At 3:07 AM -0500 2/12/98, Pip Chodorov wrote: > >"Preserving" a painting means restoring it to a condition in which it can be >hung, as the painting it always was, in a museum. To noone would it mean >digitally scanning the painting to be kept as "data" or seen on a computer >screen, nor would it mean making color photocopies or reproductions of the >painting to hang in museums in place of the original. Obviously. > >Why do people not see film as an art form, like painting, with its specific >materials and exhibition spaces? ======= A more apt analogy , I think, would be the preservation of a lithograph where only a single lithograph from an edition remains or only the stones made to print it (roughly equivalent to the "negative") remain. Pip's point remains valid nonetheless. As for the (no doubt rhetorical) question of why people don't see film as an art form, I think the answer might lie partly in the fact that those who own film art and those who exhibit it do not consider it art and/or do not treat it as art. Art dealers generally do not trim a Picasso lithograph to fit the frame they have available for it, but this happens routinely (in terms of running time and shape of the image) in TV showings of films and sometimes even for theatrical exhibition. Nor do art dealers or museums add colors to black and white etchings to cater to the presumed preferences of their audiences. The proliferation of reproductions of artworks may also have something to do with it. Whether that reproduction is a photo-reproduction of a painting or a videocassette of a film classic, it's something you can look at any time, something you can "always" replace. So the original can come to count for less--in a sense, become only one of many instances of the artwork. The content also becomes the paramount consideration for the mass audience; and the medium, its specific materials and potentials, and the stylistic considerations of the production of the original become secondary concerns (if they remain concerns at all). For instance, my guess is that most people who own a photo-reproduction of Georges Seurat's "Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte" don't use it to study/appreciate his pointilist technique. --Richard J. Leskosky Richard J. Leskosky Unit for Cinema Studies Assistant Director University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign office phone: (217) 244-2704 2117 Foreign Languages Building FAX: (217) 244-2223 707 S. Mathews Avenue <http://www.uiuc.edu/unit/cinema> Urbana, Illinois 61801 ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/screensite