This old-fashioned topic of the cinematic is what classical film
theory dealt with, trying to establish the medium as a legitimate art
form. Who cares about film being an art? Film is important whether it
is art or not. Any claim of x,y or z being 'cinematic' and a, b or c
being 'non-cinematic' is essentialist. A truly non-essentialist
approach to film would have to acknowledge that there is no such
thing as cinematicity. Film is, as Bazin correctly observed,
basically (but not essentially) an impure form which can best be
understood in terms of (probabilistic) clusters of properties rather
than essences. Not even the visual, the moving image, is cinematic,
as there have been, especially in experimental film, attempts to
produce and question cinema without a projected image (e.g. by
Michael Snow or Valie Export).
H
> Diverting from the Zizane thing:
>
> The Kermode diatribe in the Guardian does raise some ideas about
> what is cinematic. Inconvenient Truth is Powerpoint, The Queen is
> television, Zizane is gallery video, Sin City is comic book (I
> suspect K might think Sin City was cinematic), Michael Moore is
> whatever... and so on. Each of these films may deserve or be worthy
> of criticism but hardly for sinning against the magic category of
> the cinematic. Kermode seems to dislike documentary cinema and
> wishes cinema was all Powell and Pressburger and Disney (Mary
> Poppins) etc (he cites an indiosyncratic and small set of examples
> of the cinematic). Godard (always a paragon of good sense) said
> somewhere something like a film can contain anything. I like the
> idea of film inspired by or quoting Powerpoint. (I wish 99% of
> Powerpoints were more cinematic). Why shouldn't a film be
> televisual. (Just what is televisual?)
>
> And just what is cinematic? This is a much abused term. Like
> narrative. Kermode uses it as a kind unspecified touchstone. Bad
> thinking, bad argument, bad journalism. Still, just as cinema can
> use the televisual, the Powerpoint, the CCTV, the comic strip, etc,
> etc etc we can use this peculiar concept of the cinematic. It has
> some currency, it does sort of refer to something.
>
> Ross
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