Epilogue

The span of this book is roughly that of directors who had started out in silent pictures reaching the end of their careers, including their transitions to color. The introduction of sound recording and color both transformed filmmaking, not least its cost. Misgivings were voiced early on about the moral effect of the new art, even as censorship was deplored. Mannerism as an art-historical concept was being developed to supplement that of Renaissance naturalism even as filmmakers were trying to reconcile the realism to which photography might seem suited with the artificiality it also enabled. Although studying the history of film inevitably dredges up evidence of racism, sexism, and other prejudices, the history of film, like the history of art, is too complex and has long been too deeply engrained in our cultural lives for historians to choose to be ignorant of once admired works we may now in part or thoroughly deplore, as well as minor yet elucidating works that may likewise be problematic, at least in part. The supposition that respect is the default response to any work of art underestimates the changing role of laughter and other forms of active disregard, particularly during the last century.

Competing with Text

The diminished role of the hero affected even the star-driven narratives of Hollywood, in which stories of failure, disappointment, isolation, or moral compromise assumed a new prominence in the wake of World War II. The increasing artistry associated with directing correlated with storytelling that relied less on compelling expressivity and more on allowing the viewer to be intrigued rather than deliberately enlightened. The film auteur offers a parallel to the original print designer, the peintre-graveur of the Renaissance, both of them involved during the entire process, from ideation to realization.

Foreword

Our distance now from ambitious early filmmaking allows for a newly critical analysis of both its historical and artistic significance. In certain broad aspects, early filmmaking, a new art made for a more inclusive public, recapitulates both the challenges and the accomplishments of Renaissance imagemaking, which began as craft and evolved to the status of liberal art, relatively little of which was privately owned in unique examples.

The Machine Aesthetic

Film was allied with live performance because of its movement and also because many actors started in vaudeville. Hollywood often reproduced Broadway plays, prompting critics to try to define what might be specifically cinematographic, such as a facility for shifting from one layer of consciousness to another. Film allowed for a new kind of experience of dramatic art, more remote than theater in some ways but also endowed with new resources such as the close-up, location shooting, and a broad public sometimes apt for unaccustomed themes and treatments. Urban anonymity and the social effects of an increasingly mechanized environment were recurrent themes. The displacement of silent film by talkies was widely lamented, often on the grounds that silent film was just coming into its own as an art form, an early instance of questioning the reliability of technological progress.

The New and the Old in the Art of Cinema

Alberti initiated the task of articulating goals for narrative visual art, thereby rebalancing the traditional Christian emphasis on word over image. When the choice wasn’t made for them by a patron, Renaissance artists faced dilemmas about whether to appeal to a broader public (the faithful) or a more narrow one (collectors, humanists, and emerging connoisseurs). Film faced similar challenges and struggled to define its cultural place: art versus business, America versus Old World, capitalism versus Soviet communism. Hollywood specialized in romantic themes, often treated like fairy tales, though at other times addressing tensions of class and gender. Films were also used to present a version of war suitable for cultural memory, variously heroic or pacifist.

After Eve

The imagery of films both reflected and spurred radical shifts in women’s lives throughout the 20th century. The history of film, and of responses to film, provides evidence of social attitudes and prejudices—those in Hollywood but also regional biases, pertaining to race as well as to gender. Those who were socially denigrated, such as prostitutes, were often treated with a degree of respect in screen narratives. The traditional genres had depended on closure; film, especially post–World War II, featured women and children with complexly difficult lives often lacking neat resolutions. Resnais, Bergman, and Antonioni each focused on women with humdrum rather than heroic lives, and made them the linchpin for studies of the psychological pressures of the modern world.

Prologue

Cinema began primarily as a folk art, and remained a popular art, so there tended to be a considerable gulf between film and fine art. The history of cinema often exhibits a casual attitude toward stylistic innovation, while the history of art has traditionally tended to emphasize exactly that. The combined effect has tended to exaggerate the difference between the two traditions. Yet they do not operate in total isolation. The makers of cinema, even if scarcely students of the history of art, have absorbed certain of its precepts and examples. The emotional life prompted and supported by the new narrative imagery was crucial to the development of Renaissance sensibilities; cinema constituted a new chapter in this kind of enhancement. In both cases, effusive delight was expressed for the new imagery.