Ruth B. Shamir Ph.D

Ph.D. Art History & Cinema

PAINTING AT A CINEMATIC GLANCE:
THE NEW MUSEUM IN FILMS OF THE 1980's AND 1990's

The Hebrew University in Jerusalem 1999.

Ph.D. Summary

Painting and Film. Two separate media. One, belonging to an old and venerable tradition and the other comparatively new and ever­changing.

Painting in Film, or Picto­film, a special genre of film, is first promulgated in this work. Through an analysis of twelve films by eight directors, this work aims to show the contribution of Picto­film to contemporary culture and the influence of the cinematic medium on our perception of painting. An Introduction is followed by four chapters which examine this premise in­depth.

Chapter One ­ Introduction ­ Film on Art and A Theory of Picto­Film

Picto­film will be defined here as a film which employs paintings or semiotic aspects of a painting within an overall cinematic aesthetic structure in such a way as to project "enriched", semiotically meaningful light back onto the painting. Like other aspects of modern art, the pictorial image in Picto­film borrows from raw life experience.

Picto­film changes our mode of seeing. Picto­film enhances the patterns of thought and imagination and offers the viewer an extra large or multi­painting. It transposes the painterly image to a larger scale and sets it in motion. Among other things the purpose of Picto­film is to make the painting move.

How to accomplish that objective is a semiotic problem that faces each director. Dynamization of contemplation, film as a "new museum", picture as a code, expansion and 

concentration of meaning and using the picture as an ideal work of art rather than as an image of an image are some of the semiotic concerns of picto­film.

To address those concerns, We have characterized four Picto­film qualities: the 'cinematic glance', enhancement of the picto­message, the search for the real and Picto­film and the high art of our time. A brief discussion of each quality is included in the Introduction; each chapter that follows is devoted to analyzing specific films, in the context of that quality and directors' desires to resolve the semiotic problems they are confronted with.

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Chapter Two: Painting at a Cinematic Glance.

The twelve films included here were chosen because the qualities of the new Picto­film genre are most prominent in them, because of their high artistic merit and because those films created a new artistic medium.

The first film examined in detail in this chapter is Peter Greenaway's "A Zed And Two Noughts" (ZOO"). Except for the fourth chapter, "The Search for the Real", Greenaway's films feature prominently throughout this work. All of his films are dominated by visual style and all display the qualities of Picto­film as the primary new artistic medium. Greenaway, perhaps more than any other film­maker today, is obsessed with solving the semiotic problems facing a director working in cinema.

Well­known works of pictorial art or elements of those works are presented for our visual examination; however, in Picto­film instead of the traditional museum mode of viewing, the image is placed within the moving cinematographic framework of a film which almost never stops completely to freeze our view of painting. The film progresses relentlessly, as a series of discrete "glances". Works of art are presented as fragments, angles, aspects of color, shade, composition. From a semiotic point of view a curious mixture of fragmentation, of the breaking up of formerly whole entities creates an entirely new

image , a new picture which emerges in the film.

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Chapter Three ­ The Enhancement of the Picto­Meassage.

In the previous chapter the central Picto­film quality examined was the fleeting glance. A further characteristic of all picto­films is the enhancement of the picto­message, that is, a close and attentive stare, dwelling with almost painful deliberation on a feature of style, motif, composition, which originally appeared in a great work of art. What does enhancement of the picto­message do to the original paintings presented in the movies? This chapter will attempt to provide some concrete answers.

All three films which are discussed in this chapter, "The Draughtsman's Contract". "The Belly of an Architect" and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", are by Peter Greenaway.

Enhancement of a certain feature from the pictorial tradition of the past gives rise to visual image in a more abstract system, images which, in themselves, become the picto­message of the film, almost the grammar of a new language.

Film­makers achieve enhancement in a number of ways: through the use of a picture within a picture, the double frame, mise­en­abyme and other devices whereby they can achieve additional visual and semiotic depth.

Greenaway treats the whole film as a canvas, to be filled with motifs, figures, constructions and techniques from the world of contemporary and classical painting. Not only is this presentation of film as canvas valid, but we believe that the conceit of director as painter is equally valid.

