Tag: Art

A scream passed through nature and fell upon a canvas

I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence, there were blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. And my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

And that is how Edvard Munch describes what he felt while drawing the infamous painting, The Scream (1893). He saw the sky turn blood red, and he felt anxious. If you can see the artwork, the first thing that comes to your mind is ‘anxious’. The art flaunts out, speaks out anxiety; everything about that piece of art communicates some fear.

Edvard Munch describes this about Oslo, in Norway. There was a lunatic asylum near that location which admitted his sister for her disorder. Many interpretations tell that it was this asylum that he referred when he said: “scream passing through nature”. He describes how he felt anxious when he was looking at the blood-red sky. Many thought the blood-red sky was just a metaphor.

Historians explain that a nearby volcanic eruption causes a dramatic red sky in Oslo for a few days. The red sky he saw might be in one of those days. And it is only natural to feel anxious after looking at something unnatural. But if you look closely at the figure that is in the painting. It is screaming, now that figure is metaphorical. It is in-human and looks something close to what we call a ghost.

This figure might represent nature in a personal form. The personification of his feelings when he passed that area made this painting necessary. It is a crucial artwork in history because it is prominent for the movement: ‘impressionism’. People consider Edvard Munch as an expressionist artist, but this specific work is impressionistic. 

Impressionism was an art movement in the 19th century. The impressionist artists chose to draw or make a piece of art not by merely depicting something as it is. They would instead create an impression that had been in their minds while looking at the specific inspiration. You can see how it fits the profile of The Scream!

Many historians also claim that it was not just a lunatic asylum that felt like a scream of nature, but there was also a slaughterhouse nearby.

Later in life, Edvard Munch stopped consuming meat and felt it was cannibalism. He, however, continued to eat fish, but he was outspoken about turning vegetarian. ‘Vegetarian cult’ he called it. Historians related his thoughts on vegetarianism from his early ‘Scream’ days and said the ‘scream of nature’ might also refer to the screams of animals from the slaughterhouse. 

It does make sense to think of it as the screams of animals because, in his later life, Munch describes eating animals is cannibalism and they are our cousins, brothers, sisters and aunts. He is against the idea of eating closer relatives such as animals, and he supports eating our distant relatives who share different anatomy to us, the plants!

Both interpretations have something in common, the scream—screams of lunatic patients and animals from butchery. Both are innocent; they have committed no crime to suffer such punishment. It is humans that mistreat people with disorders and animals for food. The setting seemed odd, slaughterhouse one side and the lunatic asylum on the other, and the blood-red sky. It was a scream of nature; man, animal, sky, plant and everything around screamed at that moment in his mind.

If he drew this as ordinary landscape painting depicting it as it is with regular people on the bridge, asylum and slaughterhouse on either side, would it have created such an impact? Would you feel anxious when you look at it? Would you understand the scream of nature? You would need some description to figure out the motive behind the painting if it was an ordinary landscape.

It is because of the impressionistic choice he made to personify the scream, to draw the sky wavy in a surreal way, and that makes us feel anxious to look at it. It is as if it was his anxiety that he put into the work, and it transmits to everyone who looks at it. Such is the beauty of Impressionist and Expressionist arts. It is not merely capturing the movement as it is, but it is capturing the feelings that come with the moment and scenery that makes a painting and artistic painting!

Understanding Cinema

What is a movie? We can define the term in several ways, but what is the actual operation and definition of a movie? Is it art? Or a Craft? To understand what it is, you need to have a perception of what ‘craft’ means and how it is different from ‘art’. A craft is an activity to create something. Many activities go behind the screen of a film, and all these activities are unhesitantly called crafts and the people who perform these activities are craftsmen. So is the film a craft? No! But filmmaking is a craft! Cinema is an art. This piece of art is made by various craftsmen combining their crafts such as direction, cinematography, music, sound, colour and various other aspects.

Cinema, the prodigal son of multiple arts

Now let’s strip down this art called movie to understand it in the right way. But before we do that, why did I use the term ‘right way’? Is there a wrong way? Yes, there is! The way we understand films impact a lot on what we are taking from it. If we understand cinema as a ramp, then we start taking the beauty of those ramp walking models, here actors. Somewhere we have lost our perception and movies have become nothing more than ramps. We have started watching movies to look at these sparkling actors. We have begun praying them, watching their films and defending their crappy works because we like them. Fanaticism is not our concern, though. So let us not worry about the wrong understandings of a film and dive into the proper way.

The Expression

Any art is an expression, and the artists are expressers. What they express is an artistic choice. But the purpose of art’s existence is to express something. Let us assume this expressing subject as ‘information’. Because no matter what the expresser (artist) chooses to communicate through their art, it conveys some information to the viewer. The entire purpose of a movie too is to speak something; to express some information to the viewer. Regardless of what that information is, every movie does talk about something. Like their ancestor, the painting, even a movie is visual art. It does speak something and its medium to communicate is visual. 

Cinema has the attributes of almost all the art forms. It is a visual art like paintings; has sound and music, and has characters, actions and spectacle like stage plays. They are the hybrid form of art, and it takes all of those artists to make it work. Sometimes when you hear certain music, it impacts you. It reaches your brain and triggers certain emotions. Music and sound are auditory art where they tell you something too. Some music has lyrics to say to you directly, and some music talks to you through its tune and instruments. Similarly, characters speak a lot of things through their dialogue and sometimes with their expressions. But when you dig into the actual lineage of cinema, you will understand that its heritage comes from paintings more than any other art. They are called movies for a reason. And that is, moving pictures!

person holding camera film
Photo by Luriko Yamaguchi on Pexels.com

The stripping down of cinema

When you strip down a movie, that is simplifying it. You can call a film as a collage of multiple video clips arranged in a particular order to tell a specific story. And if you strip that clip to its toes, a video is a bunch of photos taken at a certain speed and animated later. So all movie is just a bunch of pictures! Let us call these photos as frames! Because that is what a movie is. It has 24 frames per second, meaning 24 photos clicked per second. When you compile these continuously clicked photos into a clip and organise all these clips to tell a story, you have a cinema!

Note to film enthusiasts and aspiring filmmakers!

Now telling a story, that is where the difference lies. How do you tell a story? In a movie, you have all the arts available to you. You have many different ways to tell a story. It is up to you to make sure that you don’t over-use any aspect and never use any other. That is what happens in many mainstream cinema. They over-use ‘dialogue’ by conveying all the information through the character’s dialogues. It is an easy way out because the character directly speaks out. But you have all the other arts to use. When we strip the film down, we understood that it is just a series of photographs. What a photo is a modern version of paintings. 

With the available technology, we can edit all the details in a picture and convey some story even through a single photo. Now in a film, you have several thousands of images, 24 per each second. How fair is it to convey all the information through dialogue and character’s actions? Why not become more artistic by choosing to share information visually. Why not use music to say something? Why not use light, colour, make-up, properties and every other aspect that appears on screen to tell the story? Do use dialogues and do use character’s action, but in a film use all the available crafts equally to convey information, and that is a story!

To know more about my opinions on films, refer to the article where I have written about Om Dar-B-Dar (1988) and Satantango (1994).