فصل النظرية ، رودولف آرنهایم وجماليات الانطباعية .. كتاب فهم السينما

Rudolf Arnheim and the Aesthetics of Impressionism

Rudolf Arnheim occupies a great place among impressionist film theorists. Krakauer's position is parallel among the realists. Arnheim's book (The Art of Film) was first published in 1933 when sound and film were still in their initial stages of development. it today. His major hypothesis is that the art of film is the direct result of the differences between physical reality and cinematic reality, and that the film director takes advantage of the shortcomings of this medium - the need for sound, color, depth, and the continuity of space and time, for example - in order to establish a world that resembles the real world, but in a limited sense. Film art does not consist of a copy of reality but of a kind of 'translation' of the observed properties transformed into the forms of the filmic medium.

As a Castelian psychologist, Arnheim was primarily concerned with the perception of experience, and his theory was based on the different perception channels of the camera on the one hand and the human eye on the other. Arnheim was predicting some of the theories
Communications specialist Marshall McLuhan, insisting that a camera image of a bowl of fruit, for example, is fundamentally different from our perception of that bowl in real life, or in McLuhan's language, "the information we receive in each case is determined by the 'form' of the 'content'." Impressionist theorists welcome such differences as they believe that the same properties that make photography decide art forms through film expression (10-15). The photograph fails to be a perfect copy of the original

Technological advances such as sound, color, and the wide screen were initially viewed with suspicion, if not hostility, by the Impressionists. They, like Arnheim, believed that the increase in the realism of film brought about by artistic inventions actually worked against the expressive qualities of cinema. Almost all of the Impressionists agreed with Arnheim in his belief that art begins where mechanical production ends, that he who competes with nature deserves to be a loser. (10- The main thesis of the book (Cinema) (Art) for example, which is a widely circulated book with great impact that was read by Ralph Stephenson and Jean Debre. (16) This is it

Arnheim discusses a number of examples where there is a lot of important difference between the image made by the camera about reality and the image that the eye sees. For example, the film director has to choose which angle he looks at the thing to shoot from. And he does not necessarily choose the clearest angles, as they often do not emphasize the great advantage of the thing. For example, in order to emphasize human power and control, a machine may take a place in a low corner. And if we depict it face-to-face (and this is the clearest angle), we will not get this meaning (10) - (17). Sometimes the director wants to grab the viewer's interest by looking at something from a different location - by filming an event from a helicopter, for example. Photography is normal.

In life, we see things deeply, and we can penetrate into the space that surrounds most things in movies. Space »is an illusion, since the screen has only two dimensions - reality The director can move objects and perspective in an impressive artistic way. For example, important objects can be placed where they can be seen in the edges or in the "wallpaper". Surprising effects can be produced by the sudden detection (with a backward movement of the camera) of something that was hidden outside the frame. The frame itself is an unparalleled identification method in the eye's perception of the natural world.

In movies, two things can be portrayed in such a way that they overshadow each other. In (Citizen Kane, for example), Kane tells his second wife threateningly that she must do exactly what he wants her to do when he speaks. In size and distance, the director can control these elements in order to achieve symbolic relationships. We can reduce the size of a person by photographing him from a distance, while a bottle, for example, may appear larger than a man because it is closest to the lens. The borrowed dominance of the bottle was inspired by the distortion process of photography.

Lighting in movies, Arnheim argues, is about more than just utility. Lights can suggest symbolic ideas, they can bring out the intrinsic characteristics of an object, they can show or hide certain details, they can move the viewer's interest from one point to another on the screen. It has no equivalent in the natural world (10-18).

In real life, we go through the experience of space and time as a continuous phenomenon, but the film maker, by means of montage, cuts time and space and rearranges them in a meaningful style. The film director, like other artists, chooses specific expressive details from the overlapping midst of physical reality. By juxtaposing these fragments of time and space he creates a continuity not found in raw nature. This is it Of course, the basic position of the Soviet montage theorists.

Arnheim points out that there are multiple mechanistic channels of perception in cinema that have no human counterpart. We cannot control our eyes the way we can control a camera to produce slow motion, fast motion, reverse motion, or freeze motion. Our eyes certainly don't have the equivalent of phasing, repeated exposure, negatives, anamorphic lenses, filters, sharpening control, and all the other special effects that can be achieved through the use of a token printer.

In short, Arnheim and most of the other Impressionists claim that the art of film is possible because there are limitations and idiosyncrasies related to this medium. Photographing it and when it transforms its raw material in this way, it does not destroy physical reality as much as it transcends it by cutting, reorganizing and strengthening some essential characteristics according to the Impressionists.
The same problem, although the problem with most impressionist theories is realism. There are many exceptions. Arnheim's analysis is certainly useful in tasting, for example, Criffith's films or Eisenstein's. But how useful is the theory in explaining Renoir or Desika films? They are almost useless in helping us to savor the works of Chaplin, Flaherty, and Leacock. Even if we acknowledge Arnheim's basic hypothesis that the photographic process is a distortion of reality, we still tend to respond to realistic films primarily because of their (similarity) to physical reality and not to their separation from it in the end. Of course, it is a matter of focus, as the films are so numerous and optional that they cannot be crammed into one theory. . Indeed, some films - The Citizen (Kane, for example) - have been "claimed" by both groups of theorists in both camps.