INTRODUCTION

Until recently, the major recurring question of value that confronted film theorists was whether film could be an art, and, thus, a source of artistic value. In the earliest stages of film theory, this worry was made urgent by the existence of certain anti-mimetic prejudices with respect to photography. For photography was regarded to be a purely mechanical process of recording, and, hence, essentially inartistic. Consequently, film, whose central constituent is photographic, likewise found its artistic credentials under fire.

As a result, the self-appointed task of members of the first generation of film theorists, like Rudolph Arnheim, was to demonstrate, often at length, the ways in which film could diverge expressively from what was thought of as the mere reproduction of reality. And, in the course of these demonstrations, film aesthetics was born. For in showing the ways in which cinematic devices creatively reconstructed pro-filmic events, an inventory of artistic structures was enumerated.

Moreover, the task of establishing the artistic potentials of film proceeded under certain constraints. For it was thought that if film had genuinely artistic potentials, they would have to be of a uniquely cinematic variety. That is, film would not be shown to be an art were it simply mimicking theater. Rather, it had to be established that film had some range of essentially cinematic effects, possessed by no other art forms, which, at the same time, performed some demonstrably artistic function (such as, for example, expression).