Woolf's "The Cinema"

All right, it's midnight, I'm hopped up on espresso from which I am sure to crash at any moment, and my thoughts are fluttering somewhere between coffee-induced mania and exhaustion-induced lethargy. Perfect way to talk about two articles.

The first article, which sets up the latter, is by Woolf herself. It's called "The Cinema" and its recommendable to anyone who's interesting it either literary or film theory. In it, she speaks on the weakness of the still-pretty-new form of media presentation, and, in a bit of unintentional foreshadowing, the possible strengths. More specifically--she must have just watched "Anna Karenina" when she wrote this--she talks about the cinema's tendency at the moment to limit rather than expand the interpretive quality of the story: "The eye says, 'Here is Anna Karenina.' A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls....but the brain says, 'That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.' For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind--her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet." Her we also see Woolf's continuing focus on the interior of the mind and its workings: more or less, she's criticizing the cinema for doing the exact same things that she was criticizing Victorian writers for in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. However, her disdain is less evident, and more encouraging: she knows it is a fledglings form. Likewise, she apparently sees potential to relate these complex emotions--her example is a black spot that emerges on the film. It turned out to be entirely by accident, but Woolf nevertheless says "[I]f a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so fair failed to find expression."

She connects what the cinema should do with, what I think, is her own view of what literature should impart; remember, Woolf's living during a time of impressionism and post-impressionism, so when she says: "Even the simplest image...presents us with impressions of moisture and warmth and the glow of crimson and the softness of petals," she's giving us her thoughts on the power of words--and something the cinema should avoid because it simply cannot impart the same things (also a bit of pre-Derrida differance ideology, if you want to stretch it). In the end, she compares the cinema, currently, to people who stumble upon the beach to find perfect instruments, with no idea how to play them...yet they play them anyway. But she never relinquishes this tone of pontentiality, that the cinema can, or could, do things if it grew out of its box that even words couldn't do.