“Something Human is Up There”
Or why film is not an artMay 13, 2026, by Kid Twist
To LB, who was more worth watching than the movies that hypnotized her
With force and fascination I drew on
The wished sight...
—Death's Jest-Book
“Print,” said Lamb, by way of explaining his refusal to read poems in manuscript, “print settles it.” So we might say of many a once hotly-debated philosophical question that time has settled it. No one today argues whether or not kings reign by divine right, for example, or seriously vexes the protocols of animal sacrifice in the temple at Jerusalem.
But time is a somewhat less-than final arbiter in these affairs—it has an unfortunate tendency to “march on,” and though kings may have been permanently, i.e., for the foreseeable future, obsoleted, it is not hard to imagine that hereditary autocrats may soon begin to claim divine sanction for their heirs apparent, and though only a few dogged traditionalists try ritually to slaughter goats in Jerusalem today, the liability to orthodoxy is so natural to the religious temperament that we may soon see the question of which side of the altar is properly to be besmeared with gore once again passionately mooted by casuists (and, not impossibly, settled by force).
What all this comes to, with respect to my proposition—that the movies are not an art—is that empirical surveys must be inconclusive. That one hundred and twenty-five years of movie making have failed to produce a single work of art cannot be urged finally to have verified it, since tomorrow, or next year, or in dim futurity, a work of art may at last stumble out of the darkness of the cutting room. Our present sample size is indeed very large, its confidence interval asymptotically approaching ever closer to unity with each release, but any extrapolation from it is subject, like all such projections, to probabilities; and though these may already be weighty enough to produce “indefectible conviction” in some, they can never satisfy a truly exact thinker. Numerical verification of an hypothesis does not satisfy mathematicians, since there is no guarantee that a counter-example won't turn up after 10316 iterations; they want a proof. So here: only a natural dimostramento, a demonstration from essences, from the inherent nature of the medium of motion pictures itself, will make our conviction indefectible; absent such a proof, it can only be a presumption, however solidly grounded. And, like the poet cited above, I ask for a discerning auditory, for I do not hope anything I say will do, what one hundred and twenty-five years of plain experience has not done, namely, to make the slightest dent in the (block) heads of cinephiles, movie-nuts or (as we will see) anime apologists. Their zealotry will, however, have eventually to be accounted for on principle, and, as I hope to show, will itself prove to be the most telling evidence for the essentially non-artistic character of their beloved medium.
Before I go roundabout to my exact demonstration, let me obviate a few objections that might naturally arise in the minds of even the most well-disposed reader.
In asserting that no movie to date has been, and none can ever be, a work of art I am not to be taken as denying, what is self-evidently the case, namely, that some movies are better than others. I would never deny that, performance for performance, Au Hasard Balthazar is a better movie than Francis the Talking Mule, which in turn is better than Francis [the Talking Mule] Joins the WACS (and I speak as one of the few alive who has seen all three—in movie theaters, at least); nor that Black Narcissus is a psychologically deeper movie than The Creature from the Black Lagoon (deep as that lagoon is) or Alias Boston Blackie; nor that Nosferatu is a much more visually arresting movie than Nosferatu, or even than Nosferatu—if you like, by increasing orders of magnitude in each superlative case. But the question isn't whether movies are comparable within their class, but whether that class is works of art. Counter-examples such as the three adduced above beg precisely that question; nor, as certain as their masterpiece status seems now to be, is it immune to empirical revision, or even reversal—it is not unheard of today for a once-time-honored “classic” to become, as they say, “cringe,” or only “now” of “period” interest: witness the sad fates of Birth of a Nation and (incredibly, to me) Potemkin.
The truth is, that “art,” or “work of art,” and so on, are today honorifics, employed to praise something as excellent in its class, or to lift it out of its class altogether in order to place it into a presumably more exalted one. In neither case does the question of essential incommensurability check the enthusiast. After all, some soaps lather better than others, but I do not on that account feel tempted to class even the best of these with The Birth of Venus or “The Shampoo.” Yet in calling Stagecoach (say) a work of art, the fancier is, in the first case tacitly, and in the second, openly, acknowledging that there exists a class apart from, and higher than, the one, movies, to which it naively, and we will assert, essentially, belongs, and out of which, in the latter case, she wishes to effect its transmigration, and with it, surreptitiously, by a sort of back-contamination, all movies. The attempt to exalt movies as art is thus a proof of their (inferior) non-art status in the mind of the exalter herself. After all, no one would praise, or even think to classify, a Rothko as a “work of art.” A work of art is simply what it is. A work of art is simply what enthusiasts wish their favorite movies individually were; and the only way they have to fulfill this Wunschtraum is magically to assume a priori that fulfilled it has already been.
The honorific content of these art-terms is about all the meaning they presently popularly possess; people talk of the decorative swirls in cups of latte as being “art,” the same way they talk of doughnuts as being “divine”—without, that is, thinking of what such honorifics originally, essentially, existentially and in eternity actually mean, no less of the objects to which the terms properly apply; they say, for example, that this wide receiver, or that bartender, or that Lamborghini is “poetry in motion,” without having sufficient familiarity with the honorable thing itself to recognize that poetry is already in motion. And so it is with films called “works of art.”
