretical view, but over forty years of experience with soundfilms have proved it ludicrous. It is, however, a consequence of afilmicapproach.

The term "cinema" derives from the machine that the brothersLumiere invented in 1895, the Cinimatographe.This influential machinecleverly allows us to bypass, albeit temporarily, a rather trickyquestion-whether the essential cinematic operation is the recordingorthe projection of images-since that Lumiere machine photographed,printed, and projected films. It did everything to a strip of film that thecinema can do-except edit it. To speak of cinema, then, is to speak of theunique way that the cinematic process uses the film material. It adds thevector of time to the filmic dimension of space; it complicates the simplespatiality of the still photograph by adding elements of continuity andsuccession (either the illusion of movement, the continuum of sound, orsome other principle of temporal succession).14 In G. W. Lessing's terms,film (still photography) is a spatial art-its elements exist simultaneouslyin space-whereas cinema is a time art-its elements appear sequentiallyin time. The essential cinematic operation is the linking of spatial im-ages, and in her essay comparing film and theater, Susan Sontag as-serted that "there is no peculiarly cinematic way ... of linking images,"15by which she meant that there was no more or less cinematic way thanany other, since linking images was in itself cinematic. However, just oneof the many indications of the complexity of the cinema art is that it isperhaps the only true space-and-time art (or certainly the art in whichspace and time play a full and almost equal role).16

14. The usual way of defining the cinematic process is that it simply provides the illusionof movement. Many pieces of cinema do not contain such an illusion, however (the finalfreeze-frame to The 400 Blows; Robert Breer's Fist Fight, which produces an illusion ofassault but not movement, since it does not include enough related frames in succession togive the illusion that anything is moving). Further, sound is as much a part of the cinema'stemporality as its visual "movement." Stanley Cavell demonstrates (in The World Viewed[New York, 1971], pp. 16-23) that sound is even less divisible than the visual imagery; it isabsolutely continuous while the image can be divided into frames.15. Susan Sontag, "Film and Theater," in Mast and Cohen, p. 253.16. The other theatrical arts--drama, opera, ballet-are also space-and-time arts, but asRudolf Arnheim shows (pp. 199-229), the temporal element is clearly dominant in all ofthem. It is because the sound cinema would lack any such dominant element that Arnheimfinds it an artistic barbarity.


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382 GeraldMast WhatIsn't Cinema?The central controversies in the cinematic approach are, first, whetherspace or time is primary in the cinema (whether the filmic or cinematic

element is dominant) and, second, whether the essential cinematic oper-ation is the recording or projecting process. Although it has never beenperceived in these terms, the famous Eisenstein-Bazin "debate," cer-tainly the most interesting and best developed theoretical controversy infilm aesthetics, revolves around precisely these two issues. On the sur-face, Eisenstein argues that the cinema communicates not by its record-ing of images but by the effects-both emotional and intellectual-ofjoining the images together. Bazin argues that Eisenstein's methodbreaks the wholeness of nature into tiny bits (both spatially and tempo-rally), whereas the cinema's guiding myth is man's drive to get nature intohis power by recreating it whole. Beneath these arguments, however, forEisenstein, time (succession) is primary, while for Bazin it is space. Andfor Eisenstein the cinematic event is in the projection process (after afilm has been shot, edited, and assembled), while for Bazin it is in therecording process (the camera's capturing nature whole). They are bothright (which also means they are both half-right). There is a potentialtheoretical (and systematic) superiority in Eisenstein, however, whichseems worth mentioning today when Bazin's position is so much moreaccepted and parroted. Bazin's answer to the question, what is cinema? is(in the terms presented above) that cinema is film that moves; Eisensteinat least answers that cinema is uniquely cinema.

A second theoretical issue that springs from the uniquely cinematicway of using film-the fact that cinema is sequential-is its comparisonto other sequential human processes that serve the purposes of bothcommunication and art-namely, language. Just as verbal (or linguistic)languages can produce communication between a speaker and listeneras well as works of art (novels, poems, etc.), the cinema can both com-municate (the "listener"-i.e., audience-understands the "speaker's"statement-for example, how Nanook catches fish) and create works ofart. The common view that there is a "grammar and rhetoric" of cinema,that there is a "language" of cinema, indicates that there is some sense inwhich a sequence of visual images is analogous to a sequence of words.Because these theorists are sensitive to the unique claims of cinema andof visual communication, they call their study not that of cinema lan-guage (which smacks too much of verbal concepts) but of cinema semiol-ogy.

