Film on Art

The film Racconto da un affresco constituted a hugely significant event in the history of film realism, opening out the broad possibilities of the art documentary. Drawing from the grammar of fiction film, Emmer, Gras and Grauding used personages painting by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, as actors, a formula that would garner huge success, starting with Alain Resnais’ commission to make a documentary on Van Gogh “à la Emmer” — but with the addition of a narrator — a film that would win an Oscar. Different transformations can be discerned in films like Papillons de nuit and Maestà, which distort or invert the terms of initial experiment: the first with animation, created from paintings, the second with actors used as painted personages that resemble a tableau vivant.    

In an open response to the Nazi notion of “degenerate art”, film-maker Henri Storck, a pioneer of Belgian documentary-making, made a short film in 1944 about the pictorial universe of Paul Delvaux with an alternative structure to customary dramatic, biographical and pedagogical narration. This form was taken on and developed by Resnais and Hessens in Guernica (1950) — also featuring an Éluard poem — and their poetic-experimental approach can be seen in films from other parts of the world, for instance the works included in this session: Vera Jocić’s Call, a meditation on the meaning of sculpture in the aftermath of Auschwitz; Alberto Gironella, in which Mexican film-maker Juan José Gurrola rethinks the iconography of Spanish painting; and Paradzhánov’s “Arabesque” journey through the world of artist Pirosmani. Film essays on art would be underpinned by the formal freedom of the movement, which emerged with the coming together of Marker and Resnais in Statues Also Die.       

In 1948, art historian Roberto Longhi and film-maker Umberto Barbaro theorised a specific wave of auteur informative documentary, believing that film production should be limited to framing the revealing detail that casts light on the painter’s style, but without breaching the aura of the works. Simultaneously, another option theorised by art critic and historian Carlo Ragghianti backed disassembling, right down to its final ramification, each work so as to expose its internal workings – a key example of this last trend is Rubens by Storck and Haesaerts, hailed at the time as “the triumphant entry of the History of Art in film” due to its capacity to audiovisually analyse art. This approach would culminate in the series Palettes, by Alain Jaubert, undertaken in 1988, which already possessed within its range of possibilities computer intervention on the image, and with eye-catching results.      

Peter Greenaway conceived an audiovisual triptych devoted to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. The three constituent pieces comprise a fiction biography, an experimental on-site installation, and this film essay on art, which uses every known discourse methodology from art history: from formalism to psychoanalysis; from sociology to iconology. The film-maker envisions a theory on the meaning of the painting — in alignment with the recurring obsessions in his filmography — and substantiates it with visual evidence in a master lecture that maximises its audiovisual possibilities.  

In 1915, Sacha Guitry filmed some of the only moving images we have of Rodin, Renoir and Monet, taking brief shots of their faces, which André Bazin called “animated photographs of famous figures”. A few years later, conversely, German film-maker Hans Cürlis brought about a key displacement: he changed the faces for hands, giving insight into how the works of Kandinsky and Grosz come into being on a blank canvas. This filmic awareness-raising would also gain richness: from the filming of hands to the use of slowing down and speeding up — with the latter visible in Visit to Óscar Domínguez by Alain Resnais; in Haesaerts’ influential transparent device in Visit to Picasso, re-explored with variations in Jackson Pollock 51 and Le Mystère Picasso, to the resources of live film to explore adjoining political negotiations in the act of creation, as evidenced in Christ in Paris.     

One of the zeniths of Belgian film on art, perhaps the freest and most creative film-making in this genre, is Painting with Falls, an unpredictable and striking filmic journey based on a painting — Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel the Elder — which ultimately offers an unabridged human analysis of present-day Belgium. Equally, it constitutes a critical and political study of observation: the multiple gaze on the image and exactly what we decide to pay attention to or ignore about everything that passes before our eyes on a daily basis.     

The artist’s essay portrait goes beyond the documentary portrait with the film-maker’s intrusion in the work: the author reorders the pieces like a demiurge, in real time, sharing the doubts of the creative process with the viewer. The result: unique pieces are created, straddling portrait and self-portrait to reveal the literary, pictorial and photographic history of the genre. This session puts forward four artist’s portraits which are, in parallel, self-portraits of the film-maker: René Magritte for Luc de Heusch; Dieric Bouts for André Delvaux; Georges de La Tour for Alain Cavalier; and Hubert Robert for Aleksandr Sokurov.

In this film, Varda creates an essay portrait of Jane Birkin, considering, simultaneously, the distance between painting and film, between the male and female gaze. Balancing the power game that is implicit in the artist-model relationship, Varda creates an unusual space inside art history’s power relationships: whoever looks and gives orders allows the model/muse to return the gaze and discuss with the artist (in this case film-maker and woman) the conditions and implication of her pictorial representation. Actress, singer and model Jane Birkin is, like Varda, a militant feminist who embodies every contradiction in the contemporary world with regard to the cultural treatment of women. Rarely has the portrait been worked upon with such awareness as in this film.