ARE
THE
CONCEPTS
OF
REALISM
AND
EXPRESSIONISM
CONTRADICTORY IN RELATION TO THE PHOTOGRAPHIC MOVING
IMAGE? (2000)
The invention of photography in the 19th century was a significant turning
point for art’s function and conceptualisation. For the first time, a man had the
oppurtunity to create an absolute copy of an image of the physical world. This
realisation brought western painting—which until then was mainly concerned with
“imitating” nature-- to an awkward position: if photography was to cover the role
of the imitation, what would painting’s contribution to art would be? At this
moment, the concept of imitation as art’s primal purpose was abandoned and
notions as realism and expressionism were introduced in art theory. These ideas
did not limit themselves to painting criticism but were applied to the whole of the
art world. With the invention of the cinema at the beginning of our century, the
question whether natural representation contradicts artistic expression became a
major one, since cinema was more “real” than anything else the art
establishment has seen then.
Posing an exact definition of the concept of “realism” is not posssible. First of
all, realism is based on a series of concepts which are problematic themselves,
such as “reality” “represantation”, “perception” and others. At the same time, the
idea of realism has been used in very different ways and sub-divisions of realism
(between which there were major differences) have imerged: naturalism, social
realism, expressive realism and others. However, if we want to give a rough
definition of the concept of “realism”, it is “the represantation of things as they are
and not in some imagined perception”, as William Gaunt suggests. For realism,
therefore, imitation becomes a key-concept. The value of a piece of art is mainly
(if not totally) dependent on its relation (“lookalike-ness”) with the image of the
real world it is supposed to represent. In this sence, the role of the artist is limited
to that of the artisan, a perfect craftsman who has practically learned how to copy
nature with its paint. Strictly realistic creation becomes an almost mechanical
process where the space for personal expression is very limitied.
In cinema (the moving photographic image), realism takes a slightly different
turn, since the imitation of the world as such is allready covered by what Maya
Deren calls the “ “Closed-Circuit of the Photographic Process”, the fact that there
is no human intervention betweenthe actual object and its
copy and on light
sensitive material, an exclusion of the human factor which is “responsibleboth for
the absolute fidelity of the photographic process and for the widespread
convinction that a photographic medium cannot be itself, a creative form”.
Therefore, in the cinema, realism is something deeper than mere imitation of
appearances, it is what Roberto Rossellini calls “the artistic form of the truth”. Of
course this is one of the ways cinematic realism can be viewed for others, as for
the french “Cinema-Veritè” movement, film should be reduced to absolute
naturalism, where artistic intervation is kept to a minimum. It is important to keep
in mind, though, that realism is strongly connected to the earliest definitions and
that “the guiding myth[…] a recreation of the world in its own image, an image
unberdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist”, as A.Bazin puts it. The
more cinema progressed as an art form though the more this definition was
abandoned.
Expressionism, on the other hand, is a much more esoteric way of
expression/recreation. Stemming from a reaction to the impressionists’
preoccupation with light and appearances, “expressionism was[…] a term applied
to the work of those artists who believed that there was much more to the world
than simply what their eyes saw”. Again this definition is quite problematic, since
“all art, as Tudor argues, involves some form of ‘distortion’, some form of
subjectivity, and therefore all art can be concidered more or less “expressionist”.
From the very point that systems of human perception and therefor
consciousness are used, subjectivity enters. As Lawson argues, “Vision is a
psychological as well as mechanical process” and the psyche carries information,
which unavoidably interferes. No image can have an objective substance; it only
exists when a light receiver (a retina, a lens) exists as well. Therfore all art is by
the human nature more or less subjective. However that fact alone does not
make it necessarily what is known as “expressionist”.
How can expessionism manifest itself in the field of the moving image? As in
pictirial expressionism, abstraction can be a means of self-expression (as
supposed to outside impression). The difference, however, between pictorial and
cinematic expression is that in the latter time plays an important role: not only
the images themselves, but also their placing within a specific context or their
development in time can create abstract effect. In the history of cinema, the main
reference to expressionism usually takes place in the analysis of the 20’s
German silent film. In the case of Weimar cinema, the idea of expressionism was
mainly applied to ways of acting and set design, it was, in other words, a
theatrical expressionism. This is not the case in modern film and video, where
expressionism should be traced in the filming and editing of the sequences
themselves, for the art of cinema is not primarily the art of staging a concept, but
rather of representing a concept through the lens. “The things themselves,
without ceasing to be what they are, become a sign or a symbol” , by the very
way they are filmed or placed within a particular context.
