Cinema and painting: how art is used in film.

This book is an attempt by an art historian to expand the horizons of her discipline in a self-proclaimed effort to "join..in the new field of comparative arts" (p. 1). Her project is ostensibly premised on the notion that art history cannot ignore film studies because "the cinema has forever changed the meaning of the word `art' and the meaning of the word `history"' (p. 2). But just as film studies specialists have in recent years moved towards a broader definition of their mandate so as to include video, television and even computer-generated art within their (academic) purview, so it would seem that art historians need to abandon their exclusionary perspective on the fine arts if they are to survive (or at least compete) in this `post-postmodern' world.

Angela Dalle Vacche, an Associate Professor of Art History at Yale University, takes as her focus the query restated from the subtitle: How (is) art used in film? Given that this could be a very large topic, she formulates a narrower set of questions intended to focus the resultant discussion more specifically on the art of painting, which is, for her, "the most problematic but also the most alluring (sic) of art forms". In doing this, she thereby revises the original question to `How is painting used in film?' Dalle Vacche first asks: "(W)hat happens to the paintings used or alluded to in these texts?", and then," (H)ow do these films define painting as the realm of high art, creativity and femininity(sic), setting it against popular culture or industrial technology? "(p. 2) While the first question seeks merely to place `painting' concretely within the filmic text, as an object to be identified, duly noted, and cross-referenced (as in `old art history'), the second question takes us into the more value-laden realm of oppositional critiques which pay homage to contemporary critical theory (as in `new film theory').

Her method of inquiry has led her to choose examples from different cultural contexts and historical circumstances, `each directed by strong, creative personalities (sic)'. The result is that the films she selects offer up different answers to the questions, and each, therefore, constitutes a separate chapter with a separate focus alluded to in its title, an approach she terms "thematic". Thus, in addition to the introductory chapter, there are eight others each dealing with a specific director, specific film, and specific theme. They are, in order: Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris: Painting as Psychic Upheaval; Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert: Painting as Ventriloquism and Color as Movement; Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O: Painting Thoughts, Listening to Images; Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou: Cinema as Collage against Painting; Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev: Cinema as the Restoration of Icon Painting; F. W. Muranau's Nosferatu: Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema; Kenji Mizoguchi's Five Women Around Utamaro: Film between Woodblock Printing and Tattooing; and Alain Cavalier's Therese. Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space.

A major difficulty for this reader arises as a direct result of the overwhelmingly episodic nature of the text. While the chapters are similar in their individual concerns with a single film, the fact is that the method of investigation as well as the findings differ so radically that there is no connection between them, no overall argument that can be traced through them, and hence no coherence to the project as a whole. Ironically, the `intertextuality' that Dalle Vacche establishes as a key element in her textual analyses of individual films is precisely what is missing in her own text.

One of the fundamental problems with Cinema and Painting, I believe, is that neither of the key terms, `art' and `painting', is ever clearly defined; the author's assumption being, I suppose, that their meaning is self-evident. However, all sorts of difficulties evolve from this omission. `Art' and `painting' are not synonymous, nor are they equivalents. That is, to ask a question about painting is not the same as to ask a question about art. While film is an art form (Dalle Vacche's fears notwithstanding), it is not a form of painting. A film and a painting may both be decribed as `art works', but their conception, production and reception are not really comparable. To overlook these differences results in a most confusing argument. Without a solid basis of terminological understanding, words take on any meaning (and no meaning) whatsoever. This is, unfortunately, pretty well descriptive of the tenor of this text.

For example, in the chapter on Antonioni's Red Desert, Dalle Vacche consistently refers to the director as painter, as painting the film (when, in fact, he merely paints the sets). Further, the opening sentence relates how Red Desert has been repeatedly compared to abstract painting, but this is neither explained (what, exactly, does it mean for a film to be compared to an abstract painting?) nor referenced. Two quotations from the director follow (again, unreferenced): the first, which is given the date of 1942, states that black and white is to color as drawing is to painting; the second, from 1964, implies that colour (film?), which has acquired a new meaning in everyday life,will replace black and white film. Dalle Vacche proceeds to make a tautological leap by interpreting these quotations to mean that they are/he is `associating color with painting and the future" and that they are "about color as abstract painting and color as the language of the future". Her use of the allusion to abstract painting gets even more opaque and equally specious when, near the end of this substantial chapter, she begins to search for specific references to abstract works within the mise-en-scene.

In a sense, Dubuffet's work("Hautes Pates"), with its oscillation between low materials with the look of excrement, mud, or decomposing bones and childlike outlines of highly simplified characters, parallels the struggle for self-assertion experienced by Giuliana in Red Desert (p.72).

and

The patches of red, blue, yellow and green applied to the side of an old hut Ugo lets go to ruin are reminiscent not only of the tassels in Ravenna's Byzantine mosaics but also of the thick dabs of contrasting colors that Stael(sic), another proponent of Art Informel, specialized in (p.73).

and

At the beginning of the film, while Giuliana is furtively eating a sandwich, her eyes dwell on black shapes on the ground whose broken outlines and corporeal densities echo the black blotches Soulages is most famous for (p.73).

Needless to say, neither film nor paintings benefit from this reductive approach.

