To understand the cinema we must first understand photography, which is its medium. Painting was shocked into self-consciousness by the invention of photography, though not, perhaps, into true self-knowledge. If the purpose of painting is to copy appearances and to place a frame around the world then, itwas argued, photography can do this just as well or better. So the true purpose of painting must be something else - the recording of a sensory impression (impressionism) or the 'expression' of emotion ('abstract expressionism'). In either case, mere 'representation' - which is the prerogative of photography - is not the ultimate goal.
Such arguments were put forward by way of saving the art of painting from the threat of the camera, and re-launching it on its path to higher things. Two philosophers - the Italian Benedetto Croce and the Englishman R.G. Collingwood - bolstered the defence of painting by giving theories of representation and expression which made expression the true aim of art, and representation at best the means to it. Photography, they suggested, is confined by its nature to the task of representation: it shows the world, but expresses nothing. It is the visual equivalent of journalism, pampering the appetite for knowledge, while destroying, through its expressive incompetence, the act of communication - the resonance of each to each - upon which art depends.
The argument is wrong: not because photography is an art on a par with painting, but because photography does not represent anything at all. It may be an art, but if so, it is not an art of depiction.
Representation occurs in painting; it also occurs in literature, where there is no question of copying the way things appear. Literature and painting represent things, not by copying them, but by expressing thoughts about them. - Roger Scruton
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