Medium essentialism
[1] Clement Greenberg is a prolific medium-essentialist in relation to modernist art, proposing that artists such as Jackson Pollock are successful because they properly exploit elements of their chosen medium, such as a painting's physical flatness.
[2] However, medium essentialism was most propagated by film practitioners throughout the twentieth century, as it legitimised cinema as an artform for the first time.
[5] Regardless of the interpretation favoured, what constitutes a film's medium, and therefore essential meaning, has been heavily debated,[6] and has prompted the creation of several sub-theories.
Non-essentialism has been the view preferred by scholars such as Noël Carroll, criticising medium essentialism in relation to film.
[12] Langer reasoned that film had become its own medium through its use of 'the dream mode', or a direct visual portrayal of an artist's intentions and/or imagination.
[6] Carroll also quotes fellow anti-essentialist critic Stanley Cavell, who argues that dreams are often "boring narratives...their skimpy surface out of all proportion with their riddle interest and their effect on the dreamer.
In addition to Scruton's proposition, Béla Balázs argued that as a film's physical constitution is transparent, it cannot carry any meaning about its content.
[21] Pudovkin's essay 'The Plastic Material' (1929) proposes that the manipulation of celluloid (or in the twenty-first century, digital editing) is what defines a film's medium.
[21] This process would involve the physical alteration of photographic material, as well as intellectual engagement with what images a film should contain, in relation to the artistic intention of the filmmaker.
He proposes that montage cannot simply be found in film and other photographic mediums such as Japanese pictographic writing, but also in natural phenomena like human perception more generally.
[24] Stanley Cavell proposes that a film's essence is defined by its medium, and that that medium lies partly within a film's portrayal of an illusion of reality, "Not by literally presenting us with a world, but by permitting us to view it unseen […] we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it.
[7] He argues a film's medium lies not within its physical material, but by the way in which it represents reality through an artform's ongoing re-invention.
Perkins was one of the first critics of the theory, who in the 1970s proposed that no one aspect of the film medium (photographic production, specifically) is superior to its counterparts (such as artistic intention or soundtrack).
Citing the example of Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), Sinnerbrink argues that the film's engaging voiceover narration, effective use of colour, exciting background music and plot cannot be distilled into a single 'relevant medium'.
