Trends and Developments in Film Criticism and Theory from the 1920s to the 1950s

The interest in the cinema's power of transfiguration gradually shifted, during the 1920s, from the discussion of photogénie to a more articulated debate that focused on the creative possibilities of the moving image. If the raw material of film was not a product of invention, but the result of a mechanical operation, in what ways could cinema still preserve a creative, indeed artistic, character? Here we can identify three major responses to this question. At the most elementary level, Delluc insisted on the choice of the visual material. If film could still be considered an art, this was only in the sense of an art of seeing. The director's talent was basically an ability to select what to see, under what light, and from what angle. This explains Delluc's special interest for the profilmic element of the cinema, from the choice of actors and settings to the handling of light. But the creative potential of the gaze could also emerge at the narrative level, for the ideal film story was nothing but the natural development of a particular setting, or the formal elaboration of the narrative possibilities that a sensitive eye had captured in it. At the other extreme, a second response was proposed by the advocates of 'pure' or 'absolute' cinema. First introduced in 1914 by the painter Léopold Survage, this line of reflexion was in no way interested in film as a reproduction of reality, but rather as a means of plastic composition. Central to this conception, which reached its high point around 1925-1927, was a fascination for the purely visual play of lines and shapes on the screen. While in the most radical cases this implied a rejection of representative images and the invitation to explore the possibilities of animated abstract figures (Henri Chomette, Louis Chavance), the notion of 'pure cinema' was more usually employed to refer to the use of specifically cinematic devices in the recording and the treatment of the images.