Among fans of the big screen there is certainly a small book of great use: The thousand words of cinema, by Giovanni Grazzini (Laterza, 1980) already historic president of the National Union of Film Critics, able to provide a sort of "toolbox" necessary to better understand the show and the whole world that revolves around it. In fact, it is difficult to fully understand a film if you are not familiar with the sophisticated mechanisms of filming techniques, the difficulties of acting, the positioning of the lights, the shots, the editing, the soundtrack and everything else that makes up a cinematographic work .
This space of Arte.firstonline.info/Cinema aims to offer readers a small "technical" support capable of facilitating the viewing and critical reading of a film. At the end of a screening it is natural to express a judgment in terms of good/bad or I like it/I don't like it, an elementary argument that is exhausted in a few lines once the relevant box has been assigned. Instead, it is a question of being able to perceive the innumerable facets that make up the cinematographic work and of being able to formulate a rounded, complete evaluation, useful for fully satisfying one's desire for knowledge and competence. It is no coincidence that the first term we propose is "author" who is often, in some contexts, assimilated to "director" who then, in some circumstances, also becomes "artist". Because, quite simply, cinema is art whether it is expressed on the big screen, as well as in television streaming, as well as still in small videos made with one's mobile phone and re-proposed on the social network circuit.
A as Author
The alphabet helps us to start this work in the best possible way and puts us at the very beginning the concept, the fundamental theme from which every work on cinema starts: how it is born, what the original idea is, to whom is attributed the paternity and who owns the intellectual property rights. In fact, who is the true author of a film? Is he the one who wrote, imagined, the story or the story or the situation that will then be seen on the big screen? Or the one who took the cue and subsequently transcribed it into a screenplay? Or again, the one who read the screenplay and imagined the transposition into images? Or, again, the person who, once shot the raw images, edited them giving them a sequential vision? Or, and we stop here even if it would have been possible to list many other figures who directly or indirectly contribute to the production of a film, who composed the soundtrack which, together with the images, makes the product more or less pleasant? It is said of Sergio Leone who, during filming, played Ennio Morricone's music in the background to allow the actors to be in tune with his idea of the film he was shooting. Indeed, what would become of his great masterpieces without the soundtrack of the most famous composer for the big screen.
Treccani defines the author as "Who is the cause or origin of a thing". Cinema is a very complex machine and does not allow easy shortcuts. In fact, it is not enough to be the owner of an idea, of a text, to be at the source of cinematographic production. It is evident how the same choice of the subject can itself be an act of authorship. Being able to identify in a literary abstraction the possibility of transforming itself into images is the essential step that allows the making of a film. It may be the case that even a pictorial work can be considered the starting point for a filmic creation and, in this case, the author could be the one who identifies this type of subject as the fundamental intuition for the subsequent screenplay. On this track, whoever physically writes this essential component of the film becomes, in turn, the author and so on along all the steps that make up the final product.
In this process, the figure who is commonly defined as the author of the film is the director, about whom we will write more when his alphabetic turn comes. In this part, we limit ourselves to emphasizing his role as an author as a subject capable of summarizing, of understanding, in himself a good part of all the other roles or skills necessary for the making of the film. Even this definition needs refinement: the director, like every human being, has his own characteristics, nature, culture, ability to direct and it is evident how one can find infinite ways of "being" or "doing" directing. One can find a director who submits to the screenplay, the wishes of the producer, the characters of the actors, or instead the director who imposes his vision, his way of seeing the shots through what only he considers to be the framing, the lights , the texts and the positioning of the characters.
In some respects, in the current dimensions of contemporary cinema, the director could resemble a managerial figure rather than an artistic figure in the strict sense. In fact, he can be entrusted with functions and roles of connection, coordination and management of the entire machine that the "artist" alone could have difficulty managing. Therefore, infinite variables that do not allow the shortcut, in fact, to enclose the term "author" under a single reading angle and, in the history of film literature, opinions are often divided. We quote a thought by François Truffaut (from The pleasure of the eyes, 1988) who writes: “Absolutely, we can say that the author of a film is the director, and he alone, even if he hasn't written a single line of the subject, hasn't directed the actors and hasn't chosen the camera angles; good or bad, a film always resembles the person who signs its making and, in the worst case - the one I just mentioned - we will find ourselves in front of a gentleman who has not directed the actors, has not collaborated on the screenplay and has not decided the angles. Even if the script were good, the actors gifted enough to play without directions, and the cameraman good, this film would be a bad film, and more exactly a bad film from a bad director”.
Giorgio De Vincenti, Full Professor of Cinema History and Criticism at the Roma Tre University, has written a very interesting essay on the subject (Enciclopedia del Cinema, 2003) where he traces the lines of this "concept" in the history of cinema, starting from when in 1895 the Lumière brothers tried their hand not so much on the idea, on the proposal of a subject, as more on the revolutionary technique that allowed the transition from static to dynamic photography. The "authors" of the first films that appeared at the beginning of the 900th century had to pose more problems from a technical, mechanical point of view than from a formal, aesthetic one. Over a hundred years later, a similar problem arises: the filmmaker is also a "technologist", that is, a figure capable of mastering new shooting techniques, new equipment, capable of providing adequate possibilities for producing a film that may never go on the big screen while always being able to claim to be "Cinema".
