Is there an absolute standard of beauty, or is art in the eye of the beholder? Cinematographer and director David Worth reflects on art and film.
Is there an absolute set of aesthetic criteria that have been handed down for centuries and generations, or in the final analysis, is “Beauty” and “Art” simply in the eye of the beholder?
Can Art be defined and categorized? Or is what makes an Artist or a piece of Art simply too illusive, mercurial, confusing, incomprehensible, unfathomable, impenetrable, baffling, perplexing, mystifying, mysterious, and sometimes revolutionary or even disgusting to be categorized or explained?
If we do insist on endless critiques and analysis, do we by our persistent probing, somehow extinguish that spark of the extraordinary that drew us to the Art or Artist in the first place? I guess, that for a piece of “Art” to survive that, it is called “standing the test of time.”
Art is easy:
It is easily the most unobtainable, difficult, ineffable and impossible goal that you can ever attempt to grasp or achieve unless you happen to be born a Mozart or a Mamet.
Art is fast:
It can happen in a flash of inspiration over night or during a period of total despair after a lifetime of preparation, like a Ginsberg or a Kerouac.
Art is cheap:
It can be found and cost you absolutely nothing or it can take your entire existence, your mind your heart your soul, your being and your life, like an Ansell Adams Photograph or a Novel by Bukowski.
Art can be recognized:
In music, the human form, children, the macrocosm and microcosm of nature, a hummingbird, a mountain range, a microbe, a redwood tree, a seashells, a sunset or the endless billions of patterns and colors in the unfathomable galaxies of the universe.
Art cannot be found:
In many expensive galleries, most television and movie studios, religious dogma, tv evangelists, on wall street, the stock exchange, insurance companies, corporate headquarters, lobbyists, congress, the pentagon, war, intolerance, racism, ignorance or any repressive, corrupt form of government.
Art can:
Make something ordinary seem profound and it can make something everyday seem timeless.
Art can:
Be frustrating, horrific, complex, tiresome and finally if we are fortunate enough, it can lead our humanity to an epiphany or even enlightenment.
The Art of Film:
Filmmaking is barely 100 years old, still it has been recognized as the great Modern Art of the last century. Today, with all the, recycled, remakes and Super Hero CGI laden dreck being churned out by Hollywood, as well as the endless hours on hundreds of channels of absolutely unwatchable television; I’m afraid that we will have to wait to see if that same assessment will be made by the end of our present century.
From thee very beginning of Filmmaking there have always been great independent Film Artists and we will mention some of them, but what excites me today is the New Technology that has totally democratized filmmaking and has made it possible for independent filmmakers of all cultures on the planet to thrive and make films…
There were several astounding Silent Film Masterpieces make early in the last century. One of the first Artistic and Cinematic achievements in the history of Filmmaking was made in 1916 by D.W. Griffith with his film, INTOLERANCE.
Can you imagine the staggering achievement back in the infancy of the film medium, of telling four (4) separate stories, from four (4) different epochs of time in one feature film:
1. The Fall of Babylon (650 BC)
2. The Crucifixion of Christ (32 AD)
3. The Slaughtering of the French Protestants by The French Catholics (1600’s).
4. A Modern Story of a man about to be hung for a crime he did not commit. (1915).
As well as Hand Tinting each story a Different Color to help the audience of the early 1900’s to follow along.
Mr. Griffith also used the shot of a woman rocking a cradle, when cutting between each story as a linking device and to symbolically make the statement that, with each new birth, humanity was given the chance to change from “intolerance” to tolerance.
In the final act of the film when all four stories were coming to a conclusion, Mr. Griffith often did not use the shot of the woman rocking the cradle, but was instead Cross Cutting directly between four epochs of time!!! A Cinematic achievement that has never been duplicated and was only attempted nearly half a century later by the French New Wave Director: Alain Resnais in his brilliant anti atomic bomb feature: HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR.
