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Films

Time Code

In another intrepid exploration of the possibilities of the silver screen, our very own movie maestro Thomas Wartenberg takes notes on an experimental new film called Time Code.

Among the issues that animated early film theorists and philosophers of film was whether film constituted an artform that rivalled the traditional ones such as theater and painting. Common to the different answers to this question was the assumption that film’s achievement of a place among the arts required its having a distinctive medium to distinguish it from its rivals. Thus, Rudolph Arnheim asserted that film’s reliance on the moving image was the key to its achieving the status of an art, so that films should reject verisimilitude as a stylistic imperative. According to Arnheim, film would only achieve artistic status once it had more fully emulated the visual structure of painting.

Against this line of reasoning stood the towering figure of André Bazin, who placed his bets on film’s photographic basis.

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