Film

Where the relations among film and art have been discussed, the outcome has often been a disdain for the artistic dimensions, achievements or potential of film. A usefully extreme version of such disdain can be found in the work of the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton who, in his discussions of photography and film, excludes the mass of popular fiction filmmaking from the possibility of aesthetic achievement or distinction, dismissing it as the “mass marketing of sentimentality under the guise of imaginative drama” (Scruton 1981: 86). Scruton writes of the “fictional incompetence” of cinema (Scruton 1983: 112),

suggesting that the fictional dimension of a film is held in check by the fact that the fiction depends on the recording, visually and aurally, of an actual space and time. The fiction of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara embracing in an antebellum mansion in Georgia depends on a depiction of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh embracing under arc lights in a studio in California. Now, the importance of this is that it reveals a particular type of aesthetic criterion: a fiction, as a type of aesthetic object, must not be bound to a mere recording of (some part of) reality. The aesthetic object is such by virtue of a creative or imaginative transformation of what it represents, and film, due to its character as a recording device (a “phonograph for the eyes,” as Thomas Edison conceived of it), is “incompetent” in performing this function: films can perform an aesthetic function, but only so far and never very well. Scruton is not a major theorist or critic of film, and his arguments are not extensively

developed, but they serve to introduce two traditions of thought about the aesthetic potential of film which are of greater significance. First, Scruton’s attitudes to film, and popular film in particular, were in many ways prefigured by the Marxist philosopher and aesthetician Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, the aesthetic potential of film was corrupted by the mechanical and commercial nature of filmmaking, this commercial function conflicting with the “autonomous” development necessary for art, debasing the Kantian “purposelessness” of art into the barren “purpose” of commerce (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 158). Adorno’s hostility to film and its aesthetic potential was, however, far from the dominant attitude among early and classical film theorists. It is among such figures that we find the second overlap with Scruton,

though their arguments move in the opposite direction to those of Scruton. Theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Sergei Eisenstein also examined film in the light of traditional aesthetic criteria, in order to demonstrate that film was capable of aesthetic achievement, rather than to expose its (supposed) failings in this regard. Writing in 1922, Eisenstein and fellow Soviet filmmaker Sergei Yutkevich proclaimed that “the genius of Charlie Chaplin” had taken “the eighth seat in the Council of Muses” (Eisenstein 1988: 29).