Motion and emotion, external and internal movement: they have gone hand in hand ever since the advent of cinema. In the moment of cinematic perception, the mechanical image reproduced by the camera enters the inner world of our dreams, fantasies and visions. For a hundred years, this magic of cinema has been at work, immortalising the fleeting moment and giving form to the shifting shadows within us. Incidentally, it works just as well for the seemingly aimless documentary shot as it does for the highly calculated feature-film scene – the two cinematic spheres whose boundaries cinema continually blurs. The things that stir the heart, as Chris Marker puts it in his film essay Sans Soleil, are what cinema seeks – and so do we, who allow ourselves to be lured into its dark auditoriums and before its screens illuminated by the light of the projector.
No single formula can do justice to film, this youngest art form, so very much a product of our own century. Though its history is still short, no longer than a human lifetime might last – so that in her film marking the centenary, Agnès Varda can still pay homage to it in the form of the hundred-year-old Monsieur Cinéma. At the same time, it is a long way from the simple fairground entertainment of the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès to the omnipresence of the cinematic in the media, whose rapid technological development already threatens us with the disappearance of the cinema. The pantheon of the finest films and directors, unveiled in a wide variety of line-ups to mark the cinema’s birthday, already looks to some like its own tomb.
Cinema enthusiasts and young people, however, remain undeterred in their fascination by such pessimistic predictions. As a venue for an intense aesthetic experience, the cinema asserts itself alongside the vast range of films available and their consumption via television and video.
One of the cinema’s enduring attractions has always been the promise of being able to transcend one’s own horizons. By breaking down boundaries – both psychological and, just as fundamentally, those of space and time – films draw us into worlds beyond our everyday identities and experiences. They offer us, by their very nature, a perspective different from our own, or even impose it upon us. Film, the medium of boundary-crossing, entangles us in the interplay of identity and its dissolution. It is precisely the diversity of expression found in European cinema and its filmmakers – in contrast to the universality, but also the uniformity, of American cinema – that thrives on this desire for transformation, set against the backdrop of one’s own origins. By questioning its own boundaries, including those of the medium itself, European cinema renders the familiar alien and the alien familiar.
This demanding, and at times exhausting, aesthetic process also has a political dimension. It transports us to the imaginary horizon of a shared history and a shared future beyond the confines of our biographical identities. After a hundred years, the utopian potential of cinema is far from exhausted.
First published in Arnoldshainer Akzente – News from the Protestant Academy No. 1/95 (in German)
© Karsten Visarius