There is a great divide between the high culture of modern civilisation and the popular culture upon which it broods. Some identify kitsch as a cause of this divide, others as the effect of it. Either way it is clear that modern artists have feared contamination from devices which are mechanical, trite and incapable of being used to convey a serious view of life, and that such devices are nevertheless popular, since they require no effort from their intended public. Modernism is a defence against banality: a way of insisting that the audience think.
Technology has also contributed to the divide between high and popular culture. The market can now be flooded at a moment’s notice with products that are both easy to grasp and impossible to ignore. The very fact that we can speak of a cultural ‘market’ testifies to the change undergone by the artistic enterprise in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’, as Walter Benjamin described it. High culture is an activity in which the producer is sovereign; pop culture, like every market, shows the sovereignty of the consumer.
The invention of the cinema was seen as both a threat, and an opportunity. Some looked forward to a new era of democratic art, of dramas addressed to the whole population, using images that were appealing and exciting even to those who had never read a book. Others feared that this democratic art would subvert the aims of high culture, by awakening the easy-going fantasies which destroy the mental discipline on which art depends.
To understand the cinema we must first understand photography, which is its medium. Painting was shocked into self-consciousness by the invention of photography, though not, perhaps, into true self-knowledge. If the purpose of painting is to copy appearances and to place a frame around the world then, it was argued, photography can do this just as well or better. So the true purpose of painting must be something else – the recording of a sensory impression (impressionism) or the ‘expression’ of emotion (‘abstract expressionism’). In either case, mere ‘representation’ – which is the prerogative of photography – is not the ultimate goal.
Such arguments were put forward by way of saving the art of painting from the threat of the camera, and re-launching it on its path to higher things. Two philosophers – the Italian Benedetto Croce and the Englishman R.G. Collingwood – bolstered the defence of painting by giving theories of representation and expression which made expression the true aim of art, and representation at best the means to it. Photography, they suggested, is confined by its nature to the task of representation: it shows the world, but expresses nothing. It is the visual equivalent of journalism, pampering the appetite for knowledge, while destroying, through its expressive incompetence, the act of communication – the resonance of each to each – upon which art depends.
The argument is wrong: not because photography is an art on a par with painting, but because photography does not represent anything at all. It may be an art, but if so, it is not an art of depiction.
Representation occurs in painting; it also occurs in literature, where there is no question of copying the way things appear. Literature and painting represent things, not by copying them, but by expressing thoughts about them. The word ‘about’ is one of the most difficult in the language. It seems to denote a relation – between thought and its subject matter. But we can think and speak about non-existent things, and what could be meant by a relation between objects, one of which does not exist? Painting is exactly analogous to thought and speech. If you paint a subject, it does not follow that the subject exists, nor, if it does exist, that it is as you paint it to be. And your painting can be of a man, even when there is no particular man of which it is a painting. In the jargon of philosophy: the relation between a painting and its subject is an intentional, not a material, relation.
A photograph is caused by its subject, and causality is a material relation. Hence the subject of the photograph must exist, and if a photograph is of a man, there is some particular man of whom it is a photograph. Furthermore, the photograph will always show the subject, within limits, as it really appeared from a certain angle: and this, indeed is the root of our interest in photography. Of course, the appearance may be deceptive, but the deception lies in the thing photographed, and not in the process of recording it.
Hence, photographs are incapable of displaying things that are unreal. I may take a photograph of a nude and call it Venus. The result, however, is not a photograph of Venus: still less a photographic representation of her. It is a photograph of a representation of Venus: the representational act, the act which establishes the ‘intentional relation’ with Venus, was completed before the photograph was taken. Photographic fictions are really photographs of fictions; the camera itself is without imagination. Interest in a photograph – even in the arty photographs of a Robinson or a Lartigue – is always interest in the thing photographed, whose existence can never be in doubt. Interest in a painting is in the presentation of a subject, which exists as a rule only in the act of presentation. That is why there is no room, in the true art of painting, for vulgar curiosity, or for those vicarious emotions which hunger for what is distant, disengaged but real.
By its very nature photography can ‘depict’ things only by resembling them. It is only because photographs look like their subjects that we were ever tempted to compare them with paintings in the first place. In looking at a photograph, therefore, we know that we see something which actually occurred, as it occurred. This fact dominates our response to the picture, which becomes in consequence transparent to its subject. If the picture holds our interest, it is because we are interested in the thing ‘shown within’. The beauty of a photograph is seen as a beauty in its subject, and if the photograph is sad, it is because the subject is sad. Consider, for example, Roman Vishniac’s superb records of the Central European ghettoes between the wars. The emotional density here belongs not to the picture but to the thing displayed, and is entirely dependent upon our knowledge that this is how things were. Hence there cannot be a photograph of a martyrdom which is other than horrifying. To take an aesthetic interest in a photograph of martyrdom is to sink into moral corruption – the corruption involved in looking aesthetically upon the sufferings of real people. By contrast, a painting of a martyrdom may be serene, as is Mantegna’s great crucifixion in the Louvre. The painting, because it tells a story, can create the distance between itself and its subject matter which is necessary for aesthetic judgement. The photograph is unable to do this, since it lacks the technique whereby the subject and its mode of presentation could be held apart.
