Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Art History For Filmmakers The Art of Vi
Art History For Filmmakers The Art of Vi
Gillian McIver
CONTENTS
PART 1
INTRODUCTION
How Does Art History Relate to Cinema History?
A Brief Linear (Traditional) History of Art
Toward an “Alternative” History of Art
CHAPTER ONE
VISUAL CULTURE AND STORYTELLING
Narrative and Storytelling in Art
Color and Narrative
Kandinsky’s Color Theory in Painting and in Cinema
Perspective and Composition
Light
Case Study: Peter Greenaway and Dutch Painting
Exercises, Discussion Questions, Further Viewing, and Further Reading
CHAPTER TWO
REALISM
What Is Realism?
What Is Representation?
Art after Photography: Modern Conceptions of Realism in Art
Case Study: Realism and the Camera Obscura
Exercises, Discussion Questions, and Further Reading
CHAPTER THREE
BEYOND REALISM
Fantasy Worlds in Cinema and Art
Oneiric: The World of Dreams
Surrealism
Going Beyond the Real
Case Study: The Archers
Exercises, Discussion Questions, and Further Reading
PART 2
CHAPTER FOUR
SEX AND VIOLENCE
Sex in Art and Cinema
Violence in Art and Cinema
Sex and Violence
Case Study: Martin Scorsese and Caravaggio
Exercises, Discussion Questions, and Further Reading
CHAPTER FIVE
HORROR
Religious Horror
Supernatural Horror
Body Horror
Monsters
Case Study: Guillermo del Toro and Francisco de Goya
Exercises, Discussion Questions, and Further Reading
CHAPTER SIX
LANDSCAPE
Why Landscape?
Beautiful, Picturesque, or Sublime?
The American Landscape and the American West
Case Study: The Road Movie
Exercises, Discussion Questions, and Further Reading
CHAPTER SEVEN
HEROES AND HEROIC ACTS
History Painting: Victory, Virtue, and the Hero
Heroism and the Western
Case Study: Subverting the Heroic Genre
Exercises, Discussion Questions, and Further Reading
CHAPTER EIGHT
MODERN MOVEMENTS
Culture or Mass Culture?
Expressionism
Abstraction
Abstract Expressionism
Minimalism
Going “Beyond the West”
Case Study: Hokusai to Disney
Exercises, Discussion Questions, Further Viewing, and Further Reading
CONCLUSION
HOW CAN WE USE ART HISTORY IN FILMMAKING?
Case Studies
Exercises and Discussion Questions
APPENDIX
Timeline
Glossary
Online Resources
Picture Credits
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
HOW DOES ART HISTORY RELATE TO CINEMA
HISTORY?
At its simplest, art history is the history of painters and paintings, or
paintings together with other art forms such as sculpture, from prehistoric
times (more than 50,000 years ago) up to the present. It is the story of the
development of Western visual culture; more recent interpretations of art
history also include the story of how non-Western cultures affect and
transform Western visual culture. It is the story of how the “canon” of
artistic excellence was established. It is the story of great personalities,
whose innovations and imaginations created significant works. Cinema
history is often also structured in a similar way: a history of directors and
their films; history of film cultures; history of national film industries;
history of the development of film technologies; and so on.
However you decide to tell art history, it is a history stretching back more
than 7,000 years, while cinema has a history of less than 150 years. Cinema
“plugs into” art history because both cinema and painting are visual art
forms, and cinema uses the imagery and symbolism that have been
developed over the course of millennia.
Art history shows how humankind continually grapples with big ideas:
man’s relationship with God, human social relationships, reality versus
ideals, social position, fantasy and imagination, good versus evil, nightmares
and fears, nature and the natural world—all have been, and continue to be,
explored through visual art.
The past is a territory that cannot be purely imagined, yet we have few
guides to know what it actually looked like. Painting can help give an idea of
how past times looked. What is especially convenient is that a painting
filters reality, so the image of the past—a stately king, a group of peasants, a
sixteenth-century interior—already indicates what are the key significant
elements that the viewer’s eye should look at. Often production designers
and cinematographers use paintings as a starting point for recreating the past
or imagining new worlds.
But we need to remember that painters and filmmakers interpret the world.
They observe it closely and then refine it to the most significant details
deemed necessary. This is as true of trying to represent the past as imagining
the future.
This book talks about art using the language of film, and demonstrates that
the link between the two is strong and unbreakable. It provides a succinct
and clear introduction to the history of art, illuminating the historical
background of image making and showing how this feeds both directly and
indirectly into filmmaking. Throughout the text, both linear and thematic
approaches are taken; the emphasis is always on the experience of looking
and watching, rather than following academic schools of thought. By using
both the language of film and the language of fine art, and comparing the
two, the book offers filmmakers a deeper appreciation of art and its value to
cinema. The book will be useful to those doing degree-level study in film
and also to those preparing to enter the profession of filmmaking, whether in
cinematography, directing, production design, or art direction.
Ways of Looking at the History of Art
Art history can be recounted as a series of movements, grouping together
artists under historical categories such as Impressionism, Mannerism,
Expressionism, and so on. The limitation with this approach is that it
excludes artists who cannot be fitted into these categories. These movements
are usually defined by critics and art historians, not by the artists themselves.
The tendency to categorize by movements also applies occasionally to
cinema, so we have Italian Neorealism, Golden Age Hollywood, the
Nouvelle Vague, and so on.
Alternatively, one can see art history in terms of historical periods, such as
the Early, Middle, and High Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-
Reformation, the Baroque, followed by the Rococo, the Romantic era
superseded by the Industrial Revolution, and onward. This approach serves
to locate art within specific defined historical periods, which can be
convenient for relating the production of art to other historical processes,
such as political movements, wars, scientific or technological inventions,
social and intellectual developments. However, the limitation of this
approach is that it can lead us to almost forget the imaginative element in the
production of art.
Sometimes the history of art is told as the story of great artists. The first
recognized historian of art is Giorgio Vasari, who wrote The Lives of the
Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), in which he
talked and gossiped about the artists he knew, and recounted what was
known about others. Despite its errors, the book is still in use today, and
Vasari’s contribution to understanding the history of art as a story of “great
artists” is still influential.
This approach has certainly been useful for filmmakers, leading to the
production of a number of films (of varying quality) that portray the lives of
important artists. While all of these films take liberties with their subject
matter, some of the more successful ones are Nightwatching (2007) by Peter
Greenaway, about Rembrandt; The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Peter
Webber, about Vermeer; Frida, Julie Taymor’s biography of Frida Kahlo;
and The Wolf at the Door by Henning Carlsen, about Gauguin. Vincent van
Gogh has been portrayed many times, but one of the best is still Lust for Life
(1956) by Vincente Minnelli. However, there are obvious limitations in this
approach: the “great man” theory of history places a great deal of onus on
choosing artists with exciting lives. Of course the tempestuous life of
Caravaggio—who was something of a villain—is more titillating than the
life of Claude Monet or Thomas Gainsborough, but that doesn’t tell us much
about their paintings.
Somewhat more useful might be the story of art as a quest for “the real” or,
alternatively, a story about the visual imagination. This book focuses on the
history of art as a history of painting the “cinematic” image. We will look at
a carefully chosen selection of paintings created at different periods in
human history, noticing how the visual imagination changes and evolves, as
we consider how these images might prove valuable to the contemporary
filmmaker.
Prehistory
The earliest evidence of what we might call art has been found in Sulawesi,
Indonesia, and has been dated as around 40,000 years old. But prehistoric
art has been found in every region of the world—in South America, in
Europe, and especially in Africa. Clearly the desire to make art is part of
what makes us human.
The caves at Lascaux in France and Altamira in northern Spain contain the
best-known examples of prehistoric painting and drawing. Typically, the
cave paintings show realistic and finely detailed renderings of animals,
whereas depictions of humans tend to be stylized and even sometimes
abstracted.
Ancient History
We can begin with the art of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the tomb
and temple paintings and friezes that have survived. In Egypt, these
normally illustrate scenes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, connecting
them to the lives of the persons buried in the tomb, or illustrate the activities
of the Pharaoh, gods, or goddesses. This is the official art of ancient Egypt,
the art of the state and the state religion, and it is noticeable for its
extremely stylized imagery.
In Japan, by contrast, secular art was alive and well. By the 12th century
(late Heian period) the e-maki or illustrated narrative handscroll was
established as a significant art form. Many traditional art histories exclude
Japanese and other non-Western art from the discussion of this period, but it
offers an interesting contrast and important broader perspective.
The Renaissance
It was Vasari who identified the Renaissance, which he described as a
“rebirth” of classical ideals: resurrecting philosophies, arts, and sciences of
ancient Greece and Rome and bringing them into Christian Western Europe.
The real story is bit more complicated than that, but Vasari was correct to
identify the great outpouring of painting that began in Florence in the
fourteenth century. The Renaissance period is notable for the development
of a highly realistic linear perspective. There were three main centers of art
in Italy: Florence, Venice, and Rome. The other principal region for
Renaissance art is the Netherlands in the early fifteenth century. We
associate the Italian Renaissance with artists such as Fra Angelico,
Botticelli, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, while in the
Netherlands we note Jan van Eyck and the development of oil paint.
The Baroque
As many books will tell you, the Renaissance then gave way to the
Reformation and the schism of the Western Christian church into
Catholicism and Protestantism. This led to the Baroque era, from the very
end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth. The period
from 1500 to 1700 is possibly the most important era for the development
of painting. Many painters we will be looking at in this book date from this
period: Bronzino (1503–1572), Titian (c. 1488/1490–1576), Caravaggio
(1571–1610), Rubens (1577–1640), Vermeer (1632–1675), Rembrandt
(1606–1669), and Velázquez (1599–1660). Theirs is painting of high drama,
marked by significant developments in lighting, composition, realism,
color, and technique.
However, traditional art history often did not discuss how this was also the
period of European expansion, which brought art and artifacts from Asia
and the Americas to Europe. This was the period where slavery was
expanded, and great wealth was created in parts of Europe. European art
begins to reflect these huge cultural changes.
FURTHER VIEWING
The Dark Ages: An Age of Light is a documentary by ZCZ Films
presented by Waldemar Janusczak that explores the dynamic art of the
Vikings, the Visigoths, and early Islam, opening up a hitherto unknown
visual culture that could enhance and enrich historical drama.
Twentieth-Century Modernism
The twentieth century is notable for two significant developments in the
history of visual culture: the cinema, which brought movement to visual
images (and later the inclusion of sound), and the development of
nonrepresentational painting—that is, painting that is not a picture of
something, but is instead what Pablo Picasso called “painting about
painting.” Here we see Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism,
conceptual art, and so forth. It can be argued that the development of
cinema and photography meant that painting became less dominant as a
form of visual culture and had less responsibility to represent the world as it
is. However, the twentieth century also gave us representational painters
such as L. S. Lowry and industrial Lancashire (Coming from the Mill,
1930), Edward Hopper and his pictures of urban America (Nighthawks,
1942), Andrew Wyeth’s American landscapes (Christina’s World, 1948),
David Hockney’s evocations of 1960s California (A Bigger Splash, 1967)
and Gerhard Richter’s meditations on recent German history (October 18,
1977). In the twentieth century, the art world opened up to include
significant artists from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,
such as Diego Rivera (1886–1957) and Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) (Mexico),
Fernando Botero (b. 1932) (Colombia), Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar (1925–1966)
(Egypt), and Saloua Raouda Choucair (b. 1916) (Lebanon). African
Americans also came to prominence, among them Jean-Michel Basquiat
(1960-1988). Before the twentieth century, social attitudes and the social
structures of artistic production meant that few female painters were well
known; exceptions included Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1656),
Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun (1755–1842), Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938),
Lady Elizabeth Butler (1846–1933), and Mary Cassat (1844–1926). In the
twentieth century, women were recognized as important painters making
significant contributions to the art form, among them Käthe Kollwitz
(1867–1945), Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), Sonia Delaunay (1885–
1979), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012),
and Bridget Riley (b. 1931).
The aim of this book is to identify key artists or artworks from all periods
that demonstrate “the cinematic” in their work and who are valuable for
filmmakers to study, to learn about, or be inspired by. Many notable artists,
important movements, and good artworks will be left out of this account
because we are focusing on what is more immediately useful for
filmmakers. Each chapter will discuss an aspect of art history and its
relevance to cinema. The book is divided into two sections: Part 1
establishes the link between art and cinema and develops the concept of the
“cinematic” in art. Part 2 is made up of shorter chapters that look at specific
directions, genres, and tendencies in cinema and art.
Part 1
1. Visual Culture and Storytelling
Chapter 1 introduces the idea of narrative in art. Paintings often tell stories,
from recounting the progress of a hunt in the Lascaux caves to the journey
of the soul after death in the Egyptian tomb paintings or a well-known
legend such as Perseus and Medusa. The chapter looks at the various forms
of narrative paintings through history. It also looks at one of the most
powerful tools in art: color. What is the history of color and its
arrangement? How did the discovery and use of different pigments
influence how people felt about color? How did color symbolism come to
affect cinema?
3. Beyond Realism
Chapter 3 discusses how artists came to represent the not-real. How and
why does art go beyond realism? We will explore the realm of imagination
through the art of myth and fantasy. Artists have been tasked with depicting
Heaven and creating imaginary worlds populated by mythic characters. The
chapter will look at the dreamlike paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, Arnold
Böcklin, and Henry Füssli, as well at the dream sequence in film. But art
also explores the unconscious mind, and the chapter looks at the Surrealism
of Salvador Dali, René Magritte, and Jan Svankmajer. This section
concludes with an examination of the astonishing films of Emeric
Pressburger and Michael Powell, and the talented artists with whom they
worked.
Part 2
4. Sex and Violence
Chapter 4 will look at genre, and how painting established visual motifs and
styles for genre films. We are used to films that portray sexuality, and to
romantic comedy, but most of the sex and gender tropes we find in cinema
were formed long ago by painting. Violence in film is frequently
controversial, but some of the best-known artworks are much more
graphically violent than any movie: we will look at the different versions of
Judith Slaying Holofernes as well as the films of Martin Scorsese.
5. Horror
Similarly, all our ideas about horror appeared first in painting. Chapter 5
examines the different subgenres of the horror film: supernatural horror,
religious horror including demons and devils, dragons and reptilian
monsters, and brutal body horror were each prefigured in paintings, such as
Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1480–1505), and
Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1575). The case study looks at the films
of Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro and the influence on his work
of Spanish artist Francisco de Goya.
6. Landscape
In Chapter 6, we will see how painting created visual motifs and styles for
expressing our feelings about landscape through an exploration of the
sublime. What were artists seeking when they started painting the
landscape? What set American landscape painting apart? Why was the
American western so popular? The case study looks at the genre of the road
movie.
7. Heroism
How do we recognize a hero? How did artists develop the visual language
of the “hero” character? Chapter 7 considers portrait painting and history
painting as the basis of our conception of the hero in cinema. The case
study of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained starts by examining the
fashionable portraiture of English painter Thomas Gainsborough.
8. Modern Movements
Modern art developed alongside cinema, and both have consistently
influenced each other. Chapter 8 looks at how in the twentieth century
painting developed in parallel with cinema, and the interrelationship
between the two. Expressionism is one early-twentieth-century art
movement that fully encompassed both visual art and cinema, but art and
cinema continue to influence each other right to the present. The chapter
looks at several modern movements in art and their relationship to cinema,
including more “difficult” art trends such as Minimalism and Abstraction,
and investigates how they have been interpreted in cinema.
1 Townsend Ludington, A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States (University of
North Carolina Press, 2000).
2 Cinematographer Style (2006). Directed and produced by Jon Fauer. DVD, color, 86 mins. In
English. Distributed by Docurama Films.
3 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translated by Claudia Gorbman (Columbia
University Press, 1994)
PART 1
CHAPTER ONE
VISUAL CULTURE AND
STORYTELLING
Our experiences are, and always have been, strongly visual. For extended
periods of human history, literacy was limited to certain sectors of the
population, and spoken words and visual images were the main means of
communication. The temple paintings, friezes, and sculptures of ancient
Greece and Egypt, the splendid altarpieces and architectural designs of the
Italian Renaissance churches—these were just as important to worshippers
as words. Secular art such as portrait painting, the drama of history painting,
and the bourgeois appreciation of landscape pictures communicate the
beliefs, values, and dilemmas of their age.
The very long history of visual art frames the way that we see things today:
how we understand beauty and sensuality, bravery and heroism, good and
evil, is strongly influenced by the way these have been represented in art.
Over the course of the twentieth century, cinema has not only availed itself
of this visual culture but has also made its own contributions.
This chapter will introduce some key points in the history of art, from the
development of image-based storytelling to the technological challenges of
composition and perspective, lighting, and the application of color pigments
to create images that can inspire awe and, above all, communicate.
Philosopher and theorist Roland Barthes said that the world’s stories are
innumerable, and that “the story exists at all times, in all places, in all
societies. Storytelling starts with human history itself.”1 Barthes concluded
that storytelling is “just there.” It is a part of life. Different types of
research, such as anthropological research by Claude Levi-Strauss and
psychological research by Carl Jung, showed that there are not only many
different stories, but within those stories there are patterns or structures that
recur beyond the individual control of the storyteller.
More recently, the art historian Ernst Gombrich proposed that one of the
things that has made Greek art so enduring and successful is the way it is
rooted in Greek storytelling. It is true that the popularity of stories such as
the Iliad and the Odyssey had a profound impact on the development of the
visual arts. Greeks put stories on their household objects, such as vases and
dishes. Greek theater boasted elaborate masks and painted scenic design.
But we can go back even earlier: if we look at the Egyptian pottery used by
ordinary households, far away from the official art of the Pharaohs, we can
see that painted images from myths and proverbs were part of everyday life.
If stories have been with us since our earliest times, as Barthes claims, then
so has visual art; and more often than not, they have gone together.
The first formally constructed narratives that we can read, because they
relate to or accompany a written text, come from Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The Book of the Dead explains what the belief systems were for the ancient
Egyptians, and many other texts provide further examples of Egyptian
mythology. But it’s when we actually look at the papyrus drawings, the
temple friezes, and the tomb murals of ancient Egypt that these stories of
death and rebirth really come to life. In Mesopotamia, one of the first great
examples of visual storytelling is the relief drawings commissioned by King
Ashurbanipal of Assyria (668–627 BC). Wanting to commemorate his own
military victories, he had his artists combine a relatively straightforward
(though probably embellished) account of his kingly exploits with the long-
established great epic story of Gilgamesh, creating a massive relief mural
that covered the four huge walls of his reception chamber.
In Italy, the Romans and Etruscans followed the Greek lead in developing
wall painting to a high level. The ancient city of Pompeii, near modern
Naples, Italy, provides us with a good idea of the paintings encountered in
daily life. In the Villa of the Mysteries, one of the largest rooms in the
preserved house has been given over to a mural that depicts the rites of
Dionysus. These rites were an important part of Greco-Roman religious
practice. The four walls tell the story of a young woman making her first
acts of worship and going through the process of acceptance into the cult.
Although, by modern standards, the mural requires some knowledge of
ancient religion to properly interpret it, the painting is highly realistic and
the principal characters of the gods and goddesses are relatively easy to
identify.
Fellini was well aware of what he was doing with this scene, because he
understood the importance of the art of ancient Rome and the enormous
legacy it has left to the modern world. Interestingly, a similar scene is
played out in the 1971 Egyptian film Chitchat on the Nile (dir. Hussein
Kamal), where a group of corrupt socialites cavort on a huge Pharaonic
statue, despoiling it; they then go on to accidentally kill a peasant woman.
In both films, the encounter with the art of the past forms a crux in the
story. The ancient art represents values that no longer exist, or are at risk, as
a result of the decadence and degeneracy of modern life.
1.1
Roma, 1972
Dir. Federico Fellini (1920–1993)
In Fellini’s critical homage to his home city, the splendor of Rome’s ancient history is suddenly
revealed as subway workers discover these ancient murals underground, only to see them melt away
upon contact with the air.
One of the most interesting examples of the Japanese hand scroll is The
Eyewitness Account of Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan in 1854,
created by several Japanese artists working together, which is now in the
British Museum. The Commodore Perry story itself was made into a film,
The Bushido Blade (1981). The hand scroll dates back almost two thousand
years before this, not only in Japan but in China and Korea, mostly
depicting well-known myths and legends. The Japanese scrolls of the Edo
period (between 1603 and 1868) are particularly dramatic and exquisite.
FRESCO
The mural painting technique used in ancient times was called fresco, or
“fresh”: color was applied to wet plaster, bonding it to the surface. This is
a firm and long-lasting technique so long as the building remains intact
and is not exposed to too much sun and weather. Some Etruscan
underground tomb paintings have been discovered, and the interior
murals in Pompeii survive because for most of the last two thousand
years they were sealed in volcanic ash.
FURTHER VIEWING
Sandro Botticelli’s Three Miracles of Saint Zenobius (1500), The
National Gallery, London
In one long painting, Botticelli shows us three key episodes in the saint’s
life, all in a single street setting, a real and recognizable Florence street.
Zenobius is identified in each section by his red cloak and bishop’s hat.
A century before the Commodore Perry hand scroll was created, the
eighteenth-century English artist William Hogarth created yet another kind
of painting series, an original “filmic” narrative. Hogarth practiced the well-
established trick of delivering an upright moral message by depicting lurid
and salacious visual evidence of lust, greed, and degradation. In a series of
six paintings, which Hogarth engraved and sold as prints (at a lower cost
and in large quantities), the viewer is allowed to peek into the private,
depraved life of Tom and witness the goings-on in the tavern, the gambling
house, and finally the madhouse. Narrative painting is here used to deliver a
vicarious experience to the viewer. One can easily compare A Rake’s
Progress to films about a character’s personal downfall through poor life
choices, such as Requiem for a Dream (2000, dir. Darren Aronofsky).
Hogarth made another narrative series, Marriage à la Mode—a domestic
drama depicting a marriage gone spectacularly wrong—and single-image
narratives such as Gin Lane, a brilliant depiction of what happens when a
community lavishly overindulges in gin. Incredibly, Gin Lane was based on
real-life events and was used as part of a general crackdown on unlicensed
distilling in London in the 1750s. With such characterful, exciting, and
titillating stories to show us, it’s not difficult to imagine that, were he alive
today, William Hogarth might be a filmmaker, rather than a painter.
1.2
The Rake’s Progress, “The Tavern Scene,” 1733
Artist: William Hogarth (1697–1764)
The Rake’s Progress is a moral story of human weakness: young Tom inherits money, squanders it in
dissolute living, tries to get his fortune back by marrying an ugly rich old woman, spends her money,
falls victim to syphilis, and eventually dies, raving in a madhouse.
But the history of art is not simply the history of different kinds of paintings
or the lives of painters; it is also about developments in technology,
knowledge, and technique.
PANEL PAINTING
Painting on wooden panels was much more convenient than painting
directly onto the wall, because the panels could be moved around and
grouped together as necessary. Byzantine icons were painted on wooden
panels, as were the religious paintings for church interiors. In the
sixteenth century, textile such as linen became popular, making paintings
lighter and therefore even more mobile.
COLOR AND NARRATIVE
Color theory and color psychology are important aspects of fine art
knowledge that have passed into the tool kit of the filmmaker. The history
of color in painting and cinema is the history of a difficult quest to
reproduce in art the colors seen with the human eye in the natural world.
Yet in both cases, it is science that makes it possible.
Synthetic pigments can be made from natural pigments that are refined, or
can be artificially created. The Egyptians worked out a system whereby
they could apply natural pigments to a metallic salt (a “mordant”) and heat
it, forming a stable “lake” pigment. Subsequent generations of artists and
chemists worked on expanding this knowledge. Industrialism proved
important in the history of color, as premixed oil paint in a tube became
available in 1841. Before this, artists had to prepare their own paints,
manually mixing pigments with a binding medium. In 1856, aniline dyes
were discovered as a by-product of industrial processes. These cover a wide
color spectrum and have the advantage of being much more stable and
consistent than natural pigments. Soon it was possible to produce them
inexpensively in large quantities. The ready availability of these pigments
offered new opportunities to painters, and we see the stupendous results in
the paintings from the last third of the nineteenth century onward. Vincent
van Gogh, for example, was able to paint brilliant yellow and purple fields
around Arles, France, because tube paint had recently become available and
so had purple paint. The color purple had always been horribly unstable,
which is why it is rarely seen in paintings, but even the new paints that Van
Gogh used have faded, leaving the images now more blue than purple.
1.3
The Umbrellas, 1885
Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
When Renoir painted The Umbrellas during a four-year period (1881–85), he used at least two
completely different types of blue. Sixteen years later, Picasso’s famous “blue period” (1901–1904)
took advantage of a huge new range of blues.
We can see a similar trajectory in the history of cinema technology, as
monochrome gave way to color, and color to Technicolor. The availability
of film stocks and film speeds, and later the emergence of digital
technologies, determined the choices available to the filmmaker, which in
turn affected the aesthetic outcome of the work itself, with each period
creating new forms of expression.
FURTHER VIEWING
It is possible to identify a number of painters worth looking at
specifically for their innovative use of color. Many of them are discussed
further in this book, but you can also look them up yourself.
Jan Vermeer (1632–1675). Notice Vermeer’s use of rare and expensive
lapis lazuli blue, particularly in the clothing of his subjects, such as the
headscarf of the subject in Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665).
Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Matisse was fond of warm colors,
particularly reds, and used them in unusual ways. Matisse was less
concerned with natural rendering of colors and more with their dramatic,
emotional, and psychological effects. See Music later in this chapter
(shown here).
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Best known as a portraitist, Sargent
is one of painting’s greatest colorists. See A Dinner Table at Night
(1884).
Jan van Eyck (1390–1441). One of the earliest pioneers of oil paint. See
the richly colored Arnolfini Wedding (1434).
Titian (c. 1477–1576). See Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas in Chapter 5.
It took time for stable color film stock to be developed and adopted, but
from the earliest experiments in cinema, attempts were made to bring color
to the screen. For example, Georges Méliès hand-painted the frames of his
fantasy films; D. W. Griffith used stenciling (known as PathéColor) in The
Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). This involved etching on
glass plates, using these plates as master stencils to cover portions of the
film, then applying colored dye to the appropriate parts of each frame.
Color tinting was also practiced.
Along with the films of Vittorio Storaro, discussed in this chapter, and The
Archers films, discussed in Chapter 3, you might like to think about the use
of color in these films:
Don’t Look Now (1973): Nicolas Roeg, Anthony Richmond (DP), Giovanni
Soccol (art director)
Gone with the Wind (1939): Victor Fleming, Ernest Haller (DP), William
Cameron Menzies (production designer)
Yellow
Yellow, according to Kandinsky,
assails every obstacle blindly, and bursts forth aimlessly in every direction. Yellow, if steadily
gazed at in any geometrical form, has a disturbing influence, and reveals in the colour an insistent,
aggressive character. The intensification of the yellow increases the painful shrillness of its note.
Yellow is the typically earthly colour. It can never have profound meaning. An inter-mixture of
blue makes it a sickly colour. It may be paralleled in human nature, with madness, not with
melancholy or hypochondriacal mania, but rather with violent raving lunacy.6
Certainly, yellow is associated with the sun and summer, but in Western
culture it is also the color of cowardice and greed. Yet in Imperial China,
the royal family were regarded as direct descendants of the Sun, which was
sacred, so they had the exclusive right to wear yellow.
Made during Sargent’s stint as a war artist in July 1918, Gassed shows a
field of soldiers who have experienced the blinding effects of mustard gas.
Mustard gas, a yellow brown sulfur gas that destroys the skin and lungs,
was a chemical weapon. The painting does two things: it represents a real
thing that happened on the battlefield, and it illustrates a biblical legend of
“the blind leading the blind.” It also echoes the painting by the Flemish
artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder of “the blind leading the blind,” in which a
group of blind men follow one another into a hole.
1.6
Gassed, 1919
Artist: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
One of the greatest paintings of World War 1, Gassed references Bruegel’s The Blind Leading the
Blind (1568) to depict a column of injured, poisoned soldiers.
Sargent is both referring to the biblical story and the Bruegel painting and
making a point about the war. But it’s not simply a painting of the blind
leading the blind. It is a painting of mustard gas. Here mustard (yellow) is
both literal and symbolic. The yellow paint that Sargent uses throughout the
picture recalls mustard yellow. It is sickening and sickly looking. This is not
bright, cheerful sunshine yellow; it is illness yellow. John Singer Sargent
was a great colorist, known for his fine, delicately tinted portraits. Long
after the use of mustard gas was banned, Singer Sargent’s use of the sickly
yellow color makes today’s viewer feel squeamish and uncomfortable.
Eugene Delacroix, in Liberty Leading the People (see Chapter 7), makes the
red in the Tricolore flag at the top of the picture dominant over the white
and blue. The Tricolore symbolizes the ideals of the French revolution:
liberty, equality, and fraternity. Here red is the most active color, as Liberty
and her motley collaboration of peasants, workers, bourgeois, and artists
stride forward and make revolutionary history. Krzysztof Kieślowski
(1941–1996) picks up on this in his Three Colours trilogy. Red (1994) is
about fraternity, about people who have little in common gradually
becoming closer and aware of their shared humanity.
Kandinsky also notes the power of deep blues. “The inclination of blue to
depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is
deeper.”10 A good example would be Vincent van Gogh’s nocturnal
pictures, such as Starry Night.
1.8
Oath of the Horatii, 1785
Artist: Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825)
David puts a dramatic red cape on Napoleon (1801, see Chapter 7), but long before that he had used
the red cape in the Oath of the Horatii, showing the oath taken by three heroic brothers willing to
sacrifice their lives for Rome. Most of the painting is in muted colors, but the red garments of the
brothers stand out, perhaps foreshadowing the bloodshed to come.
1.9
Minority Report, 2002
Dir. Steven Spielberg, DP Janusz Kaminski
Minority Report is dominated by blue colors, in both the interior and exterior scenes. Spielberg also
uses cool muted reds to complement the blues. The overall effect is distancing and menacing; like
most sci-fi films, Minority Report uses images of an imagined future to warn us in the present.
1.10
Starry Night, 1889
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
Van Gogh used many different blue shades in his paintings of the night sky. The deep blues offset the
stars and the yellow moon, which seem to whirl and spin in this picture. In Starry Night Over the
Rhone (1888), he uses deeper blues and fewer stars, and the effect is more contemplative.
Black
In Western culture, Kandinsky’s evaluation of black is generally accepted:
“Black is something burnt out, like the ashes of a funeral pyre, something
motionless like a corpse. The silence of black is the silence of death.”11
1.11
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, Easter Day, 1971
Artist: Robert Motherwell (1915–1991)
Motherwell painted more than 100 pictures in this series, all with the recurring image of the large
black oval, which references the ritual display of the dead bull’s testicles at the finish of the bullfight.
The pictures, he said, “are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death, and their
interrelation.”12
Perspective
“Perspective” is the illusion made on a flat surface (such as wood, canvas,
or paper) of a scene or object as it would be seen by the eye; that is, it gives
the impression of a three-dimensional image and creates the impression of
space and depth (and often of movement). One characteristic principle of
perspective is that objects appear smaller as their distance from the viewer
increases. In Matisse’s Music (1910), this is clearly not the case. Matisse
was trained as a conventional academic painter but was not satisfied with
the traditional approach. His interest in travel, color theory, and
experimentation led him in a completely different direction. Music removes
all perspective, together with any kind of setting or cultural specificity, from
the picture; the figures are flat and barely differentiated. Yet the strong
contrast between the cool blues and greens and the fiery red of the figures
gives the painting energy.
Look at Scotland Forever, in the Introduction. Are the horses the same size?
Not at all; there is a tremendous sense of the regiment being large, its mass
of soldiers trailing off into the distance, and this is shown by their being
painted smaller. As well, Butler gives the impression of movement: we
“feel” the horse in the foreground surging forward. This is perspective.
However, we do know that in the late Roman Empire and Byzantium, and
in the so-called Middle Ages (roughly 300–1200 AD), perspective painting
is not in evidence. There is also little secular painting of any kind. In fact,
what is interesting is how strange and different the painting of this period is
from any other time in European art. While the Roman frescoes don’t look
odd to us at all, Byzantine icons and frescoes appear impossibly stylized
and remote. Yet the art of this time was splendid and beautiful; take, for
example, the marvelous Basilica of San Vitale at Ravenna, Italy. It can only
be described as a tour de force in ecclesiastical interior decoration, every
inch of its walls and ceiling covered in marvelous technically complex and
sophisticated painting and gilding. But the style is noticeably flattened,
distinctly different from the more realistic wall painting we see in Pompeii.
Historians, like the rest of us, love to give all-encompassing labels to things.
The term Renaissance is a good example, long used to describe great social,
political, philosophical, and importantly, artistic shifts in culture and
knowledge that took place over a long period of time, roughly 400 years.
For many complex reasons, certain Greek and Roman classical texts fell out
of use, and in some cases even disappeared. But not for long, because many
of these texts, particularly those involving mathematics, were widely used
by scholars in the regions that had embraced Islam in the seventh century:
Mesopotamia, Syria, Arabia, and most prominently, Egypt. And the
scholars weren’t simply using the texts, they were building on them,
developing and extending knowledge, and eventually that knowledge found
its way back to Europe.
Due to the camera obscura and various other methods, such as using a grid
or “drawing machine,”14 perspective painting became the norm, and the
quest for more accurate and realistic pictures began. Yet by the end of the
nineteenth century, artists began to reject perspective painting. The
influence of non-Western art, the rise of photography, and changing social
relationships born of the Industrial Revolution created a desire to do
something completely new, and many artists started to seek completely
different approaches to perspective.
For example, the type of shots chosen can influence the way the viewer
interprets what’s going on. Shot size depends on the focal length of the
camera’s lens and how far the camera is placed from the subject. The most
common shot sizes are the close-up, the medium shot, and the long shot.
The close-up can offer us intimacy, but can also create tension. The medium
shot is the most common, but it often serves to bridge between close-ups,
when the most important things are said, and long shots, when we create an
establishing view of events or allow the landscape to emerge as a
protagonist in the story.
One interesting perspective is the point of view shot, also known as the
subjective camera. This is when the camera takes the perspective of a
character, and the audience sees the scene as if through the character’s eyes.
Occasionally, films are made to be seen largely, or even entirely, through
the perspective of the principal character. In Russian Ark (2002), by Russian
director Alexander Sokurov (DP Tilman Büttner), the unseen narrator is
played by the camera, using the first digital hard drive Steadicam system.
Filmed entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage
Museum, it was shot in real time. Watching the film, one cannot help
noticing that the Hermitage Museum, which is filled with art from every
period of human history, acts as point and counterpoint to the action on the
screen. The paintings and sculptures of the museum are as much a part of
the cast as are the (more than 2,000) actors.
1.12
Queen Christina, 1933
Dir. Rouben Mamoulian
A romantic drama with a historical setting, based on the life of seventeenth-century Queen Christina
of Sweden, the composition of this scene still is strongly reminiscent of traditional court painting,
like The Persian Embassy to Louis XIV (1715) by Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746). But the viewer
has little intimacy with Christina; we see her here in her official role. The contrast between shots like
this and shots of Christina’s passion and torment, told through close-ups, is what makes Mamoulian’s
film so powerful.
LIGHT
Most importantly, painters have helped filmmakers to understand how to
use light. Filmmakers, and particularly cinematographers, often go to
painting to learn about lighting. There are certain painters who are so
crucial to light that we could even call them the first cinematographers.