The semiologist answers the question, what is cinema? by calling it asequential semiological system that communicates through its manipula-tion of space (for example, the way a particular lens and camera anglemake a belligerent man in the foreground dwarf a trembling victim inthe rearground), of time (for example, cutting from the attacker and


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CriticalInquiry December1974 383victim to a slashing knife), of the objects in the shot (the faces of attackerand victim, their clothes, voices, movements), of additional structuralinformation (what we have seen these people do previously), etc. Buteven the world's most influential semiological theorist of the cinema,Christian Metz, is wary of the analogies between the cinema and verballanguages and uncertain about how useful semiological concepts willprove in the study of cinema.

First, Metz correctly demonstrates that there is nothing comparable inthe cinema to the word (or moneme, or smallest unit of meaning) inverbal languages. The smallest unit of meaning in the cinema is equiva-lent to one of the largest units of meaning in linguistics. In cinema, thatunit is the shot (notthe frame, since that has afilmic value but no cinemat-ic meaning), which Metz finds at least as complex as a complete verbalstatement or sentence-if not paragraph. The least complicated unit ofcinematic meaning is not "cat"but, "There is a cat" (and, almost inevita-bly, at the same time, "walking," "gray with black stripes," "slowly," "inthe sunlight," "next to the brick wall," "where there are also three gar-bage cans," etc.).

Second, Metz points out that cinema is a "language" without a code (orwith a very weak one). For example, the statement, "The cat has fourpaws," has a codified linguistic meaning and differs markedly from acomplicated poetic trope, such as the one T. S. Eliot uses in "TheLovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which he describes a catlike fog.Metz's point is that almost all effective cinema shots are complicated andoriginal tropes; they can only be understood in their own unique termsbecause the precise content of a shot is infinitely variable. Some cinemat-ic structures have indeed become codified (for example, we understandthat the protagonist is playing tennis in Strangerson a Train at the sametime that the villain is trying to plant a clue that will implicate him in acrime but that the ox in Strike is not necessarily slaughtered at the sametime as the workers in their tenements). But many of the cinematic signsthat have become most codified (for example, the western villain wearsblack and the hero white) are precisely those which the competentcinematic "speaker" avoids.

This feature of usage differs strikingly from that for linguistic struc-tures. "The cat has four paws" is not a cliche but a simple (yet clearlycodified) assertion. "It's raining cats and dogs" is a cliche, but it is sobecause it is a stale trope. So too are the black and white hats-furthersupport for the contention that the cinema "language" is composed ofnothing but tropes. We shall return to this issue of cinema "language" orsemiology, for it produces other kinds of theoretical problems. But fornow it should be clear that the very analogy between cinema and linguis-


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384 Gerald Mast WhatIsn't Cinema?tics is a consequence of the unique cinematic process, deriving from theCinematographe,which recorded and projected a sequential series of im-ages.

Now a movie is a specific kind of Cinematographe ecording. Lackingany term to describe the new form of entertainment that theCinematographe pawned, "movie" succeeded such ancestors as "photoplay," "motion picture," and "moving picture," eventually replacingthem in the vocabularies of its audiences. A movie differs from theprocess of Cinimatographerecording in that it has come to fulfill a con-ventionalized length (two hours, plus or minus twenty minutes); it uses anumber of narrative elements borrowed from literary forms (plot;character; "an imitation of a human action"; a beginning, middle, andend; cause-and-effect motivation); it is produced within a commercialstructure specifically developed for producing it (the commercial systemof financing, distributing, and exhibiting movies); and it serves a specificaudience function (entertainment-although "entertainment" in thesense that it might stimulate and provoke rather than simply please andpass the time). Although the term "movie" is an Americanism, its impli-cations can be applied to foreign "art films" as well, which, despite theirintellectual and stylistic differences, share the same assumptions oflength, narrativity, commerce, and audience function as Americanmovies." Although there are any number of other uses of cinematicrecording-"informational" (travel films, "how-to-do-things" films,newsreels, documentary films),1" "experimental" (abstract, purely for-mal, perceptual), etc.-most theoretical discussions of the cinematic pro-cess (or "language") have concerned themselves with how it has beenapplied to the movie form. A key difference between cinema and movie,then, is that the former is a process and the latter a form that shapes theprocess.