Well, you might say, why not invent that technique? Suppose that we do so. Suppose that we try to make our photographs so that it no longer matters whether their subjects exist, or whether they look like the things depicted. In such a circumstance, we begin to separate our interest in the picture from our interest in the thing displayed: perhaps we can now take an aesthetic attitude to the one which is not also an aesthetic attitude to the other; perhaps medium and content have at last been pulled apart.
Unfortunately, there is no way of determining in advance which detail is relevant to an aesthetic interest: every detail can and ought to play its part. At the same time, the causal process of which the photographer is victim puts almost every detail outside his control. Even if he does intentionally arrange the folds of his subject’s dress and meticulously construct, as studio photographers once used to do, the appropriate scenario, that would still hardly be relevant. For there seem to be few ways in which such intentions can be revealed in the photograph. For we lack all but the grossest features of style in photography; and yet it is style that opens the way to the question, Why this and not that?
Let us assume nevertheless that the photographer can exert over his image the kind of control that is exercised in painting. The question is, How far can this control be extended? Certainly, there will be an infinite number of things that are accidental. Dust on a sleeve, freckles on a face, wrinkles on a hand: such minutiae will depend initially upon the prior situation of the subject. When the cameraman sees the plate, he may still wish to assert his control, however, choosing just this colour here, just that number of wrinkles or that texture of skin. He can proceed to paint things out or in, to touch up, alter or pasticher as he pleases. But he has now become a painter, precisely through taking representation seriously. The photograph persists only as a kind of frame around which he paints.
The culmination of this process can be found in the techniques of photo-montage, as used by such artists as László Moholy-Nagy and Hannah Höch. Here our interest in the subject has been genuinely separated from our interest in the image, to such an extent that, as in painting, we can be entirely indifferent to the existence and nature of the originating cause. But that is precisely because the photographic figures have been so cut up and rearranged in the final product that it could not be said in any normal sense to be a photograph of its subject. Suppose that I were to take figures from a photograph of Jane, Philip and John and, having cut them out, I were to arrange them in a montage, touching them up and adjusting them until I have a telling representation of a lovers’ quarrel; it represents a lovers’ quarrel because it stands in an intentional, rather than a causal, relation to a quarrel. Indeed, it is to all intents and purposes a painting.
The history of the art of photography is, I believe, the history of successive attempts to break the causal chain by which the photographer is imprisoned, and to impose a human thought between subject and image. It is theory of an attempt to turn a mere simulacrum into a mode of discourse, an attempt to discover through technique (from the combination print to the soft-focus lens) what was in fact already known as art. Occasionally photographers have tried to create fictions, by arranging their models and props according to the requirements of some imaginary scenario. But a photograph of a representation is no more a representation than a picture of a man is a man.
The true talent of the camera is not to produce representations, but to provide us with surrogates and reminders. Hence, like the waxworks, it provides us with the means to realise the situations which fascinate us. It can address itself to our fantasy directly, by showing what is absent, untouchable, but real. This is surely what distinguishes the scenes of violence which are so popular in the cinema from the conventional death-throes of the stage. And it is this too which makes photography incapable of being erotic. For it represents us with the object of lust, instead of the imaginative symbol of it. The photograph is a realisation of the thing desired, and therefore gratifies the fantasy of desire long before it has succeeded in imagining and reflecting on the fact of it. The medium of photography, when bent towards the sexual and the violent, is inherently pornographic.
Of course, there are other, and better, uses for the camera. We wish for portraits of our friends, hoping to be reminded of their appearance and to renew our affections towards them. But why is the result so disappointing? In order to understand aesthetic appreciation, Wittgenstein once said, ‘I would have to explain what our photographers do today – and why it is impossible to get a decent picture of your friend even if you pay £1,000’.37 Because photography is understood through a causal relation to its subject, it is always, for us, the record of a moment: that sudden smile, that vanishing embrace, that flicker of a long since dead emotion. Painting aims to capture the sense of time, and to present its subject as extended in time. Portraiture is not an art of the momentary, and the true portraitist paints into the features of his sitter a whole narrative history. The causal relation which fixes the photographic image is a relation between events, and it is only by deserting his craft and taking up a pen, a brush or a pencil, that the photographer can adjust his image so as to break free of the moment. (This is surely what Brady manages in his famous portrait of Queen Emma.)
