The first in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.
Nothing is so inaccessible to mainstream intellectual thought as popular art. Popular art derives much of its glamor from the sense that it is new, at one with its time -- to see its roots in the past is to disenchant it. At the same time, its very currency, the perception that it is wholly of the present, robs it of value, brands it as transient. Add to this the modernist notion that art with mass appeal is fatally compromised by commercialism and you have a recipe for confining popular art to an intellectual ghetto. It can be studied as a sociological or political subject, as a stepchild of high art or as amusing, suggestive ephemera, but it cannot be examined on it own terms.
The modern academy, and the critical traditions associated with it, may sometimes attempt to examine popular art as an aesthetic and historical phenomenon but the standards for such an examination are shabby -- they would not be tolerated by any other academic discipline.
The proof of this, I think, can be seen in the fact that we have no critical language for discussing the unique visual methods of movies. The standard critical concepts for discussing movies are borrowed from literature or painting. The unique methods of cinema must be suggested impressionistically or simply avoided. In their critical study of the films of King Vidor, Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon state honestly that they have made no attempt to analyze Vidor's visual methods, feeling that it's impossible to do so apart from the physical presence of the films.
Of course it's easier to critique a work of art, especially a work of visual or plastic art, in the physical presence of the work, but that is not to say that critics have nothing useful to say about painting or sculpture or dance -- that their physical effects cannot be evoked and discussed in words.
André Bazin took an heroic first step towards creating a critical language for analyzing the plastic phenomena of film images but it has never led to a general system of terms and concepts.
By the same token, there has been no systematic examination of the aesthetic roots of cinematic technique, except insofar as these were based in the literature of the novel or the stage. There has been no comprehensive investigation of the history and aesthetic of the comic strip, though the comic strip has been with us since the beginning of the 19th Century, and no comprehensive investigation of the history and aesthetic of Victorian academic painting -- that is to say, painting in the age of photography. Yet the comic strip and Victorian academic painting were far greater influences on movies, on the aesthetic methods of movies, than the literature of the Victorian stage, from which movies are customarily seen to have derived.
Intellectual fashion and a territorial segregation of word and image in the academy have left the crucial arts of our time unexamined. On the whole this may be a good thing, since art that is unexamined in this sense tends to be more innovative and vital than art which feels itself accountable to an intellectual and academic authority.
Still, we should recognize the state of things for what it is. We have no substantive intellectual access to and are discouraged from engaging intellectually (in any truly rigorous way) with the most vital and innovative arts of the past century and of our own time.