ABSTRACT
The formulation of aesthetic standards, and the endeavour to decide where responsibility lay for the film as an artistic whole, were processes furthered not only by an artistic vanguard with preconceived theories, but also by the conscientious technician learning by experience and more than a little inclined to deride artistic theorizing. To view the art of the film as a fusion of elements from other arts with elements peculiar to itself is historically justified, and through the contemporary accounts of theoreticians the fusion and transformation can be seen taking place. During this period music and other sound was still external to production and in so far as it existed at all was contributed by the showmen. 1 To the renter was due the over-emphasis of the film's affinity to the stage, and the art of the theatre acquired an unhealthy influence largely through renter-sponsored films of stage productions. But the two predominating influences of the time were those of literary and pictorial art, twin strains in the aesthetic standard which was becoming defined in the minds of film makers and film critics whether art-conscious or not. The early film reviewer harped on comprehensibility and “grouping.” Did the images succeed in telling their story clearly? and were they, individually, pleasing to the eye? The two points were the expression of this dual influence, and more, of the duality of the film's aesthetic composition. For the question of comprehensibility, which was seen as the function of the scenario and as such primarily a literary function, is the first problem of the film as a series of images, or as a composition in time. Whereas grouping, epitomising the contemporary consciousness of pictorial composition, was the simplest recognition of the film as a visual art.