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Chapter Four: The Search For the Real.

Film is the complete opposite of the physical reality in which we exist. The level of sheer spectatorship manipulates the audio visual world of film in a direction away from reality. What semiotic processes occur during this juxtaposition and do they extrude into our own existential reality outside of painting and film? Is what the viewer sees, in cinematic image, the really real, the real fake or just cinematographic play. Four film­makers have examined this art­life question in semiotic terms. Each of these film­makers tackles the question of "reality" as a separate self­contained problem.

Two of the film­makers, Robert Altman in "Vincent and Theo" and Akira Kurosawa in one sequence of his epic "Dreams", "Crows" are both absorbed with different aspects of Vincent Van Gogh.

Altman explores the inner psychological forces driving Van Gogh, and to view those forces in conjunction with the more painful and cruel socio­economic reality of his time as it affects the process of creating art. He builds his film with many reality­enhancing motifs, hoping to erect a complex edifice of different layers of reality which will help viewers discover their own perceptions about Van Gogh.

Kurosawa's approach is the very opposite. Not interested in exploring the layers of reality which are behind the painter himself, he departs from some improbable dream­like premise in order to arrive at a deeper understanding and formulation of inner truth.

Two other film­makers have a different perspective on the "reality" they are dealing within their films.

In direct contrast to the Altman and Kurosawa stories around a real, and well­known artist, Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse" and Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns" present fictional painters, that create imaginary masterpieces that are dealt with in the films. The starting point for both Altman and Kurosawa is a familiarity with the works of Vincent Van Gogh, but for Rivette, the paintings in his film are devoid of any reality outside the frame­work of picto­film. We know that art which emerges in the bosom of this cinematographic reconstruction of life is an invention. We have to be convinced that what we are shown are real works by a real artist.

Rivette emphasizes the process of the painter's work rather than a finished product and the dynamic result of the cameramen's work. The girl model is actually quite plain when not being enhanced by the process of painting as shown in the film. Film, according to Rivette, is a better medium in which to capture reality, both the elusive reality of beauty and the reality of everyday life. The camera creates the reality which appears more real on screen than in real life.

Rudolph takes a diametrically opposite view of reality. The motif of reality of the fake paintings and the unreality of the originals is central to this film. For Rudolph, the real living girl commands the scene and produces the reality. Everyone must conform to the new reality. Art critics and the owner and the viewer each bring their own point of view to the work.

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Chapter Five: Picto­film and the High Art of our Time.

The visual or plastic arts, as we know them today, are a combination of three aspects which, when taken together, are called aesthetics: a high degree of technical accomplishment, a high degree of identification with the mythological and ritual model of the world, and a high degree of evaluation in the community.

High art arises where special privileged social groups claim exclusivity and appropriate these aesthetic accomplishments for themselves. After World War I with the appearance of new directions in the visual arts, aesthetics fused with social and group psychology; art was introduced into the sphere of mass media. The nature of art and the nature of the viewer's relationship to art changed dramatically.

Painting became synonymous with the notion of high art at a certain stage in its development. The very notion of high art developed from the experience of painting as an art form. With the evolution of public museum, and the expanded audience for viewing art, what 

was formerly restricted to the elitist few, now became widely available to society at large. With the introduction of reproductions, the notion of the ideal viewer changed yet again, through the availability of multiple and familiar images taking their place in everyday life. Film, as the newest medium, originated as newsreel or reportage, at the beginning of this century, and then evolved into a visual entertainment, available to a broad cross­section of a society, in greater numbers than any visual art form before it. Only gradually did film establish its own place in the world of art. It had to transcend the framework of virtual reportage, of 'life­like' narrative and to introduce direct visual language involving artistic literary or dramatic devices.

The genre of artistic film came into being and managed to establish itself firmly in the 20th century high culture.

High art, today, fuses the images of traditional high art with the forms and genres of mass popular and commercial art. The modern framework of the images of classical painting serves as the new interpretative model for these images elevating the low, mundane and democratic framework to the level of new high art, resulting in a mixed genre in which the rules of carnival and carnivalization prevail.