Cinema: The saviour of modernism

What I’ve found one of the most absorbing parts of this course is discovering the way Modernism and Cinema are so interwoven, and explicit within each other. Cinema is the modern discourse, and modernism is the cinematic subject. So I just thought in my final blog I would have a small look at cinema as the ‘saviour’ of modern art.

Modernist art is fantastic, but also (in its non-cinematic forms) very elitist. It all started off okay. Manet’s work might have looked a little bit odd and flat to its viewers (in fact, they were yelling out “hey, look at me! I’m flat!”) but they were still nice-looking paintings with recognisable subjects. Here’s a pretty girl standing behind a bar…

Cezanne followed with some funny lumpy looking fruit, which didn’t look very edible, but the colours were approximately right, and the shape was recognisable – you could tell he had some kind of ability with a paintbrush…

Then something went horribly wrong.

Mondrian’s non-representational work just does not make sense from a traditional perspective on art. I can imagine what was thought of them at the time, as its still a fairly prevalent attitude when it comes to abstract art: “But they’re just lines! My kid could have drawn them!” In fact – just did a quick google and instantly found this:

“Wouldn't share your love of Mondrian or the rest of the abstract art lot. I kinda feel that art should look like something or at least represent something unambiguously. If it's just supposed to look pleasant, then that's graphic design (I think). I might be open to calling such non-representative designs artistic if they can be shown to have something ingenious about their structure or something, much like good music does.

Instead, it seems to me that Mondrian's stuff could have been generated by a relatively simple algorithm. His basic contribution seems to be to think "Hey, let's make images composed of rectangles in primary colours!", the rest being details.” http://underanorangesky.blogspot.com/2007/05/552.html

It’s simply not easy to connect with a Mondrian composition. But while I won’t go into Mondrian’s complete aesthetic theory (!! If you’re interested, google De Stijl or neoplasticism) I will say that his art has had resonances throughout the last hundred years. So while art progressed at a rapid pace, in the broader public sphere it stagnated.

What could save art?

Cinema, of course. Film, as a new and strange medium offered the artist ample opportunity to create as they wished. It required new languages and new ways of thinking, and modernism provided this.In turn, the nature of cinema made it ideal for modernist discourses – it was a medium which was transitory, open and incomplete. Cinema provides a way of delving deeper into the alienated expression on the face of Munch’s Scream. Each film was able to produce an individual vision of the world, and this, of course, was the aim of modernist theory to begin with (See Tim Woods, ‘Beginning of Postmodernism’).

Modernist cinema was also highly self-reflexive - but while modernist painters attempted to perform this by highlighting the ‘flatness’ and unreality of their work, film makers did so by turning the camera on itself: we can look to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera for an example of this. First, a shot is taken from below a moving train, and it appears the cameraman has been run over. The film then reveals its own tricks, as we see the cameraman dig his camera out from under the train tracks. Modernist cinema looked at itself and asked – what are we representing and how?

But most of all, cinema was the most effective way of expressing modernist ideologies because it was a more accessible form of art. Even the highly abstracted city symphony films of Vertov and Ruttman can be enjoyed on a simple visual level – the viewer can watch the movement of people within the piece and find comfort in some sense of normalcy.

And that is how, my friends, cinema saved modernism.