The Prescience of Elie Faure

Élie Faure was a practicing medical doctor, as well as an art historian, philosopher, and critic who wrote essays, biographies, and even novels. His major contribution to film theory is a series of posthumously collected essays, Fonction du cinéma: l'art de la société industrielle (1953). The essays in this collection, "La prescience du Tintoret," "La danse et le cinéma," "De la cinéplastique," "Charlot," "Introduction à la mystique du cinéma," "Vocation du cinéma," "Affinités géographiques et ethniques de l'art," and "Défense et illustration de la machine" were conceived between the early 1920s and the eve of Faure's death, in 1937. All appeared initially in periodicals or as parts of other works on the history of art, philosophy, culture and ideas—a variety that is reflective of Faure's intellectual polyvalence and the pervasive presence of the cinema in the broader body of his work.¹ Like Rudolph Arnheim, Faure's relatively slender but influential volume of essays on film is accompanied by many weighty volumes of writing in a variety of other areas, the most famous of which is the multivolume Histoire de l'art (1909-27). Besides a large group of texts on the history of art and aesthetics, Faure wrote a significant collection of texts that fall at the crossroads of "race theory" or "imaginary ethnography."

For film scholars, the brightest star in this constellation of writings is the essay wherein Faure coined the term "cineplastics." Skillfully translated during Faure's lifetime by his American collaborator, artist William Pach, "De la cinéplastique" has through the years been a prominent inclusion in both French and American anthologies of film criticism and theory: a lyrical example of early attempts to grapple with the ontological status of a medium that was only just coming into its own as a popular narrative form. The high visibility of "De la cinéplastique" throughout the twentieth century has led to Faure being considered first and foremost as a voice in the conversation on the artistic status and aesthetic specificity of cinema, which Richard Abel asserts found its most intense period of public debate in France from 1920-1924 (Vol. I, 214-15). It is because Faure was one of the first to recognize the radical specificity of the cinema's plastic dimension (to paraphrase Réda Bensmaïa) that his work is most often remembered by cinema scholars today (15).

But Faure's key theoretical essays on film—particularly as represented in Fonction du cinéma—do extend over nearly 20 years. Around and after "De la Cinéplastique," Faure expanded and nuanced his views. Theater, the central point of aesthetic comparison to cinema in "Cinéplastique," is but one of the arts against which Faure measured the new medium. Therefore, only by looking beyond "Cinéplastique" can commonalities emerge between the comparative essays: a preoccupation with manifestations of movement, space and time, automatism, spectatorial education and the audience as mass is found at the inter-section of each comparison. Moreover, various aspects of the cinema's social role and function only gestured to in "De la Cinéplastique" are developed in the other essays.

This article lays out the critical stakes of the Fonction du cinéma essays, with some counterpunctal excursions into Faure's other writings. Reading across Faure's film theory in the wake of the specificity debates highlights the importance of motion or movement as an element of plasticity, as well as the definitive role of spectator as member of mass. This more extensive consideration of cineplasticity and its social nature exposes Faure's prescience. While his writings fit tightly in interwar avant-gardist obsessions with machine culture, they also look ahead in ways Faure could not himself have imagined, towards the key terms of scholarly debate on cinema as it undergoes a new ontological crisis provoked by the shift from analogue to digital recording.

Movement and Plasticity

From the outset of his writings on cinema, Élie Faure is resolutely future-oriented and utopian in his engagement with the medium. Considering Tintoretto's "Paradise," he is reminded...