The Importance Of Film

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The emergence of film is arguably one of the greatest human achievements to have been introduced in the twentieth century. Its importance can be demonstrated in its various capabilities to affect the way we relate to the world around us. I will attempt to demonstrate a handful of its capacities in hopes of producing a better understanding of film theory. The film historian Tom Gunning described the cinema prior to 1906 as a “cinema of attractions” to describe the particular form of production that took place at the time. Gunning explained that during this period filmmakers were primarily concerned with showing something spectacular to their audience, in contrast with simply addressing narrative structures. This cinema is well known for its ability to “see cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power and exoticism.” (Gunning pg. 2). This can be possibly appointed to the fact that the revolutionary capabilities of films and its relative adolescence in relation to other forms of media astonished and amazed its early spectators. For the first time in all of history, a popular medium of communication was completely lacking in any man-made creative intervention; all that it required was one to pick an event in time and the camera recorded what came to transpire. In other words, cinema ostensibly required a concrete relationship to the physical world that was grounded in real world situations. The simple fact that the photographed images existed gave evidence of its actuality to a particular time and place; a characteristic not held by paintings for instance, since painters were only restricted by their own imagination to produce the desired image. (Bazin pg.13-14) In this sense, the film is rooted and defined by the objectivity it indexes. As Bazin puts it: “The

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