Cinematography, A Creative Use of Reality by Maya Deren

I watched Meshes of The Afternoon when I was in college, in a dark screening room that smelled of feet. There was something so different about the experience. I didn't quite understand what was happening in the film, but it left me feeling a certain way, which I firmly believe is a defining mark of "good" art. Or effective art.

This essay was written by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. I read it here. She talks about the characteristics of film and photography that make them distinct from other art forms. She, too, talks about the dimension of time, like Tarkovsky in his book Sculpting In Time, as a unique feature of cinema.

Here are my notes.

• ... but the film image - whose intangible reality consists of lights and shadows beamed through the air and caught on surface of a silver screen - comes to us as the reflection of another world. At that distance we can accept the reality of the most monumental and extreme of images, and from hat perspective we can perceive live and comprehend them in their full dimension

• In certain respects, the very absence in motion pictures of the physical presence of the performer, which is so important to the theatre, can even contribute to our sense of reality. We can, for example, believe in the existence of a monster if we are not asked to believe that it is present in the room with us

• Whether the images are related in terms of common or contrasting qualities,  in the casual logic of events which is narrative, or in at the logic of ideas and emotions which is the poetic mode, the structure of a film is sequential. The creative action in film, then, takes place in its time dimension, and for this reason the motion picture, though composed of spatial images, is primarily a time form. 

• A major portion of the creative action consists of a manipulation of time and space. By this I do not mean only such established filmic techniques as flashback, condemnation of time, parallel action, etc. These affect not the action itself, but the method of revelation it. In a flashback there is no implication that the usual chronological integrity of the action itself is in any way affected by the process, however disrupted, of memory. Parallel action, as when we see alternately the hero who rushes to the rescue and the heroine whose situation becomes increasingly critical, is an omnipresence on the part of the camera as a witness of action, not as a creator of it. The kind of manipulation of time and space to which I refer becomes itself part of the organic structure of the film. There is, for example, the extension of space by time and of time by space. The length of a stairway can be enormously extended if three different shots of the person ascending it (filmed from different angels so that it is not apparent that the identical area is being covered each time) are so edited together that the action is continuous and results in an image of enduring labour towards some elevated goal. Time maybe extended by the reprinting of a single frame, which has the effect of freezing the figure in mid-action, here the frozen frame becomes a moment of suspended animation which, according to its contextual position, may convey either the sense of critical hesitation or may constitute a comment on stillness and momvemtn as the opposition of life and death.