It is my belief that film is currently the greatest of all art forms - in that, it incorporates so many aspects of other disciplines of art.
It contains elements of photography and painting, but allows movement. It can include music, but adds images to the sound. Through literary adaptation, it can add sight and sound to almost any novel, and yet is not necessarily reliant on literature as a source, as films such as The Man with the Movie Camera and Koyaanisqatsi have shown. Film bears similarities to the theatrical tradition, but allows far more freedom for editing, special effects and setting. For such reasons, I think a claim can be made that, within the art world, cinema is the most advanced representation of life known to man.
I think this is the reason I love this art form. Naturally, there is a place for all fields of art - I am not saying that film makes them redundant; simply, that it is the currently most advanced stage in the evolution of art.
However, I believe that that evolution is ongoing. Which, indeed, leads to the question: what would a yet more evolved art form consist of?
When you look at film, as impressive as it is, it still only makes use of 2 of the 5 senses of the human body (sight and sound). This is no mean feat, considering that until the onset of cinema, art (with the exception of theatre) had generally exercised only one sense at a time. So, what of the other three senses, taste, touch and smell?
While these senses might not usually be associated with art, they are not completely foreign to it. Tactile art does exist, and I have little doubt that smell and taste have been incorporated in some more experimental artworks: indeed, some might even consider the realm of cuisine preparation to be an art of its own kind.
However, these senses are still undoubtedly on the periphery of mainstream art. Apart from a few embarrassing experiments with 'smell-o-vision' back in the 1950s, the idea of introducing these things to a popular art form hasn't really had much of a run.
Still, it is my belief that there will, one day, be an art form that enables the use of all five senses. Clearly this is not going to happen anytime soon, and I'm expecting it would be a gradual development. Also, the very nature of incorporating all these faculties within an art form probably implies some kind of virtual reality situation, where the viewer is actually placed within a three-dimensional environment.
While virtual reality has usually been associated with video games, my idea is more based around the idea of artistic potential... whether that means employing a narrative flow, as in cinema, or using something of a more stationary entity. I reckon it would become used as both mainstream entertainment and a fine art, much as cinema is today.
Until then, film is the art form that should continue to reign supreme.
art
