看电影的艺术(影印第7版)01.pdf

The ART of Watching FILMS 看电影的艺术 The ART of WATCHING FILMS 看电影的艺术 The cinema is a work of art when motion conforms to a perceptible rhythm with pause and pace and where all aspects of the continuous image relate to the whole. —JOSEF VON STERNBERG, DIRECTOR 2 CHAPTER 1　第一章 THE UNIQUENESS OF FILM　电影的独特性 The tremendous expense involved in producing motion pictures reminds us that film is both an industry and an art form. Each film is the child of a turbulent marriage between businesspeople and artists. Yet despite an ongoing battle be- tween aesthetic and commercial considerations, film is recognized as a unique and powerful art form on a par with painting, sculpture, music, literature, and drama. A. O. Scott, a film reviewer for The New York Times, has eloquently iden- tified other tensions within our insatiable appetite for going to the movies: The essential paradox . . . is that it is at once collective and radically solitary, an amalgam of the cohesive social ritual of theatergoing and the individualist reverie of novel-reading. The movies offer visions of a better world even as they are symptoms of everything wrong with this one. As such, moviegoing is perhaps still . . . the exemplary modern cultural activity. It splices together individualism and mass culture—the insistence on the particularity of identity and the standard- ization of experience, the line at the box office and the solitary dreaming in the dark—like a serendipitous art-house double feature programmed by a deity with perverse tastes and an odd sense of humor.1 As a form of expression, the motion picture is similar to other artistic med