A photographer can aim to capture the fleeting moment which gives the most reliable indication of his subject’s character. He may look in the moment for the sign of what endures. But a sign is not an expression. Someone may give a sign of guilt by blushing; but he does not thereby express his guilt. Similarly, a photograph may give signs of what is permanent, despite the fact that it cannot express it. Expression, however, is what we need in a worthwhile portrait. We can never rest content with a photo of our friend. We seek the visual narrative of his character, through which to recreate the object of our affection. Even in the realm of portraits and reminders, therefore, it is impossible that photography should displace the art of painting or even begin to compete with it.
Photography is here to stay, and will always call forth the most vigorous protests on behalf of its aesthetic pretensions. And it is not difficult to see why. Photography is democratic: it puts into the hand of Everyman the means to be his own recorder. To defend its artistic pretensions is to make Everyman an artist. To attack them is to imply that the ability to create, to appreciate, to resonate – the ability to stand back from the world and record its meaning in an aesthetic judgement – is the property of the few. Such a thought will always be greeted as deepest heresy, in an age which builds its institutions and its monuments on the idea of human equality.
Where does all that leave the cinema? First, we must acknowledge that a film is a photograph of a drama, and that skilful use of the camera can never excuse the paltriness, sentimentality or weakness of the action. What I have said about modernism and its search for an art that will perpetuate the ethical vision, applies as much to the cinema as it does to the other arts. There are directors who have presented dramas that can be compared with the great modern works for the stage – Bergman, for instance, in Wild Strawberries, where an original situation, conveyed through masterly dialogue, is enhanced by dream sequences and flashbacks of a kind that can be managed successfully only through the skilful cutting that is the essential ingredient in cinematic art.
Secondly, however, we must remember the distinction between fantasy and imagination, and the inherent tendency of the camera to realise what it shows – to present not a world of imagination, but a substitute reality. This is never more obvious than in the case of sex and violence, and is the root cause of the fact that these now dominate the cine screen, and would dominate television too, were it not for the censor. With the aid of the camera you can realise violence or the sexual act completely, and so minister to the fantasy which has sex or violence as its focus. If fantasy breaks through the tissue of imagination, then the dramatic thought is scattered, and the imaginative emotions along with it: drama then sinks into the background, and all that we have is obscenity – human flesh without the soul.
Hence many people are quickly satiated by cinematic representations, and at the same time deeply disturbed and absorbed by features (violence in particular) which, from the dramatic point of view, have little intrinsic meaning. Imagination withers when realisation blooms, and the ethical view of our condition withers along with it. It is a significant fact that most cinema-goers are disposed to see their favourite films only a few times, and that even people whose interest is not in the drama but in the blood, screams, and orgasms have no great interest in revisiting the last occasion of excitement, and will proceed joylessly to the next one without raising the question of the value of what they watch. This contrasts with every other kind of dramatic art – theatre, novel, opera, dramatic poem – in which the perception of beauty brings with it a desire constantly to return to the source, to re-enact in our emotions a drama which never loses its point for us, since it touches the question why we are here.
The desire to make the cinema into an imaginative art form, with the camera and the cutting room as adjuncts to the drama, rather than as short-cuts to the gratification of fantasy, lies behind the great poetic experiments of the black-and-white screen. Names like Eisenstein, Cocteau, Renoir, Buñuel, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Truffaut and Fellini remind us of the enormous energy that has been applied to the task of taming the camera, of teaching it to serve the drama rather than to eclipse it. It is significant that the films of those masters are almost never now seen; only a few works of blatant kitsch from Walt Disney are regularly revived, and even these are often up-dated to satisfy the increasingly jaded appetite of their viewers. The war declared by the modernists on behalf of high culture has, in the arena of the moving image, been lost. Moreover, nothing has followed the modernist experiments of Fellini, Antonioni, Polanski or Godard. What now passes for ‘art’ cinema is shaped by the needs of those whose taste has been formed by the screen. Hence even the most self-consciously artistic of directors will interpolate scenes of gratuitous violence or grunting sexuality into dramas which, like the screen-plays of Quentin Tarantino, will be construed in cynical and cold-hearted terms, so that the sex and the violence can be foregrounded as the true focus of the plot.
Whether the cinema can take its place alongside the other forms of high art, as a guardian of ethical ideas in an age of doubt, is not a matter that can be settled by speculation. Nevertheless, it is fairly clear that photographic images, with their capacity for the realisation of fantasies, have a distracting character which requires masterly control if it is not to get out of hand. People raised on such images – which is to say modern, or at any rate postmodern people – inevitably acquire a need for them, and seem to focus only rarely on the drama as an imaginary event, distinct from its realisation on the screen. Observing the products of the video culture you come to see why the Greeks insisted that actors wear masks, and that all violence take place behind the scenes. You also come to see that the masks are now worn not by the actors but by the viewers, and that they stay in place all day.