three Bazin principles, where he suggested that cinema came from literature, the theater and painting. I would suggest actually that very little of cinema comes from painting..
..images which are constantly slaved to texts. I challenge you to acknowledge the notion that when you watch ninety-nine percent of cinema you can see the cinema maker following the text. The text is the prime organizer of ideas and of the narrative structure, as well as the prime organizer of the way the characters are envisaged
cinema is in deep trouble because it has been a slave to four separate tyrannies.
First of all, I believe as already indicated that the cinema is a slave to text. We should had an imagistic cinema, not a cinema which is essentially created by writers.
..second tyranny would the tyranny of the frame. This might seem strange to you, but all of us watch cinema primarily in a dark space sitting down, looking in one direction at a single frame. The human body doesn’t like sitting still, it’s obviously restless, and the notion of a single concentration on a single space is a most extraordinary situation.. A frame doesn’t exist in nature, it’s entirely artificial.. The television ratio of 1 to 1.3 has begun to create a great straitjacketing, a great closure of the ability in which the whole world is now seeing its moving picture imagery.. My desire is to break away from the conventional relationship of a seated audience in the dark focusing on one single screen throwing shadows of a hallucinogenic nature.
third tyranny would be the tyranny of the actor. Now we all know that the actor and actress are the best possible publicity stunts cinema could ever ever imagine. The actor or actress offscreen creates an environment which affects how you look at them on the screen. The whole media of the world in all its gossip facilities is very highly geared in order to create this particular relationship, but to repeat a phrase I’ve used at least fifty times in this room in the past three days, the cinema does not exist as a playground for Sharon Stone..
We have to get rid of the camera. The camera has made us arrive at cinema almost at level six on the Richter scale. We’ve already created pictures of the world which we know are grossly inadequate. The world out there is always going to be more exciting, more fascinating, more adventurous, more extraordinary than what can be presented through a camera.. cinema of the last hundred years has been very much associated with the production of a photographer, that whole situation has been changed around so that the king in terms of cinema manufacture will now be the editor. The editor, thanks to new technology, can do anything with anything.