[The Continuum of Film] a byline

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]





            Scenes overlap, sequences invert, a few minutes are capture to relative vastness, relative relation to human reality, transformation, transgression and transmogrification; the film is then relevant.

            The original purpose of the motion picture was to enhance the art of photography. Somewhere in the silent film era, film begin to serve its own purpose, seek its own means to an end beyond the stillness of captured moments.

            If “the entire purpose of life is that there is no definite purpose other than to be and become” then the clarity that film can hold serves in a flank, innuendo to a detached reality, another dimension taken from the image of man and given over to the image of the artist.

            The theory of film’s self-recognition, self-awareness is perhaps a preface to the effectiveness of the French New Wave. When the motion cinema was still on its course of evolution, filmmakers were in tandem step, not only with the becoming of technology but with the parallel creation alongside literature. The adaptation of obsolete and obscure novels became the inspiration for screenwriters, for auteurs seeking to not only advance man’s perception of this world but challenge film as it was known.

            Francois Truffaut, the French filmmaker and critic, noted for his 1951 classic “The 400 Blows” was as feared an arbiter of the new wave as Roger Ebert was in the 20th and 21st century. “A poet must be cruel to be kind;” in such a notion, both Truffaut and Ebert begin to “bury” mediocre and monotonous film in the hopes that filmmakers may develop into auteurs, to lose the fear of the leap, take a chance to experiment rather conform, thus cease catering to the public’s paradigm image of what film was and begin defining from the terror of the heart and mind what film could be.

            The true splinter in the public image of mainstream and pornographic film came with the release of Just Jaeckin’s 1974 controversial film “Emanuelle,” adapted from the novel by Lowell Blair, that depicts a young lady in Paris who flies to Thailand to discover her sexual identity. Despite offending and violating mainstream obscenity laws in modern nations, Emanuelle was a success, not solely due to its vivid, sexual imagery but its solidity, which was harvested from a salon of artist unafraid to push the set limits of the time. Though dismiss by most critics as obsequious pornography, Emanuelle is underrated as one of the films to shape-shift the world of film today and is the grandmother of fearless filmmakers the world over.


            If film ever fluctuates in depth, it is because the filmmaker lacks depth and courage, forfeits themselves the full scope of dimension that art is. The attitude of film shapes the attitude of the public, but the public wanders if filmmakers fear to roam in directions never before roamed, adapt novels never before adapted, take the time to understand fully what has been consistently dismissed.