These are Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Vermeer.
What can lighting do for painting? Lighting tells us where to look, it tells us
what’s important; it models faces and figures and reveals character.
Lighting offers the illusion of three dimensionality, as well as mystery and
drama. The “language” of lighting in film derives from lighting in painting,
developed over hundreds of years since the Renaissance. It was oil paint,
with its malleability and slow drying time, that allowed painters to build up
layers of paint and create dramatic lighting effects. Painters construct
narrative by lighting the elements they want to draw attention to and
throwing other elements into shadow. Lighting creates visual interest,
highlighting those that face the light and veiling those that turn away in
shadow, simultaneously hiding and revealing. The viewer then “reads” the
painting and works out why some things are made clear and some are
obscured, and in this way begins the process of exploring the picture’s
narrative intent.
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro is the use of bold and strong contrast between light and dark,
affecting a whole composition. Rembrandt and Caravaggio are the most
outstanding masters of chiaroscuro, using it to remarkable psychological
effect in their paintings. This is important because psychologists have
discovered that, shown a line drawing, most people actively attempt to
interpret its meaning. Shown a color painting, they tend to react to it
emotionally rather than intellectually. This is why chiaroscuro works so
perfectly; it allows you to have your cake and eat it. The viewer interprets
the meaning through the lines created by the juxtaposition of dark and light,
and the presence of color, however limited, effects an emotional reaction.
High key lighting creates a bright, even picture that brings out color and
creates an overall natural, yet “larger than life” emphasis. Bronzino’s
Allegory of Venus and Cupid shows this to good effect. High key lighting
produces a flattering, natural effect that also matches the general mood of
a romantic comedy, as in the film When Harry Met Sally, or Knocked Up.
Lighting from above tends to create a halo effect suggestive of
spirituality. See Raphael’s The Crowning of the Virgin (1502) or Murillo’s
The Two Trinities (1675). Indian film-maker Satiyajit Ray’s Pather
Panchali (1955) has many such shots.
A face that is shown in darkness or semi-darkness can symbolize self-
division and ambivalence, as in Rembrandt’s Portrait of his Son Titus and
his many self-portraits. It is a favorite lighting method in film noir: see
The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) or Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn,
2011).
Lighting from below often makes the subject’s face appear sinister or
eerie, or otherwise disturbing, and is sometimes seen in horror or
suspense films (The Blair Witch Project, dir. Eduardo Sánchez and
Daniel Myrick, 1999; Frankenstein, dir. James Whale, 1931). Caravaggio
does the same in David with the Head of Goliath. Yet see how it creates
mystery and excitement in Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment with
a Bird in an Air Pump (1768).
When the subject blocks out the source of light it creates a silhouette.
See the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich,
1818) in Chapter 6. Silhouette is used to powerful effect in Gone with the
Wind (1939) at key moments in the storytelling. Viewers can be made to
feel threatened by bottom lighting, or silhouettes, for we tend to associate
light with safety.
Vermeer uses chiaroscuro as part of the illusion of natural light to tell the
story. In Woman Holding a Balance (1662), he uses cast shadows to more
dramatic effect than in most of his paintings. The room is mostly dark, with
a thin shaft of light coming in from a curtained window on the far left of the
picture. We see a woman dressed in a fur-lined robe, holding jeweler’s
scales while standing at a table covered in jewelry. Behind is a large
painting of the Day of Judgment, when the souls of the dead are to be
weighed. Jewelry, and particularly pearls, although popular, were seen as
symbols of vanity.
Sometimes revealing the light source has its own dramatic value: in
Hendrick ter Brugghen’s The Concert (1626), musicians play by
candlelight, which creates soft chiaroscuro without blacks, melded together
by warm golden light.
1.17
Woman Holding a Balance, 1662–1664
Artist: Jan Vermeer (1632–1675)
Lighting is one of the principal tools Vermeer is using here. Art historians have long argued over the
precise “meaning” of this painting.
Tenebrism
It is possible to go further than chiaroscuro; tenebrism is the “spotlight”
effect, the extreme tonal shading of dark and light, that we see in the work
of Caravaggio and also the Spanish painter Zurbarán (1598–1664),
particularly in his series of remarkable paintings of St. Francis, which are so
high contrast they are nearly monochrome. Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro depths
are not made by the application of pure black: he built his darks up through
layers of dark earth pigments. Tenebrism and chiaroscuro were highly
prized by filmmakers in the period of monochrome, before the widespread
use of color. We see it particularly in gangster pictures and film noir: the
murky “gray” morality of the protagonists is depicted through high-contrast
black and white. One of the most masterful uses of tenebrism in cinema is
in Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles and photographed by
Gregg Toland. Another is the suspenseful, expressionistic Night of the
Hunter (1955) by Charles Laughton, DP Stanley Cortez.
FURTHER VIEWING
Examples of tenebrism
Francisco Ribalta, Christ Embracing St. Bernard Clairvaux, 1626
José de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Philip, 1639
Georges de La Tour, The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, 1640
Francisco Zurbaran, Saint Francis in Meditation, 1635–1639
CASE STUDY:
PETER GREENAWAY AND DUTCH
PAINTING
1.18
The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia Company in 1616
Artist: Frans Hals (1582–1666)
This is one of the greatest examples of Dutch Militia paintings. Hals himself had served in the same
militia and knew the group well. The people in the picture are depicted as real individuals, not types
or symbols. The original is 1.75 × 3.24 meters. Today you can see it in the Frans Hals Museum,
Haarlem.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989)
Greenaway’s film is set in a lavish and smart restaurant, Le Hollandais
(“The Dutch”), run by a French chef and patronized by the local mafioso
Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) and his unlovely crew. Spica has just taken
control of the restaurant and dines here nightly with his gang of thugs and
his much-abused wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren). Spica also does not
hesitate to use the backyard of the restaurant to enact monstrous revenge on
those who cross him. All of the restaurant’s workers are terrorized by him,
though the Cook (Richard Bohringer) manages to keep his sang-froid.
Greenaway shoots most of the film in a large warehouse, transforming it
into a huge restaurant with a cavernous kitchen. But this is unlike any real
restaurant. The interiors of both kitchen and dining room are dramatic and
sensual, richly textured and strongly colored, contrasting with the pristine
whiteness of the bathroom (the unlikely setting for the Wife’s passionate
affair with the Lover). While the kitchen is a baroque vision of Hell, all
steam and smoke and toiling minions, the dining room is dominated by one
massive reproduction of Frans Hals’s The Banquet of the Officers of the St.
George Militia Company in 1616. Why does Greenaway use this painting?
What is the connection between Hals’s painting and this film? We notice
right away that Spica and his gang are dressed in a peculiar way: they wear
the same sashes and hats as the militiamen in the painting—though the film
is clearly set in late 1980s London.
The Dutch militiamen were civilians, burghers, respectable middle-class
men, not professional soldiers. So why would Greenaway dress Spica and
his villains in this way? First, the film has a distinct critique of
consumerism and, implicitly, of capitalism—symbolized and illustrated by
Spica’s uncouth greed. The gang dress alike in this seventeenth-century
fashion that sets them apart from the rest of the patrons. If, as we’ve seen,
the paintings of militia banquets are symbolic images of friendship and
unity, the film’s story systematically portrays the course of betrayal of
friendship and unity by all of the main characters, as the Wife betrays the
Thief with the Lover, the Cook betrays his patron, the Thief, by allying with
the Wife, and of course, the Thief in his greed and brutality betrays
everyone. He betrays all kinds of friendship and unity, even that of his own
gang. At the same time, we can understand that Greenaway distrusts the
Schuttersstuk painting of the pink-cheeked well-fed burgher army, these
self-satisfied capitalists parading their wealth, fancy food, and splendid
costumes.
What is the effect of this conceit on the story? As we have just seen, it
serves to drive the plot, echoing the power relations explored in the film. It
also adds visual interest. Greenaway’s film is highly stylized, creating
strong images. The ironic thing is that the Dutch paintings of the Golden
Age are considered to be eminently realistic, yet by incorporating them into
the contemporary drama Greenaway lifts his characters out of realism. But,
as we will see, realism in film goes beyond the visual. What is real in the
film are the human emotions and human psychology. Through the use of the
painting, Greenaway links the greed, carnality, and venality of the past, in
his reading of the complacent self-satisfaction of the Dutch Golden Age
burghers, to the greed, carnality, and venality of the present—Thatcher’s
England in the late 1980s.
1.19
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, 1989
Dir. Peter Greenaway
Greenaway’s British gangster drama references Dutch painting in a variety of ways.
FURTHER VIEWING
See also these examples of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro:
Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret and Furred Mantel, 1634
The Philosopher in Meditation, 1632
The Blinding of Samson, 1636
Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) and Greenaway’s
Nightwatching (2007)
The Night Watch is quite different from the rest of the Schuttersstuk militia
paintings. It is not just a group of men around a banquet table; it is far more
theatrical, dramatic, posed. Compare its composition to Hals’s painting.
Instead of just lining the militiamen up on a horizontal plane, Rembrandt’s
composition creates the illusion of depth: he places the people in
perspective, led from the front, capturing the moment of action. Historian
Simon Schama points out that Rembrandt was well aware that these burgher
militiamen were “pretend” soldiers; the real fighting was done far away by
professionals.19 But he gave them their moment of heroic action on canvas.
Visually, too, Rembrandt makes powerful use of chiaroscuro, the use of
bold and strong contrast between light and dark. Rembrandt is the most
outstanding master of chiaroscuro in North European art; he used it to
remarkable psychological effect in his paintings.
The image is by Rembrandt: The Night Watch, or The Company of
Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch
Preparing to March Out (1642). The painting measures 3.63 × 4.37 meters.
Banning Cocq (left) and van Ruytenburch (right) are in the foreground,
surrounded by the rest of the militia in the Amsterdam street. The painting
is lively, active; one can almost hear the street noise and bustle, almost
smell the gunpowder and the nearby canal.
The painting of the Night Watch itself contains the puzzle and is the
subject of Greenaway’s 2007 film. It focuses on the relationships between
Rembrandt, who has transcended his humble origins and become a
fashionable society painter, and the bourgeois civilian militiamen who want
to be celebrated in their traditional Schuttersstuk group portrait.
Nightwatching posits a conspiracy to murder the original captain of the
musketeer regiment and replace him with the depicted Frans Banning Cocq
and his deputy, Willem van Ruytenburch. Greenaway suggests that
Rembrandt used the painting to expose and immortalize a conspiracy, using
subtle allegory in his group portrait, subverting the highly prestigious
commission into a tainted document that brought about Rembrandt’s fall
from grace into obscurity and penury. Through the story, Greenaway lays
bare the hierarchy, corruption, and venality at the heart of ostensibly
democratic and “free” Amsterdam of the Golden Age.
In Nightwatching, Greenaway, working with Reiner van Brummelen (his
DP since 1999) and production designer Maarten Piersma, makes the whole
film look like a Rembrandt painting. Most of the film is shot indoors, like
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, in a huge warehouse studio
fitted out to become various places in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.
Greenaway and van Brummelen designed the lighting in strong, warm
chiaroscuro. Striking visual effects are created simply by lighting, costume,
and textiles, augmented with period props. The way that each of the
characters is lit echoes the techniques used in Rembrandt’s portraits and
compositions.
Many years after the Night Watch, Rembrandt made the portrait of his
son, Titus in the Red Hat, set in a dramatic night landscape. This dynamic
style of low-key lighting was distinctive in Rembrandt’s portraiture,
bringing dramatic flair to the image. Titus looks dashing, and wears a
blood-red hat and a heavy neck chain that glints and adds a gold light to the
picture. The effect is strongly theatrical, and by the shadowing on his face,
Titus appears mysterious. The critic Andrew Graham Dixon points out that
this was painted shortly after Rembrandt was made bankrupt. Was it a
gesture of defiance, to paint his son as a nobleman wearing a probably
fictional gold chain?
The high drama and sense of mystery that this kind of portrait lighting
achieves is used throughout Nightwatching.
1.20
Nightwatching, 2007
Dir. Peter Greenaway
The lighting and composition of Greenaway’s biopic of Rembrandt are based on Rembrandt’s
paintings.
FURTHER VIEWING
Prospero’s Books (1991), in which Peter Greenaway’s interpretation of
Shakespeare references Mannerist painters such as Bronzino and
Parmigianino
The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), which Greenaway has said refers to
Caravaggio and other Baroque artists
Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), Greenaway’s biopic of
Hendrik Goltzius, sixteenth-century Dutch painter and maker of erotic
prints
EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Exercise 1
Watch Blue Velvet, and note how many times the red-blue contrast appears
in the film. What other colors are ascribed symbolic significance in the
film?
Exercise 2
Refer to Vittorio Storaro’s symbolic system of color correspondences here.
Watch any of the films on which Storaro was the DP, such as The Sheltering
Sky (1990), The Conformist (1970), Apocalypse Now (1979), or Bulworth
(1998). Do you see this system operating? How does he accomplish it? Is it
useful to you as a viewer to know this?
Color symbolism is important for Storaro, but not everyone shares his
view. How important is color symbolism to you as a filmmaker?
Exercise 3
Choose any of the paintings shown in this chapter, or elsewhere in this
book. Locate your chosen painting online and have a good look at it,
zooming in and scrolling around. What are the painting’s “cinematic”
qualities? As we have seen, the word cinematic has no precise meaning, but
it is frequently used to mean that a picture has certain qualities that are
shared with cinema: a dramatic moment or a striking composition. How is
this achieved in your chosen picture? What else in the picture may be
“cinematic”?
Exercise 4
Choose a static subject and location in natural light (a tree or part of a
building, for example). Now, over the course of one clear day, record the
changes in the light and how this affects the image you can make. Take a
photograph just before sunrise, at sunrise, then again at noon, midafternoon,
at sunset, and at twilight. Arrange the pictures so you can see them all at the
same time. Notice how the change in the color temperature gives the same
subject quite a different look. What kind of mood does each time of day
suggest?
Exercise 5
Many people believe that Vermeer also used optics, in the form of a camera
obscura, which is discussed in detail in the next chapter. If this is true, then
perhaps we could say that Vermeer, like a cinematographer, used a lens
through which to see his composition.
Look at Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and reinterpret this picture as an
exercise in natural lighting for a film. You will need a window that admits a
significant amount of natural light and actors to play the subjects. Using
Vermeer as a guide, position your subject in front of the window. Using
your camera, experiment with different focal lengths and different camera
positions until you can create a shot that best resembles what Vermeer
achieved.
Make sure you notice the light temperature. Morning light will be
different from afternoon light and evening light. Light changes temperature
at different times of the day, which means it has a slightly different color
and very different intensity, all of which will affect your composition. What
time of day do you think that Vermeer used?
Now experiment with your camera. Have your characters move into the
shot. Try a tracking shot to follow your characters toward the window. How
can you bring variation into the composition without going too far away
from what Vermeer did?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What is “Rembrandt lighting”? Why is it used in cinema? Aside from
Gordon Willis, can you find any other DPs or directors who seem to be
strongly influenced by Rembrandt?
PAINTING
It is worth looking at all of Rembrandt’s body of work, but look also at the
pictures of Pieter de Hooch, to see how he rendered depth of field. DP Jack
Cardiff credited de Hooch with teaching him a lot about shooting interiors
and street scenes.
FURTHER READING
In a sense, “the real” or “realism” is present in almost every kind and genre
of painting. This chapter will explore realism as a quest to portray “the world
as it appears to us.” But it is important to remember that symbolism and
metaphor also operate within realism.
We can often find out a lot by looking at some of these ancient artworks. Of
course, the objects and animals in the artworks are often included because
of their symbolic importance. Yet one of the useful aspects of art history for
the filmmaker is to see what past worlds actually looked like, though
filtered through the artistic imagination. What did people wear? What was
present in their everyday habitat? In the Egyptian paintings, we can see
papyrus and lotus plants, the Nile, and an abundance of bird life. These
really existed and largely still exist. In the pictures, stylized human forms
wear specific costumes, jewelry, and hairstyles. It is not really surprising
that in the films made depicting ancient Egyptian society, whether
Egyptian-made films or the “sword and sandal dramas” produced in the
1950s (Land of the Pharaohs, The Egyptian, The Ten Commandments),
attention was paid to include all these things in the mise en scène.
However, from the Athenian period onward (roughly 500 BC), there
gradually arose an interest in depicting things as they actually existed
within Greek society, not just presenting ideally perfect figures. Influenced
by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, Greeks became increasingly
interested in realism, and this continued through the Roman era. Initially,
this took the form of depicting comic characters that appeared in the Greek
theater. Later, however, Greek artists became interested in representing
actual people as they might have lived—for example, the famous sculpture
of the philosopher Diogenes, with his begging bowl and his dog, in the Villa
Albani, Rome. The old man has a sagging body, an unkempt beard, very far
from the heroic beauty or magnificence we normally associate with Greek
sculpture. Diogenes, an ascetic, is represented as a broken-down old man,
skinny and hunched. Diogenes was a much respected philosopher. But
instead of idealizing him, a man noted for his personal virtue as well as his
intellect, the sculptor wanted the audience to understand the human aspect
of Diogenes. This is an important development because, with this act, the
sculptor is telling us that even frail and vulnerable human beings are
capable of great and powerful acts—in this case, thinking philosophy. This
is a far cry from idealization. It brings everything down to the human level.
2.1
Nebamun Hunting in the Marshes Egyptian tomb painting, British Museum, around 1350 BC
This fragment from a tomb painting depicts a real person, Nebamun, a court official who lived almost
3,500 years ago. Here he is with his wife and daughter on board a skiff during a hunting trip on the
Nile.
Mimesis
Aristotle is the key here. Aristotle wrote about almost everything
imaginable: science, mathematics, theater, politics, geometry, and more.
Although Aristotle’s Poetics is an analysis of drama (and required reading
for filmmakers), it also gives us some very interesting insights into realism
throughout the arts. Aristotle talks about “mimesis,” which is the term he
uses to describe the representation or, more correctly, the imitation of life.
The word mimesis carries within it the word “mimic” and the word
“imitation.” Mimesis essentially means a representation imitating life. This
imitation needs to be psychologically correct—having appropriate and
immediately recognizable human qualities, qualities that we may
understand as being psychological. Even if the subjects are gods and
goddesses, within the artwork they need to express themselves in ways to
which a human “real world” audience can relate. It is this process of
relating to the characters in the artwork that allows us to enjoy the
experience. We can feel sympathy, horror, disgust, attraction, repulsion, and
sorrow—the whole gamut of human emotional reaction.
Aristotle points out that mimesis only really works if there is some distance
between the representation and the reality. An artwork is not simply
documentation. More recent research by Cambridge classicist Nigel Spivey
has investigated this idea by looking at recent work by neuroscientists.
When he asked why artistic images (for example, heroic bodies) are so
often exaggerated, the new research led him to conclude that we humans
don’t really like absolute reality—we prefer things exaggerated. This is a
shared biological instinct that appears to link us inexorably with our ancient
ancestors.1 Pure realism in art, as Aristotle had already pointed out in
drama, is boring, in the same way that CCTV footage is boring compared to
a drama or a documentary film. Add in a little exaggeration—but not too
much—and things become interesting and worth looking at. We can achieve
this exaggeration through composition, lighting, and color.
Greek and Roman art was never realistic in the way we understand realism
today. There was never any real attempt to portray everyday life. When
actual people were portrayed, these were mainly official portraits of the
elite intended to make them seem particularly powerful, heroic, and
important. However, we do see a strong interest in physical anatomy as well
as facial expression and gesture. We can also get a reasonably useful
indication of things such as costume and hairstyle.
Toward Realism
By the early sixteenth century, painting had largely left the exclusive
preserve of the church, and painters were free, theoretically at least, to paint
whatever they wanted for whoever was willing to buy the painting. But
what is interesting is that the subject matter is still ostensibly religious in
character. Take, for example, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The
Massacre of the Innocents (1565).
Bruegel here is saying to us, “This is what an invading force looks like; this
is what invaders do.” It is only the title, The Massacre of the Innocents, that
links what we see in this picture to the biblical story in the New Testament.
Everything else about it looks completely authentic, even realistic, and
chimes with what we know (from historical sources) did actually happen
with depressing frequency during that period of unrest and religious wars.
Here we see realism together with metaphor. The artist is likening the scene
to a story from the Bible. The injustice of the “massacre of the innocents”
was an important Christian teaching, and here Bruegel is comparing the
behavior of the military in his day to that of “Bad King Herod” in the
biblical story.
Filmmakers have to try to find ways to depict “the real,” and the starting
point is not any different from that of the painter: the imagination.
Continuing with the theme of conflict we met in Bruegel, look at Victor
Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939). Fleming, his DP Ernest Haller, and
production designer William Cameron Menzies had to find a way to depict
the dreadful Battle of Atlanta in the American Civil War. There were a
number of paintings made of the battle, and unlike earlier wars, there were
also photographs. But Fleming’s film does not copy them; his film has no
battle scenes. Instead he shows us only the horrific aftermath, the casualties
of war, in dramatic Technicolor. Watch the film and note the scene; notice
Fleming’s use of perspective, where he places the camera to create the
desired effect. Bruegel also uses a “camera eye” to achieve mimesis—long
before the camera.
We need to be aware that the term “realism” does not appear in art
discourse until the nineteenth century, and even then it was not used
approvingly. For the nineteenth century, “realism” meant painting the here
and now, the modern world and its inhabitants. For most of art history,
painting displays a kind of tension between painting things so that they look
realistic, while at the same time expressing a bigger and more profound
idea. We have already seen this in Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents,
where he connects the raid on a Flemish town to the biblical story of
Herod’s attempt kill the infant Christ, and in the discussion (Chapter 1) of
Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, in which the woman at a table of
jewelry is also a debate about virtue and vice. For the most part, both
painting and cinema have been content with a realism that means
constructing a lifelike image tempered by idealization.
But realism also has the ability to invoke the importance of things that are
not in the realm of idealization. Realism can be the visual route to
understanding both idealized worldviews and impoverished worldviews.
Simply put, realism encompasses both Hollywood’s glamorized realism and
“gritty” social realism, which often has a political aspect. Both work in the
dominant visual communication system of perspective realism.
“Mirror of Nature”
For most of history, art has been considered a “mirror of nature.” Like a
mirror, what you see is not “real,” but it is an accurate representation. The
artistry is in where you put the mirror. It is easy to see why more than a few
artists had fun putting mirrors into their paintings—as in Vermeer’s Music
Lesson, Velázquez’s Las Meninas and The Rokeby Venus, and Manet’s A
Bar at the Folies-Bergères. These artists use the mirror to intensify the
illusion of reality, while at the same time exposing the illusion by making
the act of viewing self-conscious.2
2.6
Portrait found at Fayum
This portrait was painted during the subject’s lifetime and buried with the body after death.
Next time you watch a film or television drama, notice if there are
mirrors or glass windows used to dramatic effect. How is the mirror used
to reflect images, and what are they trying to tell us? What are the
different ways mirrors and glass are used in film shots?
Realism as Drama
In Velásquez’s Old Woman Cooking Eggs, the lighting is also dramatic: the
subjects and their props are picked out with bright key lighting rendering
them absolutely clear, while the background is dark and indistinct. This is
quite different from the domestic scenes of Dutch painters such as de
Hooch, Vermeer, or Teniers, where details of the room are visible. Despite
the lighting, in general Velásquez’s paintings are less theatrical than
Caravaggio’s. Dramatically, Velázquez is on the side of Vermeer rather than
Rembrandt, with quieter and more contemplative paintings.
Although most portraits were made for wealthy people or aristocrats, some
artists painted ordinary people to show their artistic dexterity as well as
sometimes to make a point. Giovanni Moroni’s Portrait of a Man (The
Tailor) (1565–1570), in the National Gallery, is a realistic portrait,
interesting because of the use of “eye contact.” The subject is looking
directly at Moroni’s “camera” as if being interrupted at his work. Moroni
asserts the humanity and dignity of the working man in this picture. It has
been suggested that Moroni traded the picture for a nice suit of clothes, but
we do not know.4
Old Woman Cooking Eggs brought Diego Velázquez much attention, and he
was appointed court painter, where he executed Las Meninas, one of the
most famous paintings in history. There are many different ways of looking
at Las Meninas. On the one hand, it is a portrait of the young princess and
her ladies in waiting at the Spanish court. On the other hand, it is painting
of a man doing a painting. It is a commissioned court painting for the king
of Spain. It is a modern representation of the art of illusion. It depicts
realistically the life of the Spanish court. It is a self-reflexive meditation on
the position of the artist in society.
Caravaggio teaches us that you can portray the humdrum detail of daily life
within a grand and highly dramatic story. There is no need to glamorize or
idealize in order to tell a profound story. Velásquez shows us that you can
use realism to play myriad visual tricks within a mise en scène, giving your
viewers different points to look at and shifting their attention as to who or
what is the “subject.”
“Social” Realism
“Ugliness can have a certain beauty as well.”
—Roger Deakins, BSC, ASC, cinematographer
FURTHER VIEWING
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon
(1645)
In tandem with these writers, from the late eighteenth century onward,
Russian art almost burst upon the world from a culture devoted to icon
painting whose style had barely changed over centuries. In the nineteenth
century, Russian realism accommodated the serene riverscapes of Izak
Levitan and portraits by Vladimir Serov, but perhaps the most important
was Ilya Repin. Though he made many portraits and historical pictures,
Repin is best known for his unsentimental paintings of rough peasant life,
corvée (forced) labor, and poverty set against the unparalleled Russian
landscape. Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873), depicting a group of barge
haulers, or burlaki—men who manually hauled the barges along the river—
was praised by Dostoevsky as an unsentimental, realistic picture. Repin
dispassionately depicts the men’s backbreaking struggle, but he tells us
what he thinks, pointedly including a small steam-powered boat in the
background as a hint that modernization should sweep away this kind of
brutal work. Another little detail he includes, as a subtle social comment, is
the upside-down Russian flag flying from the main mast of the barge.
2.9
Kes, 1969
Dir. Ken Loach
Poverty, abuse, and deprivation blight the life of Billy Casper. Even the beauty of the natural
landscape cannot offer any sustenance or hope: filmmaker Loach seeks political solutions, not
romantic ones.
We can see how British director Ken Loach’s work can be related to
Repin’s. Both painter and filmmaker are primarily interested in people and
their stories, set against the forces that dominate their lives. In Kes (1969),
the brutality of life in a Yorkshire mining town and the way that the values
and the lifestyle of working-class poverty conspire to crush the spirit of a
young boy are set against pastoral green hills. Yet in both Repin’s paintings
and Loach’s film, nature is inert; it does not nurture or provide sustenance
of a physical or spiritual kind. Even the kestrel, the boy’s pet and a symbol
of nature and freedom, is vulnerable to the social forces that destroy it.
Loach does not even give us the promise of the steamboat: there is little
suggestion that any change in the way of life of the community is imminent,
however we may wish it.
2.10
Ivan’s Childhood, 1962
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986)
Instead of making a film about heroes and glory, Tarkovsky and DP Vadim Yusov portrayed the
harrowing conditions of war in the Russian winter.
“Socialist Realism”
In Russia after the 1917 revolution, social realism gave way to “socialist
realism,” which used a naturalistic style to depict idealized visions of
leaders Stalin and Lenin, as well as the lives of revolutionary peasants and
workers. Artists were approved and employed by the state, which ensured a
very high level of technical skill, but the subject matter always had to be
approved by the state, which limited the artists’ scope for personal
expression. Unsurprisingly, the same restrictions applied to Soviet cinema,
though in both painting and film, excellent art could sometimes be
produced even under these conditions. Soviet painters such as Kuzma
Petrov-Vodkin and filmmakers like Vsevolod Pudovkin made significant
achievements. In Storm over Asia (1928, DP Anatoli Golovnya), Pudovkin
shows a young Mongolian peasant becoming an anti-imperialist
revolutionary, a film that satisfied and entertained Soviet and Western
audiences alike, despite the propagandist messages that prevail rather
obviously throughout the film.
How realistic was it? About as realistic in its own way as Hollywood was. It
was the flip side of Hollywood glamor. Russian artists had to toe the party
line, while Western artists toed the bottom line.
This brings us to an interesting question. Did artists want to use art to say
something about the status quo? Or did artists paint pictures of social
realities in order to provide their audiences with a cathartic vicarious
experience? In this interpretation, looking at a picture of the downtrodden
and acknowledging what is in the picture substitutes for having to look at
the downtrodden themselves. Reading a Dickens novel about child
exploitation and abuse is a substitute for actually witnessing child
exploitation and abuse. In both cases, the audience may be motivated to
take action, but because they are not directly confronted with the problem,
they are not forced to do so. Some nineteenth-century critics rejected the
idea that art should be instrumentalized in this way: the Victorian poet and
critic Algernon Swinburne thundered that “art should never be the
handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of fact, pioneer of
morality,”9 but many in the audience disagreed. Still, there remains the
whiff of accusation that both Victorian narrative painting and Hollywood
drama sentimentalize social problems as a substitute for taking action.
FURTHER VIEWING
Watch some of the social realist films mentioned above, or try these:
Los Olvidados, 1950 (dir. Luis Buñuel)
Bicycle Thieves, 1948 (dir. Vittorio de Sica)
A Taste of Honey, 1961 (dir. Tony Richardson)
Vagabonde, 1985 (dir. Agnes Varda)
Red Road, 2006 (dir. Andrea Arnold)
Biutiful, 2010 (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)
Winter’s Bone, 2010 (dir. Debra Granik)
Make a list of others you find. Compare them. How are they similar?
How are they different? How is “the real” represented?
WHAT IS REPRESENTATION?
Discussions of realism naturally bring us to issues of representation—how
subjects are presented and what that presentation says about social attitudes
at the time of the painting and today. Representation of race and ethnicity in
Western art has been problematic, and continues to be so. Until the
nineteenth century, all of the significant Western artists were ethnically
European. Moreover, the representations of non-Western subjects were few,
and when present, frequently problematic.
For example, people of African descent are presented in Western art largely
as servants or in subordinate positions—portraits of specific persons (such
as the Russian poet Pushkin) excepted. This was often for aesthetic reasons,
with the darker skin serving as a foil to emphasize the luminous whiteness
of the main subject. We can see this clearly in Manet’s painting Olympia.
The servant’s darkness is offset by her creamy white dress, a tone similar to
that of Olympia’s flesh. The contrast of dark with shades of white is an
important aspect of the picture. However, we must be aware that no artist
makes decisions based purely on visual compositional requirements; in the
case of representation, the wider contexts of race and/or social class are
always present. Painting cannot be completely disconnected from the
situation at the time the image was produced.
Today the link between race and the exotic is less manifested in art, but
even in the twenty-first century, representations of black people in Western
art are relatively few, usually by artists of African descent; noteworthy
examples include Barkley L. Hendricks in the United States and Lynette
Yiadom Boakye in Britain. Equally, despite the increasing visibility and
success of African American actors in the cinema, there have been
relatively few African American directors and producers. One of the most
prominent is Spike Lee, whose 1989 film Do the Right Thing, an intelligent
and provocative depiction of racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood,
was critically praised for being realistic, but also made number 22 on
Entertainment Weekly’s list of The 25 Most Controversial Movies Ever
(2008).
We can see that realistic representation of the world around us, in all its
variety and diversity, is more difficult than we might imagine; it is still as
selective and subjective as ever.
2.13
Belle, 2013
Dir. Amma Asante
Belle grows up in a house full of paintings of her white ancestors.
FURTHER VIEWING
See also the work of African American producer-director Lee Daniels.
He created the 2015 Fox TV series Empire, directed Precious (2009), and
produced Monster’s Ball (2001, directed by Marc Forster).
ART AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY: MODERN CONCEPTIONS
OF REALISM IN ART
The invention of the camera relieved artists of the responsibility of
depicting the world. By the time the camera was invented, replicating the
world around us no longer had to be done by hand. For example, in 1789
when Napoleon sent a large number of artists to Egypt to document all of
the antiquities (Description de l’Égypte, published 1829), they had to do it
with drawing. This kind of documentation was later replaced by
photography. It is important to understand that these drawings were never
meant to be art.
Impressionism as “Realism”
Nevertheless, the existence of photography offered a challenge to painters
and an opportunity to do things differently. Impressionist painters wanted to
represent the real world in a visually different way. Edouard Manet, for
example, did not believe that he needed to try to replicate in paint
everything he saw before him, nor try to capture the fine details. Naturalism
seemed pointless to him. He simplified the details, and avoided transitional
tones and shading.
Impressionism is not about capturing what is “there” but is about what the
eye sees. It is a completely retinal experience. Impressionist paintings are
aware that the eye is an organic, moving entity, receiving and processing
light, shadow, shape, and color. The eye operates not on an objective scale,
but on a perceptual one. The eye is less concerned with something “being”
blue than with it “looking” blue. The mutability of light and its effect on
color, shape, and depth is at the core of every Impressionist painting.
2.14
Impression, Sunrise, 1872
Artist: Claude Monet (1840–1926)
The port at Le Havre is captured by Claude Monet at sunrise, showing the pinkish-red of the eastern
sun and the morning haze. Monet shows us light and atmosphere, but hints at the structures of the
port’s industry. This emphasis on the appearance of shifting light on surfaces and the representation
of changing atmospheric conditions is the essence of “impressionism.” Former president of the
American Society of Cinematographers Woody Omens has said that “When I think of painters that
I’d like to make honorary members of the ASC, I would in a second nominate Monet, who taught me
about color latitude and atmosphere.”16
One of the keys to Impressionism is that many painters did not always work
in the studio. With the availability of mass-produced tube paints and
portable easels, it became easier to go outside and paint en plein air (“in the
open air”). Although this had sometimes been done before, the
Impressionists argued that this was a new kind of painting, capturing a way
of seeing. It was about painting immediacy and movement, particularly the
play of light as it shifts and changes the appearance of colors. Georges
Seurat did this with pointillism: applying small, distinct dots of pure color
in patterns to form an image. This technique had been used before in
sections of paintings, but Seurat made whole compositions this way. In his
large, cinematic painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1886), this
technique can be seen very clearly. Seurat even went back and worked on
some of his earlier paintings to add pointillist elements to bring out the
impression of diffused and changing light. Seurat’s images have strong
realist elements in his depiction of the industrial landscape and scenes of
everyday life, but through his work we can begin to see other ways that
images might be considered cinematic.
Impressionism, then, is about the real, and about representing the real, but
understanding that “the real” is also a matter of perception.
In A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which was Manet’s last painting, the subject
is a real person who worked as a barmaid, and there are many accurate
details of the place. But the real achievement in this painting is the painted
mirror, which provides the backdrop of the entire painting. We can see the
very bottom of the mirror’s frame, just above the woman’s hand; leaving us
to understand that all the rest of the background of the painting is a mirror
reflection. This immediately invites the viewer into the position of the man
seen reflected on the far right talking to the barmaid.
2.15
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882
Artist: Edouard Manet (1832–1883)
Manet here is deliberately evoking the mirror trick in Velásquez’s Las Meninas. Glass and myriad
shiny surfaces are present in the painting, and the reflected crowd stretches far into the background.
We can easily imagine the clatter and clink of glass, the chatter, and the music of the bar.
FURTHER VIEWING
Look at the following Impressionist paintings:
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872 (Marmottan Monet Museum)
and The Beach at Trouville, 1870 (National Gallery London)
J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway,
1844 (National Gallery, London)
Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884 (National Gallery, London)
Berthe Morisot, The Dining Room, c. 1875 (National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC)
Compare this domestic interior by Morisot with one by Vermeer or Pieter
de Hooch.