None of this is proof, of course. But it may be offered in further illustration of their tendency to Wunschtraumerfüllung, that movie-lovers have no place in their triumphalist histories of film for those who denied its aesthetic status at the outset, except, perhaps, chained behind D.W. Griffith's chariot. But it is not the deniers' instincts that I wish to vindicate so much as the defenders' arguments, for these are actually more fatal to the case for film-as-art than any outside attack could possibly be; and more favorable, therefore, to my, as it were, inside one. Indeed, they will, in the roundabout fashion I warned of, actually prove it.
Let us return to this now-oblived controversy for a moment. The year is 1933; and to the charge that, as it did nothing but mechanically reproduce “reality,” film could not be an art, a (in my opinion somewhat too-) celebrated arbitrageur between the realms of psychology and aesthetics is assiduously enumerating all the ways the cinematic image differs from our normal perceptions, some relating to picture, some to motion. Observe that, as his argument refers to permanent-technical and, in the last analysis, neurological, factors, it is timeless—his points are as valid, or as invalid, today, and will be forever, as they were then. Observe, too, that he shares with his opponents the conviction that works of art substantially depart from reality; that “reproduce” it art works essentially do not do; so if his alleged divergences from reality fail, his defense will be found to be an argument for the position he is striving to refute, viz., that film is no art.
These differences, then, are the crux of his argument. To take only a few (for only a few will suffice):
Item, film images differ from normal perception in that they are two dimensional—but (he is forced to allow) “the movement of people or objects from front to back makes a certain depth evident,” as does “perspective overlapping.” Thus, “film pictures are at once plane and solid.” But so, too, are our everyday perceptions, at once plane and solid, if they are not, as some philosophers have argued, entirely planar. So our divergence evaporates.
Item, film images are (what we would call) “framed”: “The limitations of the picture are felt immediately.” But (he is forced to allow) “our [normal] visual field is limited” too, although “the limitation of our range of vision never obtrudes itself.” The adverbial distinction of immediately and never would hardly do even if it applied; but, of course, we feel the limitations of our normal field of vision immediately whenever something occurs behind us, and behind us a good deal of the world typically lurks—indeed, having “eyes in the back of your head” is no mere figure of speech to a New York City straphanger; and, of course, the framing edge of a movie is, like the silhouettes of those seated in front of us in the theater, one of the features we are never aware of, so effortlessly do we “disimagine” it, to use Collingwood's excellent coinage, unless, of course, the cinematography calls our attention to it, as in Blair Witch. So we have two “circumscribed” fields, whose respective peripheries in reality may, or may not, become relevant to our experience with about the same frequency, if not less, in the case of film; and another divergence evaporates.
Item, film sequences can violate “the space-time continuum”: we cannot, that is, in reality, as we can in movies, jump-cut in time or space—we must pass through the intervening space to get from here to there, and live through the intervening time. Cavell, however (from whom we have borrowed our title), remarks that film grammar—editing, that is, to which Arnheim (for it is he) is referring here—was easily assimilated by mass audiences, as, we will add, chord progressions and trobar clus have never been; and its reception would not have been so painlessly effected were there not something in our everyday reality corresponding to jumping over intervening spaces and time-spans. And this something, is, of course, memory, in the broadest sense of calling absent facts or fancies to present consciousness—the “extensive view” (extensive in time as well as space) that is notorious for bringing China and Peru into a single apperceptive survey. So once again, the alleged divergence evaporates.
As to some of his other evaporating divergences: absence of color—we experience this every night; absence of other senses (smell, hearing, etc.)—we experience this every time we look through a window; purposive lighting—no need to comment; camera angle and motion—we always occupy a viewpoint, often a moving one and—to go further—are always mis en scènes, very often in a “surround,” as Goffman would say, with others, and—at least if the sociologists are right—always performing in them when we are.
And lest we forget: we are always moving, as are “all the works of nature” and a great many of the works of humankind; and the techniques of slow or accelerated motion, offered as divergences from reality, are, as motions, continuous with, and qua fast or slow, relative to, our own usual pace; and neither would be intelligible with respect to speed, and that instantly, were they not.And so our friend's argument collapses. It has had the virtue, however, of having addressed itself to the essential foundations of film: for without motion and without pictures there are no motion pictures.1
Film, then, we are free to conclude, essentially follows our normal faculties of perception and apperception; that is to say, the effort at determination and correlation of what passes before us in movies is equivalent to the effort required of us in everyday experience. We will now add, that film not only harmonizes with our faculties in this way, but, as it were, flatters them—makes, that is, even fewer demands upon them—and doing their work for them is precisely the end to which what Arnheim calls the “artistic” use of framing, editing, lighting and so on, are the technical means. This flattery, it is true, has become, in the hands of our current hyper-expert filmmakers, effective beyond belief: their movies are, with the greatest cinematic intelligence, nay, actual genius, pre-digested to be as undemanding, perceptively and apperceptively, as possible; but unexacting, in this respect, as we have seen, the motion picture essentially is.
