Art Cinema

I never apologize for combining the word “art” with the word “cinema.” You would need a nineteenth-century conception of art—a cliché even then—to cast it as effete. After Freud, Trotsky, Benjamin, and Adorno, after futurism, constructivism, dada, surrealism, and the explosion of pop, it seems hard to remember that art—and the art film—was once considered the spiritual playground or retreat of a bourgeois elite. True, there had been “Film d’Art” around 1910, best remembered for the black-tie audience assembled for the premiere of L’Assassinat du duc de Guise at the Paris Opéra with music composed by Saint-Saens. And in the 1920s certain patrons of “The Seventh Art” treated cinema as though it were a debutante being introduced into high society. In Film as Art (Film als Kunst, 1932) Rudolf Arnheim consolidated the aesthetic principles achieved toward the end of the silent era, principles based on classical painting (balance, emphasis, discretion, and so forth). But Duchamp, Leger, and Buñuel had already blustered in to spoil the ball.

When cinema next attached itself to art, after the Second World War, it was not to emulate the forms and functions of painting or drama, but to adopt the intensity of their creation and experience. For even when it is seemingly “ready-made,” “trouvé,” “informe,” or “absurd,” art is exigent in the demands it makes on makers and viewers. Art cinema is “ambitious,” the word with which François Truffaut characterized the filmmakers he championed, the film- maker he wanted to become. If cineastes are artists, it is because they

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partake of the ambition of genuine novelists, painters, and sculptors to supersede the norm, each in his own domain.

In 1972 Victor Perkins answered Film as Art with his own Film as Film. We loved this title. It demonstrated that cinema had arrived, had come into its own and no longer needed the corroboration of established aesthetics to be taken seriously. A terrific book, it pointed to the...