If cinema were a person, it would be the lovechild of a photographer and a singer, raised by a playwright, fed on novels, and mentored by a photographer with a God complex. It does not play by the rules because it has never been the original art that other arts claim themselves to be. And that is exactly why it changed everything. In 1895, the Lumière brothers screened a simple footage of a train arriving at a station at a fair, and people who witnessed it for the first time ran out of the theatre in terror (a tale which has no substantial witness but is popularized over generations).
Not because the train was real but because cinema was. Eventually, this form evolved over time and more people like Georges Méliès, who used his magic techniques and incorporated them into film with editing techniques, and D. W. Griffith, who used the technique of theatre to maintain continuity. Eventually, song made its entry and then symbolism held hands with painting, and we saw something new and evolving till today. From that moment, cinema began its life, not just as a child of any single art form, but as a magnificent, illegitimate fusion of all of them.
And a bastard art was born. And it never stopped evolving.
While it is not I who am stating the art as a bastard art, many theorists, critics, and filmmakers embraced it and stated it directly or indirectly. The term bastard meant something that is no longer in its purest or original form. While this is a derogatory term for cinema, it works otherwise. Serge Daney, a prominent film critic who was a major figure of Cahiers du Cinéma and also co-edited it in the late 1970s, referred to cinema as “an illegitimate child of art and science.” This idea of impurity remained prominent among the members of Cahiers du Cinéma. One of the prominent members, André Bazin, and Godard shared something of a similar thought. André Bazin, in his essay In Defense of Mixed Cinema (1952), states, “The essential impurity of cinema is not a flaw but a virtue.” He terms cinema as impure, emphasizing that cinema is inherently impure because it draws from photography, theatre, literature, and more. He also argues in the essay that this “impurity” is what gives cinema its depth and dynamism. Jean-Luc Godard states something similar: “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”
Why this impurity is a blessing to cinema
As I said earlier, this tag of being a bastard does not work otherwise for cinema but helps to enrich it as a medium or form itself. There are multiple reasons for that.
- Freedom from tradition
Pure art forms, whether it is painting, classical music, or theatre, often carry centuries of strict rules and aesthetic codes. Whereas cinema, having no single parent, is not shackled by rigid traditions. It is free from traditional codes and aesthetics. But why does this freedom from tradition become an important factor? This freedom helps the art form to invent something new. The freedom allows cinema to experiment, mutate, and evolve constantly—that is why it thrives on innovation. - Universal language of emotion
While watching a painting, we understand what it tells us or what it symbolizes—it does not need a language (language in the sense of English, French, Hindi etc.—the distinction needs to be clear because language itself can be different when it comes to film). While theatre, music, or any other art form needs that communication language which is not universal, cinema does the opposite because it mixes multiple sensory elements like sound, image, movement, and performance to communicate across cultures without words. Its “impurity” makes it emotionally rich and globally resonant. Think of how early silent films or world cinema touched people who didn’t speak the language because of this hybridity. - Infinite styles and infinite audiences
When I watch Tarkovsky’s films, they approach me as dreamlike—Mirror (1975) or Solaris (1972). Or films like Dogville or Vivre Sa Vie (1962) feel like theatre. Some films like Pyaasa (1957) approach poetry to me and some films like The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) feel like painting to me.
When I was in film studies, I had to prove that some films by Godard and Truffaut were deeply influenced by Brechtian ideas of theatre and alienation. Cinema collaborates with the arts to provide something for everyone, and this hybridity provides rich aesthetics. We have to open all our senses to watch a film. It does not only show us—it makes us think about the subject matter. This infinitesimal history, while taking the aesthetics and medium of thousand-year-old art forms, makes cinema not only rich and relevant but also shows how it has developed so fast within 100 years.
| Parent Art | What cinema Borrowed |
|---|---|
| Literature | Narrrative, dialogue, character arcs |
| Theatre | Blocking, acting, performance dynamics |
| Photography | Composition, lighting, visual realism |
| Painting | Colour palettes, symbolism, mis-en-scene |
| Music | Emotional tone, rhythm, soundscapes |
| Dance | Movement, choreography |
| Sculpture/ Architecture | Spatial design, three-dimensionality |
| Technology | Cameras, editing tools, CGI, sound |
What the greats stated about it
As mentioned earlier, in his In Defense of Mixed Cinema, Bazin argues that cinema’s greatness lies in its impurity. He supported films that mixed realism with stylization, documentary with fiction. Bazin saw cinema as a dialectic—a space where varied artistic influences clash and merge. Godard once said, “Cinema is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.”
His work itself embraced cinema’s bastard nature. He mixed essay, fiction, collage, history, and theatrical style. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), did not use the word “bastard,” but emphasized how cinema democratized art through mass production, making it less aura-filled but more social and political.
Some filmmakers who proudly used this impureness of the art include Jean-Luc Godard, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Ritwik Ghatak, Chantal Akerman, and more—almost every modern and post-modern filmmaker.
Cinema’s bastardity is not its weakness, it is its wild inheritance. Its power to transform, absorb, mimic, resist, and reflect. Where pure arts may stand still, cinema moves. Where tradition may define limits, bastardity defines possibility.