Since Mr. Resnais’s film was only cutting between two epochs of time: Modern Day Japan (1950’s) and the bombing of Hiroshima (1945) or Modern Day Japan (1950’s) World War II France (1945) what Mr. Griffith had done nearly half a century earlier was essentially, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR squared!
Another early Cinematic Artist was the French Filmmaker, Abel Gance with his 1927 feature: NAPOLEON. Mr. Gance could be called the “Tony Scott” of the 1920’s because of how astoundingly experimental he was with the medium of Film.
He may well have been the first Filmmaker to use the Hand Held camera, which he used in NAPOLEON. He also mounted the camera on horseback and swung it from a pendulum. Mr. Gance was far ahead of his time by using 2 and 4 and 6 frame cuts, fast cutting as well as multiple superimpositions long before these techniques would become popular with the advent of MTV and Music Videos in the 1970’s.
For the climax of his epic film he actually placed three (3) cameras side by side to capture the conclusion of his film and projected the images onto three screens to create the worlds first Wide Screen extravaganza which he called “Polyvision”. Nearly thirty years later, in the late 1950’s, the movie studios introduced “Cinerama” using exactly the same technique in an attempt to lure Television viewers out of their living rooms and back to the movie theaters.
Nearly ten years after Mr. Gance’s revolutionary techniques, by the mid 1930’s both Sound and Color had been introduced to Filmmaking and by the early 1940’s Filmmakng had the Artistic Cinematic achievements of both Orson Welles with CITIZEN KANE and Walt Disney with FANTASIA…
Cinematic Art continued in the late 1940’s with the Italian Neo Realists, and Vitorio DeSica’s BICYCYCLE THEIF, in Japan in 1950 with Akria Kurosawa’s RASHOMON, in Franch in the 1950’s with Alain Resnais, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR and Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS, in Sweden in the 1960’s with Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA, in the USA in the 1970’s with John Casavettes FACES, in the 1980’s with Spike Lee’s SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT.
Finally after a host of Independent Filmmakers that are too abundant to name, in 1999 Filmmaking achieved, the Totally Outside The Box, Totally New Paradigm of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. A production that unleashed, both the Internet as a marketing tool and the specter of “Reality Television”.
Now well into the new millennium non-linear editing and DSLR HD capture have become second nature and behold, Hollywood was just introduced to the new Cannon C300 by no less a Filmmaking Icon than Martin Scorsese. This is a totally professional camera can shoot at a once unthought-of 20,000 ASA (or ISO) and costs around $18,000.
However, for the young independents of the world, we also have the latest DSLR’s from Nikon and Canon, both of which can shoot at over 100,000 ASA (or ISO).
Now young “student” filmmakers, kindly come to the realization that all you need is your imagination a DSLR and Final Cut Pro or a similar nonlinear editing system and suddenly you will become your own studio. Don’t even quit your day job. just get your team together, kind of like the “garage bands” of the 1990’s only now it’s “garage filmmaking”! Then while your mastering the equipment, write a compelling script, get your cast and crew into Natural Locations using Available or Practical Light and make a movie!
Celluloid Film is dead, but Art is not dead, the tools to form your own studio can be purchased for under $5000 and Beauty is still in the eye of the beholder. There are a lot of stories to tell, a lot of Artists yet to be born and more just waiting to be discovered…
Make Movies… David Worth has a resume of over thirty five feature films as a Director of Photography and Director and has worked with talents like Clint Eastwood, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Shelly Winters, Roy Scheider, Dennis Hopper, Sondra Locke and Bruce Campbell. He has taught filmmaking at Chapman University, USC and at Chapman Singapore where he also lectured at the NYU TischAsia campus. He is presently a part time professor at UCLA and The Academy of Art University in San Francisco. His first textbook: The Citizen Kane Crash Course In Cinematography… was published in 2008 and is available at www.amazon.com. Website: www.davidworthfilm.com.
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