The great art of cinema

The beginnings of the seventh art, when art was not. When the nickelodeons were rooms with 5-cents shows, mediocre entertainment for stupid people, when it was the theater that dictated the rules and customs. Then the first experiments, the discovery of the camera and that glass eye with secret potential, the first facial expression films, the funny faces, the comic skits without text, without sound, without art, snubbed by the big names of the theater. Films produced in assembly line mode, such as Ford cars. The too exaggerated gestures of the nineteenth-century theatrical tradition at the cinema do not work. Fil rouge: the obsession with mimicry that reproduces emotions as per the manual.
Cinema, as we understand it today, is still far away.

Suddenly, then, the games in front of the Charlie Chaplin mpp, the repetitiveness of the actions, the recognizability of the character and not the actor. The athletic gesture of Buster Keaton's 'chase', the face-mask of Kulešov. The Italian film diva with Lyda Borelli and Francesca Bertini who make the scene a catwalk with the best clothes and photographers. We are still in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, when Pina Menichelli brings the femme fatale onto the scene.

On the other hand, Rodolfo Valentino, from Italy, overseas will give life to the Latin lover, beauty, elegance, measured and delicate gesture. The immortal myth.
All this, before cinema speaks, before sound, before entertainment for stupid people becomes art.
Cristina Jandelli traces the origins and the first evolutions of the cinematographic language, focusing on the role of the actor, his body and how the mercyless eye, the merciless gaze of the mdp, related to it. The fear first, the discovery then, of an eye that reads the soul and therefore has great potential.

The camera gets closer and closer to the actor's face and the actor searches for it, yearns for it, is obsessed and bewitched by the reflection of his own image in a mirror that scrutinizes emotions and returns to the public.
Here, this is where the cinema acting was born, here is where and how the Cinema is born.