Film is not Steve, Film is not Joe, Film is Art

Film critics, filmmakers and a philosopher agreed Thursday that films, even Hollywood melodramas, are most certainly a form of art.

Several hundred people watched roughly 40 minutes of a 1936 Frank Capra film, "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," and then discussed the film with the experts in an informal question-and-answer session in the symposium, "Film as an Art Form."

In an introduction to the film, Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Stanley Cavell told the audience that despite their enduring popularity, the romantic comedies of the 1930s are "vastly underrated," in that they are usually considered to be only "good, solid American entertainment" rather than works of art.

Cavell said that while people often find it "too hard to believe in the seriousness of the enjoyable," the contribution of such American melodramas to world cinema is actually as great as the contribution of Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson to world literature.

The other panelists each spoke for a couple of minutes after the film, and then Cavell opened the floor up for questions. The other participants were Robert Gardner '48, directer of the Carpenter Center; Alfred F. Guzzetti, chairman of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department; Vlada K. Petric, curator of the Harvard Film Archive; screenwriter and film critic William D. Rothman; and Charles Warren '69, lecturer on history and literature.

Gardner, a documentary filmmaker, said that the film made him feel "a sort of sorrow or grief," and asked, "What is it about some element of a film like this that is capable of so moving us as to make us cry?"

The questions from the audience focused mostly on why Hollywood no longer made romantic comedies that were as moving or as successful as "Mr. Deeds."