Cinema is all about light, because it is the act of light entering the camera
that creates the image. It is not surprising that filmmakers have always
looked to painters to inspire them toward ways to manipulate this light.
Color cinematography pioneer Jack Cardiff always credited the
Impressionists with teaching him about light and color. Cardiff was
fascinated by the chromatic theories that had come out of Impressionism
and sought to explore them in film.18
SFUMATO
Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold uses an old painting technique called
sfumato.17 Sfumato (deriving from the Latin for “to smoke”) is fine
shading that produces soft, imperceptible transitions between colors and
tones. This means that there are no distinct outlines: areas blend into one
another through miniscule brushstrokes, which makes for a subtle
rendering of light and color. Leonardo da Vinci developed and perfected
sfumato; see his Mona Lisa. The opposite of sfumato is chiaroscuro.
This kind of moralist painting owes a huge debt to the work of William
Hogarth, but the Victorian moralist painters lack Hogarth’s scurrilous wit,
sardonic humor, and obvious prurient interest in the vices that he’s
depicting. The Victorian paintings coldly reject all vice, and deny the
viewer any vicarious pleasure in looking at it. It is precisely this type of
didactic painting that the artists at the very end of the nineteenth century,
together with their spokesman, the writer and critic Oscar Wilde,
particularly rejected. Rejection of this moralizing, didactic art is one of the
cornerstones of modernism. And this is where we can see how the
modernist impulse of painting diverges profoundly from the populist
impulse of cinema. The moralizing melodrama expressed in Egg’s three
Past and Present pictures is the same kind of moral melodrama we see in
the movies, right up to 1987’s Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne). Egg’s
series could be a film storyboard. The moralistic didacticism would have
appealed to Hayes production code–dominated Hollywood (roughly 1930–
1968), whereas Hogarth’s more licentious images would not have passed
the censor. Egg’s paintings, like Hogarth’s, were much reproduced, and
influenced the visual culture regardless of the changing tastes in art
appreciation. Melodramatic films about adultery or other vices (of which
there are many) are usually seen as deriving from literature, but should also
be seen as deriving from paintings like Past and Present.
Since the first uses of photography were in creating what we might call
documentary images, as opposed to fine art images, black and white was
quickly seen as being more “real” than color. Sophisticated film color was
developed in the 1930s, but for many years the problem was that it tended
to make everything “pretty.” Color suited musicals or historical dramas, but
its effects were considered inappropriate for realistic dramas.
FURTHER VIEWING
The Outcast by Richard Redgrave, RA, 1851 (Royal Academy of the
Arts, London)
When working out how to shoot the Jake LaMotta biographical drama
Raging Bull (1980), Martin Scorsese and DP Michael Chapman wanted to
represent the 1940s as realistically as possible. Scorsese and Chapman went
to Weegee’s photos of 1940s New York. Arthur Fellig, aka “Weegee,” was a
press photographer who developed into being a documenter of gritty urban
New York, but his work was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.
His published books of photography were so influential that he can be
considered to be an artist of his era. Weegee’s extremely high-contrast,
dramatic photographs of real-life events on the streets of New York infuse
the real with a clear sense of his personal style, and stylization created by
the use of the flashbulb into a particular convention of “the real”; this
convention informs the photography of Raging Bull.
2.17
Raging Bull, 1980
Dir. Martin Scorsese, DP Michael Chapman
Black-and-white police photography, boxing photography, and above all the street photography of
Weegee were the visual sources for Raging Bull.
“Photo” Realism
Documentary realism coming from the camera also inspired painters,
bolstered by the appreciation of painters such as Vermeer and Peter de
Hooch who managed to achieve images with an almost photographic
quality. Painters took up the challenge of making pictures that resembled
photographs, looked as though they could be photographs, but had a whole
host of subtle elements that meant they could not possibly be photographs.
This tendency is called photo-realism, or photo painting. It is sometimes
also called hyperrealism or super realism (though the definitions are not
absolute, and great differences exist between different painters and their
techniques).
But despite the modernity of photorealism, older impulses are still at play.
Eric Fischl’s 1982 painting The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog
(which you can see on his website, www.ericfischl.com) looks at first
glance like a photograph of a group of people and a Dalmatian dog relaxing
naked or semi-naked on a yacht while a big storm brews just ahead of them.
We can immediately make connections with William Etty’s 1832 painting
Youth at the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm (Tate Gallery), which also
depicts a group of young people enjoying themselves naked on a boat, with
a violent storm imminent. They are doomed by their irresponsible folly and
ignorant of their fate. Rejecting realism, Etty opts for a quasi-mythological
vision of beauty, whereas Fischl’s realism seems photographic, stark, and
direct. We can imagine that Fischl’s Old Man is a wealthy, decadent
benefactor (perhaps an art collector?), who enjoys the cavorting of the
naked youth on his boat, and the composition places the viewer among the
party. Robert Hughes has written of Fischl’s “desire to turn the viewer into
a voyeur, a reluctant and embarrassed witness.”20
Painters such as Chuck Close and Lucien Freud (1922–2011) continue the
realist tradition in portraiture, and Gerhard Richter moves between
photorealism based on photographs and abstract.
Artists such as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall use photography and
digital technologies to create realistic, cinematic tableaux still images that
owe as much or more to painting than to photography.
FURTHER VIEWING
Alex Colville, Horse and Train (1954); Colville’s works can all be seen
at http://www.alexcolville.ca
Richard Estes, Supreme Hardware Store (1973)
CASE STUDY:
REALISM AND THE CAMERA OBSCURA
“Houding”
The splendid and imaginative realism of Johannes Vermeer has led to much
speculation and controversy about whether he used the camera obscura or
other optical devices.22
To the seventeenth-century Dutch, the finest quality sought in painting
was what they called “houding”: the achievement of a harmonious realistic
illusion. Mimesis, but harmonious mimesis. Realism, but balanced and
proportionate realism. What they wanted was what the eye could see, the
real world, but they wanted it to be arranged pleasingly.
Vermeer appears to have achieved this by employing quite precise
geometrical measures. One of the reasons it has been long speculated that
he used a camera obscura, despite the absence of any real evidence, is that
his pictures show, to a greater to lesser degree, the depth of field illusion
you get with a lens but do not see with the naked eye. Architect and
Vermeer researcher Philip Steadman23 believes that Vermeer is more likely
to have used the chambre d’obscura than a box camera obscura, and he also
posits that Vermeer used only one or two rooms as studios, setting them up
slightly differently for each painting. Steadman demonstrates in his book
Vermeer’s Camera (2001) that the painter made pictures of only a few
rooms, with the elements altered; for example, the lids on the virginals have
different paintings on them but the musical instrument is the same.
Likewise, there is differentiation of the tile patterns on the floor, but the
proportion of the tiles is the same.
2.19
A Woman and Her Maid in a Courtyard, c. 1660
Artist: Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684)
Apart from the detailed realism of the picture, notice how De Hooch places his characters in different
positions in the composition. Notice his use of the arch and how, by turning the characters away from
the viewer, he manages to create a sense both of voyeurism and of movement.
Pieter de Hooch’s oeuvre has similar kinds of repetitive compositions,
and Steadman notes there is some evidence that he felt commercial pressure
to create variations on similar compositions.
Vermeer probably used an adjustable lens that you could turn and pull,
similar to the lens of a slide projector. This would give him different focal
points and allow him to pull things in and out of focus. We do not know if
Pieter de Hooch used a camera obscura or not, but his pictures show the
same perfect geometrical detail. De Hooch’s paintings are interesting and
notable for the way in which he depicts social relations, particularly
comings and goings and interactions. De Hooch sees social relations as
spatial relations. His pictures have many different perspectives; we look
through doorways, windows, arches. It’s very important to him how the
human subjects in his paintings occupy space.
All of Vermeer’s paintings show great awareness of lights and darks, and
a good understanding of how to maximize this. Vermeer clearly was a great
observer of life. Instead of drawing lines, he identified and marked out the
dark points of the scene. Whether or not he did look though a camera
obscura, by mapping out his paintings as darks and lights, we can see why
he has been called a “painter of light.”
In art and cinema, “realism” is about selecting and refining the world. It is
reality at a remove. It is reality slightly exaggerated, through dramatic
lighting, gesture, and composition. It can emphasize or even exaggerate the
lushness of nature or the grimness of the human condition.
Artists and filmmakers select materials from the chaotic welter of reality,
and in the process necessarily eliminate some details while emphasizing
others. The resulting structure is not reality, but is a subjective, constructed
representation of it.
Exercise 1
Study Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère).
There is a good-quality version online at the Courtauld Gallery website.
Now, try to reinterpret it as a moving image scene. Start by planning it out
in detail first, as Manet would have done. What props do you need? Design
your set on paper.
Where will you place the characters? How will you light it? Where will
your light source come from? How will you avoid flare in the glass? What
is the best way to maximize the reflective qualities of the glass bottles?
What sounds might be appropriate? Once you know all of this, try shooting
the scene. What happens when the characters move?
Exercise 2
There are many biographical dramatized films about painters, and it is
interesting to examine how cinema portrays painting. Find a film that
portrays a painter of any period, or watch one of the following:
Pollock, 2000 (dir. Ed Harris)
Artemisia, 1997 (dir. Agnès Merlet)
Strokes of Fire (sometimes called Painted Fire), 2002 (dir. Kwon-taek Im)
Utamaro and His Five Women, 1946 (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi)
Mr. Turner, 2014 (dir. Mike Leigh)
Caravaggio, 1986 (dir. Derek Jarman)
Notice what techniques the painters in these films use. Do you learn much
about their art from these biopics? Which of the films do you think best
portrays the methods and experience of painting? Is it important? In what
other ways do the films portray the “painterly life”?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
2. Watch Peter Webber’s film about Vermeer, The Girl with the Pearl
Earring. It is a fiction film based on extensive research and speculation.
What techniques does Webber’s Vermeer (Colin Firth) use?
In the last chapter we looked at how artists struggle to portray the “real”
world, as it appears to us. Through complex combinations of subject matter,
composition, lighting, and tone, the real manifested through the ages from
the Greek sculpture of Diogenes to Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey restaurant.
We also saw that our definition of the real has more to do with subject matter
than technique. Seurat’s pointillism, Manet’s broad strokes of paint, and
Whistler’s misty gray sfumato all tried to show something the painter saw,
and that we could also see. Different techniques used by artists served the
quest to portray the real.
However, looking over the history of art, it soon becomes clear that artists
have just as often not sought to portray real things, though they might
attempt painting techniques that render unreal things naturalistic, as if they
were credible and visible. This is art of the imagination, and going beyond
the real includes many different kinds of painting. Filmmakers have
deliberately looked to Surrealism for ideas, inspiration, methodologies, and
imagery. Others have sought to go beyond realism to create hyperreal or
quirky environments. There is sometimes a tendency to believe that
photography and—later—film belong to a linear progressive history,
dominated by a search to achieve realism. But it is much more complex and
rich than that. Going “beyond the real” has been as much a part of the artistic
journey as achieving the real.
This chapter looks first at fantasy and symbolism before Surrealism and then
at how Surrealism harnessed new ideas about psychology deriving from
Freud.
The enthusiasm for artworks of pure imagination was part of cinema right
from the beginning, with the fantastical films of cinema pioneer Georges
Méliès. Méliès (1861–1938), who started out as a stage illusionist, was one
of the early adopters of film technology. With Voyage to the Moon (1902)
and The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), Méliès founded not only two
genres, fantasy and science fiction, but also invented visual special effects.
Even today, his extravagant films are hugely entertaining and continue to
fascinate by their sheer artistry. Méliès was himself the subject of the 2011
Martin Scorsese film Hugo.
Mythology
Mythology provides our earliest starting point. We are all familiar with the
human–animal hybrids of the Egyptian pantheon. Only certain animals
figure in the religious system, so you get Horus the eagle-headed man, Bast
the cat-headed woman, and so on. The Egyptians did not make up unreal
animals; they combined real beasts with the human form, creating powerful
figures in their sculptures and paintings. Usually they created a human body
with an animal head, but sometimes, as in the case of the Sphinx, it is the
other way around. It is a realistic pantheon, because both the human forms
and the animal heads existed in the Egyptian landscape, and the animals
were ones that were both common and important to the society. So the
jackal-headed god Anubis was associated with the dead and was a guardian
of the afterlife. This is pragmatic, because the jackal was a scavenger
animal, known to hang around cemeteries and live on carrion.
The Greek pantheon of gods and heroes was human in appearance, but their
mythological world was populated by a huge array of monsters, from the
snake-haired Gorgon to the one-eyed Cyclops, not to mention fauns and
satyrs, nymphs and flying horses. Greek myths may be full of monsters, but
their world is full of very human jealousies, intrigues, and betrayals, as well
as dramatic battles and encounters. It is not surprising that Greek and
Roman myth has provided the biggest and most enduring source of subject
matter for artists. As late as 1933, Pablo Picasso produced one of his most
celebrated works, the etching series Minotauromachy. In the 1970s, Franco-
Serbian painter Ljubomir Popvic found fame with representations of Venus,
while in New York, Roy Lichtenstein made a comic strip Temple of Apollo
in 1975. In 1981, Russian artists Komar and Melamed made the large
neoclassical painting Stalin and the Muses. The list goes on up to the
present.
So right from the beginning, there was a desire to portray fantasy and
alternative worlds populated by mythical characters and creatures. The
quest for a naturalistic style of painting was not limited to realistic subjects,
but applied equally to subjects well beyond the scope of the actually
observable. This is why, in a painting like Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus and
Cupid, Venus looks like a real, fleshy woman and the other characters,
although clearly not realistic, look at least credible.
The visual depiction of suspense is what all action movies rely upon, from
classical epics such as Clash of the Titans to The Matrix—the moment the
hero’s life is held in the balance, and in a moment all could be lost. Titian
shows us how composition persuades us; he makes us believe that we are
there.
Cinema has tried with varying results to depict Greek myths, most notably
in the pre-CGI era by animator Ray Harryhausen, who used stop frame
models. But computer-generated imaging (CGI) has allowed filmmakers to
go much further in creating completely unreal worlds. C. S. Lewis’s Narnia
Chronicles feature characters from Greek myths, such as Tumnus the faun
(plus various different made-up ones, including the talking lion Aslan), in a
Christian storyline. Adapting these books would be very difficult without
CGI, because the characters in the world they depict could easily be made
risible. The same problems were faced by those who wanted to adapt J. R.
R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but computer-generated imaging allowed the
creation of centaurs, orcs, and various other complex characters.
A film like Victor Fleming’s Wizard of Oz (1939) gets around the problem
of the trio of Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion not looking credible, first, by
presenting the whole story as a dreamscape, experienced by the injured,
unconscious Dorothy. Fleming shot Oz in Technicolor, whereas the “real”
world of Kansas was shot in black and white. Second, Fleming makes a
clear visual link between the odd trio and the three farmhands. This adds an
extra layer of subtlety and meaning to the film, as the viewers are asked to
identify and to actively make the connection between real and unreal,
fantasy creature and real person. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in
contrast, presents the fantasy world as naturalistically as Titian’s mythic
world of Perseus and Andromeda.
3.1
Perseus and Andromeda, c. 1554
Artist: Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) (c. 1488/1490–1576)
This version of the well-known myth of Perseus and Andromeda is a good example of just why
Titian is considered a master painter. Here he captures the suspenseful moment when Perseus leaps
into the sea to behead the beast, diving headfirst into the unknown. Titian knows that we all know the
story, that Perseus does kill the beast and rescues Andromeda, and eventually they will live happily
ever after. But, crucially, he does not paint that certainty. We cannot be sure that this hero will make
it.
Medievalism
It was not only the classical world that inspired artists. In the nineteenth
century, the Middle Ages were a popular subject for visual arts. Particularly
in Britain, medievalism dominated. The famous Houses of Parliament with
Big Ben look like medieval buildings, but are not. They were built in the
mid-nineteenth century as “Gothic Revival” architecture. The medieval held
sway in painting too. One of the most interesting is John Everett Millais’s
painting of Ophelia (1852), showing the drowned Shakespearean tragic
heroine, which nearly killed his model (she got hypothermia from being
submerged in water). John Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallot (1888) and the
Pre-Raphaelite fantasies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones,
and William Morris are exemplars of this trend. The popularity of these
paintings continues up to the present, despite varying critical response from
the arts establishment and intelligentsia. What is interesting about the Pre-
Raphaelites and the other medievalists is that they considered themselves
realists. They understood they weren’t painting the world as it is, but they
took great pride in painting the medieval world as if it were real: they
painted every flower, splash of water, and blade of grass as naturalistically
as possible, taking advantage of new colors and new paint formulations. But
they were idealists. They rejected the industrial modern world in favor of a
romantic “golden age.” Medievalism’s popularity long ago passed into
motion pictures, from Robin Hood to the medievalist Game of Thrones, a
direct heritor of the Pre-Raphaelite impulse.
Symbolism
In France, maverick painter Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) embraced both
classical myth and medievalism, creating large, exquisitely detailed scenes
rendered in highly saturated color. The resulting effect is almost as if his
canvases were covered in jewels. Moreau belonged to a loose movement
known as Symbolism, which had adherents throughout Europe. Symbolism
could incorporate all kinds of images and painting styles, from Henri
Matisse’s elemental The Dance (1910) to George Frederick Watts’s
melancholic Minotaur (1885) to Odilon Redon’s Cyclops (1898). What
symbolist paintings have in common is little other than strangeness. But
they’re all clearly removed from the real world of industrial, mechanized,
and increasingly democratic Europe.
3.2
The Isle of the Dead, 1880
Artist: Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901)
Arnold Böcklin’s 1880 painting The Isle of the Dead, as well as being highly popular in its time and
much reproduced, is a cinematic rendering of the symbolist picture par excellence.
Seeing Heaven
Böcklin does not offer a vision of Heaven or Hell; his Isle of the Dead may
not be real, but it is not unearthly. The problem of depicting Heaven and
Hell was one that many painters faced, given that Bible stories made up so
many commissions in the Renaissance and Baroque period. We will discuss
visions of Hell in a later chapter (“Horror”), but how did artists depict
Heaven?
The Renaissance painters wanted to find ways to depict Heaven and Earth
in relation, and so they often created vertical paintings with Heaven at the
top, in the sky, and Earth in the bottom half. In The Creation and Fall of
Man (1513) by Mariotto Albertinelli, we see angels standing in the sky, and
Earth is an idealized version of the Arno Valley, near Florence. But the
clouds look too much like pillows, and the angels stand stiffly upon them.
Depicting Heaven in cinema has been even more difficult. The Veronese
option of setting Heaven in the clouds is used to good effect in comedy, but
this doesn’t work well in drama. In the great Powell and Pressburger film A
Matter of Life and Death (1946), discussed in the case study later in this
chapter, Powell decided to film the real world in color and Heaven in black
and white, making an immediate visual separation between the two realms.
What Dreams May Come (Vincent Ward, 1998) is a clever reworking of the
Orpheus myth. In it, Heaven’s appearance can be controlled by the
imagination of the subject. Ward has protagonist Chris (Robin Williams)
initially construct his Heaven as a painting, made from real paint. Chris
flounders around in an Impressionist landscape, getting covered in pigment,
as he adjusts himself to the afterlife. Painting is a motif that runs throughout
the film, and even if the film’s drama has serious limitations, the production
design in What Dreams May Come is some of the most imaginative in late-
twentieth-century cinema. It is interesting to note that the film was shot on
super-high-saturation Fuji Velvia film stock; the still version of this stock is
used in fine art photography. Director Vincent Ward is a successful visual
artist and painter as well as a filmmaker.
We have already looked at color in Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, but the
film has many visual art references and inspirations, including H. R. Giger,
Francis Bacon, and Joel-Peter Witkin. In Judaic and early Christian texts,
“Jacob’s ladder” is a ladder or staircase to Heaven, a meeting point between
Heaven and Earth. For centuries it has been depicted in painting—for
example, by Salomon DeBray, Jacques Stella, William Blake, and Marc
Chagall—as well as featuring in folk art. Powell and Pressburger used it in
the 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, which shares some thematic
similarities with Lyne’s film. Alternatively, in Enter the Void (2010), Gaspar
Noe suggests the afterlife is a kind of swirling, abstract, melting, colorful
void that eludes any classification as “Heaven.” In this film, Noe references
the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist text about the afterlife,
eschewing traditional Christian ideas.
Fantasy worlds remained popular subjects in art well into the twentieth
century. Cinema inherited this taste, as can be seen in the early films of
Georges Méliès, through Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, to the blockbuster
adaptations of Beowulf, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings.
ONEIRIC: THE WORLD OF DREAMS
The dream sequence is a familiar feature of cinema, appearing in films of
many different genres. We’ve already looked at Jacob’s Ladder, about the
horrific dreams of a returning Vietnam veteran. Other films that have
important dream sequences include Ingmar Bergman’s meditative Swedish
film Wild Strawberries (1957), Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller
Spellbound (1945), Sam Mendes’s exploration of a suburban husband
experiencing midlife crisis in American Beauty (1999), David Lynch’s
thriller Lost Highway (1997), and Ridley Scott’s dystopian Blade Runner
(1982). But even social realist dramas can have dream sequences: Pasolini’s
Accatone (1961), Luis Buñuel’s brutal Mexican social drama Los Olvidados
(1950), and Peter Mullan’s NEDS (2010) set in 1970s Glasgow all have
protagonists who experience revealing dream sequences. These are a few
examples from a potentially long list, but it shows how completely different
types of films can all have significant diversions in which we see into the
dreams of the protagonist.
Unsurprisingly, painters had explored the dream long before cinema, but it
was not until the late nineteenth century, at the same time that the infant
discipline of psychology was emerging, that art’s struggle to manifest the
world of the dream in visual form became an obsession.
3.3
The Nightmare, 1781
Artist: Henri Füssli (1741–1825)
Henri Füssli’s The Nightmare is one of the most famous and cinematic dream paintings.
There are many examples of paintings that show the dreamer and the
dream. In The Nightmare, a ghostly horse glares out of the picture, while
next to it a swooning or perhaps dead woman lies with the demon squatting
over her. Is the vision a dream, or is the woman the dreamer? Füssli allows
us to imagine. We see the dreamer and the dream in one image. Similarly, in
Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Los Caprichos, 1797–
1799), we see a man sleeping, and as he dreams black bats of irrationality
circle his head. As irrationality is represented by black bats, clearly Goya
wants to tell us that irrationality is not a good thing, but perhaps it is as
inevitable as sleep. Freud would have grasped that straightaway. He saw the
dream as a keyhole through which we can see our unconscious mind at
work, with all the irrationalities that we try to repress in waking life. Goya
offers a picture of a man dreaming and we see elements of the dream in the
picture. Pictures like this resemble the paintings of Heaven by Veronese:
there we see Heaven and Earth simultaneously; here we see the dreamer
and the dream together in the picture.
From the turn of the twentieth century, artists began to paint pictures that
sought to actually replicate dreams, rather than painting a picture of
somebody sleeping and having a dream. They were inspired by a general
cultural interest in dreams, fueled by cultural and scientific discourse that
led to the emergence of psychology. This was the time when Sigmund
Freud began to formulate his psychoanalytic theory, and painters moved
from contriving imaginary worlds to putting on canvases images derived
from, or suggested by, the dream state.
The Dreamscape
The Nightmare and The Sleep of Reason are strange and unsettling images,
but they are not dreamscapes. Paul Nash’s Landscape from a Dream (1936)
is an exemplar of dreamscape painting. Nash tried to replicate the dream
landscape, the place we see ourselves in when dreams happen. The dreamer
is not in the picture. The juxtaposition of objects in the landscape, the
picture-within-a-picture, and the symbolism of the hawk all suggest the
dreamworld of the unconscious mind. Nash was not a Surrealist but was
aware of Surrealism, and he explored its ideas in Landscape from a Dream.
According to Nash, the hawk belongs to the material world while the
spheres refer to the soul.
Another example is Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910). The painting
shows a tropical jungle scene, with lions and lavish vegetation, and in the
middle of it all a nude woman lies on a red velvet sofa. It is a hypnotic and
exuberant vision of desire.
Although the two films are dissimilar, both Wild Strawberries (1957,
Ingmar Bergman) and Papillon (1973, Franklin J. Schaffner) feature
protagonists having complex dream sequences that illustrate the realization
that they have wasted and abused their lives. In both cases, the protagonists
are in dire situations. The Swedish doctor is at the end of his life, facing his
own mortality; the French thief understands that in the South American
prison where he is rotting away, even if he remains alive his quality of life
is a kind of death. The dream sequence in both cases is a necessary
cognitive process for reawakening the protagonists to what is important
about life and a determination to strive to make something of value out of
the little time they have left. The dream sequences in both films show the
characters themselves as actors in the dream. But not all dream sequences
feature the character. In an admittedly short dream sequence, Blade Runner
protagonist Deckard, falling asleep at the piano, has a dreamy vision of a
unicorn rushing forward, but Deckard is not in the dream and does not
interact with the unicorn. It exists as a symbolic image, perhaps
representing his lover Rachael, who, as a replicant, is to a real woman as the
unicorn is to a real horse.
FURTHER VIEWING
See other paintings of the dreamer and the dream:
Odilon Redon, Cyclops (1914)
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Sleep (1911)
Ferdinand Hodler, Night (1889)
Giorgio De Chirico’s Dream Cityscapes
Paul Nash primarily painted tangible landscapes, so when he made
Landscape from a Dream he tells us bluntly that it is a dreamscape. Italian
painter Giorgio de Chirico painted real landscapes and cityscapes merging
into dreamscapes. De Chirico was strongly influenced by Böcklin’s later
work such as Isle of the Dead, creating strange, oneiric cityscapes that are
drawn from real places in which de Chirico lived.2 The critic Robert
Hughes notes that the town where de Chirico grew up was bisected by a
railway, and the strange appearance of a train among the houses may have
been a fact of his childhood memory.3 His cityscapes feature the same
elements in different combinations: the arcade, the tower, the piazza, the
shadow, the statue, the train, the mannequin, and sometimes an incongruous
artichoke or bunch of bananas.
De Chirico, who was also a poet and essayist, was inspired by philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche’s descriptions of the old arcaded buildings surrounding
quiet piazzas in Turin. Painting in a realist style, de Chirico depicted the
piazzas as unnaturally empty but for objects and statues that appear together
in strange juxtapositions. The compositions are modeled on illusionistic
one-point perspective, deliberately subverted. He used unnaturally sharp
contrasts of light and shade, rendering the scene vaguely threatening yet, in
a dreamlike way, strangely melancholic and poignant. To de Chirico, the
only thing that is “real” is the past, but it remains hidden behind the
apparent reality of appearances.
What Is Surrealism?
We are used to the term “surreal” being used to describe anything that looks
odd or combines disparate elements in an unusual way. But Surrealism was
a specific movement, founded in Paris in the early 1920s.7 It is important to
realize that Surrealism had a program and a contentious membership that is
still argued over. It had, and still has, strict though apparently changeable
rules about what does or does not constitute Surrealism.
Its founder and leader, André Breton, had been a medical student studying
neurology when he was called up for service in World War I. After four
grueling years as a medic, he abandoned his studies to become a poet.
Moving to Paris, he gathered around him other young like-minded poets
and painters and formed the Surrealist Group. Breton and his friends did not
want to continue the cultural forms of poetry and art that had prevailed
before the war. They saw the war as a result of a demented society that must
not be allowed to reassert itself. To that end, they felt that artists must
follow Freud’s lead in paying active attention to the unconscious mind,
seeking to liberate the human mind. If the mind could be set free, they
believed, society would follow. The Surrealists believed that the dream was
a revolutionary force. Artists and poets tried to access their unconscious
minds with various exercises that included inducing trances in themselves
or each other. We must remember that these were all young people seeking
to make their mark on the world; their understanding of Freud was slight,
yet there was a broad interest in the unconscious mind that was half
scientific and half speculative, and the Surrealist Group plugged into that
with gusto.
FURTHER VIEWING
Yves Tanguy, Azure Day (1937)
Salvador Dali, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a
Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944), The Persistence of
Memory (1931), and Sleep (1937) all show “the dreamer and the dream.”
Max Ernst’s 1939 painting The Entire City shows a huge crumbling city,
a massive and densely packed structure, brooding under a strange ring-
shaped moon; this is an image that has fed intravenously into the whole
sci-fi genre.
The Surrealists were fascinated by cinema, and even if the group’s members
and associates made relatively few films, they were active filmgoers and
critics. They often celebrated the populist aspects of cinema, even its
vigorous vulgarity, almost universally championing Charlie Chaplin, while
at the same time cautioning the viewer to “open our eyes in front of the
screen . . . analyse the feeling that transports us, reason it out to discover the
cause of that sublimation of ourselves” (surrealist poet Louis Aragon).9
Following critic Jean Goudel, they believed that cinema should be bolder
and go further in its potential to explore dream states and the unconscious,
exhorting filmmakers to fully open up their art “to the unexplored regions
of the dream.”
What Magritte and Dali have in common other than precise naturalistic
painting styles is that they continually paint their obsessions. This was a
relatively new tendency in painting, not really seen before the end of the
nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, artists claimed more freedom in
subject matter and painted obsessions and fantasies in ways that would have
been unthinkable before. It only remained whether or not their obsessions
were accessible enough that they would find clients to purchase the
paintings.
Dali was obsessed with the landscape around Cadaques, where he grew up
and lived in later life. He also had his own private symbology, which
reoccurs throughout many paintings—for example, the crutch, which he
claimed to be simultaneously a symbol of death and symbol of resurrection,
and the soft clocks symbolizing the fluidity and relativity of time (The
Persistence of Memory, 1931).
Magritte is obsessed with a number of symbols that recur over and over
again: the suited and bowler-hatted man, the green apple, the seagull, and
the train. These symbols were created by the artist. Freud believed that
there are symbols particular to the individual and the personal unconscious,
and other symbols that are more widely shared. Exploring this idea further,
his disciple Carl Jung posited that most of our unconscious language of
symbols is universal, which he called a collective unconscious. We also
have our own personal symbology, peculiar to each individual. What Dali
and Magritte are saying in their paintings is that their own personal
symbolism could be accessible to everybody. It’s a confident idea, yet the
sheer success and popularity of their works indicate that they were not
wrong.
In Time Transfixed (1938), René Magritte shows us a small but perfectly
functioning steam train emerging from a fireplace. Magritte’s images are
categorized by their deliberately bourgeois aspect: the room where this is
happening is a well-appointed bourgeois room, with a fine marble fireplace,
wooden paneling, and a big mirror—a fine family home. Out of all of this
appropriate comfort, a small steam train comes flying, pumping white
steam at full speed. So we have the phallic symbol of the train rushing out
of the yonic fireplace—all of it happening in the discreet environment of
the middle-class living room.
Surreal People
Although Magritte’s and Dali’s paintings have figures in them, they are not
characters in any real sense. Most of the Surrealists were not concerned
with things like narrative and character.
Although one might be forgiven for thinking that all of the Surrealists were
male, this is not the case: two of the most significant surrealist artworks
were made by women. Meret Oppenheim’s Object (Le Déjeuner en
fourrure) (1936), with teacup, saucer, and spoon all covered in fur, is duly
famous and remains unsettling and disturbing right up to the present.
There is strong sense of the grotesque about Švankmajer’s films. This is due
to the specific nature of Czech Surrealism, which is rooted in both Czech
art and a strong, critical relationship with realism.17 Psychology and the
unconscious mind are only one strand. One of the Czech Surrealists,
Vratislav Effenberger, said that “imagination does not mean turning away
from reality but its antithesis: reaching through to the dynamic core of
reality.”18 The work of surrealist painters like Jindřich Štyrský (The
Bathe,1934) are about rearranging the real in highly critical ways.
Švankmajer’s Surviving Life takes clear aim at psychoanalytic theories, by
having Freud and Jung as minor characters in the comic but ultimately
poignant story of a married man who lives a double life in his dreams,
where he falls in love with another woman. Švankmajer has observed, “This
civilization is based on rationality, totalitarianism that is, and anything that
is outside of this particular point or reference of reality, is difficult to
comprehend and is therefore pushed away.”19 He points out that “it is
dream and reality that together create a human life.”20
FURTHER VIEWING
Dorothea Tanning, Birthday (1942)
3.5
Surviving Life, 2010
Dir. Jan Švankmajer
Middle-aged Eugene keeps dreaming about a gorgeous young woman. He can’t wait to get to sleep,
which arouses the suspicions of his wife.
FURTHER VIEWING
The Surrealist Group members and their associates did not make many
films, but the few they made have been highly influential for later
generations of filmmakers and artists. Here are a few that are available on
DVD or online:
Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel and Dali, 1929)
L’Age d’Or (Bunuel and Dali, 1930)
The Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud,
1927)
The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930). Cocteau denied being a
Surrealist, and the group rejected him anyway, but the fact remains that
The Blood of a Poet has a strong surrealist sensibility and should be
looked at as a companion work.
Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936). Cornell was the only significant
American Surrealist to make films.
GOING BEYOND THE REAL
Sometimes artists feel they have to completely distort reality, while keeping
all of its qualities, in order to make a point.
George Grosz’s painting The Suicide was made in 1916, during the First
World War. Gross was a soldier in the trenches and experienced its horrors
firsthand. He was wounded and returned angry and frustrated to Berlin,
where he painted this savage picture. It is a pitiless image: one man hanging
from a lamppost, another lying dead in the street, which is patrolled by feral
dogs. A man rushes by, with his head down, ignoring everything around
him. The naked prostitute and her geriatric client stand at the window
surveying everything, looking satisfied and unconcerned. It is a brutal
picture of decadence, pitilessness, and human brutality. But is it real, or is it
fantasy? It is neither. What Grosz has done is paint how he feels about
Berlin in 1916. This is one of the key techniques of the Expressionists. The
picture contains both reality and fantasy.
It seems obvious that Stanley Kubrick used Pietro Longhi’s paintings in his
preparations for Eyes Wide Shut, which features a mysterious and dangerous
masque event. So the filmmaker is able to use the realist work of the
Venetian painter, who was painting the frivolity, entertainment, and
diversions of his society, as a blueprint for designing a strange, even
diabolical, ritual event.
FURTHER VIEWING
See Barfly (1987, dir. Barbet Schroeder), a biopic of writer Charles
Bukowski, which also explores Vargas Llosa’s idea of marginalized,
damaged characters representing the true struggle against the
“establishment.” Can you think of other films that explore this theme?
See also: Il Ridotto (Pietro Longhi, 1740).
We have already discussed the dream sequence, which is the standard way
that the not-real bursts into the real, offering an alternative perspective.
Michel Gondry’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores
memory, depicting the distorted memories that his characters agonize over
as they attempt to improve their lives by deleting their past from their
minds. In The Science of Sleep (2006), Gondry’s protagonist fails to
distinguish between his real world and his dreamworld; the viewer can
distinguish them because Gondry constitutes the dreamworld out of crude
handmade objects that simulate their real-life counterparts.
But some painters manage to elide the real and the not-real in clever ways,
as we have seen in the work of Dorothea Tanning. Sidney Nolan’s painting
Inland Australia (1950) is a post-photography painted landscape that
represents the interior of his native country, both as a real place and as a
nightmare space of emptiness and mystery. Dora Carrington does
something similar in Spanish Landscape with Mountains (1924). She’s
painted a realistic landscape, but rearranged it so that on second look, it
seems not quite real. Georgia O’Keefe does similar things in her landscapes
and still lifes. In some cases, the pictures are not that strange at first sight,
but upon contemplation their oddness and beyond-real qualities are
revealed. Or the opposite is true: the picture looks unreal, then gradually as
you look at it, the delineation of the real becomes manifest, as in O’Keefe’s
Jack in the Pulpit (1930).
