Jared Free - Aesthetics of Film

In, Aesthetics of Film, Jacques Aumont et al claim that the realms of film and story telling were not always destined to be intertwined, saying “during the first days of cinema’s existence, movies did not seem immediately destined to become so overwhelmingly narrative. The cinema could very well have become nothing more than an instrument for scientific investigation, a tool for reportage and documentary, an extension of painting, or simply a short-lived object of visual recording that did not have any special vocation or specific techniques for telling stories (68).” I completely disagree.
Film became an avenue for story telling the moment the first camera began to roll. Regardless of what was being filmed, early movies were visual accounts of actual and later fictional events. Just as newspapers recounted events by telling the story of what went on, films did the same thing through a visual, rather than written medium. To say that films were not always destined to be devices for story telling seems inaccurate because from their inception that’s exactly what films were; devices for conveying a story of something that happened to someone who wasn’t there to see it in person. Further, even if early films somehow weren’t about story telling, to say that story telling in films was not inevitable seems comparable to saying that automobiles were not always destined to become means of transportation for individual consumers, or that air travel would always be limited to the military. Particularly with the benefit of hindsight, Jacgues et al should have been able to conceive that film would evolve into what it has evolved into today.