Vision: Video in the Field of Film

Abstract

Frequently described as an art form by its more sycophantic admirers, throughout its 100-year history film’s formal parameters that might make that pious description take on concrete shape have proved elusive. Early attempts like The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, performed by members of the Comedie Française in 1908 to accompaniment specially composed by Saint-Saëns, are frankly documents of more popular or more elevated, traditionally recognised art forms. It is virtually a truism to repeat that the popular forms of pioneer days were superseded, in a attempt to attract higher-spending bourgeois audiences, by imitations of the themes and narratives of the bourgeois theatre. To this extent, from early days, cinema was a hybrid form, drawing its inspiration from the easel painting, the proscenium arch theatre, the nineteenth-century novel and traditions of reportage and scientific documentation deriving from photography. The photographic tradition, extending back already over 60 years, was itself in turmoil as the Eastman-Kodak process brought the snapshot within range of the masses.