A trip to the movies: 100 years of film as art.

"Film is the art of the twentieth century:" - Hans Richter. 1971 You can be grateful that my invention is not for sale. for it would undoubtedly ruin you:" - Auguste Lumiere, 1885 "It isn't worth it:" - Thomas Edison when asked if he wanted to extend the Kinescope copyright to England and France, 1891

A trip to the movies-is one of the most widely shared experiences in our cultUre; perhaps that is why we are so nonchalant about it. From near and far, as individUals, families, dates, or friends, we file sporadically into the movie theater, there gradually to merge into an audience. The house lights dim, the projector light bursts onto the screen, and we begin a journey of sounds and images.

The sentiment of some early filmmakers that cinema had no future seems ironically humorous today in light of the international output of films and the industry's huge budgets and profits. But a critical look et how far we have come and what has been accomplished adds some spice to that sentiment--and perhaps a tinge of unexpected veracity.

In the Beginning...

A funny thing about the invention of movies: it didn't just happen. There was no one singular event that marks the definitive invention of the cinema. Motion pictures evolved from a series of disparate but merging ideas, devices, people, and circumstances over hundreds of years, finally culminating in the late nineteenth century in the form we are familar with today.

Robertson's Fantasmagorie (a great name!) was just one of the celebrated "magic lanterns" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These devices were the first to contain light, source, image, and projecting lens all in one unit. Illusionists would travel the countryside with their magic lanterns strapped to their backs and would present to their audiences a series of images (ghosts and demons were especially popular) projected onto walls, sheets, or even billows of smoke.

"Motion toys," with such exotic names as the Phenakistoscope, the Traumatrope, and the Zoetrope (literally, wheel of life), became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century. These devices consisted of images on strips of paper attached to a rotating cylindrical drum; when viewed while spinning, the images produced an illusion of movement. Motion toys were based upon a principle of perception called persistence of vision: the eye retains an image in memory for a very brief period after seeing it. In 1824, Roget (of Thesaurus fame) was the first to suggest that, because of this principle, a very rapid sequence of images will give the illusion of motion. A related effect is the phi phenomenon, in which two lights placed close together are alternately turned on and off. A viewer perceives motion: one light appears to be moving back and forth. If the lights are different colors, then one light appears to jump back and forth but switch color in the middle where there is no light at all! These simple demonstrations reveal the startling fact that the world of our experience is largely created in our head.

The modern cinema, of course, is dependent upon the same principle. The amazing fact is that a "movie" does not actually show movement. A series of still frames flashed quickly before the eye (usually 24 frames per second) creates the perceptual effect--a motion picture. It seems that movies are illusions in more ways than one might have thought.

Three landmark events led to the cinema in its present form. In 1888, George Eastman developed a light sensitive paper (later celluloid) strip on a roll that he called film. Soon afterward, William Dickson, a British employee of Thomas Edison, developed the sprocket mechanism for the vertical advancement of a roll of film which he had "perforated" Finally, French brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere, who ran a photographic equipment company in Lyons, invented the Cinematograph--a machine capable of recording images on film and then later projecting the frames in succession at a very rapid speed onto a large screen.

It was on March 10, 1895, when the Lumiere brothers first used their hand-cranked Cinematograph to project images from film to screen. On December 28 of that year, in Paris, the brothers treated a paying audience to the first public showing of films. On screen that night were ten of their films, totalling 20 minutes in length--films of ordinary, everyday events. In each case, a stationary camera had recorded a simple act of movement. For example, one commonly screened film showed workers leaving the Lumiere factory at the end of the day. Other films included a train pulling into a station, waves beating on the beach, and the demolition of a wall. Because of the nature of their films, the Lumiere brothers are regarded as pioneers of one type of cinema: realism.