FURTHER VIEWING
The Colour of Pomegranates (1968) confirmed Parajanov’s distinctive
artistic style.
Parajanov’s paintings can be seen at http://www.parajanov.com.
3.6
Still Life, 1952
Artist: Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964)
Morandi’s work is about composition and arrangement.
Manet made oil paint represent glass. His bottles and glasses are shiny and
scintillating; the labels are carelessly yet proudly displayed. Morandi
strictly denies this; he completely controls the light in his pictures. Morandi
doesn’t allow the bottles themselves to reflect the light; they are simply
bland, ready-made forms that he could arrange and rearrange to explore
their abstract qualities and relationships.
Antonioni did not use the industrial setting simply to condemn it, although
he certainly had criticism. He believed that we need to find poetry and
beauty in the world as it is. “My intention,” he said, “was to translate the
poetry of that world in which even factories can be beautiful. And curves of
factories and the chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees,
which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and
serviceable.” He goes on to say that the theme of The Red Desert is the
theme of adjustment. The world will not stop for Giuliana; she must, like
the rest of us, learn to adjust to it and to find the poetry and beauty within
it.24
3.8
A Matter of Life and Death, 1947
Dir. The Archers
Michael Powell’s astonishing black-and-white stairway to Heaven.
The Impressionist painters taught Cardiff how color operates, how colors
complement each other, and how to contrast colors to create dramatic
effects. From painting he learned how light causes color to appear changed
at different times of the day because of the light-temperature shifts.
Paintings demonstrated what colors complemented each other, and which
produced disturbing effects. This painterly training was particularly useful
to Cardiff because at that time there was no digital technology, and many of
the films that he worked on used in-camera matte processes. Powell and
Pressburger’s films in particular rely on matte painting on glass to create
their stunning, often astonishing visual compositions.
Cardiff attributed his opportunity to become the first Technicolor camera
operator in Britain to his knowledge of painting. In his autobiography, and
in the biographical film made by Craig McCall, Cameraman: The Life and
Times of Jack Cardiff (2010), he recounts how, when he attended an
interview for the Technicolor job in 1937, he was forced to confess that he
had almost no technical understanding of cinematography. After what he
called a “shocked silence,” he was asked what made him a good
cameraman. Cardiff replied that he studied the many forms of light in the
world around him, and he studied the lighting used by the Old Masters of
painting. The following day, to Cardiff’s shock and amazement, he was told
that he had been chosen for the position. This eventually led him to earn an
Academy Award, and multiple Academy nominations, as well as a host of
other awards. Cardiff is considered the greatest cinematographer Britain has
ever produced.
If one looks at the acquisition history of the paintings in London’s
National Gallery or Tate Britain, one can easily guess some of the paintings
that inspired Cardiff in the films he shot for The Archers. The interiors of
Black Narcissus—in particular the chapel scenes—surely owe something to
the white-on-white tones and crystal-clear light of the architectural interior
of Pieter Saenredam’s The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem (1636).
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s At the Theatre (The First Visit) (1876–1877)
conveys the excitement of a theatrical performance, which is what the
sumptuously colored Red Shoes is all about. Renoir’s The Umbrellas must
have taught Cardiff how many shades and tones of blue could be created
within a picture.
A Matter of Life and Death was Cardiff’s first film as director of
photography for the Archers, and he was immediately confronted by
Michael Powell’s determination to push all previous boundaries. The film
began as a wartime propaganda commission, yet The Archers created the
antithesis of a war film. In the story, airman Peter Carter should have died
when forced to jump from his burning plane without a parachute. However,
the emissary of death fails to find him in the English fog and he survives,
waking up on the beach. He goes on to fall in love with June, an American
WAC controller. But Heaven will not let him go so quickly, and there
ensues a trial in Heaven, where Carter and June have to prove the strength
of their feelings and argue the case that Carter should live.
3.9
Black Narcissus, 1947
Dir. The Archers
Despite the dramatic Himalayan setting, almost every frame of this film was shot in the studio, or in a
nearby park. Its dramatic visual splendor is a tribute to the art direction and cinematography of Junge
and Cardiff.
In his 1986 memoir, Michael Powell says that Junge was “probably the
greatest art director that films have ever known.”28 Catherine Surowiec
points out that, though often overlooked by the public when they discuss
films, art directors “help to create the world of cinema magic, painting with
images of light and shade.” Often their sketches are works of art in
themselves, and this was certainly true of Junge. Set designs indicate
atmosphere, mood, lighting, perspective, pictorial composition, volume, and
spatial relationships.
Black Narcissus was a challenging film. It is set in India, and tells the
story of a group of nuns who are sent to a remote community in the
Himalayan Mountains to establish a school and clinic for the local people.
But soon the strange and unearthly mountain landscape, and the stress of
isolation as they go about their business in a windy mountaintop crumbling
palace, leads to sexual tension and the beginnings of psychological
breakdown. Featuring powerful, compelling performances by the two
female leads, Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron, Black Narcissus was
unlike anything that a British production company had produced to date.
What’s particularly interesting about the film is that not one frame of it
was actually shot in India. Most of it was shot in the studio using a big
plaster set made by Junge, which was the palace complex. The tropical
vegetation was found in the gardens of a stately home on the outskirts of
London. Everything else—the fantastic mountain landscape, the stunning
sunrises and sunsets, and the terrifying cliff drop where the final murderous
battle between Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh and Kathleen Byron’s Sister
Ruth takes place—was all hand painted. Alfred Junge presided over the
creation of some of the biggest and most impressive canvas paintings ever
painted in twentieth century Britain, as well as countless glass paintings.
Walter Percy (“Pop”) Day was the head of the painting unit. The quality of
the painting can be appreciated by watching the film, because it becomes
clear that although, on the one hand, everything appears realistic, on the
other hand, it goes far beyond realism. Junge creates a kind of hyperrealism
that is haunting, philosophical, and far more beautiful and terrifying than
the real thing. The painted world of Black Narcissus surely has to stand as
one of the greatest painting triumphs of twentieth-century art, not only
twentieth-century cinema. Black Narcissus won Academy Awards for both
design and cinematography.
Michael Powell on Black Narcissus: “It is the most erotic film I have
ever made. It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and
image from the beginning to the end.”29
The line separating the real and the unreal is always going to be blurred.
This is as true in painting as it is in cinema. The human imagination is
constantly seeking ways to explain the world as it is, but also the world as
we think and feel that it is. In trying to harness the human imagination and
allow it to enhance and illuminate reality, artists and filmmakers have
turned to fantastic forms from mythology, exploration of the unconscious,
and subversion of the ordinary objects of everyday life by giving them new
qualities.
Exercise
Select a favorite painting that depicts a dream state or a surreal vision.
Perhaps choose one that has been featured in this chapter, such as Arnold
Böcklin or Giorgio de Chirico, or look up other pictures by the artists
discussed here. Look up the works of Leonora Carrington, Henri Rousseau,
and William Blake.
Imagine recreating the painting as a scene in your own movie. What kind of
camera setups would you use? What kind of sound would you choose to
accompany this scene?
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Leslie Halpern, Dreams on Film: The Cinematic Struggle Between Art and
Science (McFarland, 2003). This is the standard text on the subject of
dreams and cinema, based on both film and scientific research.
Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (Berg, 2006)
Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and Its Shadows: Surrealist Writings on
the Cinema (City Lights, 2001). This collection of writings by the
Surrealists themselves is fascinating; it contains a particularly insightful
review of King Kong (1933) by the writer Jean Ferry.
Rene Passeron, Surrealism (Terrail, 2005)
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (Thames and Hudson, 1978)
P. Hames, ed., The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy, 2nd ed.
(Wallflower, 2008)
Wendy Jackson, “The Surrealist Conspirator: An Interview with Jan
Svankmajer,” Animation World Magazine, Issue 2.3 (June 1997)
Mario Vargas Llosa, “You Nourish Yourself with Everything You Hate,”
Tate Etc., (Spring 2007)
Shulamith Behr, Expressionism (Tate, 1999)
Seymour Chatman and Paul Duncan, eds., Michelangelo Antonioni: The
Investigation (Taschen, 2004)
Dan Fleming, Making the Transformational Moment in Film (Michael
Wiese Productions, 2011)
NOTES
1 Leslie Halper, Dreams on Film: The Cinematic Struggle Between Art and Science (McFarland &
Co., 2003); this is the standard text.
2 Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City (Yale University Press, 2014).
3 Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (Penguin, 1992).
4 Giorgio de Chirico, The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico (Perseus Books Group, 1994).
5 Hughes, op. cit., p. 161.
6 “The Spirits Released: De Chirico and Metaphysical Perspective,” in “Italian Art Now,” Art &
Design (Academy Editions, 1989), Vol. 5, No. 1/2, pp. 6–17.
7 René Passeron, Surrealism (Terrail, 2005).
8 Anna Balakian and Anna Elizabeth Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (University
of Chicago Press, 1986).
9 See this and more writings on cinema by the Surrealists themselves in Paul Hammond, ed., The
Shadow and Its Shadows: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (City Lights, 2001).
10 Terry Gilliam, Interviews, ed. David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes (University Press of Mississippi,
2004), p. 34.
11 Ibid., p. 11.
12 Margherita Andreotti, The Essential Guide (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), p. 278.
13 Terry Gilliam, interviewed by Imogen Carter in “René Magritte: Enigmatic Master of the
Impossible Dream,” The Observer, Sunday, June 19, 2011.
14 Robert Hughes, “Magritte,” in Nothing If Not Critical (Penguin, 1990), p. 157.
15 Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and Its Shadows: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (City
Lights, 2001).
16 Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (Berg, 2006).
17 See Jan Uhde, “Jan Svankmajer: Genius Loci as a Source of Surrealist Inspiration,” in Graeme
Harper and Rob Stone, The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Wallflower, 2007).
18 “The Film Experiment,” in P. Hames, ed., The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy, 2nd
ed. (Wallflower, 2008), pp. 8–39.
19 Wendy Jackson, “The Surrealist Conspirator: An Interview with Jan Svankmajer,” Animation
World Magazine, Issue 2.3, June 1997.
20 Jan Švankmajer quoted in John-Paul Pryor, “Surviving Life, Conversations with Leading Cultural
Figures,” AnOther Magazine, November 30, 2011, available at http://www.anothermag.com/art-
photography/1589/jan-svankmajer-on-surviving-life.
21 Simon Wilson, Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion (Tate Gallery, London, revised edition
1991), p. 124.
22 Mario Vargas Llosa, “You Nourish Yourself with Everything You Hate,” Tate Etc., Issue 9
(Spring 2007).
23 “George Grosz,” MOMA, http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2374.
24 Seymour Chatman and Paul Duncan, eds., Michelangelo Antonioni: The Investigation (Taschen,
2004), pp. 91–95.
25 Jack Cardiff, Magic Hour (Faber & Faber Film, 1997), p. 42.
26 Ibid.
27 Quoted in Catherine A. Surowiec, Accent on Design: Four European Art Directors (British Film
Institute, 1992).
28 Michael Powell, A Life in Movies (Faber & Faber, 2000), p. 628.
29 Ibid., p. 584.
30 Ibid., p. 44.
31 Ibid., p. 653.
32 Ibid., p. 630.
PART 2
CHAPTER FOUR
SEX AND VIOLENCE
Sex and violence are well represented in every major museum art collection,
and sexuality and violence are well represented—and sensationalized—
throughout the history of art. Some filmmakers have quite often simply
borrowed sexual and violent imagery from existing paintings. Others
unconsciously echo deeply ingrained representations of gender and sexuality
long established by painting.
We might ask why we even wish to see sex and violence represented, in art
or film? It is a good question, but we have to accept the fact that images of
sex and violence go back to the very earliest human images. The Willendorf
Venus, the oldest carved object yet discovered, is a sexually explicit female
torso. The epic battles of King Ashurbanipal and Pharaoh Ramses II cover
whole walls. Voyeurism, the practice of getting sexual gratification by
looking at sexual objects, is practiced through art. Art allows us to explore
the things that frighten and disturb us.
While present-day audiences reject the sexual attitudes behind many of the
works of art history, we must be careful not to judge them too strictly by the
moral standards of today. At the same time, we should not simply venerate
them as objects of beauty without understanding the broader context in
which they were made. The same negotiation takes place with regard to
depictions of violence. Since drama is driven by conflict, violence will be
present in drama, whether it is cinema or painting based on myths or history.
The level of violence, how graphically it is portrayed, and what is considered
socially acceptable are negotiated by each successive generation of artists
and audience. Screenwriter Paul Schrader points out that when you censor
violence in art because you think it’s not good for society, you still have the
violence in society, but you don’t have the art that comments on the violence
and helps us understand it.
Until the twentieth century, there were relatively few female painters, and
of these only a handful ever practiced history painting, or anything other
than portraiture. The majority of female painters were limited by
convention to portraits and scenes of domestic life. Within these strictures,
however, painters like Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun,
Berthe Morisot, and others created images of domestic life and nurture,
which made enormous contributions to the visual culture of the Mother
image. However, it was out of the question that women should portray
sexuality in any form, so painting mythological nudes was out of their
remit. Likewise, women were unable to paint the demi-monde of brothels,
taverns, and bars—the so-called “low life” pictures associated with
seventeenth-century “genre” Dutch painters like Adriaen Brouwer (1605–
1638) or nineteenth-century painters like Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec.
One unusual version of the Mother image is The Tempest (c. 1508) by Italian painter Giorgione. A
nude woman breastfeeds a baby while a soldier stands (guard?) nearby and overhead a huge storm
explodes in to the sky. Is there a sexual element in the picture?
The presence of the nude in art derives from the Renaissance revival of
classical ideals based on the remains of Greco-Roman art. Nudity meant
something completely different in the classical era, when artists portrayed
their deities nude to amplify their ideal forms and exemplify beauty.
Real people (like Pericles, Caesar, or Alexander the Great) were not usually
portrayed nude: they were more likely to be portrayed as a bust (head and
shoulders only) or, if full length, clothed. But whereas the Greeks and the
Romans took equal pleasure in the nude male and nude female, from the
Renaissance onward, painting developed a particular tendency toward the
female nude, with its soft and sinuous curves.
Can we use Clarke’s concept of “naked” and “nude” in cinema? When is a character “nude”?
When is a character “naked”?
Mythical Sex
Until the nineteenth century, it was extremely rare to find nudes that
represented contemporary life. Instead, nudity was more commonly used in
representing mythical subject matter. Conveniently, Greek and Roman
myths have so much sexual licentiousness that it’s very easy to find stories
and characters brimming with sexual activities. Venus, goddess of love, was
a reliable source of nudes. One of the most notable is Botticelli’s Birth of
Venus, a nude borne on the waves by a seashell.
Botticelli’s Venus is recreated by director Terry Gilliam in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
(1988, DP Giuseppe Rotunno).
The earthy yet unattainable goddess-like image of sexual allure was one of
the first things that cinema wanted to explore. In both classical and
postclassical art, Venus is nearly always shown nude. However, because of
the USA’s 1930 Hays Code, nudity could not be shown in movies, so
sexuality needed to be expressed through subtle innuendo. For example, in
the cabaret scene of Charles Vidor’s film noir Gilda (1946), Rita Hayworth
does a superlatively erotic striptease taking off only a single glove. Yet the
composition is very close to Cranach’s: Gilda is no less a Venus, flourishing
her assets and creating desire.
Biblical Sex
With the wealth of explicit sex-related stories in classical mythology (in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Apuleius’s comic novel The Golden Ass, and
more), it is not surprising that mythological subjects in painting feature
nudity in abundance. What might be more surprising is how many painters
used biblical stories as an excuse for nudity and sexual themes. Two of the
most popular were “Susannah and the Elders” and “David and Bathsheba.”
The story of David and Bathsheba again involves voyeurism, as King David
watches Bathsheba having a bath and approaches her, despite the fact that
her husband is one of his generals. He later engineers for the husband to be
killed in battle and takes Bathsheba as his wife. This is a serious spiritual
crime, and as such it could be used as a subject for monumental history
painting, without fear of being frivolous or licentious. Although the subject
has been painted by many artists over the years, the most renowned
rendering of Bathsheba is by Rembrandt (in the Louvre). This is a life-size
picture, with only Bathsheba in the frame, not David. It is considered a
masterpiece of psychological painting because Rembrandt has shown us
both Bathsheba’s moral and spiritual dilemma at being the king’s lover and
her luscious beauty, which makes us absolutely empathize with David’s
position.
Another very popular subject for biblical history painting is the femme
fatale story of Salome. The key theme is Salome’s erotic “dance of the
seven veils,” through which she entices King Herod to cut off the head of
St. John the Baptist. In painting, there are essentially two renderings of
Salome: one showing her carrying the head of the Baptist, the other
showing the dance of the seven veils. The dance only started to appear in
pictures in the late nineteenth century; the most prominent are by French
Symbolist Gustave Moreau (1874). Around this time the femme fatale
emerged as a key Symbolist motif, and it remains popular.
4.2
Bathsheba Bathing, 1654
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669)
While Bathsheba is bathing, she is spied upon by King David, who sends her a letter summoning her;
this is the moment Rembrandt paints, and he captures Bathsheba’s deep unease.
HOLLYWOOD AND BIBLICAL EPICS
From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, many Hollywood films
based on Bible stories were produced. These were very freely adapted,
often ahistorical, visually lavish extravaganzas. It is immediately obvious
how keenly paintings were used in constructing the compositions,
costumes, and sets for these films. The most desirable female stars of the
day were cast. The films continued painting’s tradition of ensuring that
sex is at the forefront of the visual display, and the painted film posters
reinforce that message. Some notably racy biblical epics include:
• Salome (William Dieterle, 1953); the poster features Rita Hayworth in a revealing belly-
dancing costume.
• Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959); this time Gina Lollobrigida as Sheba wears the flimsy
belly-dancing costume.
• David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1951) has Susan Hayward as the adulterous Bathsheba.
• The Ten Commandments (1956) by the master of the epic, Cecil B. DeMille; overheated
sexuality is provided by Anne Baxter as Egyptian princess Nefretiri.
• Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) is an atypical outing for noir director Robert Aldritch, with Pier
Angeli as Lot’s wife; this is quite tame compared to the Bible’s version.
• Esther and the King (1960) by western director Raoul Walsh; the poster has Joan Collins
prostrating herself in a revealing gown.
• Sins of Jezebel (1953) by Reginald Le Borg (better known as a horror director); the poster
promises it will be “ravishing, seductive, shameless.”
Exotic Sex
Sometimes a nude was just a nude, with no mythological or biblical
rationale. The term “odalisque” was borrowed from the Ottomans to
describe or define these nudes-for-nudes-sake. With little understanding of
the complex Ottoman sexual social structure, Westerners understood the
term odalisque to mean a harem concubine. Eastern culture and especially
the idea of the harem fascinated Westerners; however, because of the very
nature of the harem in the social structure, no Westerner was ever able to
glimpse inside one. Hence, harem paintings were based on a combination of
febrile imagination and visits to Middle Eastern brothels. By the eighteenth
century, “odalisque” was used to refer to any eroticized portrait in which a
nude woman reclines, displaying herself for the spectator.
Boucher earned good money from wealthy collectors for the Odalisque
paintings, though at the expense of earning disapproval. He spread himself
quite thin as an artist and was sometimes castigated for stooping to easy
eroticism instead of trying for something more profound. But Boucher’s
Odalisque offers us something quite interesting: an amiable sweet-faced
female figure. She is not cold and remote, not a goddess; Boucher has
painted her as a mortal woman. She lies in an overtly sexual pose, putting
the viewer in the position of the lover only moments before the sexual act
will take place. To accuse this painting, at least, of being easy eroticism
would be absolutely incorrect. Look at the composition and the way in
which Boucher uses the blue drapery. The bright, intense blue sets off the
pink tones of the flesh and creates a magnificent contrast. Yet the blue is
also calming and soothing, bringing a freshness to the painting.
FURTHER VIEWING
The Swing (1767) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, one of Boucher’s pupils, is
one of the most popular and influential paintings of frivolity and
flirtatiousness. See also the influential La Grande Odalisque (1814),
painted by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Notice how Ingres has
distorted the line of the body to make it even more sinuous and sensual.
Ingres painted a number of odalisques.
FURTHER VIEWING
Eugène Delacroix, The Women of Algiers (1834). It was difficult to
sketch local women, but Delacroix managed to create this sensual but not
sexual picture of Algerian female life.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Grand Baths at Bursa (1883)
Gérôme sketched the public baths in the Turkish city of Bursa on the
days when the baths were reserved for men; back in Paris, he added in
nude female models.
How far do Orientalist pictures and odalisques represent familiar images
of woman still represented in cinema today?
The principal character, front and center, is Venus, painted in the smooth
pearly style characteristic of Bronzino. She is being embraced and her
breast caressed by Cupid; they appear to be in the middle of a passionate
kiss. On the right an amore is about to throw a cascade of rose petals on the
lovers. But Cupid is actually Venus’s son. He’s much younger than she, and
even in ancient Greece incest was a taboo. So, Venus and Cupid are making
a display of lust, but it’s not real. Behind them lurk a number of other
characters. On the left is an older character in some distress. Above is an
old man, the common representation of Father Time. Behind the amore is a
strange character. She has a pretty girl’s face, but if you look at her bottom
half, under her dress is a reptile body and a tail. She is holding out a
tempting honeycomb.
Let us see these characters as participants in the typical sex comedy. The
female lead, of course, is Venus, extremely beautiful, displaying herself
very deliberately, and always key lit to her best advantage. Cupid is the
pretend lover, the one that Venus uses to arouse jealousy in the male
protagonist, the viewer. She makes a display of being passionate with
Cupid, and he goes along with it, but she is not serious. The amore is the
foolish friend, who cheers on Venus without thinking about the
repercussions of her actions. The older character behind Cupid is perhaps
an angry parent, or other disapproving establishment figure. Danger comes
in the form of the pretty-faced, reptile-bodied honey bearer. She is the
deceitful one who tries to upset the true romance of Venus and the
protagonist.
Bronzino offers all the ingredients of the traditional sex comedy, which
have remained virtually unchanged since the days of the Greek playwright
Menander, right up to modern comedies such as Knocked Up (2007, dir.
Judd Apatow) or The Five-Year Engagement (2010, dir. Nicholas Stoller).
Bronzino underlines the theatrical nature of the composition by including
Time holding the curtain for the duration of the performance; at Venus’s
feet we see two theatrical masks, making the point even clearer. Sex
comedies often end with some kind of moral lesson learned, as true love is
reestablished, but the moral package is never the point of a sex comedy, it is
simply its justification. The same holds true for Bronzino’s painting.
Confrontational Sex
By the twentieth century, more women were independent, and more became
artists. This meant that women’s representation of women, and of
themselves, began to change. At the same time, men started to question the
traditional representations of women in art. As noted earlier, the main
pictures painted by women had been domestic subjects and portraits,
including self-portraits. Natalya Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde
artist and designer whose work included stage sets, costume design, and
fashion design as well as paintings. A radical experimental painter,
Goncharova chose to paint her self-portrait, Woman with a Cigarette, in a
very confrontational way. Exposing her left breast, she bows slightly
ironically to traditional composition. Yet she does not try to prettify herself,
she’s not afraid to look a little tired, and she shows herself smoking a
cigarette, which symbolizes her liberation from conventional social mores.
Even more, she looks as though she’s actively participating in social and
intellectual life, as she indeed was.
Vernet’s pyramid composition in the Crimea War picture The Taking of the
Malakoff Redoubt (1858) captures the moment when the defeated British
officer has to salute the French flag, as they stand atop a hill seemingly
constructed of dead French and British corpses. In this one painting, he
shows the moment of victory for the French, humiliation for the British, and
the utter wastage of human life, which takes up a full two-thirds of the
painting. Like Elizabeth Butler, he chose a realistic style, without neglecting
the need for monumental dramatic effect. Both found powerful drama in
depicting pathos, as well as in depicting glory.
FURTHER VIEWING
Horace Vernet, The Wounded Trumpeter, 1819
Elizabeth Thompson Lady Butler, The Retreat from Mons, 1927
Brutal Violence
As the official painter to the royal court, Francisco Goya was used to
painting the monarchy and the finery of the elite. But when war broke out,
and things got progressively worse, he used his brush to record what was
happening in his country. The Third of May 1808, one of the most
influential images of warfare ever painted, depicts a nighttime military
execution, lit only by a lamp, as a firing squad of rigidly identical,
disciplined soldiers is about to kill a group of captives. But this is not an
army that is being executed: Goya makes it very clear that the prisoners are
ordinary Spaniards. The man about to be shot holds up his arms in alarm, in
a crucifixion pose, while at his feet bodies of those already slain lie covered
in blood. It is a dreadful, disturbing, and absolutely unheroic picture of war,
a counterpoint to the whole oeuvre of history painting. Although The Third
of May appears as vivid as if it were painted near the scene of action, it was
made six years after the actual event. Robert Hughes says that “before Goya
no artist had taken on such subject matter in such depth. Battles had been
formal affairs with idealized heroes, hacking at one another but dying
noble, and even graceful, deaths. Not the mindless and terrible slaughter
that Goya wanted us all to know is the reality of war, ancient or modern.”11
Goya followed this painting with an 82-part series of aquatint etchings, The
Disasters of War, which reinforced his horror and disgust at the war and is
an outstanding denunciation of violence. There are no heroes in this series,
only perpetrators and victims, and by using black-and-white etching Goya
could portray extreme gore and brutality in a way that no painting could.
For example, in plate number 37, he shows how the mutilated torsos and
body parts of victims were stuck on trees in the landscape. As the series
goes on, it gets more and more fanciful, as he starts to build in elements of
satire, absurdity, and grotesquerie. In plate 74, a wolf sits writing a message
on a sheet of paper: “Misera humanidad. La culpa es tuya” (Miserable
humanity. The blame is yours). Goya knew the series would appall people,
and it was not published in his lifetime. In 1924, Word War I veteran and
artist Otto Dix created his own version, based on his experiences in the
trenches: Der Kreig, a 52-part testament to the horror of war. Dix shows
violence, death, rape, and the rotting, decaying bodies.
4.6
The Third of May 1808, 1814
Artist: Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
One of a number of compositions that Goya created around the subject of the Peninsular War in
Spain. Critic Robert Hughes says that here “Goya speaks for the victims: not only for those killed in
French reprisals in Madrid, but for all the millions of victims destroyed, before and since, in the name
of The People.”12
War films have generally been less graphic, though in the harrowing Come
and See (1985, dir. Elem Klimov), set in World War II, the child protagonist
witnesses a pile of bodies being stacked behind a house, a barn full of
people on fire, and a gang rape. All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis
Milestone, 1930), released as a silent and a sound film, may be the first true
“war film” in its realistic depiction of an actual conflict. It did not hide the
violence of war: in one memorable scene, during an attack, a soldier grabs
onto barbed wire, but when a shell explodes, only his arms are left, hanging
from the wire, a scene strongly reminiscent of Dix’s Der Kreig.
The introduction of the Hays Code in 1930 limited the possibilities for
screen violence in war films; the emphasis was on bravery, self-sacrifice,
and often romantic subplots. During World War II, films occasionally used
strong violence to jolt the audience into heightened awareness of the war’s
dangers. Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943) chronicles a horrific defeat of
Americans in the Philippines; made just a year after the 1942 events, it
depicts stoicism, bravery, and sacrifice but also reveals graphic violence. In
the final scene, hero Dane (Robert Taylor) runs out of ammunition but
continues firing, with the machine gun pointing at the audience.
Interestingly the Battle of Bataan was the subject of two further films. Cry
“Havoc” (Richard Thorpe, 1943), about the nurses at Bataan, shows less
violence, but at the end has the women surrendering to Japanese forces,
their terrible fate implied. Back to Bataan, made in 1945, directed by
Edward Dmytryk and starring John Wayne, is highly fictionalized; here the
tone is much more upbeat than in Garnett’s film, and the combat less
graphic.
FURTHER VIEWING
Watch these war films for their depiction of violence:
La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
State-Sanctioned Violence
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by French painter Paul Delaroche was
exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1834. Several contemporary sources
described the trial and execution of the young Queen of England, which
Delaroche was able to use. He visited the Tower of London twice; his notes
and sketches of the tower and its environs show how methodical he was.
National Gallery curator Chris Riopelle says that Delaroche “wanted you to
feel he was acting as a historian.”13 However, he also understood the
necessity of creating the right dramatic moment. He played around with
actual historical detail: for example, he set the execution in the Tower’s
interior, rather than outside on the green where it actually took place. This
allowed him to concentrate the lighting and to compress the elements of the
picture into a tight, claustrophobic arrangement, increasing the sense of
dread. As well, he understood that to really convey the violence of the
execution, it was better not to portray the actual moment of violent death,
but to emphasize the innocent victim. Therefore, he presents Jane in a
shining white silk dress and blindfold, being guided to the execution block
on which she must lay her head. Her hands reach out, trying to feel her way.
The viewer’s impulse is to grab those hands and pull her out of the picture
immediately. Beside her, the implacable executioner holds the huge axe.
The composition is balanced on the left by the mourners in the background.
4.7
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833
Artist: Paul Delaroche (1797–1856)
The real Jane Grey was only sixteen years old when she became the victim of a dynastic dispute in
sixteenth-century England. Delaroche was fascinated by English history and researched it in depth.
Extreme Violence
In Chapter 2 we looked at Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Massacre
of the Innocents. We saw how Bruegel had transferred the biblical story, in
which King Herod commands his soldiers to kill the infant boys in
Bethlehem, into the rendering of a contemporary Flemish town being raided
by military force. Many painters have used this as their subject—some like
Bruegel reinterpreting it in a contemporary context, others retaining the
original biblical setting.
Cornelis van Haarlem reinterprets this biblical myth in two versions of the
massacre, 1590 and 1591. Van Haarlem’s massacre is not realistic: it is a
nightmarish and grotesque subversion of classical ideals. This is very
different from Goya, who based The Third of May on firsthand accounts of
the depredations that were happening during the Peninsular War, or Otto
Dix, who spent the First World War as a private soldier in the trenches.
Rather, this is war of the imagination, where sheer brutality reigns. In the
earlier, 1590 version, the images are even more horrible: piles of dead
babies lie on the ground, and the most prominent image is of a huge man
straddling a woman while he murders her baby. Further back on the left, a
group of women have caught one soldier and are killing him; in the
background people flee in terror, while another soldier beats a woman. The
grotesquely muscular, gargantuan nude bodies of the soldiers flinging
babies about and cutting their throats are graphic and repulsive. Van
Haarlem takes the classical notion of perfection—muscular, beautiful
bodies—and then subverts it by showing them doing acts of utter evil.14
Van Haarlem’s work belongs to a school of painting known as Dutch (or
Northern) Mannerism (see Glossary), known for dramatic, highly stylized,
and vividly colored compositions, often featuring twisted and complex
poses, sometimes (as here) sheering off toward the grotesque.
By 1917 it seems Nevinson’s view on the war was clear. Both the painting
and the 1957 Stanley Kubrick antiwar film Paths of Glory get their title
from a line in a Thomas Gray poem: “The paths of glory lead but to the
grave.”
SEX AND VIOLENCE
Sex and violence together are often one of the most contentious problems in
cinema, when violence becomes sexualized. There are different ways of
portraying it, such as displacement, but quite often the relationship between
sex and violence is the turning point of the plot: think of all those femmes
fatales of the film noirs, or the neo-noirs like Body Heat (1981) or Sin City
(2005).
Sex and violence is not a relationship made in cinema, but was already long
established in painting. One popular subject of painters was “Judith
Beheading Holofernes.” Although the early versions were restrained,
painters (or their clients) soon developed a prurient interest in combining
the sex and the violence by emphasizing Judith’s sexuality. There are three
particularly important paintings that show the actual moment of killing:
Caravaggio’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612), Artemisia Gentileschi’s (c.
1620), and the 1622 one by Johann Liss shown here. All three are extremely
violent, although the one by Liss is probably the goriest. Liss and
Gentileschi show just how hard work it is to cut off the head of a grown
man. Without being sexually provocative, they demonstrate the dangerous
nexus of sex and violence. The subject remained popular: Goya completed
a version in 1823, and the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt took time out from
painting Viennese high society to make two versions of Judith carrying the
head and exulting in it.
4.8
Judith in the Tent of Holofernes, 1622
Artist: Johann Liss (1597–1631)
This painting is based on an apocryphal Bible story: Judith was a Hebrew woman who used her
feminine wiles to get into the tent of the enemy Assyrian general Holofernes and then cut off his
head.
CASE STUDY:
MARTIN SCORSESE AND CARAVAGGIO
4.9
The Supper at Emmaus, 1601
Artist: Caravaggio (1571–1610)
As well as the “dirty realism” of the painting, note the tensed position of the figure on the left, and
the arm reaching out of the canvas on the right.
4.10
Goodfellas
Dir. Martin Scorsese, DP Michael Ballhaus
Notice how both Scorsese and Caravaggio organize groups of men—here, a group around a table.
The bleak lives and desperation of ordinary people is what Scorsese was
looking to portray in these films, and this is what he found in Caravaggio’s
great religious paintings. Before he decided to pursue filmmaking, Scorsese
entertained the idea of becoming a priest, and certainly cultural Catholicism
is a hallmark of all of his films.
What makes Caravaggio so important to Scorsese is realism, his
insistence on setting all of the religious stories in the back streets of Rome
and Naples. Take, for example, his rendering of The Supper at Emmaus
(1601). This has been painted by many artists, but only Caravaggio’s two
versions make viewers feel that they are really sitting in a shabby inn,
looking at a group of poor workers having a meal, and that one of them
might actually be the Savior. Caravaggio offers up salvation within a dingy,
dirty, completely ordinary place. It’s as if he’s saying, “If it can’t happen
here, it can’t happen at all.” Characters with lank, greasy hair, dirty nails,
sweat-stained garments—this is sometimes referred to as “dirty realism.” In
film it’s often called “gritty realism,” but it means the same thing.
Scorsese says, “I felt an affinity with the work, because they didn’t seem
like the usual models from the Renaissance, these were people who were
really living life. It was direct and powerful that way and it was startling.”
He notes, “There’s something in Caravaggio that shows a real street
knowledge of the sinner; his sacred paintings are profane.”
4.11
The Decapitation of St. John the Baptist, 1608
Artist: Caravaggio (1571–1610)
Caravaggio made several versions of the decapitated Baptist, but here he shows the awful moment of
death. The scene plays out in a dim courtyard, illuminated by an unseen light source. John has
already had his throat cut; dying, he is held down by his assailant, who is preparing to hack the head
off. The woman on the left holds the silver dish that will be used to serve the head up to King Herod
and Salome. The execution is business as usual, efficient, bleak, and stark. The older woman alone
appears appalled, holding the sides of her head, but helplessly unable to intervene; she can only bear
witness.
Both the painter and the filmmaker show powerful yet highly controlled
violence. In Taxi Driver’s climactic scene, a single light bulb barely
illuminates the corridor; the violence erupts like a bomb in a space that is
claustrophobic, horribly intimate. Scorsese concludes the scene by
following the trail of gore back out into the world, where it all started.