This distinction is significant because when the theorist asks the ques-tion, what is cinema? it is worthwhile knowing precisely what he is ask-ing. Very few theorists (Eisenstein and Metz come closest) have indeedasked, what is cinema?Many have asked, what is a movie? or, how does amovie use the cinema? or, how ought a movie to use film? For example,Andre Bazin's real question is: what is the spatial principle of moviesgiven the fact that the cinema records sequential images on film? Bazin ismore concerned with synthesizing the other two terms (movie and film)than he is with cinema. Stanley Cavell subtitles his study, The WorldViewed,Reflectionson the Ontologyof Film, but he actually reflects on theontology of movies. Like Bazin, Cavell links movie and film, arguing thatthe essence of film (photography) is to capture the world automatically

17. My ShortHistoryreally is of the movies.18. These categories are extremely imprecise but are commonly accepted.


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Critical Inquiry December1974 385and the essence of movies is to project that world successively. His pre-cise definition of movies is "a succession of automatic worldprojections."'9 By equating movie and cinema, Cavell specifically deniesthe legitimacy of those kinds of cinema that manipulate the "pure"properties of the cinematic language (i.e., various experimental, ab-stract, modernist films) because they do not contain "the world" but onlythe filmmaker's "narcissistic" references to his own fantasies and therhetorical devices of the cinema itself. For Cavell, the cinema is themovies. He even alters the concept of a cinematic medium when heclaims that the cinema is not a medium but uses many media, which hedefines simply as "ways of making sense." For Cavell, the cinema'smedia, its ways of making sense, are the familiar genres of Hollywoodmovies and familiar types of Hollywood stars-gangster, western; theDandy, the Man, and the Woman; etc. This kind of argument producesstrikingly different conclusions from those which define the cinema interms of its unique properties as a recording process, and it begins alap-dissolve into the next issue.

But, first, to recapitulate, movies are a specific form of cinema-otherscould be defined in terms of lengths other than (+) two hours, structuralassumptions other than narrativity, different commercial bases, and dif-ferent audience relationships. Cinema is a specific kind of recording onfilm (others would be variations on still-or single-frame-photography). And film is the most general term that contains the twoothers; although it may have been paradoxical to argue that there couldbe motion pictures without pictures (without photography), it might bereassuring to know that there has never been a film without film. Thethree terms reflect the fact that a motion picture is a material (film),process (cinema), and form (movie). The point of distinguishing amongthese three terms is not as an exercise in sophistry and word splitting orto force audiences into the alien exercise of differentiating amongterms they accept as synonyms. Theorists, however, should be morediscriminating, for using the terms synonymously has caused genuinetheoretical confusion, and more precise definitions can reveal preciselywhat question the theorist intends to answer.

Form and LanguageIs cinema a unique form or a unique language? There is obviously asense in which a movie is analogous to drama (or novel, painting, sym-phony, ballet, sculpture) in that it is a complete and self-contained artis-tic entity that uses its own medium (its unique "language," or material, or19. Cavell, p. 72.


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386 Gerald Mast What Isn't Cinema?both). But there is also a sense in which cinema is analogous to othersemiological systems of communication (linguistic systems; evocations ofshapes and colors; symbolic physical gestures; evocations of successivepitches, timbres, and volumes). And, finally, there is a sense in whichfilm is analogous to the materials of the other arts (canvas and paint,wood, stone, sounds, print, etc.). The material of the literary arts caneither be sound (parallel to other forms of oral communication) or writ-ing (parallel to all forms of printed communication); their semiologicalprocess (or "language") is linguistic; and their forms are such things asnovel, story, drama, comedy, tragedy, narrative poem, lyric poem, etc.(depending on the criteria of formal categorization). To ask, what is oralcommunication? is obviously a very different question from asking, whatis language? or, what is a novel? When asking, what is cinema? thesedifferent kinds of questions have been less obvious.