Now, it is evident that the several arts are constituted by their very mediums to make perception and apperception an accomplishment.
From the specific ways each of the several arts does this, I single out one that they all, each in its own way, have in common, which I will call deduction; for what is not there must be, after their several fashions, continuously still realized, that is, kept before the mind in all its sensuous presentness, if the work is to be experienced as the work of art it essentially is.
From the everyday experience of bodies in motion, for example, dance deducts, not merely the normal occasions for motion, voiced or unvoiced, but bodies themselves—for unless we, by continuously holding them in mind, in all their original force and liveliness, succeed in “seeing”—that is, in apprehending—the motions that the dancers have already made, we are not “seeing” the dance: we are watching the performance, not realizing the choreography, which is the art of dance. Music deducts, not merely all sensations but sound, but, in the same way as dance does bodies, deducts sound too: it is in this sense that it resembles mathematics, in being purely ideal; and the distinction here is between hearing the performance and realizing the composition. Sculpture2 deducts motion—and in the case of mobiles, deducts motives for motions; photography deducts motion from pictures; painting deducts real space from motions—for such successive changes as any given painting presents to long looking occur minus translation; the deductions of the novel,3 the drama and poetry are too numerous, and obvious, to mention: but in each of these something like the distinction between merely receiving and actually realizing holds good—realizing, in a sculpture, the specific motions latent in the unmoving form; in a photograph, the world from which it is excerpted; in a painting, its existence as pure duration; in a poem (to take only that), the silence of its voice.
Theatre, if it is an art, as I have come to doubt4, deducts the identity of the actor from the role, when, that is, the actor is artist enough to allow it to; film, on the contrary, as Cavell notes, deducts the role from the actor, or at least from the star—that is not Rick whatever-his-last name-is up there, it is Humphrey Bogart, not Charlotte Vale, but Bette Davis—a deduction that restores everyday perception, for, despite it all, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis are who Rick and Charlotte Vale really are, and it does not require much effort to realize that, nor to realize that Queen Elizabeth is Bette Davis, made-up, and that Duke Mantee is Humphrey Bogart, mugging.
Now, it may be objected that, on such a principle as this, trash novels and selfies are works of art, while such masterpieces as Earth and The Pagnol Trilogy are not. But I am not trying to define art, only to draw an essential distinction between it and film; and for this a necessary condition, even a negative one such as deduction, will do. Besides, to realize in the verily artistic mediums means to make real, the “real” referring to the presence of whatever is absent, and the “make,” to the effort required to apprehend it and to keep it before the mind in all its sensuous vividness; and, thanks to the omnipresence of cliches, these mediums may be so managed as to produce something that is not really real, that is, not concretely individual, and thus requiring no effort to grasp, and involving no reward for doing so.5 Still, it is worth noticing that the principle of deduction has a yonder bound: deduct too much and the medium, if it may be called that, ceases to be artistic in any way—thus cartoons, which deduct continuity of shape, or ice dancing, which deducts the frictional conditions of normal motion, are not arts, “however amusing the proceedings.”
And further: I spoke of deductions; but, when it comes to real art works, the term that better catches the qualitative difference between them and other efforts in the same mediums is abnegation—il gran rifiuto. And if I am asked what is being refused, the answer is, the very thing that film has, empirically, instinctively embraced.
Somewhere in his tedious exposition poor Arnheim remarks a little regretfully that almost all films up to that date have been used to tell stories, and ninety-one years later, we can remark the same liability. Despite the laments of the avant-garde that film might have, but for capitalism, or Stalinism, or something, despised novelistic precedents and pursued a non-narrative and non-commercial path, and despite the heroic efforts of the old 60s and 70s emulsion-scratchers to found an art of purely moving visual forms, film has remained stubbornly story-narrative, empirically speaking, at least.
But our question is, is it essentially so? And here all those exploded divergences really tell. For what else could a medium that so closely follows our normal faculties of perception and apperception be, if not narrative?
After all, our normal, and our most interested perceptions and apperceptions, and therefore the ones most easily enlisted and exploited for effect, concern human agents, who, in lit scenes, beheld from viewpoints, are seen to engage in purposeful, continuous, and for the most part, intelligible, motions, all the while performing gender, class, age-group, attitude toward the surround, and so forth. Attention to these mises en scènes becomes, because necessary, habitual; and it is to this habit that what we might call the habitus of motion pictures essentially conforms and appeals. Indeed, so ready are our faculties to anthropomorphize pictured motions, that moving pictures would, as it were, tell a story even without depicting human agents, and our old emulsion-scratchers are respectfully advised to keep this infallible propensity in mind, should they ever return to their carpenter's nails and etching needles for one last go; but, as human agents are the things upon which the relevant faculties are most instinctively focused, human doings become the essential, indeed, the predestinated subject of film. The old film-deniers were thus quite wrong in holding that film reproduced reality; what it does is reproduce psychology, in the old sense of the facultative soul, and may even be said to reproduce phylogeny, given that survival, primordially, primitively and even now, depends on continually monitoring the surround.