Scorsese takes a different approach in Goodfellas, which is not about
violence per se, but about the workings of the criminal subculture. Here,
only one character, Tommy, played by Joe Pesci, is consistently seen
committing acts of violence. His outbursts of violence are sudden, very
brief, and very deadly. While many acts of violence are referred to
throughout the film, Scorsese limits and controls the amount of violence
that we see in any one scene.
EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
The line separating the real and the unreal is always going to be blurred.
This is as true in painting as it is in cinema. The human imagination is
constantly seeking ways to explain the world as it is, but also the world as
we think and feel that it is. In trying to harness the human imagination and
allow it to enhance and illuminate reality, artists and filmmakers have
turned to fantastic forms from mythology, exploration of the unconscious,
and subversion of the ordinary objects of everyday life by giving them new
qualities.
Exercise
Select a scene from Taxi Driver or Goodfellas. Watch it and freeze frame it
at a scene of violence. What are the elements of this composition? How
would it feel to you, if it was a painting instead of a freeze frame? What, to
you, are the essential differences?
Try this exercise with other films.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
4. Since the demise of the Hays Code in Hollywood, sex and violence
have been increasingly accepted elements in films. Are there any
examples you can find in art history that show sex or violence that
would be unacceptable in mainstream cinema even today? Explore
artists like Rubens, Otto Dix, Hermann Nitzsch, Gustave Courbet, and
Ronald Ophuis.
FURTHER READING
Images of Hell do appear in art. For example, in The Rich Man Being Led to
Hell (1647) by David Teniers the Younger, Hell is depicted as an unpleasant
place, populated by demons and monsters, but no principal Devil is
depicted. The artist is much more interested in illustrating the plight of the
selfish rich man and the predicament he has found himself in. Likewise,
Bosch’s depiction of Hell in the Garden of Earthly Delights does not
contain the Devil, though it contains all kinds of monstrous creatures. Yet
however much they may have believed in Hell and the temptations of the
Devil, when it came to painting, it was almost impossible to avoid a
grotesquerie that entertains more than frightens.
This also presents a problem for filmmakers: how to present absolute evil?
As Darren Oldridge points out, “representing the Devil in film presents
similar problems to those encountered in other visual arts. As the
personification of an abstract concept, it is difficult to translate Satan into a
moving image.”3 The strange and creepy 1922 Danish silent Häxan (written
and directed by Benjamin Christensen, who plays the horned Devil) is an
early, and often compelling, example. The Devil in human form has been
represented many times in film history, from Walter Huston’s “Mr. Scratch”
in William Dieterle’s political fantasy The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941,
DP Joseph H. August) to Robert de Niro’s dapper “Louis Cyphre” in the
voodoo-infused Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker, DP Michael Seresin ) and
2010’s Devil (dir. John Erick Dowdle), which mostly takes place in a stuck
elevator. However, these depictions, while effective in their respective
stories, do not offer a special visual image.
With lavish reenactments and dramatizations, Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922),
directed by Benjamin Christensen, is one of the first films that can be considered a “docudrama.”
Based on the Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth-century text about witch hunting, it is also one of
the few films to attempt to show the Devil in monstrous form.
The title is a play on words: “mare” is obviously the horse, but it also refers
to mara, a Nordic mythical spirit sent to torment sleepers. The horse is
probably based on the ghostly beast figures in Salvator Rosa’s Saul and the
Witch of Endor (1668). One critic wrote, “The Night Mare by Mr. Fussli,
like all his productions, has strong marks of genius about it; but hag-riding
is too unpleasant a thought to be agreeable to any one.”5 “Hag-riding” is the
term used to describe the visions associated with sleep paralysis; it comes
from the older idea that during sleep a hag or witch would torment the
sleeper. Sometimes the tormentor is described as an incubus—a male
demon that sexually assaults the female sleeper (the female-on-male
equivalent is the succubus, depicted in art by Edvard Munch and Felicien
Rops, among others). The sexualized version of the vampire myth, as
portrayed in novels by John Polidori (The Vampyr, 1819) and Bram Stoker
(Dracula, 1897), clearly derives from this notion, though the vampire
displaces the sex act by blood sucking.6
See Edvard Munch’s The Vampyre, 1893. Munch’s title was not Vampire but Love and Pain, but
audiences saw supernatural sadomasochism in it.
WHAT IS “GOTHIC”?
The term “Gothic” is so overused as to be almost meaningless. Gothic
can refer to early East Germanic tribes, or their language. Alternatively, it
is most used to describe a much later medieval art movement. We talk
about Gothic architecture, but we can also fast-forward to the nineteenth
century and talk about Gothic Revival architecture, or neo-Gothic.
Complicating matters still further, Gothic is associated with
Romanticism, particularly in art and fiction. This is where Füssli’s work
fits, alongside a whole host of others. From the late twentieth century, we
can also talk about Gothic subculture in fashion and music, and that itself
has been subdivided into a whole host of aspects. Gothic is also a font.
If the term is so overused, at what point is it useful to us? Principally,
what we are talking about in this book is more properly called neo-
Gothic. It is important to understand the literary precedents of Gothic art,
which started in England in the 1760s and has continued gaining
popularity up to the present day. Gothic novels inspired many paintings,
with their scenes of mystery, horror, the supernatural, as well as
psychological terror. Plots were meant to be dark, tempestuous, with
madness and ghosts and base urges such as revenge or lust. Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–
1849) exemplify Gothic literature. The popularity of such literature
crossed over into art, and we see painters like Füssli plugging into the
same dramatic, supernatural, emotional temper. However, unlike violence
and horror dealt with in realism (such as Goya’s Disaster of War or the
opening sequence of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan), the depictions of
terror within Gothic are not meant as a cathartic experience, but are
meant to be enjoyed as thrills for their own sake. We can see this strongly
in The Nightmare: its chief and perhaps only purpose is to thrill.
BODY HORROR
Body horror is based on deep-seated fear of the disfigurement and
despoliation of the living body, and of the decomposition of the dead body.
It reminds us of our mortality, frailty, and vulnerability. Ancient cultures
understood this fear very well; for example, in ancient Egypt it was
believed that despoiling a body meant that the soul could not reach the
afterlife. Likewise, to disfigure a statue was a grave insult to whomever it
represented. Body horror in art and cinema is based on the visual
representation of this violence toward the body; to varying degrees, the
shock is in witnessing the desecration of the living or the dead.
This is certainly the case in Titian’s The Punishment of Marsyas (c. 1570).
According to the legend, Marsyas was a satyr (a half-human, half-animal
creature) who challenged the god Apollo to a music contest and lost. The
punishment, for his hubris in challenging a god, was to be flayed alive.
Titian (1488–1576) paints the flaying as a kind of diabolical party. This is
not the only painting of this horrible punishment; the subject was also
addressed by José de Ribera (1637), also quite a disturbing image. In
Ribera’s picture, the animalistic aspects of the satyr are almost completely
imperceptible. The horror lies in the visceral depiction of Marsyas
screaming in agony as Apollo strips open his leg. Bartolomeo Manfred’s
Apollo and Marsyas (1616–1620) is tame by comparison. In Titian’s
version there’s quite a crowd, playing music and seemingly enjoying
themselves. Marsyas is upside down, like an animal at slaughter, but also
maybe an alchemical reference to the symbol of the Hanged Man.8 The
mundane reality of the dog lapping up the spilt blood, while another
character is collecting the blood in a bucket, like a butcher going to make
blood pudding, renders the scene both prosaic and repulsive in the same
moment. Yet perhaps this is another alchemical reference.
Traces of body horror are evident in the bleeding dead game and slabs of
meat of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish still life, and the highly
symbolic skulls in vanitas paintings. In both cases, the pictures were meant
to remind the viewer of their own mortality, and that all the things of the
earthly world are ultimately in vain. Only God separates us from the
butchered pheasant. In the same way, body horror films also remind us of
our own mortality and the vulnerability of the flesh.
5.2
Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962
Artist: Francis Bacon (1909–1992)
Bacon made a number of “crucifixion” paintings, the last in 1988. This 1962 picture, which is at the
Guggenheim in New York, emphasizes the visceral qualities of death, the body as dead meat, lumps
of flesh.
MONSTERS
Lastly, a principal stock-in-trade of the horror genre is the monster.
Monsters appear in the Old Testament, principally the creatures Leviathan
and Behemoth (1 Enoch 60:7–8). Later Christian legend brings monsters
into the stories of saints, such as St. George and the Dragon. The archetypal
image of man killing monster, man versus beast, is one that resonates
throughout art, and countless versions exist in Western painting. Dragons,
or massive reptilian creatures, appear in both European and Asian legends
and art.
Monsters of all kinds appear in the work of Bosch, chiefly the terrifying
hybrid monster that sticks together two or more disparate creatures, as seen
in The Garden of Earthly Delights, the painting that begins this chapter.
Even more horribly, some of the monsters are hybrids of living creature and
object, such as the knife blade with ears and the Tree-Man. The knife with
ears can be seen as a very early visualization of the cyborg—a being with
both organic and biomechatronic parts. The right-hand panel of the triptych
depicts Hell and the torments of damnation. It was not meant to be horror,
but rather an allegory. In Flemish painting at this time, Hell often contained
strange allegorical creatures that represented concepts and proverbs that
formed conventions of morality at the time.
Hybrid monsters, or mutants, are a staple of the horror cinema, starting with
James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) continuing up to The Fly (1958) and
beyond. Aliens continue the monster tradition, in a huge variety of shapes
and forms. Some of the most effective aliens include The Quatermass
Xperiment (1955) and artist H. R. Giger’s design for the Alien series.
What we can learn particularly from looking at art history is that monsters
tend to take two principal forms: the human-plus-other hybrid or the
reptilian (sometimes insectoid). These appear so frequently, even in the
earliest art, that it is probable that these images plug into deep-seated primal
fears.
In his ambivalent review of The Exorcist, critic Roger Ebert asks, “Are
people so numb they need movies of this intensity in order to feel anything
at all? It’s hard to say.”13 It is true that until The Exorcist, few films had
attempted such a stark evocation of evil. But as we look back to the history
of art, we can see that tremendous horrors have been depicted in detail,
covering every possible category of horror. Many of these are truly great
works of art, such as Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas or Goya’s Saturn
Devouring His Children; others are better considered as pieces from their
time, such as Van Haarlem’s Followers of Cadmus. Certainly, we have long
desired to experience both terror and horror. So perhaps Ebert misjudged
audiences: it is simply part of the human condition to desire vicarious,
intense, horrific experience.
CASE STUDY: GUILLERMO DEL TORO
AND FRANCISCO DE GOYA
The Devourer
Del Toro first saw Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children on the cover of a
book when he was a child. He recalls how shocked he was by the
expression of madness, but also anguish, on the face of Saturn and says that
it always struck him as being “one of the most brutal images I ever saw.”17
The filmmaker has acknowledged that the painting has stayed with him ever
since, and it is clear that it influenced his creation of the Pale Man. Notice
the color palette of the Pale Man and his room, the flesh tones and the shiny
wet blood-reds. It is almost identical to the color palette in the painting and
the blood seeping from the bleeding torso. Eyes are a powerful motif in
both the film and the painting: the Pale Man has his eyes in his hands,
embedded in stigmata in each palm. Saturn’s eyes are the most prominent
things in the painting—anguished, wide-open, terrorized black holes
surrounded by bright white eyeballs. The key to understanding both the
Pale Man and the Titan is that they are following their nature: they do what
they do because that is what they are. Vidal, on the other hand, has free
will; he makes a rational choice to do evil, and so he is worse.
5.5
Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006: “The Pale Man”
Dir. Guillermo del Toro, DP Guillermo Navarro
It is not just the pale man himself; it is his environment. He lives in a room decorated with a frieze of
paintings that depict his brutalities, particularly the devouring of children. The fact that these are
painted on the wall of his room indicates the institutional nature of his position, his authority. The
frieze bears a strong resemblance to Goya’s Disasters of War in the brutality of the images. “I wanted
to represent political power within the creatures,” del Toro says.19
Cannibalism happens for several reasons. Aside from obvious cases such
as shipwrecks, the eating of human flesh is usually ritualized, and involves
a transfer of power. Saturn eats his children to keep his power; the frieze on
the Pale Man’s walls implies the same. Saturn was not Goya’s first
depiction of cannibalism. In Cannibals Beholding Human Remains (c.
1808), a group of naked cannibals pull apart a body and exultantly gnaw on
its flesh. Hughes points out that “nobody had painted such scenes before
with the same peculiarly secular feeling. The painting has no pertinence to
religion or mythology.”18 It is art coming out of the dark part of the
imagination, understanding both the horror and exhilaration of the feast.
War Horror
Often considered as an allegory of war, the Colossus is actually difficult to
read. Is the Colossus causing the panic, or overseeing the panic? Possibly,
he is completely unconnected to the events on Earth but simply obeys his
own internal laws and, just by being, terrorizes them. The same enigma is at
the core of Pacific Rim. We are plunged into the middle of war: all of Earth
against the Kaiju, reptilian-insectoid monsters of unimaginable size.
Despite the claim that ecological disaster has precipitated the situation, the
humans never know exactly why the giants appeared. The only way to fight
the monstrosity is with counter-monsters, the cyborg Jaeger.
Writer and critic Mark Kermode calls del Toro “the finest exponent of
fabulist film,”20 which reminds us that sometimes the best thing to do with
the fantasy worlds of horror—in art or cinema—is simply to sit back and
enjoy them for their ability to deliver “beautiful terror” to the safety of our
armchairs.
5.6
The Colossus, c. 1812
Artist: Francisco de Goya (1746–1828)
The giant specter stalks the sky with an attitude of angry defiance, while below him people and
animals flee in all directions in an hysterical state of panic.
However, Goya is likely not the only source of artistic inspiration in del
Toro’s work. The renowned Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco 1883-
1949 may be even more important. Some of Orozco’s finest works are
available to the public in the city of Guadalajara’s Government Palace and
the Cabañas Cultural Institute, painted between 1936 and 1939. Born and
raised in Guadalajara, del Toro likely saw these huge, dramatic murals on
many occasions. Orozco was highly political and critical, and his murals are
cinematic and exciting, depicting the colonial history of Mexico as a tumult
of blood, fire, and violence.
5.7
Pacific Rim, 2013
Dir. Guillermo del Toro, DP Guillermo Navarro
Del Toro has said on a number of occasions that he was influenced by Goya’s Colossus in creating
scenes of the battles between the giants: the reptilian Kaiju and the cyborg Jaeger.
EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Exercise 1
Cinema, like art, has struggled to give form to abstract concepts like evil, or
the philosophical questions around spirit and mortality. Watch any of the
horror films mentioned in this chapter or any of those suggested below, and
note when and how abstract concepts such as evil or the spirit world are
portrayed by characters, symbols, or other visual manifestations.
Suggested horror films (you may have already seen these, but they are
classics of the genre):
Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976; remade 2013 by Kimberly Peirce)
Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002; Japanese original Ringu directed by Hideo
Nakata)
Exercise 2
William Blake made a series of paintings about the “red dragon,” an avatar
of the Devil in the Book of Revelation. The Great Red Dragon and the
Woman Clothed in Sun was a key plot point in Red Dragon (2002) directed
by Brett Ratner. Watch this film and notice the different ways that elements
of the painting are integrated into the story.
Exercise 3
Select a favorite painting that depicts a horror vision. Either choose one that
has been discussed in depth in this chapter, by Salvator Rosa, Francis
Bacon, Titian, or Goya, or look up others such as William Blake, Hans
Memmling, Théodore Géricault, Matthias Grunewald, or Alfred Kubin, or
see Bacon’s 1953 Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (sometimes
called Screaming Pope). Imagine recreating the painting as a scene in your
own movie. What kind of camera setups would you use? Imagine it as an
audiovisual experience. What kind of sound or music would you choose to
accompany this scene?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Both Peter Paul Rubens and Francisco de Goya painted disturbing versions
of Saturn Devouring His Son, both in the Prado Museum. Which is more
cinematic? What are the criteria you used to make that assessment? How
would you storyboard such a scene?
FURTHER READING
Keith McDonald and Roger Clark, Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic
Art (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos (Dover Publications, 1969)
Colin Odell and Michelle LeBlanc, Horror Films (Kamera Books, 2010)
Darren Oldridge, The Devil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University
Press, 2012)
Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film, rev. ed. (Princeton University Press, 2015)
Daniel Zalewski, “Show the Monster: Guillermo del Toro’s quest to get
amazing creatures onscreen.” The New Yorker, February 7, 2011
David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990, 2nd ed.
(Yale University Press, 2002)
James Oles, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco
(The Museum of Modern Art, 2011)
Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera (Siqueiros
Chronicle Books, 1998)
NOTES
1 Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary
Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1826), pp. 145–152.
2 Darren Oldridge, The Devil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012). Jeffrey
Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1984) and
Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Cornell University Press, 1981) both discuss the evolution
of the idea of the Devil, with some discussion of art. Dennis Wheatley, The Devil and All His
Works (Hutchinson & Co., 1971), is a dated but entertaining and well-illustrated discussion of the
subject.
3 Oldridge, op. cit.
4 “The 10 Best Devils,” The Guardian, September 18, 2010.
5 The Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, No. 4048 (May 9, 1782).
6 Jane P. Davidson, Early Modern Supernatural: The Dark Side of European Culture, 1400–1700
(ABC-CLIO, 2012).
7 Suzanne L. Marchand and David F. Lindenfeld, Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics,
and Ideas (LSU Press, 2004).
8 Joseph L. Henderson and Dyane N. Sherwood, Transformation of the Psyche: The Symbolic
Alchemy of the Splendor Solis (Routledge, 2004), discusses the practice of alchemy in Venice.
Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012), explains the
symbolism.
9 This claim is made by artist and curator Helen Lessore, Partial Testament: Essays on Some
Moderns in the Great Tradition (Tate Publishing, 1986).
10 Nigel Floyd in Time Out London, March 20, 2006.
11 Simon Crook in Empire, no date, available at www.empireonline.com/reviews.
12 Adrian Searle, “Painted Screams”, The Guardian, Tuesday 9th September 2008
13 Roger Ebert, The Exorcist, Chicago Sun Times, December 26th 1973. Ebert’s review is archived
on http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-exorcist-1973
14 From a letter to Martin Zapater, quoted in Robert Hughes, Goya (Vintage, 2004), p. 151.
15 Adrian Hamilton, “The Shocking Truth: Why Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Tactics Are Wearing
Thin,” The Independent on Sunday, December 1, 2013; Alan Riding “Goya Probably Would Not
Be Amused,” The New York Times, April 6, 2003.
16 Interview with Enrique Diaz, www.nuvein.org.
17 Guardian NFT Interview, Mark Kermode and Guillermo del Toro, 2006. Pan’s Labyrinth, 2007,
Optimum Releasing DVD Extras.
18 Robert Huges, Goya (Vintage, 2004), p. 233.
19 Quoted in Mark Kermode, “Pain Should Not Be Sought—but It Should Never Be Avoided,” The
Observer, November 5, 2006, and in Mark Kermode, “Girl Interrupted,” Sight & Sound,
December 2006.
20 Mark Kermode, BBC Culture Show, 2006. Archived on YouTube, https://youtu.be/iqdEKahV-gs.
CHAPTER SIX
LANDSCAPE
Paintings have created many different visual reference points which have
been repurposed, both consciously and unconsciously by filmmakers. The
previous chapters have looked at the representation of gender and of beauty,
at violence, and also at the visual manifestations of our deepest fears.
Landscape painting, as a way of seeing the natural world, developed over the
course of the seventeenth century, and became extremely important in the
English-speaking world. English artists took up landscape painting with
enthusiasm, and this tendency was replicated in the new nation of the United
States of America, as the painters of the American West created the first
great movement in American art.
Landscapes helped people to see the world, and to reorder it. Landscape
paintings allowed us to see the relation of ordinary man to his environment.
They helped us to appreciate the natural beauty of the terrain, in all seasons,
in daytime and moonlight.
WHY LANDSCAPE?
The ancient Greeks and Romans painted trompe l’oeil landscapes on their
walls, to give the illusion of sitting in the open air or in a garden. In the late
medieval period (1200–1400), we start to see landscapes in paintings.
However, even though these landscapes are often reasonably accurate
depictions of recognizable places, they served principally as backgrounds to
the subject matter.
The idea that Art ennobles Nature is a classic Renaissance doctrine. Nature
(or landscape) is not interesting or important in itself, but once represented
through art it is transformed and repurposed in a variety of ways. However,
during the eighteenth century, the so-called “cult of nature” held that it is in
fact Nature that ennobles Man. Landscape painting embodies both notions.
Poussin’s friend and fellow Frenchman in Italy, Claude Lorrain, was even
more compelled by landscape. Claude put the obligatory mythical figures in
the composition, but it is said that he was so uninterested in painting figures
that he used to hire other artists to do that while he painted the landscape.
Claude was particularly interested in painting the sun as the preeminent
dynamic light source.
Pictures of countryside with peasants, shepherds, and the like are known as
“pastoral.” Idealized images of rural life gained considerable popularity in
the eighteenth century, and this popularity continued well into the twentieth.
FURTHER VIEWING
The splendid flare of the sunlight in Claude’s Seaport with the
Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648) and his sun at dusk in A
Seaport (1644).
Pieter Paul Rubens, The Rainbow Landscape (1636).
FURTHER VIEWING
Eric Rohmer’s 2007 film Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (Romance
of Astree and Celadon) strongly references Watteau’s fête galante
compositions.
See also Watteau’s Les Champs-Elysées (1717), one of his most beautiful
pictures. If you visit Paris today, you can easily forget that “Champs-
Elysées” means “Elysian Fields,” but in the eighteenth century the
Champs-Elysées really was countryside, a place of picnics and
relaxation, as Watteau shows. However, critic Robert Hughes cautions us
against looking for social realism in Watteau’s pictures: “Outside of the
gilt frames . . . France was continuously at war for most of Watteau’s life.
. . . Men need paradises, however fictive, in times of trouble.”1 Watteau
communicates this through the structured theatricality of his characters,
many of whom are drawn from the commedia del arte theater tradition.
6.1
Meeting in the Open Air, 1720
Artist: Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721)
French painter Watteau shows the pleasure and enjoyment of love, expressed with freedom and ease,
yet there is often a sense of wistfulness, almost melancholia.
BEAUTIFUL, PICTURESQUE, OR SUBLIME?
The English writer Joseph Addison (1672–1719) described the sublime as
something that “fills the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.”2 The word
comes from the Latin, meaning “up to a limit.” The word was used to
describe the emotional state generated by evocations of extreme aspects of
nature—storms, mountains, oceans, deserts—emotions that are thrilling in
an irrational and excessive way, beyond the powers of reason, and
uncontrollably wonderful.
Salvator Rosa
In the previous chapter, we looked at Salvator Rosa and his painting
Witches at Their Incantations, but that was only one of many thrilling and
deliberately sensational paintings that the Italian artist made. Salvator Rosa
(1615–1673) specialized in edgy subject matter. He was born into a poor
family of painters and builders in Naples, but his sheer brilliance as both
painter and writer soon propelled him into the public eye. He was friends
with the Rome-based French landscape painter Claude Lorrain (1600–
1682), but their paintings could not be more different. Rosa’s canvases
feature “precipices, mountains, walls, torrents, rumblings,” in the approving
words of English Gothic novelist Horace Walpole.3 Rosa’s paintings of the
Italian hinterland revel in giant rock formations, twisted trees, ruined
buildings. His landscapes are wild, uncultivated, and barely inhabited. To
the audience, Rosa’s brigands were a thrilling alternative to rationality and
stability, safely experienced in a frame and not in the street. In the
eighteenth century, there grew up a popular myth that along with painting
bandits, Salvator Rosa himself was part of a group of artist-outlaws
involved in political unrest and perhaps other depredations. Rosa’s
handsome, piratical self-portraits no doubt added to the romantic fiction.
FURTHER VIEWING
Because so many of Rosa’s paintings were bought by English people
visiting Italy in the eighteenth century, one of the best places to see them
online is BBC’s Your Paintings site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/salvator-rosa.
English Landscape
In the early eighteenth century, English intelligentsia noticed that, despite
major accomplishments in literature, painting had so far eluded Anglo
culture. Dutch painting was well established in England, because almost all
of the painters active in England in the previous two centuries were Dutch.
Rubens and Watteau provided the two principal models for eighteenth-
century English landscape painting. Both artists pay great attention to the
movement of light in foliage, and the compositions are organized in such a
way that there is as much interest in the landscape as there is in the figures.
But these painters’ gentle landscapes were not the only inspiration. Salvator
Rosa’s thrilling and titillating vistas were also extremely popular, and in the
eighteenth century almost all of his paintings were bought and shipped to
England.
In the eighteenth century, for the first time, many Englishmen, and some women, dared to become
painters. Most were from modest backgrounds: Hogarth’s father was a poor schoolteacher, George
Romney’s father was a cabinetmaker, Gainsborough’s was a cloth dealer and then a postman, and
Turner’s was a barber. All of them needed to earn a living, and they were able to do so from
painting the portraits and the landholdings of the bourgeoisie.
While portrait painting remained the bread and butter for English painters,
landscape became increasingly popular. Thomas Gainsborough left behind
many letters in which he complained to his friends about having to paint
portraits when he would really rather be out in the countryside painting the
landscape and its peasant folk. Gainsborough developed realistic landscape
painting to the point that it was finally taken seriously. As tourism and
traveling became more and more popular throughout the eighteenth century,
people wanted souvenirs, not only of trips to Italy but of trips around the
country as well, and gradually landscape painting became a viable genre for
the working painter.
6.3
Frozen River, 2008
Dir. Courtney Hunt, DP Reed Dawson Morano
Although Frozen River is a social realist picture, the thrill and tension when the protagonists drive
out onto the frozen river (filmed on location in subfreezing temperatures in upstate New York) owe
much to painters of the sublime like Friedrich. See also his The Sea of Ice (1824; also called The
Wreck of Hope, or The Arctic Shipwreck). Friedrich did not visit the icebound shipwreck, but he
certainly had plenty of opportunity to see ice on the northern Baltic coast in winter.
In Rain, Steam and Speed we see one of the first really significant
representations of the Industrial Revolution in art. Turner creates an illusion
of moving light, cloud, and steam dissolving together, capturing a cinematic
moment. Modern industry is portrayed as elemental, alive. The image is so
diffused it is almost not a landscape; Turner has also been claimed as the
forerunner to abstract art. Yet it is impossible to miss the sensation that the
train is real, hurtling toward you out of the steam and mist.
6.4
Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Turner depicts the rapid and tumultuous transformation of the landscape by the Industrial Revolution
in a composition of strong diagonals and bold contrasts of light and dark, so diffused as to be almost
abstract.
Actor Timothy Spall, who played Turner in Mike Leigh’s film Mr. Turner
(2014), says, “He was a painter of the sublime. That word has come to
mean something rather different now, something you say after you’ve tasted
something nice in a restaurant. But the sublime then was the power of
nature, and man’s irrelevance within it and the futility of attempting to
conquer it. That’s what Turner painted, that ferocious competition between
beauty and horror.”8
FURTHER VIEWING
New York City was the cultural center, and most painters were based there.
In 1825 Thomas Cole (1801–1848) helped establish the National Academy
of Design and brought artists together to paint the region around the
Hudson River Valley in New York State. They painted romantic, sublime
stormy skies and dramatic rock formations as well as gorgeous autumnal
colors. Cole and the others celebrated the novelty of the American
landscape in art, noting that, in contrast to views of Italy and Switzerland, it
was not “hackneyed and worn by the daily pencils of hundreds.”9 They
stressed their advantage, that in America the sublime wilderness was real
and still relatively close by. But Cole was no exponent of the American
Dream: he also used landscape art to warn of the dangers of material
progress and expansionism. The reality was that the Hudson River Valley
was no longer a pristine wilderness; it was a populated and touristed area,
where the Native population had been driven out decades before.
6.5
View of Long’s Peak from Estes Park (Indian Encampment), 1876
Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
Bierstadt made a sketching trip to Estes Park, Colorado, in the dramatic Rocky Mountains, in late
1876. The park was already open for tourism by 1867, with the first hotels appearing around the time
of Bierstadt’s visit.
George Catlin (1796–1872) was the first great painter of Indian life; he
aimed “to rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs.”12 He
went out West when it was still dangerous, joining a diplomatic mission up
the Mississippi River into Native American territory in 1830. Catlin made
many portraits of Native people and described their way of life in his
paintings.13 He created a huge “Indian Gallery” of portraits that toured
America and Europe for a decade. He painted important personages like
Seminole Chief Osceola and Ha-Na-Tah-Muah, Wolf chief of the Mandan
people. But he also painted Indian village life, buffalo hunting trips, and
family scenes of mothers with children. Catlin’s subjects trusted him, even
allowing him to make portraits of the Blackfoot “medicine men” and to
depict the shamanic initiations of the Mandan people. Catlin was angry
about the expropriation of the Indians and the corruption of their culture by
white settlement.14 Yet this noble aim to preserve Native culture came with
its own challenge: making ends meet led him to questionable,
compromising strategies. He lured audiences to his exhibitions by
presenting Natives enacting war dances, almost a “Wild West Show” of
sensationalism and exploitation.
6.6
Buffalo Chase, 1844
Artist: George Catlin (1796–1872)
Catlin’s mission was to record the vanishing Native American way of life.
One of the starkest paintings of Native life is by Swiss artist Karl Bodmer
(1809–1893). In “Mih-tutta-hang-kutch” Mandan Village (1834), he
portrays the dispossessed and displaced Natives in the bleak winter
landscape. Like Catlin, Bodmer wanted to record the threatened Native
American culture. Bodmer visited the Mandan people during an
exceptionally severe winter when there was little food, and even his
traveling companion contracted scurvy from the limited diet. The suffering
people are foregrounded, and the snowy landscape stretches on forever,
unrelieved by any attempt to glamorize or beautify it in any way. This is a
picture as critical as a war photograph by Robert Capa. Bodmer was
reluctant to share the prevailing American view of the Native; he
questioned the belief in “progress” and returned to Europe.
Visual artists responded to the popular interest in stories of the Wild West
and created iconic images for magazines that fed into movie imagery. Like
Bodmer and Catlin, Frederic Remington (1861–1909) was interested in
Native Americans, though his pictures largely championed the white
cowboy’s point of view. A Dash for the Timber (1889) depicts a team of
cowboys at full heroic gallop in the middle of battle. Remington was a
writer as well as an artist, and illustrated his own books. In his The Old
Stage-Coach of the Plains (1901), the coach crests a hill under a night sky,
a dramatic and cinematic narrative moment.
6.7
Wyoming String Team c. 1880, 1966
Artist: Nick Eggenhofer (1897–1985)
Young Nick Eggenhofer saw the 1898 silent movie Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, shot by the Thomas
Edison film company, and became fascinated by the legends of the Old West. He began working as
an illustrator of western scenes for magazines and book covers. His work became some of the best-
known images of the Old West and remained highly popular during the golden age of the western
from the 1920s through to the late 1950s. In recent years he has been reclaimed as a fine artist, with
exhibitions in museums, and his work is widely collected. Wyoming String Team c. 1880 is a history
painting, made almost a hundred years after the Old West had passed into legend.
FURTHER VIEWING
The best place to see art of the American West is the Joslyn Art Museum
in Omaha, Nebraska, which has the most comprehensive collection by
Carl Bodmer, as well as many paintings by Bierstadt, Catlin, and others.
The Joslyn website (http://www.joslyn.org) provides an excellent virtual
tour of the collection, with the opportunity to study the paintings in
detail.
The Western
By the time the Thomas Edison company turned its cameras on Buffalo
Bill, the imagery of the American West had been established for almost a
century: a vast empty landscape, with stunning scenery, few people, and
picturesque Native populations. Early western movies were able to use
these paintings and illustrations to create exciting settings that were already
familiar to audiences. Early American cinema audiences were almost
entirely based in urban areas, particularly the immigrant-populated cities of
the eastern seaboard, who only saw the West in the cinema and in art.
The western is the most landscape-centric film genre. Indeed, the landscape
defines the western completely, as the stories are inextricably linked to their
location. But the visual imagery of the western is drawn almost completely
from painting: the sublime vision, dramatic sunsets, a sense of isolation,
emphasis on topography such as mountains, rivers, and lakes. Figures are
often depicted as almost miniscule.
But the paintings are themselves nostalgic, showing a vanishing way of life,
hiding the reality of tourism and the squalor that existed in both Native
encampments and settler villages. The popular media of the time did not
elaborate on these things.
6.8
Stagecoach, 1939
Dir. John Ford
By the late 1930s, location shooting made it possible to take the whole film on location to Monument
Valley in Utah, where Ford shot almost all of his western films.
CASE STUDY:
THE ROAD MOVIE
Heading West
Two young men with motorcycles cut a lucrative drug deal and then ride
across the USA to the New Orleans Mardi Gras. On their way they visit a
hippie commune and a Mexican American farm, befriend a civil rights
lawyer, and encounter intolerance and violence. Peter Fonda and Dennis
Hopper wanted to make a movie that would take the pulse of the era, a time
convulsed by the Vietnam War and the perceived “generation gap” between
the conservative older generation and the youth.19
Easy Rider contrasts “America the beautiful” with an ugly America: the
beauty of the landscape against the brutality of its inhabitants. But not all of
the landscape: the film idealizes the Southwest, with its dramatic desert
vistas, populated by hospitable, spiritual folk—Native Americans,
Hispanics, hippies—and indicts the South. “In the Southwest the
protagonists enjoy the freedom of the road, the hospitality of those they
encounter in the beauty and mystery of the region’s wilderness.”
Conversely, the South, despite occasional glimpses of verdant beauty and
Old South plantation houses, reveals African American poverty and a
despoiled industrial world of oil refineries, cheap cafes, and ignorant
bigots.20
The movie was made on location, following much of the famed old
Route 66 through California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Louisiana, and a
great deal of it was shot on the open road by DP Laszlo Kovacs. Fonda and
Hopper rode their motorcycles on the road, accompanied by the camera car,
a 1968 Chevy convertible with the backseat taken out and a pinewood floor
where the tripod was fixed. This allowed Kovacs to use a telephoto lens to
offer many different points of view while aligning the movement of the
bikes, capturing the landscape from the bikers’ perspective. “Laszlo was
able to give us a sense of freedom of being on the road, of being able to
experience America for the first time . . . he was able to be that metaphor of
freedom” (Cinematographer Ellen Kuras).21
Kovacs, a refugee from the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, recalls first
crossing America by bus, sitting in the front seat. His first impression of
America was that it was a “devastatingly beautiful country . . . it left such
an impression on me [. . .] that later on I was able to use it in my movies.”
The trip also “taught me one lesson that the environment the background is
so important it has to be a third character because it tells so much about
people who live in it.”22
The landscape is indeed a character in Easy Rider. As Fonda points out,
the film reverses the classic western route of east to west. The journey starts
in hope, with stunning sequences in the Painted Desert and in Monument
Valley (interestingly, the film crew left New Mexico and passed right
through Texas; if they shot there, none of the footage is in the film) and
ends on a nondescript roadside on the banks of the Atchafalaya River in
upstate Louisiana. Kovacs invoked romanticism through the use of lens
flare; previously considered a grave camera error, Conrad Hall had used it
in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke. Kovacs saw its aesthetic possibility to create
what he called “rainbows” of light, romanticizing the landscape and
offering a shimmer of hope that is belied by the film’s story.23
Twentieth-Century Landscape Painting and the Madness of
Civilization
Since the locus of the American art world was still New York, other parts of
the country were relatively underrepresented until the 1960s. While the
Southwest was painted, by Georgia O’Keefe among others, the Deep South
less so.24 O’Keefe, a New York artist, went to New Mexico in the 1930s
and painted its desert landscapes, later making it her permanent base; the
state later became one of the most significant artistic communities outside
New York. Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) painted the industrial landscape
(see American Landscape, 1930, a depiction of the Ford plant on the River
Rouge near Detroit, Michigan, strangely devoid of people). Regional
painters did have a local impact: the Bayou School painters settled in and
around New Orleans and captured that area’s particularity (see the works of
William Henry Buck, 1840–1888, and others on the Historic New Orleans
Collection website, http://www.hnoc.org). Others explored remote
locations: Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871–1945) traveled alone by
canoe around the Pacific Northwest.
