Exploding Cinema Tyrannies
Reading Matthew Clayfield's - A Cinema Exploded sent me to Peter Greenaway's Cinema Militans Lecture: Toward a re-invention of cinema
Four years old, but an important optimist's manifesto for reviving a dying art. I like that Greenaway thinks - as do I - that cinema has yet to come into its own. We have had mostly 100 years of finely illustrated text.
One of the greatest potential excitements is the ability and freedom now to fashion the frame to suit the content. Very crudely, a snake travelling across the grass suggests a long horizontal frame, a giraffe, a tall vertical one. And morphing such a snake into such a giraffe can be accomplished with hands-on ease. The frame can be cut and cropped with various layers of density, overlap and metamorphosis.
Pre-Renaissance painting, having no imperatives to depict the real, played with subjective scale, and with condensed and simultaneous time, both considerations being relevant to the dictates of theological ideals