Synopses & Reviews
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 (Therese).
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.
Review
andldquo;A fascinating study of modern art in a group of American and European films. Felleman adroitly examines how sculptures and paintings hold up in the film medium as much more than props and reproductions. Her perceptive visual analyses of artandrsquo;s seminal role of her chosen eight films reveals how art evokes such themes as freedom, mystery, playfulness, sexual awakening and passion, existential angst, gender politics, and threats to the status quo. . . . and#160;An important contribution to film studies.andrdquo;
Synopsis
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 (Therese).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.
Synopsis
Instead of concentrating on surface similarities and notions like influence, it argues for an ongoing dialogue, a continuing relationship between cinema and painting that plays itself out in the norms of visual representation, in the historical changes of the 'eye.'
Synopsis
Real Objects in Unreal Situations is a lucid account of a much neglected subject in art and cinema studies: the material significance of the art object incorporated into the fiction film. By examining the historical, political, and personal realities that situate the art works, Susan Felleman offers an incisive account of how they operate not as objects but as powerful players within the films, thereby exceeding the narrative function of mere props, copies, pastiches, or reproductions. The book consists of a series of interconnected case studies of movies, including
Pride and Prejudice,
The Trouble with Harry, and
The Player, ultimately showing that when real art works enter into fiction films, they embody themes and discourses in a way that other objects often cannot.and#160;
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [267]-292) and index.
About the Author
Susan Felleman is professor of Art History and Film and Media Studies at the University of South Carolina.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Work of Art in the Space of Its Material Dissolution
1. Doubly Immortal: The Song of Songs (1933)
2. Suspect Modernism: Venus von Gericht (1941) and Muerte de un ciclista (1955)
3. The World Gone Wiggy: The Trouble with Harry (1955)
4. Art of the Apocalypse: The Damned (1961)
5. Object Choices: An Unmarried Woman (1978) and The Player (1992)
6. Subjects, Objects, and Erotic Upheaval at Pemberley: Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Bibliography
Index