IF PHOTOGRAPHY survives in film, film must share the same affinities. Ac-
cordingly, four of the five affinities which seem to be characteristic of film
should be identical with those of photography. Nevertheless they call for
renewed discussion because of their extended scope and their specifically
cinematic implications. The last affinity to be examined -- for the "flow
of life" -- is peculiar to film alone, since photography cannot picture life
in motion.

As has been pointed out, everything reproducible in terms of the
camera may be represented on the screen -- which means that, for instance,
the "canning" of a theatrical performance is in principle unobjectionable.
Yet I have stressed that films conform to the cinematic approach only if
they acknowledge the realistic tendency by concentrating on actual physical
existence -- "the beauty of moving wind in the trees," as D. W. Griffith
expressed it in a 1947 interview in which he voiced his bitterness at con-
temporary Hollywood and its unawareness of that beauty. ¹ In other words,
film, notwithstanding its ability to reproduce, indiscriminately, all kinds
of visible data, gravitates toward unstaged reality. And this in turn has
given rise to two interrelated propositions regarding staging: First, staging
is aesthetically legitimate to the extent that it evokes the illusion of ac-
tuality. Second, by the same token anything stagy is uncinematic if it
passes over the basic properties of the medium.

There would be nothing to be added were it not for the last proposi-
tion about staginess. Although the general statement that the artificiality
of stagy settings or compositions runs counter to the medium's declared
preference for nature in the raw is certainly to the point, it nevertheless

-60-