Cinema Verite 

Many of today's films are in tune with this most basic of artistic principles: show the world as it is. Realism is best exemplified by documentaries--particularly "direct cinema" or cinema verite, in which the filmmaker tries to record events with as little interference as possible. Excellent modern examples include Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies (1967), a film which was banned because of its honest portrayal of the dehumanizing conditions inside an institution for the "criminally insane"; Le Sang des Betes (1949), an unflinching, eye opening look at work in side a slaughterhouse; Marcel Ophuls' monumental The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), a disturbing portrait of anti-Semitism during the Nazi occupation of France; and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), the definitive Holocaust film, over nine hours long, consisting mostly of interviews.

The documentary form itself poses intriguing questions about the nature of realism in film. For many people, the documentary filmmaker is different from the director of fictional films in that he or she attempts to "document" facts or record the objective truth. Yet famed director Josef von Sternberg once said that "every film is fiction because it is contrived." More over, the idea that a documentary should have a propagandistic or subjective point of view is widespread among filmmakers and can be traced back to Russian director Dziga Vertov, whose idea that "art is not a mirror which reflects the historical struggle but a weapon of that struggle" became an inspiration for many documentarians. Vertov himself made some amazing and challenging films, including Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

It was British film producer John Grierson who coined the term documentary, defining it as "the creative treatment of actuality." One of the earliest nonfiction films to receive both critical acclaim and widespread popularity was Nanook of the North (1932), in which director Robert Flaherty actually had Inuits (Eskimos) wear old fashioned clothing and reenact outdated rituals. Similarly, in Man of Aran (1934), which chronicles life on the small islands near Ireland, Flaherty taught the islanders how to harpoon sharks because, as he said, "One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit. Sometimes you have to lie." And while Flaherty's well regarded movies may strike some people as a clear case of documentary malpractice, the fact remains that even the most honest documentary is never completely "objective."

Some recent films have generated new interest in the issue of just what is the boundary between fact and fiction in documentaries. In Roger and Me (1989), director Michael Moore deftly skewers the policies and business practices of the General Motors Corporation but freely manipulates the chronology of events. Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line (1988) argues that a convicted cop killer is innocent by using direct camera interviews and stylized, point-of-view re-creations of the crime. Warren Beatty's historical epic Reds (1981)--not strictly a documentary--tells a fictionalized version of the life of radical journalist John Reed but uses testimony from actual witnesses sprinkled throughout the film. This controversial device generated much criticism, typified by Trevor Griffiths' comment, "History to Hollywood is a blank check" And in 1992, Oliver Stone's JFK presented a wealth of evidence suppressed by official inquiries into the assassination of John F. Kennedy but used a highly fictionalized account of the Garrison investigation to do it.

The realist concept was purposely altered and reconceived in Italy just after World War II by a number of filmmakers who used movies to portray the personal, emotional truths experienced in the every day lives of ordinary people. The first of this style was Ossessione (1942), which was based upon James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. (Because of copyright problems, the film was not seen in the United States for over 30 years.) Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1945) was the most influential of this neorealist movement, which often used real people in place of professional actors, and his statement, "This is the way things are," became the movement's motto. Paisan (1946) is considered his greatest film; like neorealist films in general, it is imbued with a sense of compassion and pathos and a keen eye for social justice. But perhaps the best-known (and best loved) neorealist film is Vittorio de Sica's masterpiece The Bicycle Thief (1948), which portrays the quietly heartbreaking tragedy of one unemployed man and his small son in postwar Italy. As an example of film's ability to artfully render some fundamental truths of the human condition, it remains unsurpassed.

Although neorealism represents a particular place and period in film history, the underlying subject--the moral lives of ordinary people--has a long and international history. From Japan, Yasujuri Ozu's films--such as Tokyo Story (1953), Equinox Flower (1958), and Floating Weeds (1959)--movingly depict such human dilemmas as jealousy and emotional abandonment in a variety of emotional colors ranging from affectionate comedy to wrenching sadness. Indian filmmaker Satjyajit Ray directed films of beauty and power such as the Apu trilogy--Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1958)--which follows the journey to adulthood of a small boy from a poverty stricken Bengali village.

