ABSTRACT
The cinema, in order to be an art, must acknowledge its own modes of expression and its own limitations; it must, above all, free itself from its enslavement to dramatic art, which needs words—only words and intonation—and can do without gestures and scenery. I have already shown that the fantastic world of the cinema is made up of transformations, metamorphoses, and that an artist is such when through his imagination is able to look at life as a metamorphosis. 1 In short, it is about changing one form into another, or one form from another. How many of the numerous armies of writers, of directors, and of actors can boast of a cinematic soul? Very few, and this will be clear to you if you will take into consideration most of the films that unfold before you in movie theatres; in hardly two or three do the signs of the ‘techniques’—those artifices, those tricks (as they say) which are the best means of expression in the cinema—show themselves. The others show scenes from any old play, so much so that for each one, you have to imagine the words and refer yourselves to theatre: they are the mask, the shadow, the ghost of dramatic art. The closed circle of photography has not yet been overcome: they make films as if they had to be a well-organized series of photographs, in which each one would be complete in itself, and the representations carried out from begin to end with a rigorous continuity were not yet organic. The most adaptable art, the most ‘dynamic’ art, it gives you instead, by the fault of its creator’s artistic consciousness, a static impression: you feel that it looked for the ‘frame’ and that it was carefully constructed to give you a beautiful succession of ‘frames’ gathered together: the tumultuous comical or dramatic events prepare that scene—where the protagonists appear in close up, often with only their head and shoulders in a circle of light—to show you the joyous or mournful, comic or tragic facial expression. In reality, these films are composed of many photographs in just as many cinematic parentheses.