While American painting in the mid-twentieth century was dominated by
Abstract Expressionism, landscape painting did survive. However, it was
Pop Art that addressed the modern American landscape from the 1960s,
critiquing the romanticism of the road, the lure of the highway, and the
vastness of the American terrain. While pop artists acknowledged the
dominance of the road as an American motif, and mobility as a
characteristic of American culture, they “questioned the road as a metaphor
for freedom seeing it as quote little more than a conveyor belt that runs
through a repetition repetitive vacuous monotonous environment.”25
Andy Warhol borrowed newspaper clippings to create colored silk
screens devoted to a series of car crashes, critiquing the media’s
concentration on highway disasters, deglamorizing the myth of the car crash
as a romantic “blaze of glory” ending (see Orange Car Crash Fourteen
Times, 1963). Allan D’Arcangelo (1930–1988; see US Highway 1, Number
5, 1963) reduced the road to a series of signs, a never ending blacktop of
ennui where nothing happens. Even the desert is critiqued in Lyn Foulkes’s
paintings: in Death Valley, USA (1963), the landscape is unromanticized,
undistinguished, inhospitable, and unpleasant. In the 1995 painting The
Western Viewpoint (which can be seen on the website
http://llynfoulkes.com), Foulkes paints the desert as a dried-out inhospitable
environment, inhabited by a pastiche image of an “Indian” couple in
traditional dress, echoing the art and film trope of the “spiritual Native” in
the desert environment. They are overlooked by a Mickey Mouse sitting on
a fence post surveying the scene, with the symbol of a question mark above
his head. In the foreground is a fence bearing a sign “This fence is state
property. Do not move without permit.” A drooping American flag stands to
the right. It is a highly critical perspective, an approach that has much in
common with a film like Natural Born Killers by Oliver Stone, a road
movie that criticizes every romanticized cliché of the road movie, and the
media that glorify senseless violence.
6.12
Meek’s Cutoff, 2010
Dir. Kelly Reichardt
The figures are silhouetted or semi-silhouetted against the sky and dry, scrubby ground. The textiles
on the line and the skirt of the dress are caught by the wind. While the foreground of the image is
homely, the vast blank expanse beyond and the lone rider indicate a deep sense of isolation.
Reichardt’s depiction of the encounter between the white settlers and the
Native (Rod Rondeaux as “The Cayuse”) and their inability to
communicate is both realistic and poignant. But Rondeaux’s brave is not in
control of his environment: he is as alone as the settlers—he may also be
lost.
Jean Francois Millet, a nineteenth-century French realist, is known for
his scenes of the French countryside and the way of life there. He and his
friends left Paris for Barbizon, a village near Fontainebleau south of the
capital. Inspired by English painters like John Constable, they wanted to
paint nature, and especially landscapes. Millet wanted to produce
landscapes with figures, but instead of idealized pretty shepherdesses and
milkmaids, he portrayed real people, peasants working in the fields. Muted,
glowing light created by cloud formations and weather, as well as the
position of the sun or moon, infuse all of his works. Millet himself came
from a farming family and knew the rhythms of peasant life at first hand.
See also The Gleaners (1857).
Many of Meek’s Cutoff’s compositions and lighting bear strong
resemblance to Millet’s works, including the night scenes (see The
Sheepfold, Moonlight, 1856). At other times, such as the campfire scenes,
we see Rembrandtian chiaroscuro. The powerful heat of high noon in the
Oregon desert is conveyed in a stark, hard-edged look; the colors, usually
so muted and softened, suddenly seem almost unbearable. Is Meek’s Cutoff
a western or a road movie? It is both. It critiques the whole body of
“knowledge” about “the West” framed by cinema and by painters like
Bierstadt, Remington, Eggenhofer, and others. The road is unknown, the
destination seems unattainable (in real life the wagon train did make it,
barely). The West is dramatic, beautiful, empty, mysterious, terrifying. The
film is mainly about the people lost in it, wandering, thirsty, vulnerable, yet
poignantly hopeful.
6.13
L’Angélus (The Angelus), 1857–1859
Artist: Jean Francois Millet (1814–1875)
In a potato field, a man and a woman are reciting the Angelus, a Catholic prayer traditionally recited
at 6 p.m. Millet wanted to catch the rhythms of peasant life in a simple scene. The light is beginning
to fade.
6.14
Stalker, 1979
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky creates a mysterious postapocalyptic landscape out of postindustrial ruins in Soviet
Estonia, including a dilapidated shipyard, a decommissioned hydroelectric station, and an abandoned
oil processing plant.
The French landscape in winter is the setting for Agnes Varda’s 1985
film Vagabond, a road movie about a young female drifter. Again, there is a
refusal to romanticize, prettify, or even find any beauty in the out-of-season
Languedoc landscape. Director Varda has said of the film that she wanted to
explore what freedom meant—but not only freedom, also the dirt of the
road, the grit and the stench of life on the road. Vagabond is a European
riposte to the American myth of individual independence, symbolized by
the West and the open road.
Part dystopian road movie, part spiritual quest, Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Stalker, loosely based on the 1971 science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, moves through a devastated landscape. Two
men, a writer and a professor of science, hire a Stalker, a guide to take them
through a mysterious and forbidden terrain, known as the Zone. Within the
Zone, they believe, lies a Room which supposedly contains the power to
fulfill a person’s deepest desire. As they set off on the journey, the Stalker
informs the men that the problem with the Zone is that it is a sentient
landscape: the land itself senses their presence and lays dangerous traps for
them. The Stalker’s role is to find a safe route to the Room.
The film treats landscape in an interesting way. The Zone is shot in color,
often with a strong emphasis on blues and greens, which contrasts with the
rusty red of some of the industrial detritus that lies around. The Zone is
compelling; its ruined beauty is seductive. Although there is only one brief
moment in which Tarkovsky shows us the sentience of the Zone’s terrain,
we believe in it right from the beginning of the journey. Most of the other
scenes are high-contrast sepia, giving a sense of timelessness. “The Zone
doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films;
the Zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it, man may
break down or he may come through.”29
EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Exercise 1
Consider different kinds of landscape, including the industrial landscape
discussed in Chapter 3’s section on Antonioni’s Red Desert. Watch any of
the following suggested films of different genres—or choose your own—
and note the different ways that the visual appearance of place dramatically
affects the mood and drives the story. Consider the “landscape of the mind”
and how landscape settings serve as outward manifestations of characters’
inner subjective states. Can landscape in cinema or art ever be neutral? Why
or why not?
The Last Frontier (1955), dir. Anthony Mann, DP William Mellor
Kes (1969), dir. Ken Loach, DP Chris Menges
Get Carter (1971), dir. Mike Hodges, DP Wolfgang Suschitzky
Eraserhead (1977), dir. David Lynch, DP Frederick Elmes
The Deer Hunter (1978), dir. Michael Cimino, DP Vilmos Zsigmond
Beau Travail (1999), Claire Denis, DP Agnès Godard
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, DP Gökhan
Tiryaki
Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), dir. Shane Meadows, DP Danny Cohen
The Last King of Scotland (2006), dir. Kevin MacDonald, DP Anthony Dod
Mantle
Or choose a road movie:
Central Station (1998), dir. Walter Salles, DP Walter Carvalho
Y Tu Mamá También (2001), dir. Alfonso Cuarón, DP Emmanuel Lubezki
Children of Men (2006), dir. Alfonso Cuarón, DP Emmanuel Lubezki
Las Acacias (2011), dir. Pablo Giorgelli, DP Diego Poleri
Exercise 2
Brazilian director Walter Salles (who studied film in the US) has made road
movies that explore the landscape of South and North America.
In 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries, and in 2012’s On the Road, Salles and
DP Eric Gautier, depicted two iconic journeys: respectively, Ernesto Che
Guevara’s South American odyssey toward politicization, and Beat writer
Jack Kerouac’s account of the chaotic, emotional road trips he and his
friends made across the US. Watch both films and compare the way Salles
and Gautier depict each journey and their approach to visual storytelling.
Compare their depiction of landscape and how each shapes the film’s story
and characters.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Heroic Characters
Heroic characters are central to human culture. They always appear; only
the outward trappings change. Carl Jung proposed the idea of archetypes, or
“primordial image” that we are all born with and that shape human
behavior. The hero archetype is one of these. In painting, Greek mythical
characters were by far the most favored, although biblical heroic characters
such as David also appear frequently. The problem with biblical characters
as heroes is that the most heroic Christian character, Jesus, does not
conform to the hero stereotype. In this respect, Greek mythology was a far
more reliable source of painting ideas. Ever popular Hercules, the
impossibly strong man, recurs in art from Greek friezes and vases through
early Renaissance paintings right up to present-day cinema.
We’ve already seen Titian’s painting of Perseus and Andromeda, with the
hero in mid-plunge into the sea to rescue the woman from the monstrous
sea serpent. The important thing about the hero character is that the hero is
mortal, or at least half-mortal, and so his or her feats are particularly
remarkable. The difference between a Greek god and a heroic character is
that the god is expected to be great and powerful, so therefore is not really
heroic but simply doing what gods are supposed to do. The hero, on the
other hand, has to become heroic.
FURTHER VIEWING
Some paintings of the exploits of the hero Hercules throughout history:
Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Hercules and the Hydra (1475)
Gregorio De Ferrari, Hercules and Antaeus (1690s); another version was
made by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1530).
Hendrick Goltzius made an engraving, The Great Hercules (1589) and a
later painting, Hercules and Cacus (1613).
Rubens made several Hercules paintings, including an amusing depiction
of The Drunken Hercules (1611).
A late interpretation, Hercules Freeing Prometheus (1819), by Friedrich
Heinrich Fuger, also shows the Romantic fascination with the defiant
hero Prometheus (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was subtitled “A Modern
Prometheus”).
FURTHER VIEWING
Films about Napoleon Bonaparte: how “heroic” is he?
Napoleon (1927), dir. Abel Gance, DP Jules Kruger; one of the greatest
history films, owing much to both David and Delaroche
Désirée (1954), dir. Henry Koster, DP Milton R. Krasner; a different
approach, focusing on the relationship between Bonaparte (Marlon
Brando) and Désirée Clary (Jean Simmons)
Waterloo (1970), dir. Sergei Bondarchuk, DP Armando Nannuzzi
David was not the first artist to show that portraying real-life people as
heroes involves exaggeration and theatricality. David knew that this is not
how Napoleon crossed the Alps, but he understood that in order to create a
painting with the highest impact to deliver the propaganda message of
Napoleon’s overarching genius, strength, power, and glamour, it was
necessary to create a powerful, glamorous painting. This problem is at the
heart of biopics that attempt to show the core character in a heroic light.
Much of the true story and extraneous detail has to be removed, and any act
or gesture made by the central character needs to be reinterpreted as heroic.
One of the best examples of this in recent cinema is Mel Gibson’s 1995 film
Braveheart, which puts a completely new gloss on the true story of William
Wallace. Wallace was a real person who did rebel, but under circumstances
rather different from those shown in the film. The film tries to capture
historical detail, but there’s no question that it was glamorized for dramatic
effect.
7.2
Toussaint L’Ouverture at Bedourete, 2004
Artist: Kimathi Donkor
Here Donkor is employing the archetypal heroic composition and gesture established by David and
also referencing David’s use of color. But the political intent is completely different: L’Ouverture was
the leader of a slave rebellion in Haiti, inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution. However,
Napoleon sent troops to the island to quell the rebellion, and L’Ouverture was arrested and
imprisoned. He remains a key figure in black history.
Symbolic Heroes
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People depicts the Paris uprising of July
1830, which overthrew Charles X, the king who was restored after
Napoleon’s defeat. Delacroix did not participate in the uprising; he was in
the Louvre helping to protect the collection from the chaos. Though he
depended on commissions from institutions and members of the royal
family, Delacroix had republican sympathies. Perceiving the uprising as a
suitable modern subject for a painting, he started to paint this dramatic
scene of the crowd breaking through the barricades, led by the female
symbol of Republican France, “Marianne” or Lady Liberty. It is a cinematic
and romantic vision, seeking to achieve immediate emotional impact.
7.3
Liberty Leading the People, 1830
Artist: Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
“Although I may not have fought for my country, at least I shall have painted for her,” Delacroix
wrote in a letter to his brother.2 It is not only Lady Liberty who is shown in a heroic pose; so are the
men fighting alongside her. This is one of the first actively political works of modern painting.
The painting has a pyramid composition: the base, strewn with corpses,
serves as a pedestal supporting the victors as they push forward, and the
pyramid is crested by the lovely Marianne. In her, Delacroix combines
classicism, Romanticism, and realism. Liberty’s dress is draped in the
classic manner, and her face has a Grecian profile with classical straight
nose. But her upraised arm reveals the underarm hair that was so vulgar that
no painter dared to represent it. She holds a real gun in her left hand, the
1816 model infantry gun with bayonet. She is half-naked, but not sexual.
The bare-breasted, fierce image of Marianne leading the battle had appeared
in the French revolutionary propaganda of the 1790s; Delacroix revives it,
but here makes it romantic, full of color and life, yet also real. The other
figures in the painting are as real yet as symbolic as Marianne, as Delacroix
faithfully reproduced the style of dress worn by different sectors of society
at the time. The man to the right of Liberty in the black beret (worn by
students) is a symbol of youthful revolt. The man with the sabre on the far
left is a factory worker. Elsewhere in the picture we can see that Delacroix
has depicted other workers and peasants realistically. The figure with the
top hat may be a self-portrait, or one of Delacroix’s friends. He represents a
bourgeois or fashionable urbanite making common cause with the ordinary
people.
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People was a key inspiration for Eve Stewart, production designer
for the 2012 film of Les Misérables,3 which is set during the 1830 events.
The 1830 uprising did not end in a new republic but in a substitute king,
and it took several more revolutionary events before France finally became
a republic. As one of the most dramatic, persuasive, and stimulating images
of revolutionary action, Liberty Leading the People was dangerous. The
painting was hidden away from public view in 1863. Today it is one of the
most popular paintings in the Louvre.
Liberty Leading the People is one of the most cinematic paintings of the
nineteenth century and continues to serve as a matrix for crowd scenes, and
for the inclusion of symbolic character types within the composition.
However, the active heroic female figure, which owes something to the
athletic dynamism of the Roman goddess Diana, is only rarely presented in
cinema. In recent years female action heroes have become more common,
but with the exceptions of the characters Sarah Connor in the Terminator
films and Ripley in the Alien films, it is rare to see female action heroes
who are not sexualized. Delacroix’s Liberty is bare-breasted to emphasize
her femaleness, but she is not using her femaleness to be sexual.
FURTHER VIEWING
Theodor Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819). Géricault (1791–1824)
was Delacroix’s teacher. His The Charging Chasseur (1812) reinvents
David’s Napoleon portrait as a romantic adventure. The Raft of the
Medusa is a political work, depicting a recent scandal: the aftermath of a
shipwreck in which the captain had left the crew and passengers to die.
Heroic Bodies
Ford Madox Brown was inspired by two people: he admired William
Hogarth, who created pictures with social comment and immediate
relevance, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who emphasized the nobility of
labor, believing that work should be a rewarding experience worthy of
respect. Brown wanted to paint the “nobility of labor.” His central character
is a young workman, holding his shovel at a right angle to his body, his
muscles taut and rippling impressively. Brown is doing something similar to
Napoleon’s horse rearing up: an unrealistic position to create an image of
heroism. The young workman is the hero of the picture, with a strong,
classical body. He is a modern Hercules, in a heroic pose.
Again we see the pyramid composition, but here Brown subverts the
pyramid. He puts the aristocracy (on the horses), who occupy the top of the
social hierarchy, at the top of the pyramid, but he recedes them into
darkness. The principal subject, the young worker with the shovel, he
places slightly off center, and makes space around him, so that the eye is
naturally drawn there. Unusually for a painter, Ford wrote a comprehensive
explanation of all the details in the picture, including the symbolic
meanings of every single subject, which was published in the catalog
essay.4 Philosopher Thomas Carlyle (a “brain worker”) appears in the
picture, in the hat on the far right.
7.4
Work (1852–1865)
Artist: Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893)
Ford Madox Brown is not among the ranks of “great artists,” but he is useful and important because
the wide dissemination of prints of his Work entered the popular consciousness. Brown’s paintings
and murals tend to be didactic and moralistic, and Work is no exception. Apparently, as Brown was
walking down the street one day, he noticed a group of workers digging a drain, putting in London’s
vast sewer system. He decided to paint them right there on the street, in order to capture the precise
details of light, color, and form.
But the heroic body can also be a site of critique, with the image of heroism
undermined through the body. For example, Ernst Kirchner’s Self Portrait
as a Soldier (1915), shows the soldier, the consummate hero, wounded and
disabled; Horace Vernet’s The Wounded Trumpeter (1819) likewise shows
an incapacitated warrior. Many filmmakers have used the physicality of the
heroic body and its suffering as core images in films dealing with war. Clare
Denis’s Beau Travail (1999) makes the warriors’ bodies a site of suffering,
not just from the conditions of the desert but also from homoerotic longing.
In Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, the body of bomb disposal expert
William James (Jeremy Renner) is often encased in armor that renders him
like an alien or a powerful insect; when he emerges from this carapace, he
falters, and we see his confusion and weaknesses. In the western Django
(1966, Sergio Corbucci), the hero’s hands are crushed and mutilated before
the climactic battle.
7.5
The Hurt Locker, 2008
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, DP Barry Ackroyd
The tension in this story of a three-man bomb disposal team, shot on location in the Middle East, is
heightened by the concealing armor they wear.
HEROISM AND THE WESTERN
John Ford was aware that he was in the business of making myths. In one of
his most important films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a character
says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This is what Ford
wanted to do. He often said that while his films were historical, he was not
married to history. Ford was a friend of Wyatt Earp in the gunfighter’s later
days, when he served as a consultant on early silent westerns. In
Stagecoach, Ford tried to show the complexities of the American West—the
conflicts between the Natives and the white settlers, who in turn had
conflicts with outlaws, lawmen, and gunfighters. Ford’s westerns were
highly influential and made it a successful genre worldwide, spawning
imitators in many countries. At the core of the western genre is a tension
between the idea of valorizing Nature and the “noble savage”—whether it
be the Native or the cowboy living in the “natural” life—and the “civilizing
mission” ideology of settlement. Most of the painters discussed earlier in
the chapter could be seen as championing Nature. But John Ford believed in
the civilizing mission, and until his latest films (The Searchers, 1956), his
moral compass was clear, as were his heroes.
Yet later directors who address the western genre, such as Robert Altman in
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969),
not to mention the whole subgenre of “spaghetti” westerns initiated by
Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), question even the idea of
civilization, never mind heroism. In Leone’s films, the beautiful western
landscapes of John Ford are replaced by bleak, inhospitable desert
landscapes (even though Leone filmed part of Once Upon a Time in the
West (1968) in Monument Valley, he refused to make it picturesque). In
Sergio Corbucci’s original Django (1966), the frontier town is always
muddy, dreary, and filthy, with permanently hurtling wind. The protagonists
of these films are only heroic by default; they do not seem heroic, rather
mysterious, asocial, and amoral.
CASE STUDY:
SUBVERTING THE HEROIC GENRE
The western was the film genre that brought the heroic figure together with
the overwhelming yet splendid landscape. This case study looks at a
subversion of that cinema genre through an unlikely relationship: English
portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough (Blue Boy, 1770) and
American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained, 2012).
Quentin Tarantino has often been referred to as the archetypal
“postmodern” filmmaker. His films bear the hallmarks associated with
postmodernist approaches: appropriation of ideas, images, and texts from
different sources; referencing other movies, books, and art; pastiching
established genres; conflating popular culture and high culture. In his later
films, Tarantino subverts existing genres, including established trash and
schlock genre forms, and through the process of subversion seeks to make a
serious point.
Thomas Gainsborough, the eighteenth-century portrait and landscape
painter, could not be further apart from Quentin Tarantino at first glance.
Yet Gainsborough was subversive in many ways. Like Tarantino, he broke
new artistic ground and challenged established artistic forms. However,
until Django Unchained, it would have been ridiculous to imagine a
comparison between Gainsborough and Tarantino, or even to discuss them
within the same sentence. But in that film, Tarantino and his design team (J.
Michael Riva and Sharen Davis) appropriate a key element of one of
Gainsborough’s most popular and most widely distributed paintings, The
Blue Boy. It is from this starting point that we will look at this case study of
Django Unchained and Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.
The Blue Boy was painted before Gainsborough moved to London. Born
and raised in a lower-middle-class family in rural Suffolk, he moved to the
spa town of Bath as his portrait practice developed. The problem for
Gainsborough was that he preferred landscapes. He liked painting people—
skin tones, drapery, and costume—but, with the exception of certain female
clients, he disliked painting portraits of the type of people who
commissioned him. We know this because in his letters he complains about
his rich, arrogant, empty-headed clients, and says many times over that he
wishes he could just go to the countryside and spend the rest of his life
painting landscapes and common folk. (His own favorite was The
Woodsman, 1788, a portrait of a poor forest worker.)
It is not unusual for people to dislike their day job and wish to be doing
something else. But Gainsborough’s ability to create real likenesses of his
subjects made him successful. He rejected the current fashion of painting
his subjects dressed up as mythological beings; he wanted to paint people in
their own clothes, looking as they would if you met them. One of the
trendiest fashions in mid-eighteenth-century England was to be painted
wearing the court costume of the previous century, in the style of Dutch
painter Anthony Van Dyke at the court of King Charles I. Van Dyke’s
paintings were widely copied; all decent painters understood that they
should be able to make a Van Dyke to order. Van Dyke painted his
aristocratic subjects wearing elaborate silk and lace suits, one of the most
influential being Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart
(1638). In the painting, Bernard Stuart is wearing a fabulous pale blue satin
suit, though most of it is obscured by a heavy silver cape.
Normally this is the kind of portrait that Gainsborough would have
scoffed at replicating. But two years previously he had been elected a
founder member of the Royal Academy of Arts. It was never an easy
relationship; Gainsborough felt like an outsider with something to prove.
He decided to challenge the claim of the Academy’s head, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, that blue colors should be used only as accents, not in the main
mass of the picture. He painted a mass of blue, an exercise in color and light
reflecting on silk, using layers of different blue pigments: lapis and indigo,
cobalt and turquoise, together with charcoal and creamy white, and sent The
Blue Boy to the Royal Academy’s 1770 Salon. But who was the blue boy?
He was not an aristocrat or theater celebrity who would normally command
an Academy-level portrait. He was Jonathan Buttall, a good friend of
Gainsborough and an iron merchant in London. It was not a commissioned
portrait: Buttall posed for Gainsborough as a friend. Buttall was far outside
the circles of power; he could never have worn court dress. Therefore, The
Blue Boy is a subversion. It is not only a painting of an eighteenth-century
man in seventeenth-century dress; it is an aristocratic portrait that portrays a
middle-class man.
The painting became the talk of the Academy, and its success spurred the
painter to move to London two years later. He was commissioned by the
royal family, and his success enabled him to take more time out to paint his
beloved landscapes. But it was not that simple. Soon after arriving in
London, Gainsborough fell out with the Royal Academy and spent the rest
of his life in rivalry with Joshua Reynolds. He would probably be surprised
to know that The Blue Boy remains his most popular and most influential
painting—though not his best—while to him, it was a caprice. While
Jonathan is not portrayed heroically, he stands for the bourgeoisie, excluded
at that time from political power and influence, which was still in the hands
of the aristocracy. Dressing him in Van Dyke costume must have been a bit
of a joke, a subversion to slip into the heart of the Establishment, the Royal
Academy.
7.6
The Blue Boy, 1770
Artist: Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788)
Gainsborough painted his friend Jonathan Buttall in seventeenth-century court dress.
7.7
Django Unchained, 2012
Dir. Quentin Tarantino, DP Robert Richardson
Django rides majestically through the cotton field as the pickers look at him in astonishment.
The next shot is of Django wearing a bright blue suit, styled in a vague
pastiche of seventeenth-century fashion, the archetypal Blue Boy. The
connotations are rife: The Blue Boy is a well-known kitsch print, but the
painting resides in the important Huntingdon Museum in Los Angeles.
“Boy” was a condescending term used to address all African American
males regardless of age, particularly in the South.
We first see Django in his blue suit from the side, riding a horse through
a landscape, a cotton field. The composition of this shot is itself a nod to the
subgenre of the equestrian portrait. Van Dyke made a famous equestrian
portrait of Charles I, which was repeatedly copied, and Gainsborough made
variations on Van Dyke (as exercises, or simply to pay the bills). And the
David portrait of Napoleon is an equestrian portrait. Equestrian connotes
aristocrat and hero. But in that costume? Not yet.
The blue suit makes Django stand out, command attention, and is
ineffably striking. Riva notes that “color is a really important to me, it’s a
mood establisher.”7 The intense blue (much brighter than The Blue Boy’s
silk) acts paradoxically as a red flag to the white supremacists he
encounters. But both Jonathan Buttall and Django are in costume; Jonathan
could never dress like that to do his daily business as an iron dealer. Django
soon equips himself in what Riva calls “warm nicotine colors,” in more
practical—and stereotypically “western”—garb.
The Blue Boy motif is incongruous in a western. Yet, as Tarantino points
out, “One of the things that’s interesting about Westerns in particular is
there’s no other genre that reflects the decade that they were made and the
morals and the feelings of Americans during that decade than Westerns.
Westerns are always a magnifying glass as far as that’s concerned.”8 He
notes that “Westerns of the ’50s definitely have an Eisenhower birth of
suburbia and plentiful times aspect to them. . . . the late ’60s has a very
Vietnam vibe to the Westerns leading into the ’70s, and by the mid-70s, you
know, most of the Westerns literally could be called Watergate Westerns
because it was about a disillusionment and tearing down the myths that we
have spent so much time building up.”9 Django is a western that subverts
the dominant white male hero in a wish fulfillment revenge fantasy that
forces the audience to confront race and slavery. It is probably too much to
consider The Blue Boy as a wish fulfillment class fantasy. Perhaps we
should consider Django Unchained’s Blue Boy motif to be a parody, with its
political connotations, while Gainsborough’s Blue Boy is an apolitical
pastiche. Yet Gainsborough’s own letters bear witness to his private
discomfort with the upper class.
Tarantino and Gainsborough share the status of being both insider and
outsider. Neither man belonged to an influential coterie or was a member of
an art or film dynasty. Both gained success on their own terms, even if
Gainsborough sometimes whined about his clients.
You don’t actually need to know anything about the Van Dyck paintings
or Gainsborough to appreciate Django Unchained. But understanding the
art historical provenance of the costume, with its many underlying
connotations, can help you see why it is so effective, and how art can be so
influential that it manages to be replicated in unexpected places, while
continuing its original message.
7.8
Django Unchained, 2012
Dir. Quentin Tarantino, DP Robert Richardson
Django is on his way to becoming a hero, but he has to get rid of the blue suit to make it really
happen.
EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Exercise
Watch several exciting action films that involve heroic characters doing
extraordinary things. Note the kinds of “heroic poses” that the characters
use to reinforce their heroic status (freeze-framing or making screen
captures can help here). This might involve analyzing camera angles and
lighting as well as looking at the actor’s body language. How do these
freeze-frames compare with the “heroic” paintings discussed here, or with
other paintings you have found in books or online?
DISCUSSION QUESTION
At different times in history, visual art has had this aim and effect. As we
have seen, the Catholic art of the Counter-Reformation was deliberately
aimed at attracting the mass of the population and reinvigorating
Catholicism through the persuasiveness of dramatic imagery, which was
combined in churches with music and ritual. History paintings could inspire
the thrill of battle and provide visual manifestations of values and virtues.
Even the Victorian “moral” paintings so derided by modernists were meant
to communicate and reinforce widely held ideas and codes of conduct
through dramatic appeal to the popular imagination.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, all artistic activity has been under
the constant influence of the moving image. Everybody watches films; most
people watch television. Artist, mechanic, professor, president, prince,
schoolteacher, policewoman—no matter who you are or what role you
occupy, whether you ever set foot in an art gallery or open an art magazine,
you watch television and movies. There is no artwork in the twentieth
century that can be exempted from the influence of the moving image. This
is not to say that the influence can necessarily be read directly in the
artwork, only that all artwork is made within the context of the dominance
of the moving image, just as the art of the Italian Renaissance was made in
the context of the dominance of the Catholic Church.
EXPRESSIONISM
Dating the watershed moment of “the modern world” is impossible, but we
could take 1889 as a credible starting point, with the completion of the
Eiffel Tower in Paris, a marvel of engineering and design with no
discernible practical function. Over the next decade and a half, the world
saw the introduction of the automobile, the movie camera, the “flying
machine,” the electric light. Crucially, all of these new inventions were
aimed not at the delectation of elites, but at the masses. Although it took
time for mass automobile use, mass flight, and the installation of electricity
in everyone’s home, the die was cast. What followed was an
unprecedentedly accelerated rate of change that seemed to promise a new
order of things—in short, a new world. Yet the human self remained as
stubbornly unsatisfied, complex, and neurotic as ever. It was this inner
world of the self that artists like van Gogh painted, expressing his own
sense of isolation in the world—in short, human subjectivity. The attempt to
depict subjectivity came to be called Expressionism. If the Impressionists
had sought to depict perception, the Expressionists sought to depict
perception through psychology, wrapped up in an overwhelming sense of
self.
8.1
Five Women on the Street, c. 1913
Artist: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938)
In Kirchner’s group of five women in a Berlin street, we can see the symbolic expression of an inner
experience. The forms and shapes of the women are reduced to angular strokes, expressing the
artist’s subjective feelings. Kirchner ignores the traditional rules of perspective and academic
proportion; even the color, applied with sweeping spontaneous brushstrokes, is used mainly to
express emotion. This is the first of a number of paintings Kirchner made of street prostitutes, and all
appear to betray his fear of them; despite their slender, birdlike shape, they are depicted as predatory.
While Paris remained the artistic fulcrum it had been throughout the
nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century newly unified Germany
began to be an influential center of artistic innovation. Germany was rich,
industrial, vigorous, and outward looking. It attracted artists like the
Norwegian Edvard Munch and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, as well as a
number of German artists, particularly in the southern city of Munich and
the eastern towns of Weimar and Dresden. Although never quite as
bohemian as Paris, the German cities felt more comfortable and artistically
exciting than any in Britain or America.
Artists formed groups, such as Die Brücke (“the Bridge”). Oriented around
painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and his friends, the group was named “the
bridge” because they wanted to assert a connection between the future and
the traditional visual culture of Germany.
By 1910, the angular, emotional, and often wildly distorted pictorial style
associated with Expressionism was established. Robert Hughes calls it
“German Gothic without the religious content.”2 Painters and illustrators
turned to woodblock printing techniques or charcoal drawing that
resembled woodblock’s chiaroscuro style. One of the principal centers of
Expressionist activity was Berlin. By 1911 it was established as a
significant artistic city: a big, imposing and thoroughly modern metropolis.
Unlike Paris and London, which had been major cities since early medieval
times, Berlin was new and modern; it transformed quickly from a
backwater in the far northeast of Germany into a huge, cutting-edge
industrial city.
Politics were progressive, and culture was experimental and exciting. At the
same time, the city was thrilling and more than a little frightening compared
to genteel places like Munich or Cologne or quiet towns like Dresden.
FURTHER VIEWING
Erich Heckel’s (1883–1970) 1913 woodcut print Two Men at a Table and
the 1912 painting in the Kunsthalle Hamburg. The image was conceived
as an illustration of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
His figures have prominent genitals, with bursts of coarse dark pubic hair.
Saying “erotic works are also sacred,” Schiele sometimes only painted the
body parts (Male Lower Torso, 1916). This is a complicated eroticism,
nonnaturalistic and controversial, with the genitals prominent, often placed
(following the rule of thirds) where the eye is naturally drawn into the
picture. Schiele uses clothing to reveal sexuality, the models deliberately
lifting their clothing to expose their genitals. In Schiele’s work, the body
itself is the tool of expression; it expresses vulnerability and fragility, but
conversely also its strength and sinew, and the body’s secret, usually hidden
powerful places.
However, even if suffering in the modern world was secular, not religious,
mysticism was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Partly a reaction against nineteenth-century materialism, the tendency was
influenced by the writings of Dostoyevsky and the philosophy of
Schopenhauer. Many artists and intellectuals were also strongly influenced
by the Theosophical movement, which attempted to synthesize various
Eastern and Western spiritual thought into a new, postreligious spiritual
system, free from the strictures of traditional European churches.
8.2
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920
Dir. Robert Wiene (1873–1938), DP Willy Hameister
Director Wiene employed designer Hermann Warm and painters Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig;
together they took the craft of scene painting to new heights of imagination and innovation. The
artists painted light and shadows directly onto the walls of the sets, creating a world of pure
theatricality, which was then brought to life through the clever camera work of Willy Hameister.
Robert Wiene’s 1920 film about madness and murder, The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari, is one of the key works of high Expressionism. As well as
virtually every frame of the film resembling an expressionist painting or
woodcut, it is the first film to use the cinematographic technique of the so-
called Dutch (“Deutsche”) tilt. The camera angle is deliberately slanted to
one side, and Wiene and his DP Willy Hameister use it to create a sense of
unease and disorientation, visually emphasizing the film’s theme of
madness. Fritz Lang’s Nosferatu (1922), though principally following
Gothic and romantic tropes, contains key expressionist moments,
particularly the lighting and the use of the vampire’s distorted shadow.
Expressionism was part of Alfred Hitchcock’s tool kit: as well as admiring
Murnau and Lang, he worked on English-German coproductions at
Babelsberg before returning to London in 1926 to make The Lodger: A
Story of the London Fog, clearly under the influence of Expressionism.
But Expressionism found its way into other genres too: see Walther
Ruttmann’s extraordinary “expressionist documentary” Berlin: Symphony
of a Great City (1927), which depicts the rhythms of one day in the life of
the city. Berlin here is not just a setting, it is the character: the people,
machines, and landmarks that populate are its features and expressions.
FURTHER VIEWING
Sometimes Expressionist painters sought to explore the territory between
the inner and the outer world by portraying figures wearing masks. The
mask is an interesting motif in painting; we have already seen Roberto
Longhi’s use of the mask in his paintings of eighteenth-century Carnival
Venice. The expressionist masks of Emile Nolde and James Ensor, and
the later adoption of the mask in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, were
at least partly inspired by the recognition that the traditional European
culture of masked revels had passed away, merged with a new awareness
of so-called “primitive” art and artifacts brought from the Americas, the
South Sea Islands, and Africa and displayed in museums and at fairs.
