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    Aris Pretelin-Estéves
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    ESTUDIOS SOBRE GENERACIÓN DE IMAGEN CINE-FOTOGRAFÍA-TEATRO

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    ESTUDIOS SOBRE GENERACIÓN DE IMAGEN CINE-FOTOGRAFÍA-TEATRO

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    12 views13 pages

    Susane Sontag - Film and Theatre

    Uploaded by

    Aris Pretelin-Estéves
    ESTUDIOS SOBRE GENERACIÓN DE IMAGEN CINE-FOTOGRAFÍA-TEATRO

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 13
    SUSAN SONTAG FILM AND THEATRE ‘The big question is whether there is an unbridgeable division, even opposition, ‘between the rwo aris. Is there something genuinely “cinematic”? we, eve Simplification testifies to the ambiguous scope of the camera eye Fess the camera can be used t projet a relatively passive, unselecive Linge sion-as well as the highly selective (“cited vison generally assoc cing ao athe nema isa “medium” as well asan art in the sense thatitean encapsulate ‘any ofthe performing arts and render itin a film transcription. (This“‘medivey"cc 362 Rona aspect) There, movies: aturized on fila Way that fila by say that one is because one car ‘had an early but earliest films we ‘marooned in tia son playing Han recently, the ca Courage with th (ilmed by the M ‘But from the “medium” and ¢ What occurred im ‘events captured « isely because th spectator, the iw Constitute an i ‘newsree!” gene document ofa tea theatre, It only ag, performance, Amd ‘mentary record af in Paris and New" of plays, The other parad Activity of the mot tion of fantasy. Th Métis (like many, nalogy with the the very stu of ‘momphoses. Butta cof” the action andl fous sense. In their disjunctive preseaga cematic"—so far ast The contrast beam represented oF depig drawa crude bom ity, indeed to an wl Kracauers striking bit of intellectual mg more cinematic) tha FILM AND THEATRE 363 non-art aspect of film attained its routine incarnation with the advent of elevision, ‘There, movies themselves became another performing art to be transcribed, mi aturized on film.) One car film a play or ballet or opera or sporting event in such a way that film becomes, relatively speaking a transparency, and it seems correct to says that one is seeing the event filmed. But theatre is never a “medium,” Thus, because one can make a movie “ol” a play but not a play “of” a movie, cinema had an early but, should argue, fortuitous connection with the stage. Some of the carliest films were filmed plays. Duse and Bernhardt and Barrymore are on film— ‘marooned in time, absurd, touching; there isa 1913 British film of Forbes-Robert- son playing Hamiet, a 1923 German film of Othello starring Emil Jannings. More recently, the camera has “preserved” Helene Weigel’s performance of Mother Courage with the Berliner Ensemble, the Living Theatre production of The Brig (filmed by the Mekas brothers), and Peter Brook's staging of Weiss's Marat/Sade. But from the Deginning, even within the confines of the notion of film as a “medium” and the camera as a “recording” instrument, a great deal other than what occurred in theatres was taken down. As with still photography, some of the ‘events captured on moving photographs were staged but others were valued pre- cisely because they were not staged—the camera being the witness, the invisible spectator, the invulnerable voyeuristic eye. (Perhaps public happenings, “news,” constitute an intermediate case between staged and unstaged events; but film as “newsreel” generally amounts to using film as a “mediuen.”) To create on film a document of a transient reality is a conception quite unrelated to the purposes of theatre. It only appears related when the “real event” being recorded isa theatrical performance. And the first use of the motion picture camera was to make a docu- ‘mentary record of unstaged, casual reality: Louis Lumitre’s films of crowd-scenes. in Paris and New York made in the 1890's antedate any use of film in the service of plays. The other paradigmatic non-theatrical use of film, which dates from the earliest activity of the motion-picture camera, is forthe creation of ilusion, the construc- tion of fantasy. The pioneer figure here is, of course, Georges Méliés. To be sure, Malis (like many directors after him) conceived of the rectangle of the sereen on analogy with the proscenium stage. And not only were the events staged: they were the very stuff of invention: imaginary journeys, imaginary objects, physical meta- morphoses. But this, even adding the fact that MéHits situated his camera “in fromt of" the action and hardly moved it, does not make his films theatrical in an invid- ious sense. In their treatment of persons as things (physical objects) and in their

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