Back to 'cinema is filmed theatre

Following its invention, cinema was initially conceived and approached as photographed theatre. After a reasonable period of self-establishment, however, it has become commonplace that cinema essentially differs from theatre, and is thus a new and independent dramatic art form. Eventually, while the advent of performance art created the illusion of a basic affinity to theatre, on the grounds of spectators actually experiencing real bodies on a stage, there has been a broadening of the alleged gap between theatre and cinema, in which the spectator's experience is mediated by images of actors projected on a screen. I reconsider here both the initial and eventual approaches, reflecting my own intuition that, without ignoring fundamental differences, a feature film is a recording of a fictional world formulated in the medium of theatre. It has to be decoded and interpreted, therefore, as a theatrical text, since a recording does not change the nature of the recorded text. Consequently, differences between cinema and theatre are fundamentally the result of technical constraints and advantages. I support these theses by a thorough analysis and critic of Roland Barthes' seminal article 'Rhetoric of the image' on still photography

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Illusion · Intuition · Linguistics · Literature · Movie theater · Photography · Rhetoric · Visual arts · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theatre and Performance Studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Basic kinds of iconic metaphor in the theatre and other iconic arts

  Open Access•Eli Rozik•Semiotica•2006

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• Six Species of Signs

  Open Access•Thomas A Sebeok•Semiotica•1975

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