There was precedent. Turner’s late works, such as Rain, Steam and Speed—
The Great Western Railway (1844), are so indistinct as to often be
considered almost abstract. We have already seen that the Impressionists
wanted to depict perception, and Expressionists wanted to present the inner
world outwardly. Abstraction sought to consider the image outside of the
confines of figurative depiction, moving even further away from
representation.
What set Kandinsky apart from most of his peers was that with his lawyer’s
mind and training, he could think and write well. When he turned his
attention to writing about art, he was able to convey his ideas as
persuasively as any barrister. In 1912 he published Concerning the Spiritual
in Art, in which he made some grand claims for painting: he believed that
great works of art “can at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they key
it up, so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning keep the strings of the
musical instrument.”5 Note how Kandinsky is linking painting to the more
abstract form of music, not unlike James Whistler and his Nocturne
paintings. But Kandinsky went further than Whistler: he collaborated with
composer Arnold Schoenberg and tried to compose avant-garde operas
himself.
The Blue Rider Almanac, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc
(MFA Press, 1965), is a widely available facsimile of the original edition.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
The idea of a link between spirituality and abstract painting established by
Kandinsky lived on, particularly in the postwar work of the American
Abstract Expressionists. As we have seen, American landscape painting
owed much to ideas about the sublime, but also to American
Transcendentalism. This was also an antimaterialist philosophical
movement, grounded, at least in part, on the actual experience of Nature.7
As one of its principal thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1836,
“Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and
uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”8 But the American
landscape painters were interested in painting the uniqueness of the
American landscape. America was filled with the grandeur and mystery of
its own landscape, with overwhelming places like the Rocky Mountains, the
Mojave Desert, and the Grand Canyon as well as the almost limitless broad
sweep of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Abstract Expressionism was the name given to a loose and barely affiliated
group of painters based in New York after the Second World War. But the
roots of Abstract Expressionism may lie further away, in revolutionary
Mexico. Mexican revolutionary painters, led by Diego Rivera, David
Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco, began a tradition of creating large-
scale murals in public space; these murals had dramatic nationalistic, social,
and political messages expressed in bold, striking colors. The idea was to
emulate the populist yet passionate art of the Church to deliver a
revolutionary and nationalistic message to the masses. The idea of public
murals was taken up in the United States by Roosevelt’s Federal Art
Project, part of the New Deal meant to combat the depredations of the
1930s Depression. The project employed large numbers of artists to
produce public murals presenting socially accessible “American” imagery
for the masses. The idea behind it was to create appealing American
alternatives to European communism and fascism.
Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko both worked on the Federal Art Project
and admired Mexican muralism. After the Second World War, they moved
away from the pictorial tradition of muralism and became completely
abstract painters, yet kept the muralist’s sense of size and drama. The role
of Expressionism in their large-scale abstract paintings is more a matter of
the influences than anything that can be seen directly on the canvases. Both
were interested in mysticism, spirituality (though not specifically religion),
and human tragedy, and were influenced by psychoanalysis and classical
mythology. Both were strongly affected by the philosophical question
“What is modern Man, and what is his fate?”10
Rothko would soak his unprimed canvases in layer after layer after layer of
paint, laying it on in horizontal lozenges. Many of the paintings appear to
offer a sense of a horizon; Robert Hughes links them to the tradition of
American landscape, saying that landscape “was there, in an oblique way,
through scale”11 and intensity of color. Rothko wanted the viewer to be in
the painting, not standing looking at the painting, so he made the huge
fields of color enormous, overwhelming.
The critical world responded, and this is where we see the next important
aspect of twentieth-century art: the domination of the critic. In this case, it
was writer Clement Greenberg, who decided to champion the Abstract
Expressionists as urgently important artists expressing something
completely new and definitively American. More recently, research has
come to light demonstrating how Abstract Expressionism was promoted as
part of the pro-American cultural message so important during the Cold
War. It was bold, it was expressive, it was certainly American, and most
important, the pictures themselves didn’t say anything specific at all.
Abstract Expressionism was not critical and political like European art, and
it was certainly not communist like Soviet Socialist Realism.
Pollock and Rothko also obligingly fed themselves into American popular
mythology, though they probably didn’t intend to, and so entered the
popular romantic myth of the artist as the “troubled outsider” battling his
demons, portrayed so often in films. By 1956 Pollock was established and
admired; unfortunately, he was also a heavy drinker and he crashed his car
while drunk, killing himself and one of his passengers. He died a legend,
the rebel artist overcome by his demons. Rothko’s final major work was a
set of huge paintings for the interior of a nondenominational chapel in
Houston, Texas. The Rothko Chapel paintings are enormous and dark, in
colors ranging from black to deep plum-red. Rothko intended them as
monuments to the depths of human tragedy. He committed suicide not long
after, before the paintings were hung in the chapel in February 1971.
Dominique de Menil, who commissioned the chapel, said that the work was
“the expression of an artist deeply moved by the tragedy of the human
condition. They are an endeavor to go beyond art. They are an attempt to
create a timeless space.”12
8.4
Eyes in the Heat, 1946
Artist: Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
Named “Jack the Dripper” by the press, Jackson Pollock was the first American artist to become
truly famous, with these seemingly spontaneous eruptions of paint on canvas. In fact, Pollock exerted
absolute control over the effect he wished to create, often touching up a drip with the paintbrush.
FURTHER VEIWING
See Pollock (2000), directed by and starring Ed Harris, who did all the
paintings in the film, following Pollock’s method. The film was not
authorized by Pollock’s estate.
Abstraction in Cinema
Of all the influential modern movements in art, abstraction is probably the
most difficult to connect to cinema. The same impulse that was at work in
painting, to explore the world of forms and shapes instead of taking on the
responsibility for creating representations of things, was also influential in
cinema. Movie cameras were taken up and explored as tools for the creation
of images, including abstract images. In 1920s Germany, several painters,
including Hans Richter and Walther Ruttmann, established a group
dedicated to what they called “absolute” film. They joined Kandinsky in
desiring to create what they called an “absolute language of form”:
abstracted geometrical images analogous to music—that is, images without
images. Ruttmann’s work in particular, such as Lichtspiel: Opus IV (1925),
is compelling, as are the experimental abstract films of the multidisciplinary
Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Ruttmann and Moholy-
Nagy also made documentary-style “city” films, in which they applied what
they learned from their exploration of light and shape in their abstract films
to the real world.
Other experiments produced delightful and quirky films such as Len Lye’s
A Colour Box (1935). This abstract film was made by painting colorful
patterns directly on the film itself and synchronizing them to a popular jazz
dance tune. The film was aimed at the popular audience and was sponsored
by the British General Post Office. Generally speaking, however, abstract
films remain the preserve of experimental artists and were not aimed at
mass audiences. Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) is an example. Brakhage
took moth wings and small pieces of plants, placed them between two strips
of 16mm film, and then made a contact print. Projected, it was an abstract
film of strange unearthly beauty made without a camera.
8.5
Locke, 2013
Dir. Steven Knight, DP Haris Zambarloukos
The abstract effect of bokeh as it floats among the metallic sheen of the cars and their mirrors and
windows, and across Locke’s face, renders the world of the highway alien and unreal.
MINIMALISM
As well as rejecting any form of representation, Minimalists wanted to
remove suggestions of Expressionism from the artwork, as well as
suggestions of illusion or transcendence. They rejected symbols or
metaphors of any kind. According to one writer, “Minimalist painting is
purely realistic—the subject being the painting itself.”14
The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor notes that the silence of Minimalism is a
reaction against the “noise” of twentieth-century life. “That plainness has
such impact bespeaks the excess of noise that has invaded the landscapes
around us.”15 In an era overwhelmed with images and sounds, reduction or
filtration ends up being an emphatic form of presence. Donald Judd said, “If
my work is reductionist, it’s because it doesn’t contain the things people
think it ought to contain.”16 Seen in this way, Minimalism is less an artistic
style than a way of dealing with the world. Less is more.
Minimalism has its roots in the Russian Revolution and the emergence of a
group of young artists, the Constructivists, who felt called upon to make a
“new art” that shed the corruption, decadence, and injustice of the past.
Like Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich (1879–1935) was initially interested in
the Russian peasantry, the embodiment of the mystical “Russian soul,” and
created stylized simplified forms such as The Mower (1911–1912). But only
a year or so later he produced Black Square (c. 1913–1915), and in 1920
White Suprematist Cross. Black Square is simply a black square on a white
background, nothing more and nothing less. Black Square brings to an
abrupt end centuries of representation in art and could be said to mark a
“zero hour” in modern art. Malevich enthusiastically termed this new
direction Suprematism. He claimed it as the beginning of a new culture.
Art, he said, can only happen “when the forms in his picture have nothing
in common with nature. Our world of art has become new, nonobjective
pure. . . . Everything has disappeared; a mass of material is left from which
a new form will be built.”17
FURTHER VIEWING
Following are some significant minimalist artists to look up. Their works
are held in many major collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art
and the Tate.
Painters
Frank Stella
Agnes Martin (1912–2004)
Robert Mangold
Sculptors
Donald Judd (1928–1994)
Dan Flavin (1933–1966)
Carl Andre
The Constructivists wanted to make “pure” proletarian art, to support
revolutionary socialism. They wanted art to be instrumental and wanted it
to be applied to textile design, ceramics, public murals, anything that could
be experienced and appreciated by the ordinary worker. However, they
forgot that most people, especially the proletarians, wanted figurative
images. Multiple millennia of experience had developed communication
through figurative images, and the new language of pure form proved
inadequate. This new art proved useless as communication. In this instance,
Joseph Stalin (who also wanted art to be instrumental) was correct to claim
that Constructivist art was useless to advance the necessary cause of
socialism. By the late 1920s Malevich returned to figurative painting,
making rural scenes again, as well as portraits of his family and friends. In
the 1930s the Soviet regime established Socialist Realism as the officially
supported authorized style.
It is interesting to see how, during the Cold War, this Soviet revolutionary
idea of pure forms stripped of accretions of meaning was taken up and
asserted as a revolutionary new American art movement. This demonstrates
that we need to appreciate that both linear and parallel developments exist
in art and cinema, and that the influences that form artistic works, and even
whole movements, are complex.
In film, a minimalist approach means to be more human, and purge the film
of artifice. This was taken to extreme conclusions with the Dogme
movement of the 1990s. This was a project started by the established
Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier and the emerging filmmaker Thomas
Vinterberg, who published the “Dogme 95 Manifesto” in 1995. The
manifesto contained the deliberately named Vow of Chastity. The religious
connotations are both tongue-in-cheek and absolutely serious. The idea was
to purify film of its accretions of effects and technology, stars and celebrity,
and “tricks of the trade,” and concentrate on the core “classical” values of
story, performance, and theme.20
Unlike minimalist art, which was claimed eagerly by the elitist art world
(something Carl Andre, for one, has never been particularly comfortable
with), minimalist films remain associated with the independent sector. They
are usually low budget and less commercial. Some filmmakers such as
Steven Soderbergh, who started his career with the minimalist Sex, Lies,
and Videotape (1989), have managed to continue to make minimalist films
alongside higher-budget commercial movies.
FURTHER VIEWING
Below are five key minimalist films released since Dogme95:
Shane Carruth, Upstream Color (2013)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past
Lives (2010)
Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy (2006)
Miranda July, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Suzanne Bier, Open Hearts (2002)
Steve McQueen’s first feature film, Hunger (2008), which explores the
imprisonment of IRA member Bobby Sands, can be considered minimalist
in its filmic style and method, but it also deliberately echoes compositions
inspired by minimalist art. For example, some scenes frame one character
(the prison guard Lohan or the protagonist Bobby Sands) against a blank
backdrop, and the movements of both camera and actor are minimal: the
action slows down, the story pauses, and the elements in the frame become
elements of the greater tragedy that McQueen wants to address. Steve
McQueen had a successful career as a fine artist before embarking on
feature film directing.
Joanna Hogg’s 2013 film Exhibition is set in an architecturally minimalist
house. Both this and her earlier film Archipelago (2010) are essentially
minimalist in approach. While minimalist art has often been seen as a
“male” category, minimalist cinema has attracted many female directors,
including Hogg, Scherfig, and others.
The DP of Taxi Driver, Michael Chapman, was inspired by New York artist
Robert Rauschenberg’s arrangement of objects and color on the canvas,
created by collaging together different materials with paint in bright
primary colors. Chapman, talking about the ending of Taxi Driver, said that
he wanted the composition to look “like a Rauschenberg.”22 Rauschenberg
sourced the material for his work from the real world, scouring his
neighborhood for detritus to incorporate into the artwork using a technique
known as assemblage. He created what he called “combines,” works using
detritus as the raw material. In Bed (1955), he dripped and splashed red
paint across a quilt, then displayed it on the wall as a painting, thus
juxtaposing the strangeness of a vertical bed with a picture of a bed. There
are many inferences at work: illness, childbirth, nightmares, sexuality,
murder.
8.6
Taxi Driver, 1976
Dir. Martin Scorsese, DP Michael Chapman, art director Charles Rosen
The arrangement of the elements in the frame are inspired by Rauschenberg’s “combines,” or
assemblages. The bed recalls the artist’s 1955 piece Bed, which is in MoMA and can be seen on their
website, www.moma.org.
From 1916 to 1963, Rockwell made the cover images for the Saturday
Evening Post, a mass-market popular magazine that offered articles and
fiction. During the Second World War his hopeful magazine covers, such as
Hasten the Homecoming (May 26, 1945), uplifted worried families.
Rockwell even invented a character, Willie Gillis, a “typical GI,” and
followed his military career during the course of America’s involvement in
the war over eleven magazine covers and a painting. Private Gillis was
depicted from induction through discharge, but he was never shown in
battle.
8.7
Forrest Gump, 1994
Dir. Robert Zemeckis, DP Don Burgess
The innocent, wholesome world of Forrest Gump’s childhood is deliberately modeled on the
idealized image of small town America depicted in Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers.
FURTHER VIEWING
Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers can all be seen on the Saturday
Evening Post website, http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com.
As well as somewhat idealized scenes of ordinary American life, often
infused with humor, Rockwell also included social critique. For example, in
1961, at the height of the American civil rights movement, Rockwell
painted Golden Rule. It depicts a large gathering of people from all different
races, colors, and religions. Text overlays the painting: “Do unto others as
you would have them do unto you.” The painting was used as a front cover
of the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell based the painting on photographs
from his own travels, and also real people who modeled for him. Three
years later he painted The Problem We All Live With, which was featured in
Look magazine. Again, the civil rights movement framed his subject, a six-
year-old African American girl going to attend her desegregated school. As
happened in real life, she was accompanied by four US marshals, who are
there to enforce the desegregation. The sheer popularity and accessibility of
Rockwell’s work made his critical commentary on the civil rights
movement and the desegregation process unavoidable to middle America.
Zemeckis’s film also follows this same trajectory, as we see Gump coming
of age into a more troubled America. Gump serves in Vietnam and is
inadvertently caught up in many of the key issues of the period such as the
Watergate scandal, which shook popular trust in the office of the president.
Exposed to the effects of discrimination against disability and race, Gump
becomes an everyman, a witness to history.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg both have Rockwell original paintings
hanging in their workplaces, and both contributed their collections for a
special exhibition, “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections
of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” at the Smithsonian in Washington,
DC, in 2010. In 2014 Lucas donated half a million dollars to the Norman
Rockwell Museum. Lucas, Spielberg, and Zemeckis are known for films
that, although seemingly heartwarming and affirming, deal with dark and
complex problems and situations. It is not surprising that all have been
drawn to Norman Rockwell, whose pictures at first glance seem almost
sugary but, upon reflection, have much stronger messages to pass on.25
Taxi Driver and Forrest Gump are films that, however different they are in
almost every way, want to tell us something about the America the
filmmakers see around them.26 Rauschenberg and Rockwell are as different
as Taxi Driver and Forrest Gump. Here we can see that each American
artist in his own way addressed the issues that American society faced,
communicating with their own audience—Rauschenberg with the artistic
intelligentsia, Rockwell with “ordinary” Americans. Both in turn provided
inspiration to popular and successful films. This process of inspiration and
referencing is part of many films, and as you develop your understanding of
art, you will develop your ability to discern it, as well as use it yourself.
Modern Movements
Because abstract art departs radically from all previous kinds of art in the
Western tradition, it has never been obvious to viewers what they should
make of it. Unlike a mythological scene or religious depiction, an abstract
picture does not depict and thus reaffirm any well-known story or value.
Unlike a realistic picture, it does not attempt to show truths about the world
as it is. Instead, abstract art turned to another art form to convey its
meaning: words.
There have been instances of artists writing about art: Hogarth’s The
Analysis of Beauty (1753), Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), and Samuel
van Hoogstraten’s 1678 Dutch painting manual, Introduction to the
Academy of Painting, are examples. More commonly, philosophers like
Edmund Burke wrote about aesthetics, and there were critics like Charles
Baudelaire. Abstract artists, many of whom were educated in other
academic subjects, did write about art, their art. Kandinsky (studied law),
Robert Motherwell (studied philosophy), and Mark Rothko (briefly studied
liberal arts and sciences at Yale) wrote substantial books. Many abstract
artists also gave interviews and participated in documentaries where they
were able to explain their ideas. The role of the critic also became much
more important, because the art was so subjective. The critic came to be not
just an arbiter of fashion and taste but an interpreter, the intermediary
between the artist and his or her public. However, we should remember the
advice of E. H. Gombrich in The Story of Art: “one need not necessarily
accepts the artist’s theories to appreciate his work.” This is as true for art as
it is for the writings of Vittorio Storaro. The best way to approach an
artwork is directly—experiencing it and forming your own views first.
Criticism also became more academic. Increasingly anchored in universities
as well as journals, critical discourse began to appropriate concepts (with
varying accuracy) from other disciplines: anthropology, Continental
philosophy, psychology, even biology. This intellectualization of art
eventually gave rise to conceptual art, the art of “pure idea.” Even before
the First World War, French artist Marcel Duchamp had laid the table for
conceptual art by criticizing what he called “retinal” art—work that aims
principally to engage the eye. Duchamp argued that the idea was primary.
However, the problem with Duchamp’s position is that, biologically,
humans are retinal: vision is our strongest and most primary sense; once the
eye is engaged, the other senses and the brain strive to serve vision. To
reject the retinal is to force oneself into an unnatural, almost punitive
position, groping around for ways to organize meaning.
But Duchamp made us question and examine how we perceive the visual as
an image of a thing, and how the relationship between thing and image
shifts and changes. Questioning the conceptual arrangement of things and
images preoccupied the art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. By the end of the twentieth century, Postmodernism took these
ideas further, questioning the distinction between high culture and mass or
popular culture and, like earlier projects such as the Bauhaus, seeking ways
to reintegrate art and everyday life. More explicitly, Postmodernism refuses
to recognize the authority of any single style or definition of what art should
be. As a result, postmodern art is typified by the self-conscious use and
mixing together of earlier styles and conventions, often blending different
media. We have already seen this in the discussion of Tarantino’s Django
Unchained; the achievement of the film lies in its functioning within the
complex visual terms that evolved from modernist and postmodernist ideas.
ART CRITICISM
Here is an example of what a popular museum guide says about the
Rothko painting shown in this chapter:
“[Rothko’s mature works] . . . metaphorically encompass the cycle of life
from cradle to grave, in part by harboring an oblique reference to both
adorations and entombments. The stacked rectangles may be read
vertically as an abstracted Virgin bisected by horizontal divisions that
indicate the supine Christ.” (Jennifer Blessing, Guggenheim Museum)
Although the critic’s reading may be insightful and help us to enjoy the
work, it remains necessarily laden with conjecture and assumption. It
cannot say that Rothko’s work is a good likeness, or even if it is well
painted, as these criteria do not apply.
Cinema would have little of this. Cinema, so far, has been able to pick and
choose those aspects of art that serve cinema and has largely eschewed the
rest. Although film criticism developed in the post–World War II period, it
has never gained quite as powerful a hold over the film world as art
criticism has done within the art world. There are expressionistic films,
films that contain abstraction, even cerebral conceptual movies, but they’re
all recognizable as cinema and can be experienced and enjoyed as such.
Despite Godard’s dry assertion that he makes films “for one or two people,”
films are made for the collective experience, to communicate. The tools of
reading the film are almost always there, inside the film. To most
moviegoers, a film does not need exegesis, unlike some modern art.
8.8
Weeping Woman, 1937
Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
In the late nineteenth century, African artifacts, masks, drums, and carved statues began appearing in
Paris, as a result of French colonial activities. Picasso saw these images as “raw material” and
appropriated their forms into his paintings. Picasso’s use of African art gave him freedom to alter and
distort the human face and body beyond conventional forms of representation.
GOING “BEYOND THE WEST”
European art has always been influenced and invigorated by art from other
cultures, and this process is usually reciprocal. Despite wars, imperial
conquest, chauvinism, and the acts of regimes and institutions, art has
always had a degree of relative freedom and, to a similar degree, has always
been porous and open to influence even if not always consciously. We have
already seen how European artists like Picasso became inspired by African
masks, and how the Blue Rider almanac featured a huge range of global art
alongside paintings and drawings by Kandinsky, van Gogh, Natalya
Goncharova, Franz Marc, and others. The Blue Rider group did this to
make a few specific and direct points: that art is universal; that art is art, no
matter where it is produced, or for what purpose; and that European art
would benefit from the influence of art from non-European cultures.
However, we have to remain aware that the way “art” developed in Europe
was not the same elsewhere. Art had differing functions in different
societies. This could lead to problems when Western artists met non-
Western art.
The influences are fascinating to trace. The Chinese art available in Europe
was deliberately created by the Chinese for the export trade and consisted
mainly of the delicately painted or drawn pictures on porcelain that inspired
the famous Delft potteries in the Netherlands. The Delftware, in turn,
created a stronger desire for the color blue, and the increased blue
production also benefited artists. Though many travelers brought art back
with them to Europe, they did not necessarily understand what it was that
they possessed. Many pieces—from Africa or the South Sea Islands, for
example—had ritual purposes. It was difficult for many Europeans to
accept that an African carving might have a religious purpose not entirely
different from that of an icon or crucifix in the Christian church.
Port cities like Venice and Amsterdam were conduits for art and goods from
around the world, but trade was so vigorous and lucrative that by the
eighteenth century there was scarcely any fashionable house in Europe
without a Chinese screen or cabinet, a Turkish rug, and some Indian carved
wood. And these made their way into countless European paintings. Later
artists consciously sought to incorporate non-European elements into their
paintings. The appeal of the Orientalist school of paintings was at least
partially due to the portrayal of the rich textiles and luxury goods that made
up the “Arabian nights” fantasies of the paintings’ buyers. Coupled with the
actual textiles and luxury goods, which could also be purchased, the
nineteenth-century bourgeois could indulge his oriental fantasies, which
included a heavy dose of eroticism.
8.9
Avatar, 2009
Dir. James Cameron, DP Mauro Fiore
The blue-skinned Na’vi live in harmony with nature and worship a mother goddess. They embody an
enduring Western trope about the lure of a primitive “natural” life that stands in contrast to
mercantile, industrial civilization. This cultural longing exists alongside a history of colonial
exploitation—which Cameron’s film addresses via science fiction.
European painting was also exported outside of Europe, though aside from
the splendid Baroque churches of Latin America, it is unclear how much
demand there was for European painting as a product. Most importers
sought European technology. However, we do know that European
paintings arrived in China and Japan, and they were carefully studied with
great interest by Chinese and Japanese artists and scholars.
“World” Cinema
If we turn our attention to cinema, we can see that the adoption of film
technology outside of Europe was rapid. Most parts of the world received
film technology at more or less the same time. Within a few years, there
was a vigorous cinema industry in British-occupied India, led by Indians
such as Hiralal Sen, who founded the first production company, and
Dadasaheb Phalke, who made the country’s first features, based on India’s
mythological epics, the Mahabarata and the Ramayana. Indian cinema,
particularly Hindi cinema, has continued to borrow from its myths and
legends in much the same way that Western cinema continuously borrows
from the Greeks. The Indian film industry prospered, and today
“Bollywood” produces and exports huge numbers of films, while regional
industries serving the country’s numerous languages and cultures are also
active. Independent Bengali filmmaker Satiyajit Ray learned from Italian
neorealism to make significant realist films, including the Apu trilogy
Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1959),
which have in turn become influential to European and American
filmmakers.
FURTHER VIEWING
Many of Hokusai’s works, including all of those discussed here, can be
seen online at http://www.katsushikahokusai.org. For Hiroshige, see
http://www.hiroshige.org.uk.
8.10
An Autumn Afternoon / Samma no Aji, 1962
Dir. Yasujirō Ozu (1903–1963)
In this bittersweet domestic drama, his last film, we see Ozu’s signature floor-based camera and
striking composition. Ozu’s color films are notable for his use of strong clear color.
8.11
Bathing man (woodblock print), 1863
Artist: Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864)
Kunisada’s print has elements of the comic; we see the man grimace as the water cascades over
him, but we also notice the way his bright, intricately-inked tattoos are echoed by the flourishing
foliage growing next to his crouching body as he showers in the open air. Kunisada’s striking use
of just a few strong colors is typical of the Japanese print, and was a revelation to European
painters.
But the reach of ukiyo-e was much greater than influencing Impressionism,
or even manga. The popularity of these prints, and the general
acknowledgment of the brilliance of The Great Wave, meant that the entire
style of Japanese art became influential and popular. It was copied
endlessly, and frequently appropriated. What the Japanese brought was a
simplification and refinement that offered fresh possibilities, particularly in
the age of the camera. The Japanese prints offered the illusion of depth, not
through shading, chiaroscuro, and modeling, but through flatness, clarity,
line, and carefully placed detail.
European illustration changed completely through exposure to Japanese
graphic arts. This had a huge influence on animation. Early animations, like
zoetropes and simple short films, had simple drawings. If we look at
Disney’s early shorts, the Silly Symphonies (for example, The Goddess of
Spring from 1934), the drawing style is good but quite fussy. It is
functional, the animation is clever, and it certainly was an important
experimental stage in developing the animation of realistic human figures
and creating the illusion of three-dimensionality. But to create an animated
feature, something more than technical skill was needed; it needed real
artistry.
The kind of sophisticated illustration used in Snow White owes a lot to
the achievements of ukiyo-e, and especially Hokusai. Hokusai was able to
suggest three-dimensionality in his compositions, often framing the subjects
through foliage. In Snow White, the compositions are often framed by
branches or flowers, drawn in a style reminiscent of the Japanese. The early
scene in which Snow White is gathering flowers in the forest resembles
different compositions found in the ukiyo-e pictures. Even the Queen’s
smooth, masklike face owes something to the influence of Japanese Noh
theater masks, which were copied by the American mask maker W. T.
Benda.33
Exposure to Japanese art touched not only the “high” art of the
Impressionist paintings, but also the “low” arts of advertising and popular
cinema. European art was changed and at the same time invigorated by new
philosophical possibilities, with repercussions in every art form, from
posters to architecture.
8.13
Japanese people (color woodcut), c. 1830
Artist: Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
Japan at cherry blossom time is the subject of Hokusai’s print. Typically occurring in late April, the
cherry blossom (sakura) season is marked by celebration and picnics or just resting under the
magnificent trees. The blossoms are richly symbolic in Japanese culture. Japanese people is typical
of Hokusai, who often depicted scenes of ordinary life. Again, note how limited his palette is, and his
use of outline.
Exercise 1
Watch The Lodger or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and freeze-frame the film
at random points during the viewing. Compare the frames to pictures by
Ernst Ludwig von Kirchner or Eric Heckel, or choose other German
expressionist artists. What are the key shared elements of Expressionism?
Exercise 2
What differences can you spot in Minimalism between visual art and
cinema? What about minimalist architecture? Can you think of any films
that use minimalist architecture as a setting or location?
Exercise 3
You may be unfamiliar with Japanese art, but choose several ukiyo-e
pictures and imagine stories around them. How do color, composition, and
shape organize your experience of the image, and how do they affect your
imagined story?
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Picasso painted his lover, the photographer Dora Maar, as The Weeping
Woman. It does not look like Maar’s face at all. What can representations
like this convey to us, and how can they be repurposed in cinema?
FURTHER VIEWING
Aside from the Japanese films mentioned in this chapter, the following are
worth seeing:
Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, is a
fictional biopic of printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro. It is often seen as a thinly
veiled autobiography of the director himself.
Chi-hwa-seon or Strokes of Fire (2002) is a biopic by Im Kwon-taek about
Jang Seung-up (Oh-won), a nineteenth-century Korean painter of humble
origins; it won the Best Director prize at Cannes. The film demonstrates
many traditional techniques used in Oriental painting.
FURTHER READING
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (Thames and Hudson, 1991)
Shulamith Behr, Expressionism (Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999)
John Willett, Expressionism (World University Library, Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1970)
Christopher Rothko, ed., The Artist’s Reality (Yale University Press, 2006)
François Truffaut, Hitchcock by Truffaut: A Definitive Study of Alfred
Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster, 1984)
James Meyer, Minimalism (Phaidon, 2010)
Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford University
Press, 1990)
Joan Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art (Thames and Hudson, 2000)
Lionel Lamborn, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the
West (Phaidon, 2005)
Daisuke Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema
(Duke University Press, 2013)
Violet Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (American
University in Cairo Press, 2007); an interesting history though the films
discussed are often difficult to obtain
Satyajit Ray, Satyajit Ray on Cinema; foreword by Shyam Benegal
(Columbia University Press, 2013)
Mark Cousins, The Story of Film (BCA Pavilion Books, 2004) and his TV
series The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2012); strongly recommended for the
world cinema perspective Cousins gives to his authoritative account of
cinema history
NOTES
1 Scholars disagree whether the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement of the 1920s and
’30s should be considered part of Expressionism and if there is such a thing as post-
Expressionism. In terms of visual style, John Willett argues convincingly that they are all just
different phases of Expressionism. Willett, Expressionism (McGraw-Hill, 1978).
2 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode 6: “The View from the Edge” (BBC, 1980).
3 Quoted in the exhibition Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude, Courtauld Gallery, London, October
23, 2014–January 18, 2015.
4 Willett, op. cit., p. 8.
5 Wassily Kandinsky, Introduction to Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael T. H. Sadler
(1916), available at www.gutenberg.org.
6 Ibid., Part II: “The Movement of the Triangle.”
7 American Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that began in the Unitarian Church.
Among its projects were diverse unconventional anarchistic and communitarian schemes for
living, bound up within an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of
all creation and the innate goodness of mankind. Transcendentalists elevated insight over logic
and experience as the source of truth, but believed that this insight could be found in communion
with nature. Among the adherents were poets such as Walt Whitman. The Transcendentalists also
influenced novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and American intellectual life
generally.
8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (James Munroe and Company, 1849).
9 Quoted in Anna Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (Yale University Press, 1989), p.
102.
10 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (Yale
University Press, 1997).
11 Hughes, op. cit.
12 Dominique de Menil, quoted in rothkochapel. org.
13 Leja, op. cit.
14 David Burlyuk, quoted in Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Indiana University Press,
1993), p. 19.
15 Quoted in Anatxu Zabalbeascoa and Javier Rordiguez Marcos, Minimalisms (Gustavo Gill,
2000).
16 Quoted in Strickland, op. cit., p. 20.
17 Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, quoted in Room 7 of the
Exhibition Guide, Malevich: Revolutionary of Modern Art, Tate Modern, London, July 16–
October 26, 2014.
18 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (Reaktion, 2000), p. 29. This is based on ideas expressed in
Aristotle’s Poetics which is widely available and is free on www.gutenberg.org.
19 Quoted in Strickland, op. cit., p. 103.
20 Richard T. Kelly, The Name of This Book Is Dogme95 (Faber & Faber, 2000).
21 Rauschenberg’s achievements included painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and
performance art. See Catherine Craft, Robert Rauschenberg (Phaidon, 2013) and Calvin
Tompkins, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (Picador, 2005).
22 Michael Chapman interviewed in Making “Taxi Driver” (dir. Laurent Bouzereau, 1999).
23 Ibid.
24 Robert Zemeckis quoted by Richard Corliss in “The World According to Gump,” Time, June 24,
2001.
25 David Savran expands on these points in detail in Chapter 6: “The Will to Believe,” in Taking It
Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton
University Press, 1998).
26 Martin Scorsese interviewed in Making “Taxi Driver.” Zemeckis in an interview says that the
film is in part about “grieving the end of the American Dream.” Zemeckis interviewed by George
Stroumboulopoulos, Tonight (CBC), archived on http://www.cbc.ca/strombo.
27 Unfortunately there is no authoritative text on the history of Egyptian cinema; Violet Shafik’s
Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (American University in Cairo Press, 2007) gives a
partial account. Ibrahim Fawal, Youssef Chahine (British Film Institute, 2001) is an excellent
discussion of the prolific and controversial director.
28 Although she does not discuss Hussein Kamal’s work, Susan Fellerman addresses the use of art
as cinematic and narrative motifs in film in Art in the Cinematic Imagination (University of
Texas Press, 2006).
29 The recommended text is Mark Cousins, The Story of Film (BCA Pavilion Books, 2004) and his
accompanying widely available TV series, The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2012).
30 Linda Hoagland and Pete Grilli, “A Conversation with Masaki Koyabashi” (1996), reprinted in
the 2006 Masters of Cinema collection edition of Kwaidan.
31 For a useful and fascinating discussion of the way Japanese filmmakers adopted and used
Surrealism, see Mark Schilling, “Japanising the Dark Side: Surrealism in Japanese Film,” in The
Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, ed. Graeme Harper and Rob Stone (Wallflower, 2007).
32 Timothy Clark, Hokusai’s Great Wave (The British Museum Press, 2011).
33 There were, of course, other artistic influences at work in early Disney animations. See Van
Norris, “Interior Logic: The Appropriation and Incorporation of Popular Surrealism into Classical
American Animation,” in The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, ed. Graeme Harper and
Rob Stone (Wallflower, 2007).
CONCLUSION:
HOW CAN WE USE ART HISTORY
IN FILMMAKING?
Whether we realize it or not, there is a relationship between the long history
of art and what filmmakers do. Of course, no film is simply the product of
its director; a film happens when the director puts together his or her vision
of how the film should unfold and how it should look. The director works
with the cinematographer, who makes decisions about lenses, lighting, and
movement. Meanwhile, the production design team prepares the sets or
locations. As we saw with Hein Heckroth and Jack Cardiff, the production
designer and the cinematographer use their own knowledge of art to suggest
possibilities, creating setups that serve the script and the director’s vision.
An aspiring director, cinematographer, or production designer should have a
basic, straightforward grasp of art history and know that sometimes the best
place to get inspiration and ideas is the local art museum.
It is impossible to separate film from visual art. Film was born when visual
art was already almost 50,000 years old. At the same time, after film was
invented and disseminated, visual art could not fail to be constantly
influenced by the moving image in all its forms. Today, art is inseparable
from film. As Kerry Brougher points out, we often experience art through
the agency of film: “by the 1930s cinema was no longer borrowing from
art, it was converting modern art into popular culture. . . . Surrealism,
German Expressionism and abstraction were being converted into
languages for mass consumption.”1
Cinema does more than simply “borrow” from art. We have films that offer
artists’ biographies; films that refer to, echo, or are influenced by paintings;
even films that actually have paintings as part of the mise en scène. There
many different ways of looking at the relationship between art and film. We
can compare a film to a painting; we can seek the influences between the
film and a painting; we can seek the deeper relationships, which may be
more philosophical than specific. However, when looking at the relationship
between cinema and painting, it is just as important to notice the ways that
they diverge as it is to notice the ways in which they may converge. Here
we present some short case studies that examine convergence and
divergence between film and painting, suggesting a variety of different
ways that visual art can inform cinema.
