The second national conference titled: ” Scenography between theater and cinema ” 23-24 February 2025

Preamble of the conference 

        Anyone who studies the arts of theater and cinema will notice the close and diverse relationships that unite them, which are genetic relationships that take the scrutinizing researcher back to the first roots of their origins. Theater, which preceded cinema in appearance and development, began as a religious ritual or rather a devotional rite in open spaces until it began to give up some of its religious aspects in favor of worldly elements, as well as its entry into built halls and its submission to artistic, technical and literary laws and customs. As for cinema, whose emergence was delayed until the end of the nineteenth century, its birth was linked to technological developments and scientific inventions due to its conditional connection to the machine. Cinema – in this case – is an industry whose practice depends on a group of means and machines, and that is the aspect that makes it different from theatrical practice.

       The theatrical performance is a live, direct, renewed and instantaneous celebration, in which the performing artist meets the receiving audience in the same place and at the same moment. As for the cinematic film, it is a type of packaging that is repeated in the same way every time it is shown to its audience and recipient. In its early beginnings, cinematic practice relied on theatrical creativity and was bound by its traditions for a period of time. The camera is fixed in place and the movement in front of it is organized horizontally. Before the cinematic image acquired its characteristics of movement, realism, wide screen, colors, character, quality, artistic realism, and an expressive and formative role to convey theatrical works as they are, until the camera was liberated and began to be unique in its techniques and characteristics, it became necessary for it to search for its own subjects and drama. Instead of conveying theatrical drama as it is, it began to transform it into distinctive cinematic films.

        Cinema acquired its own language and material, especially in its treatment of time and place, while theater monitors places that generally depend on the scene as a basic unit, through a fixed or sometimes changing scenography on which the theatrical action takes place, and continues throughout the show, and the artist and the recipient together take into account the ritual of the place suggested by the scenography with all its elements, as well as the alphabet of connotations and key meanings resulting from this known space, since there is no action outside this space. The viewer remains in a fixed position between him and the fixed stage. However, cinema relies on the shot as a building unit, and due to its analytical nature, the action in it remains continuous because it deals with a series of pieces of space and the frame in it is temporary, whether closed or open, it is a means of isolation, it displays a small part of the scene, and there is an aspect of the action waiting outside the frame to be filmed.

        As for the viewer in cinema, he directs his sight towards the camera lens that does not allow him to move his sight in any direction or from any distance, there are close-up shots that are magnified and there are distant shots that give him a comprehensive view through the screen that he does not have the ability to modify or change, no matter how far away he is from the screen. Cinema, which has freedom and freedom in all directions, deals with scenography in two ways: it either suffices to reconstruct the place and makes us, through the movement of the camera, feel and sense it as something tangible, not as a photograph as it approaches the stage.

       Or it achieves it by creating aesthetic spatial dimensions that the viewer perceives from a sequence of fragmented places that may not be linked by a material relationship except through the drama itself, and this is what the theater cannot do except by suggestion through dialogue or symbolic scenes. Scenography in all cases, whether in cinema or theater, is absolutely subject to the event, as it is a means and not a formative end, as Marcel Martin says. Finally, cinema – although it tried in its path to evade the aesthetic legacy of drama – derived a lot from its logic and aesthetics in favor of its genres and filmic types, and by virtue of the clear convergence and proximity between these two arts, the difference between them quickly fades and disappears through artistic developmental turns that re-question the seventh art in its relationship with the fourth art on the one hand, and with modern science and technology that has not stopped making radical changes in the techniques and methods of processing images and scenes on the other hand.