Javi - Essay draft: Film as Art and the cinematic experience

In this essay I will show some ideas that I have been diving into reading different books that are close to my area of interest. They are all connected to the theme of the second annotation I did this trimester: Film as Art.

After reading that essay by Pavel Büchler, I have been reading different books related to some of the film directors that due to their style and intentions have been placed in the intersection between Art and Cinema. The film of these directors with many others have strongly influenced a generation of contemporary visual artists that have been fascinated by the phenomenon of cinema.

It was really interesting for me to find connections between these different pieces of text. One key film director that connected both spheres is Michelangelo Antonioni.

• L'avventura

The premiere of Antonioni’s film L’avventura is remembered as one of the most controversial premieres of the Cannes festival. 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, a truly inspirational 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”

• A sense of the end

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 viewed associated 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.

Bibliography

• "Contemporary art and the cinematic experience. Cinéma, cinéma". Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
• "Paisajes de la modernidad. Cine Europeo, 1960-1980". Domènec Font. Editorial Paidós.
• "El estilo transcendental en el cine. Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer". Paul Schrader.
• "Esculpir en el tiempo. Andrei Tarkovski". Libros de cine RIALP.