Part 1- What's Art?

To really appreciate films, we must first try to understand what is ART 

WHY ART?




Art is not a luxury but a necessity for man, a necessity arising from his very nature.

 Man is not a machine which can be turned on and off; he is a being with immanent life, functioning 24 hours a day.

But man is a limited being, so he must have rest and re­creation and relaxation in order to restore his energies. And above all man is an intelligent being; he is the only creature of earth able to reflect on himself and the world around him. He must feed his mind with ideas and his imagination with vision as well as feed  his body with food and restore it with rest. Art fills that need in man for ideas and visions.



Man is not manufactured, not put together by forces outside himself; rather, he develops according to his nature, by his own acts, through his own experiences and sharing the experiences of other men, and according to the ideals and visions of life and of man which he shares with other men. The more truly human ex­periences a man has, the higher his ideal of man, the clearer his vision of man, the more of a man he will become.

Since man is a limited being, his actual experiences of life will be limited. However, through works of art he can have vicarious human experiences; and if a novel, a poem, a painting, a song or a drama is a truly human experience, honestly recreated, it will help a man grow as a man. It will help him understand himself and the world around him.


Fictional art is sometimes called "an escape from reality” This is not wholly true. In a sense art is an "escape into reality."

If we would truly understand life we must see it whole; that is, it must have a beginning, a middle and an end. But in our own lives we do not see life whole; we see only the middle.

 We come into life after it begins and we have to leave before it is over. For in­stance: John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill lived lives which will affect the lives of millions of other men. However, neither Mr. Kennedy nor Mr. Churchill could fully understand their own lives and their effect on the world. They were too much involved, too close to the events which they shaped and which shaped them.

Some day an artist will come along who will write a book or make a moving picture of the lives of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Churchill, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Then those who read it or see it will understand that life and understand more about all of life.

That is why Aristotle says that a work of art must have a begin­ning, a middle and an end; only then can it help us to see life whole and to understand life.