Art And Engagement

8. Cinematic Reality

CHAPTER EIGHT Cinematic reality FILM IS THE MASS ART OF OUR DAY. IT APPEARS TO PURVEY FANTASY to a huge market of people hungry for distraction from dull routine and for deliverance from a sense of anonymity and powerlessness. But cinema is not so much an art of escape as an art of entry. In this modem equivalent of crystal gazing everyone becomes his or her own clairvoyant, able to see beyond the ordinary limits of time and place to the farthest distances of artistic imagination. For film is a composite ofmagic carpet and time machine, capable of transporting us instantly to any place in the world and any moment in history. Yet cinema represents more than the ability ofmodem optical and chemical technology to produce waking dreams, dreams that realize the intent of both Middle Eastern romance and modem science fiction. What makes film so remarkable an artistic means is its capacity to completely shape the perceptual materials that constitute human reality in ways that go far beyond the usual physical and chronological constraints of ordinary life. More than any other art, film can order the pure dimensions of experience directly and without any apparent physical intermediary to create a convincing and absorbing reality of its own. Unlike most other arts, there is a clear separation in film between the physical materials of the art and their perceptual forms. Film does not distract Copyrighted Material 175 us with physical objects, living bodies, acts of producing sound, or usually, with linguistic symbols that stand as surrogates for experience . There is no paint, no stone, no dancers, and ordinarily, no printed words. Like recorded music, the substance of film is exclusively perceptual, while its technical origins remain hidden. The cinematic world, then, is purely phenomenal. Here is perhaps the quintessential art form ofmid twentieth-century technology, joining electricity, optics, and chemistry with mechanics in the motion picture camera, the darkroom, and the cutting room to fashion a total perceptual experience. Cinematic art may also be unique in the complete control it grants the artist in shaping the dimensions of experience. For the perceptual environment that cinema creates is fashioned out of the fundamental constituents of the human world, using space, time, and movement to combine visual images, ambient sounds, spoken language, a social and physical setting, and the mental images of memory and imagination into a continuous whole. Through the skillful use of camera and movement, processes of developing and printing film, sound recording, and especially through the distinctive and powerful technique ofediting, the director can create a seamless and all-enclosing sequence of experience that embodies all the perceptual qualities of the human world. Because of its comprehensiveness and the fact that perception is synaesthetic, joining together all the sensory modalities, cinema is able to draw the audience into a degree of engagement to which access is easier, more direct, more complete and compelling than in any other art. How, precisely, does film accomplish this? Most obviously through its use oftime. Filmmakers manipulate time the way composers order sound. Time in film is not the chronological time it takes for the film to run; it is more than plot time in which the action unrolls. It is experiential time, the time of perceptual awareness. The director not only creates in time out of temporal segments but creates time itself, bringing temporality into conscious experience and imparting to it a distinct quality and character. Time here is not a linear, one-dimensional, and unidirectional phenomenon . It becomes almost like a solid. Our ordinary perception of temporality is as a fluid medium, but the filmmaker handles it as if it were a tangible material that can be manipulated at will. And indeed it seems as if it can. Slowing down and speeding up the camera's 176 Copyrighted Material Art and Reality shutter speed alters the course ofthe action and displays the elasticity of time, which is closer to our actual experience than the regular movement of the clock. Stopping the camera freezes time. Tracking or panning shots may halt the progress of time, for when the camera moves forward or to one side to present a scene or a character's life at different periods it effectively displaces the passage of time and evokes a sense of timelessness. l But it is especially through the technique of montage that the filmmaker has the power to freely create a temporal...