Curator Stuart Comer has noted that “it is impossible to read the cinema
without thinking about Edward Hopper.”2 But Hopper’s paintings, though
they convey a strong sense of narrative, also convey a strong sense of
stillness, status, and inertia, not unlike the stillness in Giorgio di Chirico’s
paintings. Hopper was interested in Freudian notions of the unconscious,
which were coming into common currency in the first half of the twentieth
century. We can see the stillness and emptiness in Hopper’s pictures as
frozen moments in a psychological drama. Hopper is often linked to film
noir, but the differences are as significant as the similarities. A number of
Hopper’s pictures echo the film noir’s sense of mood, suspense, and
intrigue and the use of the urban environment, and both often have female
experience at the core of the drama. But in the noir films, female experience
is seen through the male gaze and is eroticized; in Hopper’s paintings,
female experience is more often than not female-centered, and frequently is
explicitly de-eroticized (see his 1941 painting Girlie Show for an example).
Film noir—and cinema in general—can often be voyeuristic, and this is
something that Hopper’s paintings have sometimes been accused of,
particularly in the way in which they view people through windows. But it
is less voyeurism in the paintings than the unavoidable “casual glance.” In
the city environment, when we glance around, we are so often surrounded
by glass that we are compelled to look through and into. Hopper captures
that.
9.1
New York Movie, 1939
Artist: Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Edward Hopper’s paintings often portray human relations and the city as interactions of light and
space. The usherette lingers in the brightly lit cinema lobby, engrossed in her thoughts, while the
audience absorbs the flickering and shifting monochrome of the screen. Note the uses of red and blue
in the picture.
In Thumbs Down, painting condenses the film into a single image. Both
Gladiator and the painting are hyperreal, based on trying to deliver as much
veracity as possible. The question arises, why bother making the movie
Gladiator when Gérôme’s painting would do? Philosopher Walter Benjamin
has an answer for this: “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation;
before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the
movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it
is already changed. It cannot be arrested.”5 The movie offers movement and
development; it tells us who the anonymous gladiator is, and who is the
emperor who controls human life. We learn more about the social and
political framework under which gladiator combat happened. All of this
information was digested by Gérôme and expressed in a single painting;
Ridley Scott fleshes it out. Neither is better or more rewarding than the
other; they simply deliver the same material in different ways, and both are
available. However, we have to admit that the movie is more immediately
rewarding to contemporary audiences than the painting. The film has
grossed more than $450 million, which represents many cinema tickets; add
to that DVD sales, streaming rights, television broadcast, and so forth. This
is a very widely seen and popular film. Theoretically, even more people
could see the Gérôme painting because it is available online, and no doubt
the success of Gladiator made more than a few people discover the
painting. But would the film even exist in its current state if not for the
painting?
9.2
Gladiator, 2000
Dir. Ridley Scott, DP John Mathieson, production design Arthur Max
The corrupt and amoral Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) gives the “thumbs down” (pollice
verso) signal, indicating that the gladiator should kill his opponent. Mathieson employed multiple
cameras filming at various frame rates, creating stop-motion effects for the action sequences. The
vast crowds, and ravenous tigers, were rendered in CGI.4
But the artwork that is most heavily referenced in Inception is The Prisons
(or Carcieri) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Trained as an
architect and as a stage designer, Piranesi was fascinated by the ruins of
ancient Rome and spent most of his career drawing them, or fanciful
imaginary cityscapes based upon them. Carcieri is a series of imaginary
prisons, huge vaults with stairs and walkways with impossible perspectives,
that seem to lead everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
However, one of the most remarkable things about Days of Heaven is that it
was shot almost entirely at a particular time of day known as “magic” (or
“golden”) hour. Magic hour lasts less than thirty minutes; it is that moment
of sunset when the sun has gone down but the sky is still light. At the brink
of twilight before the darkness begins to fall, luminosity is very soft and
rose-tinted.
9.5
Days of Heaven, 1978
Dir. Terrence Malick, DPs Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler
Critic Roger Ebert observed that “‘Days of Heaven’ is above all one of the most beautiful films ever
made.” Because Malick shot almost all of the film during “magic hour,” it took a long time to make;
the original DP Almendros had to leave the production and Wexler completed the film.
9.6
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885–1886
Artist: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Sargent painted this outdoors during the magic hour, in order to precisely capture the quality of light.
Like Terence Malick, it took Sargent quite a long time to make the work—all of autumn 1885.
For most of human history, drawing and painting have been the repository
of our human culture. For the past century, film has also taken on that role.
It is through art that we originally constructed and disseminated our ideas
about “What is beauty?” Painting engendered and developed our
appreciation for landscape. It carried our ideas about what is worth
remembering, valorizing, or commemorating. It demonstrated, through
visual communication, our social, religious, and political values. Through
painting we can see when and how new ideas and objects entered culture—
from the appearance of a new color derived from a scientific invention to
the appearance of a Japanese textile in a portrait. Painting is an integral part
of human history, and it tells the story of what it is to be human. Cinema is
also about telling the human story.
Exercise 1
Pure observation of light is the first and most crucial step. Recall the
lighting exercise you did in Chapter 1. Now pay special attention to the
quality of “magic hour.” Choose a subject, but this time include a person in
the scene. Observe how the color changes and intensifies in a very short
period of time. Make notes, but don’t take pictures. Think about how the
light at magic hour made you feel.
Exercise 2
How can films address characters from paintings? Paintings are full of
characters, and we have seen many of them in this book: Lady Liberty,
biblical Judith, Millet’s peasants, the Dutch guardsmen, and more. But
paintings are silent and static, and it is up to the viewer to imagine the
characters coming to life. Choose a painting from this book, preferably not
a historical character, and write a brief character sketch for the subject of
the painting.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
TIMELINE
PREHISTORY
Altamira Cave paintings.......................... c. 18000 BC
Lascaux Cave paintings........... c. 17000—15000 BC
325 AD
Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire; 652 Islam conquers Roman North
Africa; 718 Conquest of Byzantine Constantinople. These changes broadly affected art.
THE RENAISSANCE
14th–17th Century
1300–1600
1517
1517 is the accepted date for the start of the Reformation, which split the Western Christian Church.
This has wide implications for the fine arts. The Post-Reformation period, after 1600, includes the
Baroque.
Bronzino.............................................................1503–1572
Tintoretto........................................................... 1518–1594
Pieter Breughel the Elder.............................1525–1569
Paolo Veronese ...............................................1528–1588
Hasegawa Tōhaku .......................................... 1539–1610
Paolo Fiammingo...................................... c. 1540–1596
Hendrick Goltzius.............................................1558–1617
Cornelis Van Haarlem....................................1562–1638
Francisco Ribalta ........................................... 1565–1628
Caravaggio...........................................................1571–1610
Guido Reni ........................................................1575–1642
Frans Hals.......................................................... 1582–1666
José De Ribera .................................................1591–1652
George De La Tour..........................................1593–1652
Artemisia De Gentileschi............................. 1593–1656
Nicolas Poussin............................................... 1594–1665
Johann Liss.........................................................1595–1631
Francisco De Zurbarán................................. 1598–1664
Anthony Van Dyck.......................................... 1599–1641
Diego Velázquez.............................................1599–1660
The Le Nain Brothers.....................................1599–1677
Claude Lorrain.................................................1600–1682
Rembrandt Van Rijn......................................1606–1669
David Teniers the Younger...........................1610–1690
Salvator Rosa.....................................................1615–1673
Esteban Murillo..................................................1617–1682
Albert Cuyp .....................................................1620–1691
Jacob Van Ruisdael ...................................... 1628–1682
Pieter De Hooch.............................................1629–1684
Jan Vermeer......................................................1632–1675
Gregorio De Ferrari................................... c. 1647–1726
Jean-Antoine Watteau...................................1684–1721
William Hogarth...............................................1697–1764
Pietro Longhi .................................................. 1700–1785
François Boucher........................................... 1703–1770
Giovanni Battista Piranesi............................1720–1778
Sir Joshua Reynolds.......................................1723–1792
Thomas Gainsborough.................................. 1727–1788
Jean-Honoré Fragonard.............................. 1732–1806
Joseph Wright “Of Derby” .........................1734–1797
John Singleton Copley...................................1738–1815
Benjamin West................................................ 1738–1820
Henry Fuseli (or Füssli).................................. 1741–1825
Francisco Goya.................................................1746–1828
Jacques-Louis David......................................1748–1825
Friedrich Heinrich Fuger................................1751–1818
John Cozens...................................................... 1752–1797
William Blake.................................................... 1752–1827
Utamaro.......................................................... c.1753–1806
Thomas Stothard ............................................1755–1834
Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun ................1755–1842
Hokusai.......................................................... c. 1760–1849
Nicéphore Niépce...........................................1765–1833
Sir Thomas Lawrence................................... 1769–1830
Caspar David Friedrich................................ 1774–1840
James Mallord William Turner.....................1775–1851
Kunisada Utagawa ....................................... 1786–1864
William Etty.......................................................1787–1849
Louis Daguerre..................................................1787–1851
Horace Vernet .................................................1789–1863
Theodore Gericault..........................................1791–1824
George Catlin....................................................1796–1872
Ando Hiroshige................................................1797–1858
Eugene Delacroix............................................1798–1863
Henry Fox Talbot............................................1800–1877
(Invented calotype process)
Thomas Cole.....................................................1801–1848
Karl Bodmer.....................................................1809–1893
Jean Francois Millet .......................................1814–1875
Augustus Egg................................................... 1816–1863
George Frederick Watts............................... 1817–1904
Théodore Chassériau..................................... 1819–1856
Ford Madox Brown..........................................1821–1893
Jean-Léon Gérôme .......................................1824–1904
Gustave Moreau ............................................. 1826–1898
Arnold Böcklin...................................................1827–1901
Dante Gabriel Rossetti..................................1828–1882
John Everett Millais....................................... 1829–1896
Albert Bierstadt..............................................1830–1902
Eduard Manet ..................................................1832–1883
Edward Burne-Jones.................................... 1833–1898
Felicien Rops.................................................... 1833–1898
William Morris .................................................1834–1896
JM Whistler.......................................................1834–1903
Winslow Homer................................................1836–1910
Odilon Redon....................................................1840–1916
Claude Monet .................................................1840–1926
Berthe Morisot.................................................. 1841–1895
Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouy.. 1842–1923
Ilya Repin...........................................................1844–1930
Walter Greaves................................................1846–1930
Elizabeth Southerden Thompson,................................
Lady Butler................................................... 1846–1933
Paul Gaugin......................................................1848–1903
John William Waterhouse............................ 1849–1917
Vincent Van Gogh.......................................... 1853–1890
Ferdinand Hodler ............................................1853–1918
Unknown Japanese artists
The Eyewitness Account of Commodore Perry’s
Expedition to Japan in 1854.................................. 1854
John Singer Sargent......................................1856–1925
Georges Seurat................................................ 1859–1891
Henry Ossawa Tanner....................................1859–1937
James Ensor.....................................................1860–1949
Gustave Klimt................................................... 1862–1918
Edvard Munch..................................................1863–1944
Suzanne Valadon............................................ 1865–1938
Wassily Kandinsky ........................................1866–1944
Emil Nolde..........................................................1867–1956
Henri Matisse....................................................1869–1954
Emily Carr........................................................... 1871–1945
Aubrey Beardsley............................................1872–1898
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin....................................1878–1939
Kazimir Malevich..............................................1879–1935
Natalya Goncharova....................................... 1881–1962
Pablo Picasso.....................................................1881–1973
Edward Hopper................................................1882–1967
Jose Clemente Orozco................................. 1883–1949
Erich Heckel...................................................... 1883–1970
Diego Rivera......................................................1886–1957
Georgia O’Keefe..............................................1887–1986
Giorgio de Chirico...........................................1888–1978
Paul Nash...........................................................1889–1946
CRW Nevinson................................................1889–1946
Egon Schiele ....................................................1890–1918
El Lissitzky.........................................................1890–1941
Giorgio Morandi..............................................1890–1964
Max Ernst.............................................................1891–1976
Dora Carrington ..............................................1893–1932
George Grosz................................................... 1893–1959
Norman Rockwell........................................... 1894–1978
David Siqueiros ...............................................1896–1974
Nick Eggenhofer..............................................1897–1985
René Magritte.................................................. 1898–1967
M. C. Escher.......................................................1898–1972
Jindřich Štyrský.............................................. 1899–1942
Weegee Arthur Fellig................................... 1899–1968
Yves Tanguy.....................................................1900–1955
Mark Rothko.....................................................1903–1970
Salvador Dali....................................................1904–1989
Frida Kahlo....................................................... 1907–1954
Francis Bacon..................................................1909–1992
Dorothea Tanning............................................1910–2012
Jackson Pollock............................................... 1912–1956
Agnes Martin....................................................1912–2004
Robert Motherwell .......................................... 1915–1991
Sidney Nolan......................................................1917–1992
Alex Colville......................................................1920–2013
Lucien Freud..................................................... 1922–2011
Robert Rauschenberg.................................1925–2008
Andy Warhol.....................................................1928–1987
Donald Judd..................................................... 1928–1994
Allan D’Arcangelo...........................................1930–1988
Richard Estes..........................................................b. 1932
Lyn Foulkes..............................................................b. 1934
Paula Rego...............................................................b. 1935
Frank Stella..............................................................b. 1936
Robert Mangold.....................................................b. 1937
David Hockney.......................................................b. 1937
Carolee Schneemann ..........................................b. 1939
Chuck Close ..........................................................b. 1940
Valie Export............................................................b. 1940
Anselm Kiefer.........................................................b. 1945
Eric Fischli............................................................... b. 1948
Cindy Sherman ......................................................b. 1954
MOVEMENTS
We have to remember that movements are fluid and any dates given are only approximate. Many
movements overlap, and many artists combine approaches from different movements. A movement
really only indicates a dominant trend, and sometimes only indicates an art-historical classification,
which is helpful if you want to look up artists or artworks. Don’t take them too seriously.
CLASSICAL.................................5th–4th centuries BC
The Parthenon sculptures............................ c. 438 BC
MEDIEVAL..................................................500–1300 AD
Book of Lindisfarne, Northumbria, c. 715; Basilica of San Vitale Ravenna c. 547
ROCOCO.......................................................18th century
François Bouchard
PRE-RAPHAELITE......................................19th century
Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John Everett Millais, William Morris
MINIMALISM.......................................Mid-20th century
Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Frank Stella
OP ART................................................Mid-20th century
Bridget Riley
CONCEPTUAL ART...............................1970s–present
Marcel Duchamp, Yayoi Kusama, Fluxus, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović
POSTMODERN ART..............................1980s–present
Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Ai WeiWei, Banksy
GLOSSARY
Arcade (architecture)
An arcade is a structure made of a series of arches carried by columns. This
creates either a passageway between the arches and a solid wall, or a
covered walkway that provides access to other places such as adjacent
shops. Arcades were devised by the Romans and were used extensively in
Renaissance Italy. Giorgio de Chirico painted eerily deserted arcades. Paris
had significant arcades, built in the 1820s, called passages couverts, and
some are still in use. Louis Malle’s 1960 film Zazie dans le Metro features
scenes shot in the Passage du Grand Cerf.
Avant-garde
The term comes from the military, meaning advance-guard or vanguard, and
refers generally to anything that is experimental or risk-takingly innovative.
In art, the term first appeared around the 1890s to describe the work of
young painters in Paris who seemed to be doing things quite differently
from even the generation just a few years older. Generally speaking, the
term is used to mean artists or art movements that seem to be opposed to
mainstream cultural values and styles. These were characteristic of the
twentieth century.
Baroque
The baroque style arose in the period immediately following the European
Reformation, and is often associated with Italy and Spain, although major
examples of baroque architecture and art appear in Germany and
throughout Central Europe. Baroque style is identifiable in compositions
that emphasize movement, with complex use of diagonal lines and pyramid
structures, dramatic and dynamic lighting, and rich colors, augmented by
the dramatic effect of light and shade. This is the era in which chiaroscuro
becomes one of the dominant techniques in painting.
Bauhaus
A school of art, architecture, and design established by Walter Gropius,
initially at Weimar, Germany, in 1919. Through a community of artists
working together, the school’s aim was to bring art back into contact with
everyday life. Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and artist/filmmaker László Moholy-
Nagy taught there. See Moholy-Nagy’s films Gross-Stadt Zigeuner, a short
documentary about Berlin’s marginalized gypsy community, and Lichtspiel
Schwarz-Weiss-Grau (Lightplay Black-White-Gray), a fascinating
experimental film about light, shape, and form, both 1930.
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro (from the Italian chiaro, “light,” and scuro, “dark”) is the use
of bold and strong contrast between light and dark, affecting a whole
composition. Here light and shadow are used to define three-dimensional
objects within the composition, and also to create high drama. Examples:
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656); José de Ribera (1591–1652).
Classicism
The classical approach highly values the art and philosophies of classical
antiquity from the Western tradition (Greek and Roman) as setting the
standard for taste. Classical art typically seeks to be formal, restrained, and
rational, always paying attention to the rules laid down by Greek aesthetic
philosophy. Example: Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665).
Cubism
Instead of depicting objects from one particular viewpoint, the artist
analyzes the subject, breaks it up, and reassembles it in an abstracted form.
Cubism depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints simultaneously.
Cubist paintings appear fragmented and abstracted. This approach
challenged and even rejected ideas about perspective established in the
Renaissance, emphasizing the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas
instead of creating the illusion of depth. The movement was founded in
1907–1908 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and was joined by
Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, and Jean Metzinger, among others.
According to the curator Bernice Rose, it was the artists’ interest in film
that spurred them to invent a new style of painting that “could meet the
challenges of a perceptually re-invented world.” See, for example, Picasso’s
Portrait of a Woman (1910), Georges Braque’s Still Life with Harp and
Violin (1911), or Juan Gris’s Glass of Beer and Playing Cards (1913).
“Dutch” (“Deutsch”) tilt
A strongly angled camera shot in which the camera is set at an angle on its
roll axis so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of
the camera frame. The angle is so-called because of its popularity in early
German (“Deutsch”) cinema and was associated with Expressionism, both
in visual art composition and film. The technique was brought to
Hollywood in the 1940s, where it became a staple of horror and film noir
pictures. See John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Sam Raimi’s
The Evil Dead (1981).
Expressionism
Expressionism is both an artistic movement of the early twentieth century
and an artistic style that continues up to the present. Expressionism involves
figurative depiction, not of objective reality but rather of the subjective
emotions and psychological states that are aroused within the person. This
can be achieved by creating images that are distorted, exaggerated, and
combine colors in unusual or irregular combinations, or through vivid,
violent, dynamic application of formal elements in the composition. It
draws attention to the continued presence of the irrational in a seemingly
ordered and rational cosmos. Expressionism is often associated with
Germany, where the movement formed around a number of young painters
who called themselves Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). After the First World
War, painters such as George Grosz and Otto Dix renewed this tendency,
but with a far more critical and aggressive perspective. German
Expressionism came to an abrupt end in 1933 when the Nazis forbade it as
“degenerate art.”
Figurative
Refers to work that is clearly derived from real subjects, and therefore is
representational. The term arose only after the advent of abstract art. The
majority of the artworks discussed in this book are figurative.
Fresco
The mural painting technique used in ancient times was called fresco, or
“fresh”: color was applied onto wet plaster, bonding it to the surface. This is
a firm and long-lasting technique so long as the building remains intact and
is not exposed to too much sun and weather. Some Etruscan underground
tomb paintings have been discovered, and the interior murals in Pompeii
survive because for most of the last several thousand years they were sealed
in volcanic ash.
Futurism
Futurism was founded in Italy in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti.
It explicitly rejected the art of the past and celebrated change and technical
innovation. The Futurists praised technology, the automobile, and all
aspects of speed, power, and movement. This is reflected in paintings by
Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini. See Giacomo
Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912).
In 1916 the Futurists started to experiment with film, and although most of
the original films they made have been lost, they were influential at the
time. Futurism’s greatest influence outside of Italy was in Russia, inspiring
painters and filmmakers, including the greatest—Lev Kuleshov, Dziga
Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin—whose work contributed so
much to the development of cinema.
Gothic
In art, this usually refers to a long period that lasted from the mid-twelfth
century to the fifteenth century, or as late as the end of the sixteenth century
in northern Europe. Gothic architecture is particularly striking; one of the
best examples is Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Painting was mainly of
religious subjects, and gold leaf was often applied. Example: the Italian
painter Duccio (1278–1319). In the nineteenth century appeared the
“Gothic Revival,” involving a romanticized version of medievalism, and
sometimes a taste for the macabre. Example: Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828–
1882) and William Morris (1834–1896) in art and design; Augustus Pugin
in architecture (1812–1852).
Grotesque
Originally, the term grotesque referred to paintings and carvings that
depicted intricate compositions, combining or interweaving forms of human
and animal figures, often with foliage and other decorative elements.
Frequently these figures looked strange and even comical; conversely, they
could be frightening. A good example might be gargoyles on Gothic
buildings. From the eighteenth century onward, however, grotesque
increasingly has come to mean anything strange, fantastic, often with an
ugly or incongruous appearance. In modern art, the works that appeared in
post–World War I Germany by artists such as George Grosz, Max
Beckman, Otto Dix, and others are often referred to as grotesque. The
grotesque appears in contemporary art and illustration, and in all kinds of
genre films.
“Isms”
As has been made clear in the book, movements and “isms” are not to be
taken too seriously when we consider the relationship of art and cinema. At
least as many artists (and filmmakers) do not adhere to any movement, but
continue to flourish. Therefore, although the art history books might say
that American art in the 1940s and ’50s was dominated by Abstract
Expressionism, many realist and surrealist painters continued to work
productively. Likewise, film history books often discuss the Italian
neorealist movement, but other films were made in Italy at the same time
that did not belong to this movement. We have to recall that in any given
time, everybody is exposed to all kinds of art, not just whatever the key
movement of an era has to offer. Nonetheless, being aware of movements
and “isms” can be useful when attempting to understand general directions
in the arts.
Mannerism
Mannerism is a movement in late Renaissance art, roughly between the
1520s and 1590s. It questioned the accepted harmonies of classicism and
idealized naturalism prevalent in the work of artists such as Rafael,
Leonardo da Vinci, and others. Mannerist artists were interested in
experimenting with more challenging styles and techniques. The results are
stylized paintings that are visually striking but openly artificial, and
allegorical subjects were popular. Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
(c. 1544–1545) is considered one of the greatest Italian mannerist paintings.
The movement also existed in northern Europe, where it was often darker,
even sometimes grotesque. The Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem is a
good example of a northern Mannerist.
Metaphysical Painting
This is a very short-lived movement, if it can even be called that, as it
principally applies to only two artists: Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà.
In the period between 1911 and 1920, de Chirico was studying philosophy
and was fascinated by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche on Italian
architecture. This inspired him to create paintings that aimed to present
more than what meets the eye, to go beyond the physical representation of a
real place, in his case contemporary urban landscapes, and suggest
metaphysical ideas—that is, ideas that suggest other things, such as the
past, memory, and dreams. The names of de Chirico’s paintings, such as
The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1913–1914), also played a major role in
suggesting the metaphysical world.
Mimesis
Mimesis is a basic principle in art, applicable both to painting and to
cinema. Plato and Aristotle discussed mimesis as the representation of
nature. To Plato, all artistic creation is just imitation of what exists
theoretically in a world of ideas. Aristotle was more down-to-earth and
stressed that art imitates things that exist in real life. However, in his great
work on theater, The Poetics, Aristotle also pointed out that to be effective
mimesis must be more than copying; it must be very carefully crafted and
augmented, with just the right modicum of drama. One of the best ways to
think about mimesis is whether, all things considered, what is presented is
believable. This means that, given the “rules” by which the world of the
artwork is constructed, does it appear believable? This is why we are able to
accept a film like Ratatouille (Pixar, 2005, directed by Brad Bird), a
computer-animated comedy about a rat who is a chef in a fancy restaurant.
Logically, we know that the presence of rats in restaurants would bring the
health and safety inspectors. Within the rules of the world of the film, we
accept it because the psychological complexity and the social commentary
of the film are mimetic—that is, they imitate the world that we know.
Arnold Böcklin’s painting The Centaur at the Blacksmith’s Forge is not
realistic because there is no such thing as a centaur, but within the rules of
the world of the painting, there is a centaur, and since centaurs have horses’
hooves, we can readily accept that from time to time he’d want to have
them shod.
Minimalism
Minimalism was an art movement, principally in the United States,
characterized by rigorous stripping down of the artwork into almost pure
form. It embraced both sculpture and painting; minimalist painting is also
sometimes referred to as hard-edge painting, aiming at anonymous
construction of a simple object. Red Orange White Green Blue, a 1968
acrylic painting by Ellsworth Kelly, is a good example, being simply made
up of stripes in these respective colors.
In cinema, minimalism is also about rigorous simplification; it is
distinguished by a stripped-down approach, low budgets, and deliberate
avoidance of artifice. The Danish Dogme95 movement is an example of
film minimalism.
Modernism
Modernism is a product of the tremendous changes that came about as a
result of industrialization in the nineteenth century; it both embraces these
changes, in the constant search for new forms of expression, and rejects
them in favor of a newer and better way of being. Art is seen to move away
from mass society; the concept of the avant-garde is born.
Neoclassicism
In the late eighteenth century, German archaeologist and art historian
Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768) revived a taste for classical art, strongly
influencing Western painting, sculpture, and architecture. The aim was
strong, simple compositions without frill or fuss and rational use of space,
line, and color without obvious manipulation of emotions. Example:
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), who proclaimed “An artistic genius
should have no other guide except the torch of reason.”2
Pop art
Pop art was principally an Anglo-American movement, starting in the late
1950s, that sought to incorporate elements of popular culture into the
subject matter of painting, and sometimes even physically into the art
object. Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines,” collages of detritus picked up in
the neighborhood, are part of pop art; Roy Lichtenstein’s large-scale painted
renderings of comic strips and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of tabloid press
photographs are key examples. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow
Up shows aspects of pop art in a story about a fashion photographer; it is
satirized and pastiched in the Austin Powers films (1997–2002).
Postmodernism
As with most movements, it’s impossible to know when modernism ends or
postmodernism starts. But we can identify certain key characteristics of the
so-called postmodern. Instead of always looking for the new and original,
the postmodern approach sees value in exploring and using the art and ideas
of the past, but always doing so critically. Postmodernists don’t just accept
traditional explanations or truths, nor do they immediately dismiss them and
look for new “truth.” Instead, they want to examine and question what may
be missing, essentially “reading between the lines.” Postmodernists
appropriate ideas, images, and so on, but transform them into something
else, conveying different messages. Postmodernism is difficult to identify
precisely, but its influence can be seen in all aspects of contemporary
culture. One aspect of postmodernist art may be a kind of pessimism about
the possibility of escaping from borrowed imagery into “authentic”
experience. This is explored by the Wachowskis in The Matrix (1999).
Realism
Realism in art has several meanings. The first is simply mimesis, the
attempt to portray real-world things—that is, nature and everyday life—as
truthfully as possible, rejecting imaginative idealization in favor of close
observation of appearances. Examples of realist painters include Jan
Vermeer and Caravaggio.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, painters began to reject drama and
Romanticism in favor of a truthful and accurate depiction of nature and
contemporary life. Painters like Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet
wanted to paint frank reality, to show real peasants and laborers and the
local character of landscapes, emphasizing the simple and ordinary aspects
of life.
Rococo
The term rococo refers loosely to a highly decorative style of painting and
design. It derives from the Baroque of the seventeenth century, but by the
eighteenth century the style becomes much lighter in color, with far less use
of dramatic lighting effects, more informal compositions, and quite often a
delicately veiled eroticism. The style originated in France, some of the
greatest exponents being the painters Antoine Watteau, François Boucher,
and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, but it was influential in Italy and elsewhere.
Fragonard’s The Swing (1767) is one of the great exemplars of the rococo.
However, some art histories deny that rococo applies to painting, seeing it
purely as a design tendency.
Romanticism
Romanticism in art can be seen as a reaction against the rationalism and
materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture, but it
was also part of a desire to explore the world in a new way. Instead of
continuing the great traditions inherited from the ancients, imbued with
reason and rational thought, the Romantics advocated the primacy of
emotional, personal expression. Romantic art is based on the real, but
makes it more emotional and dramatic. Example: Eugene Delacroix (1798–
1863).
Sfumato
Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold uses an old painting technique called
sfumato. Sfumato (deriving from the Latin for “to smoke”) is fine shading
that produces soft, imperceptible transitions between colors and tones. This
means that there are no distinct outlines: areas blend into one another
through miniscule brushstrokes, which makes for a subtle rendering of light
and color. Leonardo da Vinci developed and perfected sfumato; see his
Mona Lisa. The opposite of sfumato is chiaroscuro.
Sublime
In art, the sublime happens when an artwork has the power to provoke a
kind of ecstasy, approaching the limits of the mind’s strongest emotion.
Dramatic landscapes or frightening yet beautiful images invoke the
sublime. Edmund Burke wrote that “whatever is in any sort terrible or is
conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to
terror, is a source of the sublime.”1 In a sense, the sublime cannot be
absolute; it involves the experience of the individual experiencing horror,
destruction, and awesomeness simultaneously with beauty. J. M. W.
Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), Henry
Füssli’s The Nightmare (1781), and American painter Frederick Church’s
Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) are all good examples. In cinema, most
thrillers attempt to create the sublime. A good example is Henri-Georges
Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1952).
Surrealism
Surrealism started with poets and became a movement encompassing all
aspects of the visual arts, literature, theater, and cinema. Surrealism was
articulated in the early 1920s, particularly through the surrealist manifesto
written by poet André Breton, the self-appointed leader of the movement.
The Surrealists were interested in invoking the unconscious mind and,
whether through writing or visual art, representing the contents of the
unconscious. Like the Expressionists, the Surrealists embraced the irrational
but had a much more positive aim: they believed that if they could set free
the human mind, a broader and more positive freedom for human society
would inevitably follow. Surrealism was very widespread, with adherents
across Europe, including Britain, as well as in North and South America.
Surrealism also strongly influenced cinema, and though there are few
purely surrealist films (see the work of Jan Svankmajer), many filmmakers
invoke surrealism in the creation of dream or fantasy sequences where the
content of a character’s mind is explored on the screen (Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry, 2004).
Symbolism
Symbolist artists shared the romantic value of “emotional truth” and
subjectivity of experience, but went even further. Rejecting the need for
realistic depiction, symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an
emotion or idea rather than try to represent the natural world and instead
used symbols—often hybrid oeuvres mixing Greek myth, biblical stories,
and mythological characters. Examples: Gustave Moreau (1826–1898);
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).
Tenebrism
Tenebrism (derived from the Latin tenebrae, “darkness”) is the “spotlight”
effect, the extreme contrasts of dark and light, used in figurative
compositions for dramatic effect. Some of the masters of tenebrism are
Caravaggio and also the Spanish painters Francisco Zurbarán (1598–1664;
see Saint Francis in Meditation, c. 1635–1639) and Jusepe de Ribera
(1591–1652; see Saint Jerome, 1652), French painter Georges de La Tour
(1593–1652; see Dice-Players, c. 1651), and the Dutch painters Gerrit van
Honthorst (1590–1656; see St. Peter Released from Prison, c. 1616–1618)
and Hendrik Terbrugghen (1588–1629; see Esau Selling His Birthright,
1625).
Trompe l’oeil
Trompe l’oeil, or “fool the eye,” is a kind of illusionist painting that depicts
an object so exactly as to make it appear real. This idea began with the
ancient Greeks and was also popular with Roman muralists. European
painters sometimes employed this technique, creating window-like images
suggesting actual openings in the wall or ceiling. A good example is A
Trompe l’Œil with a Garland of Flowers and a Curtain (1658) by Frans van
Mieris (1635–1681). Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit (1599) is a good example
of trompe l’oeil in a small painting, but it is more common in murals,
ceiling paintings, and, of course, in theater set design and matte painting,
where scenes are painted on glass panels mounted in front of the camera (as
discussed in Chapter 3’s case study of Black Narcissus).
Trope
Tropes are commonly recurring devices and conventions that are already
familiar to the audience. At their best, they can create a kind of familiarity
that indicates a signature style. At their worst, they are clichés. It is not
uncommon for a film director to develop certain themes, tropes, and
character motivations common to that director’s style. Tropes can be story-
based or visual, but in all cases should feed into the film’s theme. For
example, Christopher Nolan can be said to employ several storytelling
tropes, including nonlinear narrative, characters undergoing identity crises,
and ambivalent endings. Genres employ tropes: the 1940s film noir femme
fatale often smoked, while the ingénue rarely did. Horror movie tropes
include the dark, mysterious cellar or attic.
Vanitas
Vanitas in art derives from the biblical verse Vanitas vanitatum omnia
vanitas (Eccl. 1:2;12:8): “vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” It normally includes
a skull or skeleton amid objects from everyday life, thus suggesting that all
human achievements are transient and ultimately futile. See Harmen
Steenwyck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (c. 1640).
The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger combines vanitas
with portrait. Both are in the National Gallery, London.
Vorticism
Very few significant artistic movements have arisen in England, and many
claims have been made for Vorticism, which flourished briefly from 1912 to
1915. It was the brainchild of writer/painter Wyndham Lewis and, like
many similar modernist movements, vehemently rejected the art of the past.
It openly embraced machinery and industrialization, and visually it owes a
great deal to Cubism and Futurism. Although the output of Vorticism was a
mere footnote in art history, the painting Bursting Shell (1915) by C. R. W.
Nevinson is a particularly evocative piece of war art. Although Nevinson
was associated with both the Futurists and the Vorticists, he never formally
belonged to either.
ONLINE RESOURCES
Online Collections
BBC: Your Paintings
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/
yourpaintings (all the paintings held in the national collection across the
UK)
Edward Hopper
http://www.edwardhopper.net
Andrew Wyeth
http://www.andrewwyeth.com
Some contemporary artists are difficult to find online, but their work can be
found in the books mentioned in the Further Reading sections at the end of
each chapter. Artnet.com can also be a useful resource.
BFI Screen Online has many articles and stills about British cinema
http://www.screenonline.org.uk
Scala Archives
http://www.scalarchives.com
Tim Marlow, Great Artists Vols. 1 & 2 (Seventh Art Productions, 2001): an
entertaining, multipart series that covers almost everything you ever wanted
to know about traditional art history
Thanks firstly to the many students I have taught at SAE Institute and other
institutions.
I am indebted to the many talented artists and filmmakers with whom I’ve
worked as curator and friend, whose lively conversation led me to explore
this subject.
The publishers would like to thank Doreen Bartoni, Mairi Cameron, Rob
Edgar-Hunt, Larry Engel, Angela Giron, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Murphy,
Lewis Paul and Kimberly Radek.
Fairchild Books
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
www.bloomsbury.com
FAIRCHILD BOOKS, BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc
Gillian McIver has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action
as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
McIver, Gillian.
Art history for filmmakers / Gillian McIver.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4725-8065-8 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-4725-8066-5
(epdf) 1. Art and motion pictures. 2. Painting--History. I. Title.
N72.M6M39 2016
700.9--dc23
2015020639
To find out more about our authors and their books please visit www.bloomsbury.com where you will
find extracts, author interviews and details of forthcoming events, and to be the first to hear about
latest releases and special offers, sign up for our newsletters.