And with that we can name what it is that film essentially embraces and the arts refuse.
Humanity.
Film is, by its very nature, addressed to normal human faculties and concerned with normal human interests, and these are the bases of its mass appeal and of the enthusiasm it inspires in its followers. It has no competitor in these respects except for popular songs, which, like it, flatter an innate susceptibility of humans (to rhythm) and rehearse simple human situations. The greater possibilities of simplification offered by their three-minute length would seem to give “pop” songs the advantage with respect to “audience-share,” and perhaps this factor provides the pressure under which movies are evolving towards all the simplifications that lie within their technical scope—to such an extent that, instead of calling anime movies, there may come a day when enthusiasts call movies anime. I leave the competition with video games to those who have surveyed them more closely; but even cinema zealots have acknowledged that contemporary film is more accurately understood as a genre of amusement-park thrill rides than as “the seventh art” it was once fervidly hailed to be.
But be all that as it may, our original proposition, that movies are not an art, is seen to have its ultimate ground in the inescapable fact that something human is up there, whereas in the arts, properly so called, though in some works some thing of the human may be provisionally some where, this interest is subordinated to the sublimely indifferent one of formal beauty. It is a concern with this latter that all the several deductions of the arts add, or, if you prefer, leave over, when once the disturbing element of normal human interest has been remitted to those parties interested in it, namely, to normal human beings.
Addendum: On Some Consequences of the Foregoing
I said above that time is a fickle arbiter—that many once dead-and-buried points of controversy may, as it “marches on,” return to liveliness. I will now add, that such an issue may not only be resurrected, but the original verdict upon it reversed.
Such has been the case with the relation of art and morality. When I was young, it was taken for granted that the pretensions of morality to rule over aesthetics had been absolutely exploded—that the struggle between them had been fought in the nineteen-twenties, chiefly over the status of the Fleurs de Mal, and the philistines had been utterly routed. It was simply the case that, to put it one way, the Good and the Beautiful were independent transcendentals, each convertible indeed with Being, but not convertible each into the other; or (to put it another way) that the artist, in heedlessly, selfishly, even demonically, pursuing beauty, had, insofar as her work attained that goal, already fulfilled her moral (social) duty; or (to put it the best way, as we shall see) that the only “good” the artist need be concerned with was the good of the work to be done.
Today, of course, the boot is on the other leg. Morality rules art, and even the demonic “genius,” her claim to that status dismissed by the inverted commas, must observe the pieties; even as aloof a thing as an abstract painting is required to “justify itself” before the bars of politics and social utility; and he/she/they who writes a love poem, voicing the same sentiments that lovers have voiced since Ur, may have to answer the charge of “objectifying” the beloved. The old question, “can a morally reprehensible person make a great work of art?” is answered No in thunder; and moral critics, with all of Ruskin's certitude, but somewhat less of his eloquence, have sunk many a quondam masterpiece on the grounds of what often amount to reports, i.e., hearsay, about the personal vices of its empirical creator. How Baudelaire has fared in this climate I am too-easily disheartened to research; but the poet who, in wonderfully melodious verses, fantasized about ejaculating his (syphilitic) semen into a wound in a woman's “flank” that he has opened with that express purpose in view, is unlikely to be celebrated, as he once was, as a great liberating figure in the arts. Even, in that interregnum of the nineteen-eighties, when he was extolled for “transgressing” morality, the allowance was conceded on (higher) moral, and not proper aesthetic, grounds—the poetic value of the poems did not come into it, only their scandalous occasions.
Now, I think that, for this great reversal of sensibility, vast in its implications for both critical evaluation and artistic practice, the vulgar notion that the movies are an art is largely responsible. I will, as before, go round about to reach this perhaps initially startling conclusion. And, as before, the essential nature of the motion picture medium will be the ground of all I have to urge against it in this regard. And, again, by “movies,” I am to be taken as referring to television and anime as well.
A controversy currently agitating the movie fandom, or at least, its intelligentsia (whom one wishes would find something less unintelligent to talk about), is whether “depiction equals endorsement,” or, as it is often formulated, whether “problematic portrayals normalize [sometimes propagandize for] behavior.” Thus, I have heard it asked (by the same commentator, albeit in different commentaries), whether a film in which a fifteen-year-old boy has an affair with a twenty-five- year-old woman, or one in which a forty-year-old man has one with a twenty-five-year-old girl, endorses “age-gap” relationships, antecedently recognized to be in themselves disapprovable—”not okay” or “never okay.”
Now, such a question would be unlikely to be naively asked of art works such as Torse or Rhoda in Potatoland, and not only because these have, when compared to movies, minuscule audiences. It is, of course, legitimate, given their tremendous popularity, to be, as have moralizers always been, to the point of legislating “codes,” concerned with the moral “influence” of motion pictures—nay, to be positively alarmed by the fascist sub-, i.e., plain-, texts of superhero movies of the Marvel Comic book or Princess Mononoke type, though I observe no “X rating” threatens these puerilities—the old aphorism, that “all genres lean right,” would be truer to our time if “lean” were replaced with plunge. But we cannot rest with so simple a view of the matter. For the purchase morality claims to have on movies is the result, not of their mass popularity, for this is itself merely a second-order effect, but of something absolutely fundamental.
