Modal Cinema

Art is somewhere between beauty and a stupid thing. Between play and a rut.

Cinema is a dialectical art. Not only because it deals with the record, and then darts from there, cutting and constructing. It is dialectical also because it does not exclude the completion of other forms in order to achieve its own status. (NOTE: all mixed art postdates the development of motion pictures). Cinema actively subordinates itself throughout its production in order to exist. At the crossroads of this dialectical art are two such subordinate modes: one is language, the other form.

Language connects two poles: Literary and Visual (NOTE: representing common people in painting postdates the photograph: Vermeer). The former concerns itself with words, the latter with pictures. Cinema is neither exclusively, and always both indeterminately. This mode is in constant flux.

Form, on the other hand, negotiates a different negative pair: the Theatrical and the Representational. The theatrical is contrived and performed; the representational desires to capture a sense of reality. The former is rehearsed, a precise fake; the latter is repeated, building from an actuality, known or unknown at the time it is “captured”. This mode is less in flux as it is always inexact, no matter if it is consciously decided upon or not. Both, on equal stepping, are fictions.

Every filmwork, every cinematic artifact, has its own unique coordinates in the sphere of possibilities, its own intersection along these modal axes.

There is no pure cinema.