Cinematic

Cinematic sound challenges the idea that Photography inspired by cinema is cinematic and cinema inspired by photography is photographic. The sound found in modern cinema is of course inspired by the cinema before it. But it is wholly removed from photography. A holistic definition of cinematic must be applicable to more than just photography and cinema, yet still apply to them without losing its depth and usefulness as a descriptive term.

The term cinematic is a useful one, it carries with it a cluster of properties that artists and critics use to communicate ideas about artworks. It can describe the history of their art-forms as derived from the photographic, their aesthetics, subject matter, mood, scale and intensity, their influences, and their method of exhibition. Maybe the word cinematic is useful because of its vagueness and to assign it one specific definition would be reductive and counterproductive. The word thrives in context. Alex Prager and Gregory Crewdson’s works are cinematic in terms of their aesthetics and influences as well as their subject matter and photographic visual medium. Robert Capa and Frank Hurley’s works are cinematic in that they influenced cinema and so they exist in the sphere of cinema’s history. The Murder of Crows (2009) and FOREST (For a Thousand Years) (2012) are cinematic in their scale and intensity, in their production and possibly their influence. Simply put, it can be useful shorthand for ‘like a film’.

If, then, cinematic can mean so many different things in different contexts is there a more precise definition than ‘like a film’? ‘Like a film’ feels clumsy and almost as if we are no closer to a definition than at the beginning of this book. In the beginning we discussed narrative. A narrative is a story, one to get invested in and care about. We discussed editing and visual techniques as methods cinema uses to convey its narratives and pull an audience into them. And we discussed documentary photography and its disposition to feel too real to feel truly cinematic, even when it is using the visual language of cinema. Finally we discussed sound, and its incredible power to completely immerse an audience. For photography, or any medium, to be cinematic it must immerse an audience wholly in a fictional narrative and successfully distract from the real world for even the briefest moment.