That fundamental something is the intrinsic appeal movies make to our ordinary faculties of perception and apperception. These, we said above, movies reproduce and flatter by what they show; and, we will now add, do so just as fully by what they cannot show. For just as the movies reproduce the normal functions of perception and apperception, so also do they reproduce the normal limits of these faculties.
Normal perception gives us the bodies, motions, postures, etc., of the people in our “surround,” which are, furthermore, “framed” for us by the muscular-skeletal fact that the visual field is more easily surveyed horizontally than vertically; the “aspect ratios” of movie and television screens obviously reproduce this natural prolate-ellipsoid proclivity. So far, so familiar from the main body of this essay. But be the oval of vision what it will, what we cannot perceive in any orientation are the minds of others, their internal lives; these we depend on inference to divine; and inference, relating as it does present appearances to past experiences of similar ones no longer perceptible, is an apperceptive act.
Now, it goes without saying that inferences are always dubious; and we should be in a constant dither of uncertainty were not a “schedule of displays” at hand to make our orientation to the surround easily legible to others in it, and theirs, to us. But displays can only do so much; and the neutral expression of the person across the subway car from you, displaying, as it legibly does, beyond merely her present compliance with that schedule, the absence of hostile intent, shows you nothing about the emotions and thoughts going on behind it—these are actually inscrutable.
This essential inscrutability of the human countenance, so briefly described but so thoroughly penetrated and searched by the great novels, film cannot help but reproduce, as reproduce the conditions of normal perception it must always do. But it can reduce the apperceptive burden of inference by increasing the legibility of thoughts and emotions—the grimaces of the actors, the simplification of character to a narrow psychological range of types, the generic conventions of story, the manipulation of lighting, point of view and so on, flatter apperception by directing inference in one direction only. And if movies remain somewhat at a loss about what to do with the act of thinking itself, well, so too are we in real life at a loss, unless it externalize itself adequately in some form or another, such as a book or a painting, and not, as with movies it must, in a snatch of dialogue and/or (and for some celebrated directors, who pride themselves on being “visual story tellers,” preferably) in a dramatically furrowed brow.
Now, when the film intelligentsia say that certain portrayals in film “equal,” “endorse,” “normalize” or “propagandize for” conduct or attitudes, they mean, of course, equal, endorse, normalize and propagandize for them in real life; and the transfer, as of a decal, from the one to the other is unobstructed for all the medium-specific reasons we have stated; but, for the same reasons, this time relating to medium-specific limits, rarely so unambiguously made as to deny controversial catnip to critics. For our purposes, it is enough that both sides in such controversies take for granted, what is essentially true of film, that when the portraying actor is doing something even as politically unobjectionable as smiling (no less leering), he is presenting the material equivalent of an immaterial, in this case, a psychic, state, just as he would be in real life, and readable there by the same means; and ditto for more lengthily labored aggregate displays readable under such general and therefore abstract rubrics as “age-gap relationships.”
What all this comes to is that what we see on screen is the corporeal equivalent of an incorporeal state not then visible and usually, as in the case of abstract nouns—some of which end in -ship, others in -ity, still others in -tion, and not a few in -ism—never so; and whenever we have a corporeal equivalent of an incorporeal state we have what Kenneth Burke calls metonymy.
Film, then, is metonymic by the very nature of its medium—the *something human up there *is intrinsically readable as something human out here; and this is indeed the ground of its popularity and the key to understanding the right-ward direction of its history. The moralizers thus have a justification for their concern; whether that justification justifies anything further need not detain us here.
Now, although some of the arts may employ metonymy as a figure, the arts themselves are not metonymous. They are autonomous; that is to say, far from being a corporeal equivalent of an incorporeal state, each real work is the corporeal equivalent of itself alone—this is, indeed, what we mean when we refer to each work as a concrete, self-subsistent and self-intelligible individual; and it is only by mistaking them for an art that the expectation of metonymy, inescapable in motion pictures, and the moral preoccupations relevant thereto, has been transferred to the real arts, with the evil consequences mentioned above. In other words, fans, having first made the cinema into one of the arts, have ended by making all of the arts into cinema.
But conditions are what they are; and we should not call the times evil “unless they make us so.” The perfection of the work to be done remains the good of the artist qua artist; and if seeking this non-moral good makes her, as I believe Maritain puts it, “inhuman,” well, so much the better for the work. I will not return to Baudelaire in this regard, for there are too many subtilties and ambiguities in even one of his poems, no less the whole sequence, to deal with here; but I will say to all love poets that, if their poem is charged with “objectifying” the beloved, they should rejoice in the reprehension; for in an art that makes so many deductions, divesting a subject of her subjecthood is but one deduction the more.
