A Hymn to Film

A friend who knows my bookishness remarked how surprised he was to find how nearly fanatic a fan I am of film. Books are intellectual; movies, of course, are entertainment for the philistine.

Nonsense. Film can be fine art. What's more, it is the fine art of the age and of the future.

What I mean is that film is the preeminent artistic medium for now and for the forseeable future. Not because of its commercialization and the money of the masses; art has always been commercial and responded to the power of the purse--at least since the Dukes of Venice started patronizing them. Film is the preeminent art because of the still-boundless potentiality of the medium.

Take painting. Painting can provide great art. I was awestruck when I saw Guernica in real life; the textbooks fail to mention that it is the size of a small house, and the effect is harsh. But the technology of painting has not changed much in several centuries. As a result, some say all that can be painted has been painted. I am not one to say if that is true or not, having failed to review the entire history of painting before blogging; but perhaps the sense that that is true explains why painters always seem to be harping after the new and the shocking--because that is the only goal left to them, and it is a hard goal indeed.

Film, by contrast, is a still-evolving medium. Modern cinematography was arguably invented as recently as 1941 with Citizen Kane. New cameras and lenses are invented on a regular basis. And the marriage of the movie with the computer that began with Jurassic Park in 1993 reached has reached a dazzling culmination in films like Finding Nemo (2003) and The Lord of the Rings (2001-3); and doubters should read about the Wachowski brothers' virtual reinvention of the technology of film that burst all bounds in The Matrix series (1999-2003).

The new technology pushes back the bounds of what it is possible to do and to express with the medium. A film like Return of the King was literally inconceivable prior to 1993. It was not physically possible to make before; even better may yet come.

But isn't that all just sound and fury? Isn't the real power of the medium in its story and characters? Again, nonsense. Of course pure image with shallow characters will produce sterile claptrap like Star War: Episode I and Matrix Revolutions. But a movie is far more than a filmed play. It combines the story and characters of plays with the images of photography (If painting and photography are art, why isn't the visual element in a movie?) If a picture is a thousand words, the new pictures made possible with new technology can tell new stories. Imagine Finding Nemo filmed with real fish.

Because film is a still-evolving medium, some movie-makers are still excited to use it to tell real stories. "Art for art's sake" hasn't overtaken Hollywood yet. Before that silly mantra evolved, art used to have a function, a purpose. Art was about something. The thing it depicted actually counted for something until someone decided the form counted more than the content and abstract art arrived. Prior to that much art was produced to say something about religion, war, death, marriage, friendship, and history. Painting doesn't do that much anymore; some films do.

I don't buy that cinema had some golden age in the 1940s or 1970s. The golden age still is. In 2004 alone we've had some good-to-very-good films: Harry Potter, Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles, The Terminal, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and some near-greats: Collateral, Friday Night Lights, Fog of War, and Osama. And those are just the ones I've seen. Many movies are opium for the masses, perhaps; but to count out the medium entirely cuts one off from one of the few artistically creative media around; not just a tragedy, but almost a danger to the well-balanced mind.