What is photogénie?
To begin with, the most initial concept of “photogenie” was introduced by French filmmaker, Jean Epstein (1923), in “On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie” in the development of French Impressionism in the 1920s. Jean Epstein described that photogenie was called “filmic reproduction”. It aesthetically “transformed” the aspects of things, beings or characters in realistic to the virtual medium, film. More simply, Louis Deller called the process of filmic reproduction as “the art of cinema”. Perhaps, it is more appropriate to describe this concept as physical Phase Transition: Under different conditions, water will transit to solid or gas. Essentially, the appearance of water is changed, but the molecules of water are still water.
How to achieve photogénie in a film? Is it Intentionally or Accidentally by the filmmaker?
“Any aspect of the material, not enhanced by filmic reproduction is not photogenic, plays no part in the art of cinema”. Jean Epstein (1923)emphasised that if a film was not produced in this way, then it was not cinematic. Hence, he stated that filmmakers should consist of “mobility” and “personality” in their artworks. It was believed that the photogénic characteristic of things referred to its ability to move through time and space, which meant: the ability to reflect changes in space and the passage of time. As the eighth category of art, the ability of cinema had more approaches to demonstrate the sense of space and express the flow of time than paintings. “If a painting ignored the construction of the three-dimensional space, it was not a good painting.” Similarly, if the film was lack of mobility, then it should not be called “motion picture”. In short, the aesthetics of the film was highly related to “the possibility to show time flow through images”.
Besides, there was a resemblance to denote the same concept in the 1920s of China, traditional Chinese landscape painting. It had similarity in representing the mobility of the space and time. Compared with the same period of western painting, Chinese landscape painting emphasised more transformation of feelings than Western at that time. Thence, through a painting or a moment of a film scene, we could see the possibility of time flowing.
(Painted by Chang Dai-Chien between 1910 and 1957)
Moreover, back to our main idea of mobility in films, in Inception (2010), which was directed and written by Christopher Nolan successfully visualised the mobility as Jean Epstein mentioned.
At the aspect of this script, Christopher Nolan had spent around 10 years to finalise the script and discussed how dreams and reality interacted. Interestingly, people all had the experience of dreaming dreams but when to end up of the dreamings, we only remembered the structure of the “events”, not the “length” of dreamings. In other words, the concept of dreamings, people seemed to not realise the flow of time while they were dreaming. Christopher Nolan engaged to aesthetically re-produce this idea into the mobility of time through visualising the dream of a dream. Correspondingly, Jean Epstein also certainly believed that “film was the most powerful medium, to convey authentically unreality and reality”. And this film did.
In terms of the reflections of spectators’ viewing angle, when we spent 10 minutes on watching this movie, it also played the same 10 minutes but we had experienced the transformation of time by the concept of intersecting with dreamings. More simply, the director skillfully established a limitation of the period (the length of the film), which was the “time”, and the audiences could deeply felt the extension of visual when they watching the film, which was “photogenic”. For instance, in this scene, the ability of crosscutting was able to reach the intersection of time. Then, through the changing of gravity in the following sequence, these scenes perfectly demonstrated the switching between unreality and reality. In some ways, the definition of Jean Epstein’s (1923) “the ability to change space and time” was just essentially similar to this concept of the film.
For another concept of photogenie, “personality”, could be simply interpreted as the film style of a director. According to Jean Epstein (1923), “personality is the spirit visible in things and people”. He wanted to emphasise the involvement of the person holding the camera through the characteristics of personality. Moreover, mechanically speaking, the lens alone could naturally disclose the “truths”, but what we looked for, was to create the lens cinematically through the role of an author of the film, which was the film director. For example, in this scene( see from 0:45 to the end), if we watched it by our naked eyes, it may be a part of daily life, but through the arrangement of the director, the moment seemed to be eternal.
(All clips from Inception (2010) )
Reference List
- Epstein, Jean. “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie.”, French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939. Vol. 1: 1907-1929.
- Ed. Richard Abel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. 314-18.