Addendum Two: The Same Topic, Continued
Time, alas, having continued to “march on” since the above addendum was appended, recent developments in the arts themselves have shown that the, what we might call, “moralizing metonymic transfer” discussed above, is not the only, nor the most insidious, way in which mass cinephilia has succeeded in subduing the actual arts to the measure of the movies.
We saw that the arts, properly so-called, as distinguished from the movies, make perception and apperception an accomplishment. Recognizing a variation in a theme (no less in a tone row), or a sub-rhythm in a line (no less a counterpointed strophe), or a structural principle in an abstract space (no less in an optical one), to take just these, already requires, in even the simplest instances, an effort of determination that recognizing the Blob in The Blob, the Thing in The Thing, or the talking mule in the never-to-be-forgotten Francis the Talking Mule, plainly does not; and although apologists for “the modern” in art, and in music, poetry and painting especially, have been at pains to defend it against complaints about what appear to most to be its “mulish vagary” by citing its “intrinsic difficulty,” it is well to remember that difficulty is a relative term, and, in the present instance, taken together with its correlate, refers to any departure from the easily assimilable, and demanding, in precisely this sense, the arts, by virtue of what above we called their “deductive” mediums, and of countless other ways as well, have always been. If complaints about their difficulty are no longer (but for a few legacy headscratchers like Pierrot Lunaire or Finnegans Wake) still heard, it is not because cinephiles, confident that theirs is “the seventh art,” have courteously ceded to its six exhausted senescent sisters a little latitude in the difficulty department, but because they have, by various means, succeeded in evacuating from artworks anything that would have otherwise given them the pip—in making, that is, The Waste Land as easily digestible as The Walking Dead, if less “thought-provoking.”
What those means are we will come to shortly; for now, let it suffice that they all involve the sort of inversions noted many times above.
A celebrated movie director recently forewent studio backing and self-funded, as they say, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the production of his “passion project.” This expenditure was considered a proof of his remarkable commitment—though, of course, “self-funded” (in the aesthetic sense) autonomous artworks have always been, and a great deal more than money has been bled to produce them. The result, anyway, was something the film intelligentsia instantly and unanimously pronounced “a mess.” But, again, a mess is relative to some pre-existing idea of order; and that the cinephile élite found this movie a mess (forgive the repetition, but they seemed bereft of any other word with which to describe it) proved, on closer inspection, simply to mean that it taxed their powers of apprehension past what they had been (dare we say potty-?) trained to expect. But, after all, the motion picture in question was composed of moving pictures of human agents—was still, that is, very recognizably a motion picture—with all the flattering perceptibilities and apperceptibilities such an ontological status essentially entails. Inadequately legible its departures might have been, exasperating to its critics they certainly were, and celebrated by future generations of cineastes they may well inevitably be, they nonetheless remained within cinema—they were just not flattering enough for the faculties of a cohort conditioned by the medium itself, and habituated by its by-now hyper-expert practitioners6, to demand even deviations be more or less directly intelligible7.
After what specific motes in that “mess” these connoisseurs were straining, having swallowed those camels, I leave it to others to determine. But if such was the response of a cineaste élite to what was still recognizably a movie, what will be the response of the cinephile mass when confronted with a unique thing that, rather than beguilingly smoothly adapting itself to their faculties, demands that they adapt their faculties to it, or come away with nothing—that is, when faced with a concretely individual work of art?
In light of the developments mentioned above, such philistine histrionics as are reputed to have befallen Blue Nude would be welcome. But no: in fact “the challenge of art” is, as Gilson puts it, not dismissed with guffaws (or with hisses or fisticuffs, to cite some other débuts scandaleux) but confidently “answered”—that is, dodged—by assigning the undomesticable, indigestible, intractable thing in question its proper place in—what else?—a humanized narrative.
The work is not repudiated, heavens forfend—it is simply ignored, in favor of a story which situates it. The primary, but not the only, move in this project is to substitute, for the (present) artwork, the (absent, and possibly long-deceased) empirical person8 (naively) taken to be the artist.
Now, it is worth pointing out, as it has become necessary to do, that a work of art, once finished, does not, in its aesthetic character, change, which is simply to say that the words of a poem, or the notes of a score, for example, do not rearrange themselves when the book is closed. Nor does the finished work develop—it does not, that is, spontaneously turn into some further state of itself. Nor does it generate another work—paintings do not have offspring by parthenogenesis or mitosis, or by conjugation either, however close to one another they may be hung—nor, for that matter, do they go out drinking with their fellow artworks when the museum or library closes. Nor is the work contagious, like influence—I mean, like influenza—nor is it infectable, once finished. Nor, having been the work of, let us say, a female Jewish-American person, is it female, Jewish, American, or a person. Change, develop, generate, associate, influence and be influenced, keep kosher, vote, and so forth are all things that artists do or are, or can do or can be; and it is easy to see how their lives, their influences, their development, their identities, their circles, their saloons, their cenacles, their milieux, etc., which really do involve time and change in their structure, may be enlisted, or rather, seized upon, in the interest of providing their works, what the works themselves cannot, namely, a humanized narrative that explains them.
