essay on kinematography

abstract

Not likely in any other decade than last century’s „twenties“ there has been so much reflection on the relationship of film and art and on „film as art“. And the scope of topics was enormous. Unto our times there hardly is a problem, a tendency, a possibility, that the early „Avantgarde movement“ would not have had discussed. Questions regarding form & content, production & reproduction, narrative & „absolute“ film, montage, problems in the representation of movement, repetition and so on. From the „specific“ ways of expression, to all the prospective possibilities ranging from multiscreen projection to the „expanded cinema“ the Avantgarde artists anticipated almost everything that movie makers in later years would experiment with.

The core of this paper consists of the record (protocol) of a fictious congress where seven Avantgarde representatives – Salvador Dali, Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and Hans Richter – and three art historians – Rudolf Arnheim, André Malraux and Erwin Panofsky – dispute on their understanding of film (art). A number of 300 original quotations have been integrated into several discussion topics. This collage might reveal new insights even to the expert of that epoch. Two reflective parts cling to that record, one explaining the context and some of the crucial terms as film, cinematography, „gestaltung”, movement, mimesis, production and reproduction and the concluding part is an assessment of the quotations from a present point of view. The paper is written in German.

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