The theoretical bias has been toward an exclusive concern for the filmmaterial and the cinematic language without a proper concern for thecinema's various forms. The theorist frequently dismisses the formalquestion by condemning these forms as impure borrowings from other(usually literary) arts. But this tendency is unwarranted and dangeroussince a medium-if the term is to mean anything at all-can only signifythe synthesis of an art's material and its "language" with the structuralforms by which these elements have been organized (or might be or-ganized). One danger is that the theorist can make an erroneous deduc-tion based on an invalid definition of the art's material. In effect, myrefutation of photography as the basis of the cinema art was an attemptto show that film and not the photograph was the material of cinema.But this tendency can be even more dangerous when the theorist con-centrates exclusively on the cinematic language because the evidence ofall the cinema's forms is that it has no language. It has, rather, manylanguages.

One conclusion that seems quite obvious when surveying the diverseforms of cinema (movies, cartoons, documentaries, abstract-experimental, etc.) is that it is the most hybrid art form in human ex-perience. It is a truly American art in the sense that it is the "melting pot"of virtually all the other arts. Cinema obviously has much in commonwith music. First, most forms of cinema use music (and always have usedmusic), underscoring the visual or narrative effects with tonal accompa-niment. The use of music is as common to abstract films (like those ofOskar Fischinger and Len Lye) as it is to perceptual films (the musiqueconcrete in the films of Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Stan Brakhage,Michael Snow), as it is to animated films (Disney reached his artistic adult-hood only when sound allowed him to synchronize his visual effects withmusic), as it is to movies (for example, Gustav Mahler's contribution to


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CriticalInquiry December1974 387Death in Venice, George Gershwin's to An American in Paris, DukeEllington's to Anatomy of a Murder, or Bernard Herrmann's to CitizenKane). Interestingly, none of the puristic theorists (Gene Youngblood,Annette Michelson, Gerald O'Grady) who want to purge the cinema ofits impure literary elements (i.e., narrativity) is much bothered by itsimpure musical ones.20

There is, however, another and much subtler sense in which musicand cinema are analogous. If one can define music as a succession ofrelated sounds producing kinetic (physical) and emotional effects butnot necessarily conceptual ones, one can equally define the cinema as asuccession of related images that can produce kinetic and emotionaleffects in addition to (or even rather than) conceptual ones. Eisensteinwas perhaps film history's most sensitive cinema "musician," and if onereads his montage theory carefully, one can see that he is as concernedwith weaving a "musical" spell with his editing as he is in producingintellectual recognition and political results. I discovered Eisenstein'shypnotic music during one of my yearly screenings of Potemkin.When Ilisten to music I am an inveterate head-bobber, unconsciously using myhead to keep time with the physical and rhythmic sensations of the music(I can only imagine what this does to people seated behind me at con-certs). I suddenly became conscious during the screening of Potemkinthat I was doing the same thing-bobbing my head in rhythm withEisenstein's montage. His individual strips of celluloid contain a visualtone, and splicing them together necessarily produces a rhythm, "vol-ume," and mood (for example, the languid tranquility of the ships slid-ing through the fog in Odessa's harbor or the dissonant cacaphony ofthe violent slaughter on the Odessa Steps), just as the succession of notesdoes in music.The films of Robert Breer are also extremely concerned with a visual"music," and .his films develop a kind of violent, smashing, assaultive"melody" (often by splicing twenty-four different frames together persecond or adding a rhythm by producing each second of film from six

20. In ExpandedCinema(New York, 1970), Gene Youngblood argues that all films withnarrative elements are "redundant." Only those films which are pure and free in theirmanipulations of the visual language of cinema can expand consciousness. Gerald O'Grady(more influential for his lectures than for any published articles) also makes the moralist'sargument. The "purely" cinematic puts people in touch with their inner lives, dreams, andunconscious, thereby expanding awareness and strengthening the soul (O'Grady's originalfield was medieval allegory). Annette Michelson's argument is that of the modernist artcritic rather than the moralist (her values are also often clearer in lectures than in herpublished writings, although the inferences of her revised discussion of "Film and theRadical Aspiration" [in Mast and Cohen] are clear). For Michelson, the manipulation ofpurely visual values in the cinema parallels the way that she sees all the arts progressingtoward purity in this century.


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388 Gerald Mast What Isn't Cinema?four-frame patterns). Like so many "experimental" films, Breer's areperfect test tubes for isolating cinematic elements. This fact does notnecessarily make them better or even "purer" cinema, but it does makethem good test tubes, since any useful experiment isolates the significantvariables and eliminates the influence of any others.