“The great artists […] have always been able to combine the two tendencies
[realism and expressionism]. They have allotted to each its proper place in the
hierarchy of things, holding reality at their command and molding it at will into the
fabric of their art” , Bazin argues. It was soon realised that imitation of nature by
itself is not sufficient for appreciating the value of art. Artists attempted to find a
way to idealise nature and thus, through making it look more beautiful, express
their personal aesthetical and conceptual concerns. “All efforts necessarily came
down to choosing the best parts of Nature, in order to form an exquisite whole
that was more perfect than Nature itself, without for all that ceasing to be natural”
, as Tzvetan Todorov argues. A cinematic example of this idea of the idealisation
of nature is the case of the expressionist director Fritz Lang, who “found it more
convenient to recreate nature in the studio or in similar circumstances”, as Mitry
suggests. Although his sets were very similar to natural settings and his stories
were supposed to take place in natural contexts, his need for personal
expression demanded that he could manipulate his environment as much it was
necessary.
In this sense, realism moves to a point where it is actually much more
mediated without ever being removed from its representational purpose, a
mediation based on the artist himself, his very own experiences and purpose.
Thus the distinction between what is objective and what is subjective is blurred:
“The artist has not created something ‘unreal’, but he has used the camera to
expose new aspects of the external world, communicating his attitude towards it”
. For such an approach, Parker Tyler uses the terms “illusionist realism” and
“realist illusion”, which in cinematic mean to use the camera as an instrument of
rediscovering the world around us. The concept of abstraction is of great
importance here. For it is the way in which the artist’s lens blurs the image that
his personal expression comes through. As Lawson argues: “The concept is
abstracted from ordinary observation; it is a product of the mind. It is not
necessarily irrational: abstract thought can be extremely logical, but aesthetic
abstraction asserts the primacy of inner experience” . Of course such a definition
of realism is extremely broad and poses problems to distinguishing realism from
expressionism.
One of the most influential figures in the history of film theory, who wrote on
the creative use of reality is Maya Deren, an underground American film director.
In fact, Deren believed that this is exactly the purpose and essence of cinema: to
start from a representational image, but manipulate it as to arrive to very abstract
conclusions. “Photography, being itself the reality or the equivalent therof, can
use its own reality as a metaphor for ideas and abstractions” , as she suggests.
Editing plays here a major role, as “it establishes a context, a form which
transfigures them [the shots] without distorting their aspect, diminishing their
reality and authority, or impoverishing that variety of potential functions which is
the characteristic dimension of reality” . Shots are used in a functional way in
order to serve a purpose within a self-ruled context. Here we enter the field of
structuralism, in which the content of a particle is not important as such, but is
necessarily dependent on the whole. This approach retains the spatial
characteristics of realism, but alters its time structure as a means of personal
expression.
We have seen so far that the concepts of “realism” and “expressionism” are
not necessarily contradictory and that the ideas that are connected to them can
coincide and apply to both of them. Therefore, it is useful to establish a term that
combines that two concepts. This terms is “expressive realism”, an idea that
emerged in the previous century, but which can probably be applied to art even
today. Catherine Belsey quotes: “The aristotelean concept of art as mimesis, the
imitation of reality, was currect throughout the Renaissance and particularly
during the eighteenth century. Expressive realism was the product of the fusion
of this concept with the new Romantic conviction that poetry, as the
‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’” . The most impressive and
historically important cinematic representative of expressive realism is the
Russian avant-garde film-maker Dziga Vertov. Vertov developed the theory of
the “kino-eye”, according to which the purpose of cinema is to record “life-as-itis”, but recontextualise in the post-production phase in order to appreciate
images not only for their meaning but also expressive formal qualities. As Hans
Richter argues, “Vertov located the expressiveness of the object photographed in
the expressiveness of movement. Faces, trees, clouds, a falling drop of blood
became in the rhythm of Vertov’s series of images, a metrical language of the
document – became film poetry” . Vertov believed in the power of the camera to
represent to us a world we have not been aware of, which still consists of
elements that are around us in our everyday experiences. “The secret may be in
an angle, or an arrangement of light, or an arrangement of movement” , as John
Grierson suggests in order to get an image whose expressionism depends on its
very representational formal qualities. In other words, a realist image has got not
only meaning, but also expressive value based on the possibilities of its form.