Surely, a crucial question, neither asked nor dealt with in Cinema and Painting, is What is an art film? Given that seven of the eight films Dalle Vacche has selected are absolutely canonical non-Hollywood, non-mainstream `foreign' art films,and six of those seven were directed by internationally-recognized and acclaimed `serious' directors, her unwillingness or neglect in tackling that question is mystifying. However, what this oversight does appear to do is permit her to include Vincente Minnelli's 1952 full-blown MGM technicolor musical An American in Paris as an equivalent text - a decision that has to be mind-boggling to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge about film history and theory. Not only is it included, but by its placement as the first film to be discussed, it appears to be privileged over the others. Dalle Vacche's introductory justification for this is as follows:

I start with Minnelli's An American in Paris and follow it with Antonioni's Red Desert because, by setting them next to each other, I want to suggest how much common territory can be found between a European "art film" and an MGM Hollywood musical. This order makes it possible to see the European art film as a special genre that only deviates from or simply alters, but does not subvert, the Hollywood mode. Antonioni's reaching out to painting in film is as unsettling as Minnelli's. Whether creativity is set in the rigid context of the American industry or in the looser European milieu, it always and inevitably destabilizes male identity. An American in Paris and Red Desert both qualify as art films...... (pp.5-6)

However provocative some of these statements may be, nowhere in the course of the text are they worked out as a cogent argument. They are merely dropped into the text, as if for effect, and then abandoned. Minnelli, it would seem, has been included because the Cahiers du Cinema crowd considered him an auteur, although she does not make clear that he was not ranked among the great directors, but singled out for his idiosyncratic highly stylized formal approach. For Dalle Vacche, however, there is little distance between auteur and artiste.

Granted, An American in Paris is about art, at least nominally. Set at the beginning of the fifties, its protagonist is Jerry/Gene Kelly, an American ex GI who has stayed on in Paris in order to paint. First and foremost, however, the plot is about a guy, Jerry, who falls in love with Lisa,a very young French woman who turns out to be engaged to Henri, an older Frenchman. Art is really incidental to the narrative, although absolutely crucial to the style of the film. Historically, the art scene in post-war Paris, as in post-war New York, had been transformed dramatically, not just because of the war and its after-effects, but also because of the impact of abstraction as the radical new means of expression. This film presents an art/world untouched by either; Jerry's own paintings are loosely realistic views of the city; the artists specifically referred to by the film are primarily nineteenth century Impressionists(Renoir), Post-Impressionists (Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo) and early twentieth century modernists (Dufy) and primitifs (Rousseau).

Dalle Vacche, however, ignores the intriguing problematic evoked by this anachronism (1) in order to play her trump card; Jackson Pollock. While she admits that there is no evidence of any direct influence of Pollock on Minnelli, that does not prevent her from noticing all sorts of connections, from a shared interest in Surrealism's linking creativity to the unconscious to their "cherish(ing) well-known American values of youth, energy and spontaneity, and they both fantasized about a fusion of self and other, of subject and object, that is, becoming one with the image. To convey this desire, they transformed painting into dancing, while subscribing to a primitivist approach that enables the artist to reach back to the roots of his creative impulse" (p. 15).

One thread I would like to pull from the above is her claim about Minnelli and Pollock both transforming painting into dancing. For this to make any sense with regards to Minnelli, it would have to mean that he took actual paintings (e.g. Renoir's 1872 Pont Neuf or Toulouse-Lautrec's 1896 Chocolat Dancing at the Achilles Bar) and used them as visual sources for dance numbers. For this to make sense with Pollock, though, she has to pull a sleight of hand, and turn his photographically-documented method of production (i.e. moving around a canvas placed on the floor while applying liquid paints by dripping and flinging techniques) into a simile for dance; a trick which not only trivializes his approach but also seriously misunderstands his intentions. And even then, there is no parallel to be found in these two instances. The ultimate question has to be, then, to what end does she tailor these examples to fit a pre-conceived notion of what she wants to find?

Perhaps the clearest example of this slipperiness may be found in another analogy she makes between Minnelli and Pollock.

We have no record that either artist made statements about the other, but we can still account for the weakness of Minnelli's happy ending for An American in Paris by recalling the popular perception of Pollock's visceral approach to art-making. This is to say, in the fifties Pollock's laconic, intense persona must have pushed the boundaries of heterosexuality to the point where it threatened to slip into homoeroticism" (p.5).

What is she actually saying here? The boy-girl(Jerry/Lisa) relationship in Minnelli's film could only be a front for the real boy-boy(Jerry/Henri or is it Jerry/Adam) couple? Jackson Pollock was a gay pin-up boy?

In addition to the general weakness of the ideas expressed in Cinema and Painting, there are other aspects of the text which I found frustrating as well. Even though some of the films she uses are quite well-known, I would imagine that the less-specialized reader would not have familiarity with the lesser-known examples, like Therese, Five Women Around Utamaro, The Marquise of O. At least some form of narrative outline would have been useful in order to follow her analyses. With Therese, which I have not seen, I found I had no idea of what the film was about, after reading the chapter on it. Her illustrations are for the most part well-chosen, but there is the odd one which has little connection to the text and yet has an entire page devoted to it--the reproduction of Delaunay's Eiffel Tower with Trees (1910) on p. 37 or de Stael's Painting (1947)p. 74, useful perhaps if reproduced in colour, but not much help flattened out in black and white.

While the project of investigating the relationship between art and the cinema is a valid enterprise, I'm afraid that Cinema and Painting: How Art is used in Film does not adequately address the scope and implications of the task.

(1) One can only surmise that this was a result of the increasing popularity in post-war America of late nineteenth and early twentieth century French painting. In other words, Hollywood was substituting its knowledge of what was commercially successful in the art market for what was avant-grade in the artists' studios.