MLN

A persistent but difficult-to-articulate idea that we have of the cinema is that its relations to other artistic media are somehow special. For example, we know that since the cinema's invention its technology and mass appeal have often led it to be regarded as uniquely deleterious to other media, and the theater in particular: a threat to the survival of older forms that has been, by different parties, both regretted and welcomed.¹ But occasionally we also encounter commentators who, not always contesting the sociological or economic factors underlying the latter observations, nevertheless choose to frame the cinema's relations to the other arts in terms of a special power for reconciliation or harmony, at least when in the right hands.

The contemporary Argentine director Matías Piñeiro gives us one variation on this idea. In a 2016 memorial tribute to the late French director Jacques Rivette (with whose films Piñeiro's are frequently compared, typically for the importance that each gives to filming theater and theatrical rehearsals), Piñeiro characterizes Rivette's [End Page 1283] works as having effected a kind of peaceful coexistence among various media: "Cultural hierarchy and snobbery evaporate in the face of power generated from these amicable duels between cinema and its neighboring arts." Piñeiro adds, "In Rivette, there is no need to translate one art form into another; his films simply display one art exposed, naked and afraid, in front of another one, a moment of encounter captured in time and the energy of this complicity projected onto the screen" ("Deaths of Cinema").

Here Piñeiro's writing has several ambitions (including a comparison between Rivette and the defense by his Cahiers du Cinéma mentor André Bazin of film's "impurity" with respect to other media: Bazin 63–75), but it is close enough to presenting an image of Rivette's medium as a special refuge from the problems that the other arts typically confront away from the cinema, such as problems about where one art ends and another begins, as well as about which art is higher and which is lower. Under Rivette's camera, that is, "music, dance, painting, theatre" (as well as novels, as in the importance of Balzac's History of the Thirteen to Rivette's Out 1, 1971) could simply be, obviating the need for any further questions about medium specificity or hierarchy. On the other hand, we have to keep in mind that Piñeiro is offering a piece of criticism (however convincing) about what a specific talent like Rivette could achieve in film (and, moreover, what he could achieve by filming manifestations of the other arts), not an ontological claim about what film could do "automatically," or simply in virtue of the medium it is.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, a version of the latter, stronger claim does appear in one of the most famous essays in English on modernism in the visual arts, and in terms that explicitly foreground cinema's relationship to theater. Since its publication in Artforum in 1967, Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" has been known for its controversial claims about minimalist (or as Fried puts it, "literalist") artists such as Donald Judd, Tony Smith, and Robert Morris. These include Fried's claims about about how these artists' works, in effecting a "kind of stage presence" (Art and Objecthood 155, henceforth AO) constitute "a new genre of theater" (AO 153), and, through their reliance on such "theatrical" effects, amount to the "negation of art" rather than a fulfillment of the principal task supposedly facing modernist artists: namely, to establish on new grounds (or to reconfigure) what had been convincing about, say, painting or sculpture of the past. And it is toward the end of these arguments that Fried offers his own version of the idea of the cinema as a refuge. For Fried, the task of [End Page 1284] defeating theater, as well as the modernist task of re-constituting what had been convincing about past instances of a medium, simply have no application in film: or as...