From the former Czechoslovakia have come such films of wry comedy and gentle romantic melancholy as Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965) and Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966), while Polish director Andrzej Wadja's films Man of Marble (1976) and its sequel Man of Iron (1981) provide powerful historical documents of the strategies and resources that average citizens use to withstand political repression.

From Britain, the very contemporary films of Mike Leigh often highlight the dreary, downbeat lives of working-class people with a biting humor and chagrined hopefulness. High Hopes (1988) and Life Is Sweet (1990) are two of his best, while the shattering Naked (1994) is an amazing document.

In the United States, such independent filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley offer touching and well-realized excursions into the lives of ordinary (albeit odd and quirky) people: for example, Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986) and Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth (1990) and Trust (1990). Finally, Spike Lee has ushered in a whole school of young African-American directors whose films exhibit a visually aggressive style of social realism: for example, Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986) and Do the Right Thing (1989); John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1992) and Higher Learning (1995); and the Hudson brothers' Menace II Society (1993).

Cinema Fantastique

The idea that movies should reflect or portray reality is right at home with much of the movie going public. Perhaps the most common complaint made about a movie today is that it isn't "realistic" enough. But other film fans don't agree; they want the cinema to explore the world of imagination and the "unreal." To them, a realistic film is humdrum and unsatisfying; they want cinema to show what cannot be seen in real life.

This sentiment is not a new one. An early fan of the Lumieres' technology was French magician Georges Melies, who ran the Robert-Houdin Theatre (named after the great magician) in Paris. When Melies began experimenting with film, the result was a distinctly different style from what the Lumiere brothers had fashioned--cinema fantastique.

Melies saw that film could do much more than just record everyday events. His most important discovery was famously serendipitous: one day while Melies was filming a funeral procession, the film jammed inside his camera; after developing it, he watched in amazement as a carriage turned into a hearse. Melies immediately recognized the value of such camera tricks and consequently began to explore "special effects" His use of trick photography, staged settings, superimpositions, fading dissolves, slow and fast motion, miniatures, and fictional (often fantastic) stories revolutionized the making of films.

Today Melies is recognized as the originator of the film aesthetic referred to as formalism or expressionism. Instead of showing us what is real, the filmmaker manipulates the form of the film images in order to show something unreal, even absurd or outrageous. Melies used film to advance the world of imagination and artistic expression; of his S00 plus films, his most celebrated is A Trip to the Moon (1902), which stands as a monumental achievement in the history of the cinema.

The works of Jean Cocteau, history's greatest poetic film maker, are excellent examples of how film can be fantastic and even lyrical in telling a story. His dreamy version of Beauty and the Beast (1946) epitomizes the qualities of cinema fan tastique. Many of Cocteau's other films are intensely personal and symbolic, particularly the trio The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1949), and Testament of Orpheus (19S9). Ironically, Cocteau called his films documentaries, based on his credo "Film is truth, twenty four times a second."

The most influential early expressionist film was Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919; above left). Its striking, abstract sets and brooding lighting evoke emotions better than any dialogue. Other celebrated examples of expressionism include Fritz Lang's early German films, especially Metropolis (1927), which depicts a stunning and highly stylized future world where objects and scenes penetrate below the surface to the essence of symbolism (and featuring the first robot woman created by a mad scientist); and M (1930), starring Peter Lorre in his first film role as a child murderer hunted by police and criminals alike.

