Early and silent cinema - Essay Example

The era of modern art and silent cinema began at roughly the same time period, ie, around 1895, when Cezanne showed his paintings for the first time. From 1907-1912 when revolutionary changes in art were taking place, film making took on a new direction, where artists created cinema, which would be termed as “paintings in motion”. The importance of cinema as an art form was underscored by Louis Aragon in 1918, when he commented in ‘Le Film’ that cinema must occupy a “place in the avant-garde’s pre-occupation”(Rees.A.L.1997).The cinema made during and before this period are exhibitionist in temperament and the spectator is integral to the action.

Narrative technique of film making makes the audience “powerful voyeur with the ability to penetrate into the character’s most private reaches”.(Gunning) The sequential events which are a part of narrative cinema are conspicuous by their absence in avant garde films who give precedence to style and interpretation rather than in making a movie which tells a story. The movies made in the avant-garde genre generally elicit the response that it is not quite a movie, since it breaks away with all the traditions of narrative cinema on which most viewers have been brought up.

The early avant-garde films on the other hand “catalyze…our first fully critical response to a set of experiences our culture has trained us to enjoy.” (MacDonald, Scott, 1993) Avant garde cinema saw its finest exponents in France and Germany and post-revolutionary Soviet Union. As said earlier French and German directors were using cinema as a tool to enhance their repertoire and this period created some of the finest abstract and surrealist cinema, a nomenclature earlier associated only with painting.

The films of the Lumiere brothers, with their “populist admiration for working class