Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film / Edition 1

by Angela Dalle Vacche

Overview

The visual image is the common denominator of cinema and painting, and indeed many filmmakers have used the imagery of paintings to shape or enrich the meaning of their films. In this discerning new approach to cinema studies, Angela Dalle Vacche discusses how the use of pictorial sources in film enables eight filmmakers to comment on the interplay between the arts, on the dialectic of word and image, on the relationship between artistic creativity and sexual difference, and on the tension between tradition and modernity.

Specifically, Dalle Vacche explores Jean-Luc Godard's iconophobia (Pierrot Le Fou) and Andrei Tarkovsky's iconophilia (Andrei Rubleov), Kenji Mizoguchi's split allegiances between East and West (Five Women around Utamaro), Michelangelo Antonioni's melodramatic sensibility (Red Desert), Eric Rohmer's project to convey interiority through images (The Marquise of O), F. W. Murnau's debt to Romantic landscape painting (Nosferatu), Vincente Minnelli's affinities with American Abstract Expressionism (An American in Paris), and Alain Cavalier's use of still life and the close-up to explore the realms of mysticism and femininity (Thérèse).

While addressing issues of influence and intentionality, Dalle Vacche concludes that intertextuality is central to an appreciation of the dialogical nature of the filmic medium, which, in appropriating or rejecting art history, defines itself in relation to national traditions and broadly shared visual cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292715837
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	03/01/1996
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Angela Dalle Vacche is Associate Professor of Art History and teaches in the film studies program at Yale University. She is the author of The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. A Thematic and Intertextual Approach
• Chapter 1. Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris: Painting as Psychic Upheaval
• Chapter 2. Michelangelo Antomom's Red Desert: Painting as Ventriloquism and Color as Movement
• Chapter 3. Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O: Painting Thoughts, Listening to Images
• Chapter 4. Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou: Cinema as Collage against Painting
• Chapter 5. Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev: Cinema as the Restoration of Icon Painting
• Chapter 6. F. W Murnau's Nosferatu: Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema
• Chapter 7. Kenji Mizoguchi's Five Women around Utamaro: Film between Woodblock Printing and Tattooing
• Chapter 8. Alain Cavalier's Thérèse: Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Editorial Reviews

In this ground-breaking study, the author shows how eight films variously define painting as an art. . . . For all the wide range of art references, the readings of the films are rigorous and sensitive as film criticism. This art historian knows film.

Choice

In this ground-breaking study, the author shows how eight films variously define painting as an art. . . . For all the wide range of art references, the readings of the films are rigorous and sensitive as film criticism. This art historian knows film.-- "Choice"

From the Publisher

Presents candid interviews with some 30 Koreans ranging from recent immigrants to third-generation Korean-American gay activists, artists, crime victims, shopkeepers, and mixed-race Koreans grappling with issues such as racial tension, class and gender differences, family, and home. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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