One of the most startling approaches to expressionism was the intellectual philosophy known as surrealism, which attempted to undo the rational world and to expose the unsullied truth of human phenomenology by providing a raw glimpse into a mental world uncluttered by conscious or cultural censor ship. One of the first films to convey the surrealist attitude was Rene Clair's The Crazy Ray (1924), an image-laden sci-fi concoction. G. W. Pabst produced Secrets of a Soul (1926), the first film to explore Freud's theories of dream interpretation. But it was in 1929, when Luis Bunuel and Salvadore Dali unsettled the film community with Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), a disturbing, meandering potpourri of irrational, symbolic episodes, that surrealism in movies had truly arrived. Bunuel's later work L'Age D'Or (1930) parodied society, religion, and capitalism and hence was received with maniacal protests, including bombs hurled at the screen. Bunuel's uncompromising and often scandalously funny ouevre includes some of history's best surrealist movies--in fact, some of history's best movies, period. Among these are The Exterminating Angel (1962), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and The Phantom of Liberty (1974).

A potent offshoot of surrealism was Dadaism, an artistic philosophy which emphasized anarchy, absurdity, and the mocking of society and its conventions. In 1923, artist/photographer Man Ray was asked to make a film for a Dada gathering. He randomly pieced together bits of film he had exposed with various objects and shapes sprinkled onto the raw film stock. The result, Return to Reason, was presented at one of the last Dada soirees and produced a near riot. (In Dada-land, this was considered a great success.) Perhaps the most clever Dada film is Rene Clair's Entr'acte (1924): created to be shown between acts of a ballet (hence the title), the short film's central focus is a funeral procession gone absurdly awry. Though outrageous to many (which was, after all, the point), Dadaism exerted a profound influence and its absurdities can be found in the comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Monty Python; in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant antiwar farce Dr. Strangelove (1964); and even in the classic horror parody Night of the Living Dead (1965).

Avant-garde and experimental filmmakers often ignored story altogether and manipulated film in order to demonstrate pure formalist qualities. The work of German abstract painter Hans Richter is probably best known and most influential. His "absolute films" rejected narrative and sometimes consisted merely of abstract shapes and designs. Film historian Arthur Knight wrote about Rhythm 21 (1921): "Richter was concerned with texture and light, with movement drawn from inanimate things, with rhythms created by cutting." Dreams That Money Can Buy (1944) became Richter's best known film, although his earlier films were pristine inspiration for the experimental film movement. Richter was one of the leaders of both surrealism and Dadaism and produced some of the most creative films emphasizing form over content. Like all great artists he used the medium to seek the underlying "truths" of reality.

Classical Cinema

The vast number of films made today fall somewhere between the two poles of realism and expressionism--cinema verite and cinema fantastique--and are referred to as classical cinema. In fact, however, the two approaches are not so objectively distinct as one might at first conclude. A good example is Wim Wenders' beautiful and mesmerizing Wings of Desire (1987), which uses a fantastic gimmick to portray the reality of our inner thoughts and desires: angels listen to our private musings and yearn to join us in our mortal lives. The listening-in sequences are some of the most transcendent and introspective ever filmed.

Since the experience of viewing a film is psychological--that is, subjective--the viewer's interpretations, moods, and attitudes help define the experience. "I see no dividing line between imagination and reality," Italian film director Frederico Fellini once stated; and Fellini's own long and distinguished career mapped a trajectory from such neorealist classics as La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) to fantastical opuses like 8 1/2 (1963) and Satyricon (1969). The finest cinematic moments, in short, can achieve a creative tension between the real and the fantastic.

The films of Alain Resnais and Orson Welles are good examples of how both realism and expressionism can be found on-screen at the same time. Resnais' films are mood pieces that set out to subvert time and space. The short film Night and Fog (1955) may be called a documentary, since it includes archival footage of the Auschwitz concentration camp, but Resnais intercuts the brutal death scenes with modern-day images of a quiet, empty, grassy Auschwitz and overlays both with a poetic soundtrack. Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) is partly a love story, but its haunting images and eloquent, oblique dialogue evoke deeper psychological issues, while the elliptical and enigmatic Last Tear at Marienbad (1961) delves even deeper into the cinematic manipulation of time and memory.