If the cinema has much in common with music, it is not surprising thatit also shares traits with ballet. In its underscoring of visual movementwith music, the cinema parallels the familiar medium of the dance. Thisparallel is especially obvious in two kinds of films. In silent comedies thelink with ballet is clear in the clown's performing feats of incrediblephysical dexterity, contrasting the supple, graceful, lithe movements (asin Chaplin and Keaton) or the frantic contortions (as in Lloyd, Turpin,or Larry Semon) of his physical instrument with the static space thatsurrounds him. And that is dance. After all, it was W. C. Fields whomisanthropically remarked, after seeing Chaplin in The GreatDictator,"He's nothing but a damn ballet dancer." And Fields was partly right(Chaplin was also a few other things). But the balletic principle is equallystrong in certain kinds of animation and abstract films (Disney, Fisch-inger, Lye, Whitney) in which the hypnotic movement of shapes,forms, and colors on the screen is emphasized, punctuated, and under-scored by music on the sound track. The silent comedies (especiallyChaplin and Keaton) choreograph a ballet of physical bodies in space;the abstract or animation films choreograph a ballet of shapes, forms,and colors against a stable and defining matrix.

Clearly the cinema shares visual and compositional assumptions withpainting. The screen is a two-dimensional surface; it can compose withinthat frame by using both shapes and colors; it is capable of using princi-ples of perspective, depth, and balance. A movie also shares visual andspatial characteristics with its partner-in-film, the still photograph-itsuse of lenses for distortion, perspective, and emphasis; its use of lightingfor tone, texture, and depth-of-field; its selecting, balancing, and em-phasizing of its photographic subjects.

But it is equally clear that the cinema shares traits with the literary arts.A movie contains all six of Aristotle's elements of the drama-plot,character, thought, diction (in two senses: the diction of the dialogueand the cinematic "diction" of the movie's semiological system), melody,and spectacle. Yet a movie has as much in common with narrative fictionas with the drama. Like the novel, it uses a focused narration (cameraparallels narrator); like the novel, it is much freer in its manipulation oftime and space than the realist, Ibsenesque drama. Indeed, the cinemareveals its hybrid essence (or non-essence) in its perfect synthesis ofAristotle's dramatic and narrative "Modes." We perceive the events in


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CriticalInquiry December1974 389the dramatic "mode" directly (they play themselves out directly beforeour eyes); we conceive the event from what we are only told about in thenarrative "mode" (we get the events from some speaker's point ofview).21 The cinema does both-alternately or simultaneously. Somescenes seem to be played directly before our eyes without comment;other sequences (say, the familiar montage of the actress rising to star-dom that uses speeding trains, newspaper headlines, glimpses of thecurtain going up and down, close-ups of applauding hands) are sum-marily told. But the cinema actually dramatizes and narrates at the sametime, for even those scenes that seem to be played directly without com-ment can only come to us through the eye of the camera, which selectsall the details and reactions we are allowed to see.

Given the analogies with these six other arts, and given their undeni-able contributions to the effects of some or all kinds of film, it would notseem unwarranted to claim that the cinema communicates not only bymanipulating its own "language" but by manipulating the "languages" ofall the arts that contribute to it. How do we understand (both com-prehend and experience) a moment in a movie? Probably, the musicgives us one clue; the dialogue actually tells us something more; thepersonalities and attitudes of the characters we have met gives us furtherinformation; the lighting imparts it tone and mood; the cutting inducesa proper feeling and rivets our attention to the essential points of con-centration; the spatial balance guides our eye and our interest to wherethey belong; the faces of the actors tell us something more; the camera'spositioning and activity literally give us its slant on the action; the func-tion of the scene in the film's plot conveys its importance and relevance;the colors (if the film uses color) saturate the action with their reso-nances. If one tried to eliminate all languages from cinema except theuniquely cinematic "language," one might well be left with a silent"scratch film" or one of Man Ray's collages.

To take a specific example, how do we know that Susan Alexander hasattempted suicide in CitizenKane? Two specific signs, one visual and onesound, mark the precise moment of an action that is merely implied.First, we watch a light bulb that suddenly snaps off, its filament glowingbut dying gradually over a period of several seconds. Accompanying the"dying" light bulb is the "dying fall" of Susan Alexander's reedy sopranovoice, its nasal screech suddenly interrupted by a process that sounds asif it too has been snapped off, but the stylus remains on the disk while theturntable runs down. The voice falls and groans to a stop, preciselymirroring the slow death of the light bulb's filament. The next cut re-

21. George Bluestone, in Novels into Film (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966) (and ex-cerpted in Mast and Cohen, pp. 291-301), devotes his attention to these two modes as wellas to the artistic consequences of perception as opposed to conception.


