User:Javier Lloret/Essay: Modernity, Film, Art

In this essay I will share some ideas that I have been exploring from different books that are close to my area of interest. It started with the second annotation I did this trimester: the Film as Art essay by Pavel Büchler. After reading it I have been reading different books related to the cinema of some of the film directors that tried to break with the tradition and conventions of cinema. The films of these directors, due to their style and intentions, were considered part of the called modernity in cinema. This covers the first part of this essay. The second one is dedicated to the work of some contemporary visual artists that, being strongly influenced by cinema, decided to use it as a found object, making it part of their art pieces.

Modernity in cinema
One of the points in common that I found in the differents texts I’ve read, is that for tagging a type of cinema as modern there’s has to be a tradition. That is way movements from the 1920s are not considered as moderns but avant-garde movements. In the 1920s it is considered that cinema is still not a cultural tradition, that’s why avant-garde cinema is considered more as an extension of avant-garde artistic movements as Dadaism and surrealism.

The concept of “Modern cinema” seemed to appear on the 40s but according to theorist David Bordwell, modern cinema became institutionalized as an “international art cinema” in the 1960s just like classical Hollywood cinema did in the 1930s.

Noël Burch dedicated his book “Praxis du cinema” to compare the changes on style, technique and narrativity from the classical modern cinema. (Kovács p. 37)

According to “András Balint” the shift between neorealism and modernism comes when the character no longer represents a social environment, but on the contrary, she becomes completely alienated from any environment. It is not simply the personalized or psychological description of the character that makes this shift. It is rather with the split between the character and her social or historical background that modernism starts. (Kovács p. 171).

But if we are talking about the shift between neorealism and modernism we should first go through the concept of neorealism. Italian neorealism was a film movement that started with the film Obssessione by Luchino Visconti in 1943. Italian neorealism represented the social environment of the Italy at that time, at the post-World War II moment. It was shot on location, most of the time with non-professional actors. Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini won the Grand Prize of the festival of Cannes, making more well known this cinema movement.

Patrice Hovald in his book “Le néo-realisme italien et ses créatures” considered “Viaggio in Italia” by Roberto Rossellini the first film in film history that cannot be compared to anything else before it, a film that does not exist in relation to other film.

But before him, the film critics from the French magazine “Cahiers du cinéma” already wrote about Rossellini and “Viaggio in Italia”. In April of 1955, the film critic Jaques Rivette from the French magazine “Cahiers du cinéma”, published a letter in the edition 46 of that magazine about the italian director Roberto Rossellini.

In this letter Rivette concludes that modernity in cinema starts with “Viaggio in Italia” (1955) by Roberto Rossellini. Rivette explains that in that second world war context, “Viaggio in Italia” stays out of it, in a no-place, getting out of the shadows of war. This no-place that he connects with an emptiness is the breakthrough with tradition and the starting point of modernity in cinema.

I find quite interesting the evolution of these film critics (Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer) than afterwards became film directors in what it was called “Nouvelle Vague” french cinema movement. As film critics they admired Rossellini but also Hawks, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang. That admiration could made us think that when they’ will become film directors their films would be not so far from their admired directors.

The premiere of Antonioni’s film “L’avventura” is remembered as one of the most controversial premieres of the Cannes festival and also one of the key moments of the modernity of cinema. It was on May 15th 1960. When the film was getting close to the end the audience started whistleing and booing as a sign of disapproval.

What did Antonioni do for creating such a strong feeling of rejection from the audience of the festival of cinema considered the most important by many experts?
Antonioni with L’avventura called the primacy of the story into question. The narrative aspect of the film was relegated to the background.

How did Antonioni achieve this purpose?
Mainly having the popular actress Lea Massari vanishing at the beginning of the film. The rest of the film focused on the the search for the missing woman, named Anna, that would never appear on the film again. Instead of that, that is what the audience expected, Claudia that was Anna’s friend and Sandro, Anna’s boyfriend, end up in a middle of a love affair. We could say that having the main character (and star actress) of the film vanishing at the beginning of the film Antonioni proposed another type of narrative, one based more on suggestion and omission.

Domenech Font, an inspiring Professor of history and theory of Cinema from the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona and also author of (between many others) the book “Landscapes of modernity. European cinema, 1960-1980”. In this book we can read: “L’avventura” is the first vertex of a tetralogy about feelings and loneliness formed by “La Notte” (1961), “L’eclisse” (1962) and “Deserto rosso” (1964)... In all of them, the narrative is vague and based on the feeling between characters of bourgeoisie”.

So we could say that Antonioni had a concept for those films that goes beyond the narrative. After this tetralogy Antonioni’s interests shift towards the enigma of visibility. Some of his most relevant last films are about characters whose work is connected with sight: a photographer (“Blow-up”), a journalist (“El reportero”) and a filmmaker (“Identificazione di una donna”).

Contemporary visual artists & cinema

The film directors I mentioned were influenced by the cinema of their generation and they tried to break with tradition. We can see here a connection with a generation of contemporary visual artists that have been fascinated by the phenomenon of cinema. And have tried to analyze it and to fragment it for creating something new that breaks with the way we are used to watch films.

The work “A sense of the end” (1996) by the artist Mark Lewis consist on nothing but scenes immediately recognizable as film endings. This isolation of scenes could be connected with Antonioni’s decision in L’avventura of breaking with the film conventions regarding film endings. Mark Lewis is one of that contemporary visual artists who uses cinematographic techniques (he actually shoots with a camera the scenes of his Art pieces) for not making a film. He does what he called part-cinema: “Moments that temporarily refuse to reveal an integrity regards to the film as a whole, bur are nevertheless born of it”. Other Artists that have been influenced by cinema don’t use cameras to shoot the visual material that is present in the works. Instead of that they make use of existing film material, which they analyze and modify incorporating it into their own work.

One of the most well known artists that make use of cinematographic footage for his installation work is Douglas Gordon. Gordon’s most known project is 24 Hour Psycho. By massively slowing-down the film (until it lasts 24 hour) Gordon tried to transfer the cinematrographic tension that characterizes suspense films into the exhibition space.

In “Confessions of a justified Sinner”, a two-channel video installation Gordon modified footage from the films “The Exorcist” by William Friedkin and “The song of Bernadette” by Henry King. Playing these two films at the same time and on the same screen Gordon plays with the contrasts created by the combination of good and evil, a “horror” film and a “musical”, colour and black and white. And they are projected in a way that their frames blend into each other, making difficult to the audience to recognize which frames or areas of the piece represents the idea of “Evil” or “Good”.

● Bibliography ● Font, D. (2002) "Paisajes de la modernidad. Cine Europeo, 1960-1980". Editorial Paidós. ● Kovács, A.B. (2007) “Screening modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950s-1980s”. The University of Chicago Press. ● Debbaut, J. (1999) "Contemporary art and the cinematic experience. Cinéma, cinéma". Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven. ● MPAA (2004) "Cut: Film as found object in contemporary video”. Milwaukee Art museum.