And this, notwithstanding—in a way, because of—the necessarily fragmentary nature of the residues of the artist's actual existence, for all that we really have of any life—and here the reader is invited to consider her own for confirmation—are minuscule remainders of the many-dimensioned, continuously-conscious, ever-changing whole, in virtue of whose imperfection every biography must be a caricature. Nor is the biographical stick-figure that emerges by guesswork from the fragments made any more substantial by being inserted in any one, or all, of the “wider contexts”—economic, social, institutional, stylistic, intellectual or even aesthetic—conjured up by the art historian, and even by the real historian, out of the likewise-fragmentary residues of some (arbitrarily) delimited spatio-temporal continuum. These latter accounts, as they, too, all survey a necessarily indeterminate field of promiscuous fragments, promiscuously preserved, though not always caricatures, can never be more than what real historians acknowledge them frankly to be, namely “interpretations.” Narrow or wide, then, all such accounts are bound, by the nature of their materials, to be simplifications, and it is perhaps unfair to charge them all with being simplistic. But simplistic in the extreme do they become when once their caricatures or characterizations are used as explanatory calculuses to settle scores with a complex individual and self-sovereign work of art, whose genesis and development we are, as Gilson bluntly puts it, “simply not in on,” and would be what it is whether we were or not.
But, of course, gossip about artists and nonsense about contexts are exactly what appeals to the cinephile mass, habituated as they are to having simplified inferences made for them, by all the filmic means we have already considered. In movies, however, the already-directed perceptible presentation, such as the actor's grimace, is directed still further to an already-simplified efficient cause, namely, the character's anguish (or whatever) at its situation; with an artwork, the illation is reversed: acquaintance with the imperceptible biographically or historically hypothetical cause precedes and directs acquaintance with its perceptible hypothetical effect, the work, with which, of course, no acquaintance on these terms is possible.
True, cattiness and sciolism have probably been with us always; but, still, the discovery of their serviceableness in aesthetics is recent enough for Hanslick to have noted it for a novelty in the 1890s, and—real critic that he was—to have decried it as the impertinence it most eternally is and must be. It is hard not to see the increasing normalization of “contextual readings,” biographical or otherwise, in classrooms, galleries, museums, university-press catalogues, journals and elsewhere as a reflex of the demand for effortless intelligibility fostered in the cinephile mass by the development of ever-more flattering techniques of film; indeed, the degree to which these fatuities have come to precede, supersede and finally supplant interest in individual works is what we might call the cinephiliac contribution to culture.
Two reflexes of this reflex are worth considering.
The demand, be it recalled, is for a humanized narrative. Qua humanized, this is met by shifting interest from the artwork, which is not human in any respect, to the empirical person or artist, which is human, and in every respect but that of her aesthetic physiognomy, which happens to be the only one that may (or may not)9 aesthetically count. The effects of this shift have been sufficiently ventilated.
But, of course, a narrative requires a succession of terms; and, qua narrative, there has been a corresponding shift of interest from the individual work, which is a self-subsistent term an sich, to some sort of series, as in the oeuvre, through which back-door the ever-changing, ever-influenceable, ever-developing empirical person of the artist is reintroduced and again becomes the focus of interest, or in the gallery or museum show or retrospective, whose very rationale is to collocate multiple works on the pretext that they “contextualize” each other, or are all of them “contextualized” by some supposititious afflatus.
The oeuvre is the happy-hunting ground of literary historians, academic commentators, popular biographers, and even public-television documentarians, who vastly outnumber, and who certainly outsell, literary artists. The show is the bailiwick of the curator, who not long ago was charged with selecting individual works whose aesthetic merits justified their acquisition, but who is now personally celebrated for collocating works under some writ, biographical, historical, stylistic, or what-not. In somewhat the same manner in which “poetry reading” has come to mean, not reading poetry yourself, but having it read to you, to “see the show” means just that—to see the show, not, that is, to see any individual work in it as an individual work, but at most to see each as an illustration of the show's always thematic, usually conceptual and ultimately verbal rubric—and I use this, still-liturgical, term to remind the reader of the original meaning of “cure,” “curation” and “curatorial.”
The art curator, who has lately come to claim the title of artist, has been allowed to make herself a usurper; but the art critic, whose beat the show has become, has degraded herself into a posturer.
If we ask by what means (besides possessing a great prose style10) a critic proves herself worthy of credit, we shall find only the power of eliciting, from individual works, the principles and co-factors that make each the very work it is, and no other, whatever relations between works she might afterwards find it illuminating to consider11—that is, by her demonstrating superior, often enough pioneering, powers of perception and apperception, to whose acuity we provisionally, but always profitably, submit our own. Criticism, so understood, is a vocation, and a rarer one even than that of artist—rarer even than sainthood12—and when not so practiced degenerates into “art writing,” art-world gossip, restaurant-style show-reviewing, grandstanding or simply celebrity journalism.