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390 Gerald Mast What Isn't Cinema?veals the empty bottle of sleeping pills with an inert Susan Alexanderlying in her bed beside the nightstand.

But both the light bulb and the screeching voice have been previouslyestablished as motifs in Susan's relationship with Kane and emblematicof her singing career. The light bulb has repeatedly blinked on and offat the start of each of her disastrous operatic performances; it is a thea-ter work-light, whose extinguishing signifies the beginning of yetanother humiliating performance. This time when the light bulb blinksoff and then dies, along with Susan's voice, it signifies the last time shewill ever use her voice on a stage. That voice-its reedy, scratchythinness-has also been clearly established (her first "performance" forKane in her shabby parlor, when she has a toothache and he is splatteredwith mud; her traumatic singing lessons in the new parlor that Kane'smoney pays for; her repetitive failures on stage).But both the bulb and the voice also have clear relationships to otherstructural, psychological, and intellectual issues in the film that have alsobeen established-Kane's decision to use Susan to vindicate himself withthe "people" after they defeated him for governor; the collapse of hismarriage after the revelation of Kane's "love nest with 'singer' "; thehumiliating opera tour in which Susan meets jeer after jeer (except inthe Kane newspapers); the frantic pressure of performing in city aftercity, night after night (implied by Welles' montage of newspapers, back-

stage preparations, curtains going up, etc.). The implication of the dyinglight bulb and voice is not just suicide but Susan's decision to end animpossible and humiliating existence once and for all, in the only waythat seems possible. And the only way to understand that action from thefilm's semiology is to understand the whole film.

For this reason I am somewhat skeptical about the ultimate value andeventual usefulness of cinema semiology. Any attempt to codify asemiological system of the cinema must take into account every factor inthe preceding paragraphs (and probably a lot more) in every shot ofevery film. Peter Wollen, a leading British apologist for semiology,22once told me how he applied his study of signs to Citizen Kane. In agraduate seminar, he assigned one student to examine the contributionof the music, another of the dialogue, another of the acting, another ofthe camera work, another of structure, another of lighting, another ofmontage, another of staging (or blocking), etc. By studying each of thesecontributions, and their interrelationships, they could note the strategiesof each, the points of convergence or of divergence, of harmony andcounterpoint, and thereby develop a full and accurate statement about

22. His major work is Signs and Meaning in the Cinema,rev. ed. (Bloomington, Ind., andLondon, 1972).


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CriticalInquiry December1974 391the film's intentions and effects. But isn't this merely the application of"New Criticism" to the cinema? I will grant that this is an admirablyrigorous application, but the best "New Criticism," whether of cinema orof any other art, should always be rigorous-a woeful lack of most filmcriticism. Just as the critic of the novel must take into account both thework's content and its literary devices for conveying the content (espe-cially since its form is its content and the two are interdependent), thecritic of the cinema must also examine content, cinematic devices, andthe dependent relationship between them. Wollen admitted that anyrigorous film critic necessarily practiced semiology. So what else is new?

The fact that a movie uses so many semiological systems, so many"languages," implies that it is an inherently "impure" art. There are, ofcourse, other arts that are similarly and necessarily "impure." As Arn-heim develops in his Film as Art, all the theatrical arts are inherently"impure" (opera combines literary values [narrative], music, and visualstimuli; dance combines the same three, but in differing proportions;drama combines narrativity, sound ["melody" is more general thanmusic and includes the sound of speech], and the visual).23 Aristotlerecognized this "impurity" in drama when he defined spectacle andmelody as two physical effects of the drama that cannot possibly exist inthe narrative mode. And for this reason Aristotle found drama thesuperior art in that it contained everything that narrative did and thensome.