In comparison, Welles' films appear realistic because of their straightforward content, but they are full of innovative expressionist elements. Citizen Kane (1941; p. 10, right) bombards the viewer with daring camera angles, stirring shadow-play, and riveting long shots in deep focus. The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Welles' sublime study of human evil, features in its famous finale a shootout in a hall of mirrors, while Touch of Evil (1958) opens with a breathtaking tracking shot--a single camera prowling over characters and scenery for three and a half minutes without a single edit--that has become a classic of its kind. Welles' Shakespearean films--Macbeth (1948), Othello (1951), and Chimes at Midnight (1967)--also exhibit a striking expressionist style.

There are two more directors who must be mentioned in any celebration of film as art. The film-maker who has advanced cinematic art more than anyone is Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. As with most things of high value and rich reward, his films require effort to understand and appreciate. Anyone schooled in film by television and Hollywood will need time to gradually wade into Bergman's world. His themes are deep, sometimes inscrutable; the moods profoundly existential. Meaning in Bergman's films often exists on a plane above the characters, plots, and dialogue, in the shadows cast by symbols, ideas, and feelings. Persona (1966) may well be the most complex movie ever made and, overall, probably the best; while The Seventh Seal (1957; p. 11, left) is a masterpiece of human expression, symbolism, and philosophical meaning. Cries and Whispers (1972) moves with deliberate forboding, deep sadness, and a wealth of psychological dynamics. And for those who are daunted by Bergman's reputation for brooding loneliness and existential despair, such films as The Magician (1958), Monika (1952), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and Fanny and Alexander (1983) are lighter and more accessible.

Finally, there is Jean-Luc Godard, our most intellectual modern filmmaker. From the breezy and disorienting jump cuts of his early classic Breathless (1961; p. 11, right) to the flippant science-fiction dystopia of Alphaville (1965) and the bemused left wing polemics of Masculin/Feminin (1966), Godard has relentlessly probed the limits of film. In his Les Chinois (1967), it is even stated that the Lumieres were the fathers of formalist films while Melies was the founder of realism! This amusing bit of iconoclasm reminds us that film interpretation has a subjective nature. As Godard demonstrates time and again in his films, the audience is not static: there is an organic interplay--a synergism--between film and viewer. We each bring our subjective experiences, values, personal histories, and understandings to the event. We may all gather as an audience and share the same sounds and images, but when the film ends and the credits are rolling, we sit in the dark no longer together but each immersed in our own subjective reflections. As Lily Tomlin once quipped: "Just remember, we're all in this alone."

RELATED ARTICLE: My Favorite Decade

Film artistry reached its peak during 1959 and 1960 with the release of some phenomenal films, including Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura; Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus; Fellini's La Dolce Vita; Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and Psycho; Bergman's Virgin Spring; Robert Bresson's Pickpocket; and from the French New Wave, Godard's Breathless and Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player. Even Hollywood contributed with Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, and William Wyler's Ben Hur.

The following decade was filled with some extraordinary films, culminating in the greatest science-fiction movie ever made, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Those years were a cineaste's delight, with such bounty as Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961), a lyrical charmer; Hitchcock's suspense classic The Birds (1963); and Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Alphaville (196S), and Masculin/ Feminin (1966). Also notable were Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Shame (1968); David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with a young Peter O'Toole in fine form; the courtroom drama, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), a stylized, expressionist depiction of a women's mental collapse; Orson Welles' superb rendering of the Shakespearean rogue Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1967); Sundays and Cybele (1962), a touching tale of a disturbed man's attachment to a young girl; The Innocents (1961), a suspense thriller based upon Henry James' The Turn of the Screw; Bunuel's masterful pastiche of surrealism, Viridiana (1962); Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), the life of a donkey used as an allegory for the human condition; and many others. In terms of artistic excellence and sheer abundance, it was an unsurpassed decade of film.

