Javier Lloret - Annotation: Some notes on Art as Film as Art

In this text Pavel Büchler, an artist, teacher and writer, shares his thoughts and notes about why Film as Art.

Pavel refers to the article “The Thoughts That Made the Picture Move” written for an encyclopaedia of the cinema in 1933 by Rudolf Arnheim. In this article Rudolf Arnheim gives an account of a pioneering discovery which, later on, “led to the development of film as art”.

The cinematographer M.A. Promio got the inspiration traveling by boat along the canals of Venice to arrive to this conclusion. “The film camera, which could take pictures of moving things while it was standing still, perhaps could take immobile things while it was moving itself”. This statement can make us think that film is considered not as a reproduction but as a self-defining reality. Film not as a documentation of reality but as a medium used to create alternative realities.

Pavel also explores the nature of film quoting artists like Hollis Frampton. Frampton in his 1960s performance “A Lecture” declares that “film is, first, a confined space... It is only a rectangle of white light”. This rectangle, the shape of a frame, had inherited his shape from sources like the painting canvas and a sketch book. An empty frame for self-expression.