Maya V

When I say there are four types of cinema, I’m merely duplicating the familiar phrase, “there are two types of people in the world…” It’s something magical, thinking that one reflects another, and together they create a third—while all of them, at once, are observed by a fourth. Numbers are nothing new. We hardly think of one thing before already thinking of another. Sometimes they seem like the same thing, other times, something apart. I believe we’re thinking the same thing.

Aside from all that, there’s the fear of believing true what one merely suspects—it’s better to believe in nothing. For now, knowing how to count to ten is enough. Let us give Pythagoras’ Tetractys the same importance that homeopathy gives its sugar pills. Let us treat the effect with the cause: 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10.

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In fact, there aren’t four types of cinema, but infinite variations in the proportion of three elements. The fourth is the one that contains (and does not contain) the first three—in this case, Cinema. The first is the body, the second the soul, the third the mind. Analogies can shift as needed. Of the body we might say it is money, action films or commercial cinema, pornography or some Hitchcock movie; from the soul is born drama, as well as music videos, soap operas, or the films of Giulietta Masina, directed by her husband Fellini; and from the mind comes comedy, farce, allegory, and symbol.

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We could also divide the historical seasons of Cinema this way: a maximal faith in the effects of the cinematograph, from the Lumière brothers to Eisenstein or D.W. Griffith (we might also distinguish three types within each era, if that’s what we were after); a passion for the human in Fellini, Bergman or Bresson; and the games of Greenaway, Kubrick, or the general influence of Godard. It would be easier to say premodern, modern, and postmodern—but then, perhaps, people would take me more seriously than they should.

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Wars also seem to mark a division in Cinema. Gilles Deleuze speaks of movement-image culminating in the games of Hitchcock, and time-image emerging in the dead time of Antonioni. Compare the narrative shift in L’Avventura, when Sandro stops searching for Anna to pursue Claudia, with the shift in Psycho, from Marion Crane to Norman Bates. Both films announce the change in 1960s cinema. What the master of suspense foresaw was a brutal shift in the viewer’s expectations, while Antonioni did the same by stretching not movement but time itself, creating the impression of “being in time.” Hitchcock crossed the line with experiments like Rope, which pretended to be a single continuous shot, yet his works remain grounded in suspense and movement, anchored in cause and effect. In contrast, Antonioni’s cinema—like that of many others emerging in that period—softened causal relations to emphasize the chance occurrences that better reflect the tangled web of life.

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For some, neither will nor chance is enough—they think in terms of the predetermined. They anticipate the story and let it unfold freely into the destiny created within their works. This is the fourth type of Cinema, foreshadowed by titles like A Man Escaped or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth. The struggle is enacted in the real (with the hands). He must remain awake to fulfill his fate of escaping prison. Cinema would be like the wind blowing within the spectator who desires, like in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, where chance and destiny are woven together: the fate of a poor woman over 100 years old, who is about to die; a reporter, foreign to the village, waiting to photograph the funeral; and an innocent child who must study for an exam.