By abetting cinephile taste, the curator and the critic, like the biographical caricaturist and the wider-context-monger with whom they overlap and interpenetrate, have committed treason against the essential haecceity of art—I say again, have committed treason against the essential haecceity of art. But worse than these are those fifth-columnists, themselves natural-born members of the cinematic mass, who, partly by seeking after “effects,” but chiefly, for our purposes, by expressly embedding their efforts in humanized narratives, either art-historical or identity-autobiographical, have imported cinematic norms into the arts, properly so-called, themselves—I mean, the artists, or rather, the artists falsely so-called, as the criterion of validity in this business is precisely loyalty to the medium.
We saw that the motion picture essentially and eternally involves reproducing the everyday world of perception and apperception, while the arts, properly so-called, essentially problematize the use of those faculties, and this, by virtue of their several mediums, of whose manifold specific particularities we singled out one they had in common. But medium-specificity is the ineffaceable ground and final justification of artistic production: there is no painting without something like paint, no poetry without something like chant, no music without something like tones, and so on through, and it is with, and within, these limitations that the arts triumph over the induration and obtundation of our vital faculties brought on by use, disuse, and misuse. That the very idea of the arts being materially several is in danger of being drowned in the backwash, undertow and rip current of the cinema is indeed very true; but if, as the poet says, Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch, it is precisely there, nighmost this catastrophe, in their materials, and nowhere else, that the saving agency to be found. Since it necessarily involves continual self-estrangement from the omniprevalent cinephile regime, we may call loyalty to the medium the aristocratic form of exile.
1 And in these ultimate terms, “motion pictures” includes television shows and anime; and I am grateful to the fans of these latter puerilities (children among them) for having taken to calling them “movies,” not “cartoons,” rather in the way cinephiles call movies “works of art,” for in so doing they have spared me the trouble of having to prove that movies these studio-products actually are, at least so far as the strictures that such a status incurs. From these I exempt the shadow puppet play, for reasons that will be made clear shortly; but to obviate a possible misconstruction, this exemption will have nothing to do with the types (linen, silver or OLED ) or size (IMAX or cell-phone) of the screens on which the images move.
2 I am not going to go through all of the varieties of all the arts—in this case, animatronic robots, low relief, assemblage, etc.. My point concerns only the difference in question. What the point of the point will prove to be will offend film aficionados even more; I urge them, accordingly, to abate their ire until I give it occasion righteously to explode.
3 Of pictures of any sort—the addition of pictures produces "graphic novels," that is, comic books.
4 But about the puppet theater I have no such doubts whatsoever.
5 I invite the reader to take any popular "novel" off the shelf at the bookstore, and, standing there, read only the middle inch of each page; I wager she will lose nothing of the plot; and then to try the same experiment with Henry James. Movies are likewise eminently "drop-in-able" at any point—indeed, the invention of "showing times" is very recent; people used to enter at any point, and stay through until the point they entered came around in the next showing. Television carries this laxity even further: any "series" is wholly intelligible at any episode you happen to "watch." I cannot speak for anime in this regard.
6 Film makers have discovered many means of disburdening the audience of “the pains of consciousness,” sound effects and soundtracks being the most obvious. Lately it has become common to include an audience of spectators of the action inside the film itself; in this way not only is the actual audience relieved of having to gauge what sort of emotional response is appropriate to the situation, which it had hitherto been left to the soundtrack to ensure they were, but of having to feel the emotion at all. The movie thus watches itself for you, to borrow Adorno's harrowingly accurate characterization of popular music. This practice seems to have been inaugurated by the finale of Ghostbusters: it may be called the visual equivalent of the soundtrack. TV “canned laughter” is perhaps the ultimate precursor of this device.
7 The “less” refers to those easy ambiguities that provide the substance, or rather, the talking-points, of cinephiliac debate about what such-and-such a movie is “really about.”
8 This is not the place to elaborate the well-known distinction of empirical person and aesthetic personage; but every artist, properly so-called, will know how emphatically an artwork is its own moving cause, and its completion, its own entelechy—will know her role in what is solemnly called “the creative process” to be liker to that of a medium, or a midwife, than to that of a marketer or MacGuffin-merchant. The properly so-called business will be cleared up shortly.
9 The point of this cryptic parenthesis will be made clear by the next footnote but one to follow.The point of this cryptic parenthesis will be made clear by the next footnote but one to follow.
10 “My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery...When I visited her in the hospital, Mom asked me whether the show was worth losing her legs for. 'No,' I told her, though at that point, I hadn’t seen it. When I did, two weeks later, my answer proved correct.” The critic who does not see the inanity, not to say, feel the horrid taste, of this, the opening of a too, too long essay about (what else?) a trend in the art world, has much to do to earn his way back to serious consideration, to say the least. That the editors (of a magazine that once published Melville) allowed this anecdote to pass shows that the decline of editorial tact has kept pace with the decline of curatorial judgement, and in the same direction, i.e., towards humanized narrative. Both were once vocations, in the sense about to be developed.
11 It would be here that the aesthetic personage might be relevant.
12 The calendar is smaller.
About the Author:
Kid Twist's work may be found in The Revenant Quarterly..