Arnheim Film Essays

Not to bring down Arnheim because he does a good job of disproving these claims very thoroughly.

Not to bring down Arnheim because he does a good job of disproving these claims very thoroughly.I have to gripe at his indictment of the future of cinema and b2.5As much as this book likes to think it's relevant today (see opening of book), it's really not.

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Rather, one of those qualities of the camera that makes film art possible will be lost again, since every artistic creation demands that distance from reality which Progress is trying to remove.

In the fall of 1957 the University of California Press expanded Arnheim’s 1933 book Film by four essays and brought that landmark work back into print as Film as Art.

Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early limitations: no sound, no color, no three-dimensional depth.2.5As much as this book likes to think it's relevant today (see opening of book), it's really not.

The reason Arnheim wrote this was to disprove claims at the time that film was not art because it was mechanically imitating reality (or something similarly stupid); which today holds no ground and was something I wasn't even familiar with.

The wide country road of film art, whose lovely goal was becoming ever clearer in the distance, was closed for technical renovations, with a detour erected on a bumpy path over the fields.

[…] One may welcome the appearance of sound film, but the unscrupulous strangulation of an entire branch of art, the violation of talented and inspired artists, remains a scandal. It had not lost its fruitfulness, but only its profitability.

Those who try to be lovers of both the people and art – a difficult double calling these days – have hailed film as the illustrated bible for the people.

The esoteric pleasures of the art of printing are now to be surpassed by the (equally nutritional) visual instruction provided by the living picture, whose lessons are thought to be best suited to making an impression on the eye of the common man.

Regardless, he makes generalized statements about what constitutes an 'art'.

He also relies heavily on assumptions of what the future cinema might entail - this leads him to make false claims about the (lack of) artistic merits of sound film, colour film, 3D film, and other ty Arnheim's anatomical survey of how film form differs perceptually from the then-hegemonic contention that "film is a mechanical reproduction of reality" merits some praise for its counter-hypothesis to realist film theory.