Aristotle, however, did not perhaps realize that the consequence of a"pure" art was an infinitely greater complexity in manipulating the de-vices and effects of that single system. For that reason, both lyric poetryand, even more obviously in the twentieth century, the novel have beenable to accomplish far more complicated manipulations of languagethan the drama (compare Beckett's plays with his novels; comparelonesco's stream of fairly simple puns, cliches, and spoonerisms withProust's and Joyce's complex streams of consciousness). Painting andmusic (without a text or "program") are two other arts related to cinemathat can attain a kind of purity since they manipulate only a single kindof physical stimulus and a single semiological system. But the evidenceseems to indicate that purity in the cinema is, first, questionably possible.What is there in the cinema that is absolutely unique to it except succes-sion? But not a succession of images, for images are the borrowings fromother arts. And, second, to attain purity in the cinema is questionablydesirable. To eliminate any of the cinema's communicative systemsmight prove an interesting individual experiment but is clearly a kind ofemasculation.23. Arnheim, pp. 199-229.


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392 Gerald Mast WhatIsn't Cinema?Another way of examining the same issue is to apply the familiardistinction between beauty and utility to the cinema. Just as in prose we

recognize a utilitarian kind of writing (either called "expository," whosepurpose is information, or "rhetoric," whose purpose is persuasion) andanother kind called "poetic," whose purpose is beauty, one can distin-guish between utilitarian films-for example, an army training film forrecruits on "How to Make Your Bed" (this film exists, I assure you)-andmovies (say, Citizen Kane). But as with the other arts, the distinctionbetween utility and beauty is cloudy in both theory and practice. Thereare many pieces of utilitarian prose that are extremely beautiful in theirstyle, structure, or thought (to name a few obvious examples, Milton'sAreopagitica, Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," Mencken's "On Being anAmerican"). Several authors of "poetic" works-for example, Brechtand Shaw-insist that a work of art cannot be beautiful if it is not alsouseful. There are at least two arts-architecture and pottery-that de-vote themselves equally to the beauty and the functionality of the work,and whose beauty is a function of its utility.

So too, although it is simple in cinema to distinguish between "How toMake Your Bed" and CitizenKane it is not so easy to distinguish betweenNanook of theNorth and CitizenKane. Indeed, the best documentary (ornonfiction) films are considered best not because they contain the mostinformation but because they are the most beautiful, effective, com-municative, and interesting human documents (i.e., precisely the samecritical criteria as for movies). Indeed, there are several films (Potemkin,October,Open City) that are claimed by historians of both the documen-tary and the fictional traditions.

The relevance of this discussion to the general issue of cinema formsand languages is to provide yet another reminder that the medium doesnot have clear-cut categories of uses, effects, and devices but a spectrumof shades of usage that imperceptibly melt and fade into one another.An educational film does not differ from a movie (which, in turn, doesnot differ from an animated film) in being a fundamentally differentthing but in applying the same languages and devices in differing com-binations and proportions. "How to Make Your Bed" does not differfrom CitizenKane in its not using camera angles, lighting effects, lenses,human participants, narration, dialogue, structure, editing, music, etc. Ituses the same "languages" as the important work of art; it simply usesthem differently to accomplish its own ends. Indeed, CitizenKane con-tains this identical inference within itself in the difference between thecinema style of the early section that parodies "The March of Time" andthe styles of the succeeding "fictional" sections, not to mention the dif-fering styles of each of those sections so as to suit the specific narrator ofeach (Thatcher, Leland, Susan, etc.) and the specific period of Kane'slife it describes.


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CriticalInquiry December1974 393The question, what is cinema? differs from the question, what is goodcinema? The question, what values are inherent in the art? differs from,

what values are best for the art? Rather than distinguishing betweenworks as cinema or noncinema, it would be more honest to distinguishbetween them as good cinema and bad. "How to Make Your Bed" maybe as competent technically as CitizenKane at achieving its ends; it mayeven achieve them as well or better (a snappily made bed as opposed to aman bored by the saga of Charles Foster Kane). One can only find CitizenKane the superior work by discussing the superiority of its ends-andthat means formulating artistic values, not defining the medium and itslanguage. Michael Snow's Wavelength(an excruciatingly but fascinatinglyboring forty-five-minute zoom shot of a single room, considered a chefd'oeuvreof the perceptual, experimental film) is either superior or in-ferior to Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (a trashy, Lana Turner melo-drama of 1959, considered a chefd'oeuvreby auteurcritics) by being betteror worse cinema, not in being more or less. The question now is whetherit is possible to define cinema in a way that does not exclude the legiti-macy of any of its irrefutably legitimate forms and then deduce a set ofvalues that can apply to all those legitimate forms.

what is'nt cinema

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