The Tyranny of the Box Office

In the hands of Resnais or Welles, Bergman or Godard, film is an art form. Alas, what is patently obvious today is that, in the short course of its history, the cinema--especially the American cinema--has become an industry of commercial exploitation. Libby Gelman Waxner, the alter ego of film critic Paul Rudnick, thinks of movies as catalogs, and this tongue in cheek comment is dripping with truth. Product placements are only one obvious example of the retail slant of Hollywood movies, which also "sell" clothes, hair styles, values, behaviors, and beliefs. In the United States, movies are particularly aimed at teenagers and children. When asked why he doesn't seek roles in Hollywood, British actor John Hurt replied, "America only makes children's pictures" In 1984, Robert DeNiro opined, "Movies are in major trouble. They're aiming most of the movies at children--the most mindless, uninformative, and vulgar bunch of projects"

This problem highlights the difference between art and craft. By craft we typically refer to technical virtuosity and skill without regard to a higher artistic purpose. Art, on the other hand, is imbued with values, purpose, message, and meaning. Of course, there is good and bad art, just as there is good and bad craft; and the boundary between art and craft is often a highly subjective one. Still the distinction is useful. Slavko Vorkapich wrote:

Most films are examples not of creative use of motion

picture devices and techniques, but examples of their use

as recording instruments and processes only. There are

extremely few motion pictures that may be cited as in

stances of creative use of the medium, and from these

only fragments and short passages may be compared to

the best achievements in other arts.

The movies coming out of Hollywood are often well crafted but totally lacking in artistic value. David Shipman observed, "{George}Lucas and {Steven}Spielberg may be making themselves and their backers very wealthy: at the same time they are doing their medium a profound dis-service" Godard's view that "there is only one solution--to turn one's back on American cinema"--may once have seemed an outrageous statement, but it is becoming increasingly more acceptable. Indeed, a number of young American filmmakers led by Nick Gomez, director of the critically acclaimed Laws of Gravity (1993), are attempting to put together alternate sources of funding in order to bypass the Hollywood studios. And when we consider the pandering, insipid content of the trash now being projected onto pint sized screens in shopping malls, it is not difficult to understand why.

In 1989 David Putnam warned: "The medium is too powerful and important to be left solely to the tyranny of the box office or reduced to the sum of the lowest common denominator of public taste" But certainly we cannot rely upon the Hollywood moguls now in power to make a difference. Actor Rod Steiger gives the problem a cause: "I believe to the marrow of my bones that, as far as America is concerned, the respect for the artist is about the level of respect for the waste matter of a dog last Monday in Hyde Park" In 1965, Orson Welles lamented, "I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but of its treatment of {D. W.} Grifffith,{josef} von Stern berg, Buster Keaton, and a hundred others" Director Erich von Stroheim expressed his own frustration: "When I saw how the censors mutilated my picture Greed, which I did really with my entire heart, I abandoned all my ideals to create real art"

This point was unintentionally and ironically reinforced by producer Lloyd Kaufman, who urged filmmakers, "It's up to us to produce better quality movies" The punchline: Kauf man is responsible for the dim witted horror movie dud Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (1989)!

How, then, should we judge cinema's first 100 years? If our standard is the tarpit of modern Hollywood movies, then, to quote Thomas Edison, it wasn't worth it. In fact, when considering the juvenile, trashy, and exploitative nature of the vast majority of films produced today, then Lumiere had a valid point: they may ruin you--in spirit and humanity, anyway. But if we look beyond the Hollywood system to the independent artists on the edges and rims (and sometimes even within the system itself)--and especially if we look to the cinematic out put of other countries, where profits are not the only goal, where film literacy is encouraged, and where challenging and important work is valued and subsidized at far higher levels than in the United States--then some treasures of artistic integrity and cinematic magic can be uncovered and savored. In those special moments, film may deservingly be called the art of the twentieth century.

Bruce Hinrichs is a professor, artist, musician, and author residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He currently teaches "The Art of Film" at Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. He has exhibited blown-glass, etched art pieces at galleries and art fairs in many cities throughout the United States and is currently working on a nonfiction book Mind As Mosaic: The Robot in the Machine.