THE SEARCH FOR CINEMA: A HISTORY OF ONTOLOGICAL CINEMA THEORY FROM 1900-1960 (FILM, MOTION PICTURE)

This work is a history of theorists' attempts to define the medium of cinema. The scope of this history extends from the earliest days of the cinema to the early 1960's, a period which is often referred to as the "classical era" of cinema theory.The concluding chapter, "Classical Aesthetics, Modernism, and Classical Ontologies of Cinema," is an attempt to place the preceding analyses into a larger context. This chapter characterizes the development of classical ontological cinema theory as a manifestation of the influence of modernist thought, a series of reactions to the technological and social upheavals that occurred during last years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. This work concludes by noting that classical ontological cinema theory taken as a whole reflects a multiplicity of views concerning the cinema that, in harmony with the general thrust of modernist thought, imply that no definitive answer to the question "What is Cinema?" is possible but that there exist many possible definitions of "submedia" which taken as a whole constitute the universe of cinema.Most previous works on this subject portray the whole of classical cinematic theory preceding the realist approach taken by Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer as an expression of a unified "formalist approach" whose major theme is a rejection of cinema's ability to reproduce reality. In contrast to this, the present work divides these early ontologies into three categories: a Western approach (Vachel Lindsay, Hugo Munsterberg, and Rudolph Arnheim) which emphasizes the cinema's ability to function as a medium of "high art", a Soviet approach (Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, V. I. Pudovkin, and Sergei Eisenstein) which generally emphasizes the cinema's potential to serve the practical needs of society as an educational instrument, and a category occupied solely by Bela Balazs, a theorist who created an ontology which synthesizes elements of both the Western and Soviet approaches and prefigures many of the themes expressed in the post-World War II realist theories of Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. The chapter devoted to post-World War II realist theorists indicates that Bazin and Kracauer's approach to the ontology of cinema differs from the Soviet approach and Bela Balazs's approach primarily in its rejection of the use of cinema as a vehicle for ideological communication.