ABSTRACT
Let me begin with the first lines of Rudolf Arnheim’s “To Maya Deren,” an essay first published in Film Culture in 1962, as a eulogy to the filmmaker he admired:
This stunning opening paragraph not only mourns in elegant terms the admired film artist whom Arnheim had come to know in New York City, it does so by recalling the author’s main argument in his foundational work of film theory, Film as Art, first published in Germany in 1932.2 While able to appreciate film’s mimesis creating the “almost physical immediacy” of the mourned artist, Arnheim argues that it is not through its representational realism that it achieves its art.3 Rather it is in defamiliarization, abstraction,
and self-aware foregrounding of film’s material differences from reality that film art emerges for Arnheim.
