Art History For Filmmakers

Since cinema's earliest days, literary adaptation has provided the movies with stories; and so we use literary terms like metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche to describe visual things. But there is another way of looking at film, and that is through its relationship with the visual arts – mainly painting, the oldest of the art forms. Art History for Filmmakers is an inspiring guide to how images from art can be used by filmmakers to establish period detail, and to teach composition, color theory and lighting. The book looks at the key moments in the development of the Western painting, and how these became part of the Western visual culture from which cinema emerges, before exploring how paintings can be representative of different genres, such as horror, sex, violence, realism and fantasy, and how the images in these paintings connect with cinema. Insightful case studies explore the links between art and cinema through the work of seven high-profile filmmakers, including Peter Greenaway, Peter Webber, Jack Cardiff, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino and Stan Douglas. A range of practical exercises are included in the text, which can be carried out singly or in small teams. Featuring stunning full-color images, Art History for Filmmakers provides budding filmmakers with a practical guide to how images from art can help to develop their understanding of the visual language of film.

Fascinating documentation of one of the most important film societies in American history.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art–film nexus at successive historic moments.

This is an analysis of what has been called the seventh art. It traces the development of film from its scientific origins through to cinema today, covering the key elements and players that have contributed to its artistic and technical development.

This collection of essays demonstrates the usefulness of looking at cinema with the analytical methods provided by art theory. "The Visual Turn" is a dialogue between art historians and film theorists from the silent period to the aftermath of World War II.

“More than half a century since its initial publication, this deceptively compact book remains among the most incisive analyses of the formal and perceptual dynamics of cinema. No one who cares about film can afford to remain ignorant of its insights and wisdom. As digital technology fundamentally alters motion pictures, the lessons of Film as Art commend themselves as excellent insurance against reinventing the wheel in the new media landscape and hailing it as progress.”—Edward Dimendberg author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity “After more than eight decades, Rudolph Arnheim's small book of film theory remains one of the essential works in defining film art, understanding film less as reproducing the world than as opening up new possibilities for formal play and unexpected imagery. Anyone serious about film, whether scholar, filmmaker or simply a lover of cinema, must take Arnheim seriously.”—Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang and D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film “An aesthetic theory based on the formal ‘limitations’ of the medium, Arnheim’s Film as Art always provokes students in an age of few limits and less formality, and they argue and engage this classic text with unparalleled passion. Written in the wake of sound’s transformation of the cinema, Arnheim’s essays are not only central to understanding a major historical moment in theoretical debates about what constitutes the ‘essence’ of film, but also are a must read for anyone seeking a lucid, detailed, and rigorous argument about how works of art emerge from expressive constraint as much as expressive freedom.”—Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts

Art Nouveau thrived from the late 1890s through the First World War. The international design movement reveled in curvilinear forms and both playful and macabre visions and had a deep impact on cinematic art direction, costuming, gender representation, genre, and theme. Though historians have long dismissed Art Nouveau as a decadent cultural mode, its tremendous afterlife in cinema proves otherwise. In Cinema by Design, Lucy Fischer traces Art Nouveau's long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement's enduring avant-garde aesthetics and dynamic ideology. Fischer begins with the portrayal of women and nature in the magical "trick films" of the Spanish director Segundo de Chomón; the elite dress and décor design choices in Cecil B. DeMille's The Affairs of Anatol (1921); and the mise-en-scène of fantasy in Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Reading Salome (1923), Fischer shows how the cinema offered an engaging frame for adapting the risqué works of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Moving to the modern era, Fischer focuses on a series of dramatic films, including Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), that make creative use of the architecture of Antoni Gaudí; and several European works of horror—The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Deep Red (1975), and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)—in which Art Nouveau architecture and narrative supply unique resonances in scenes of terror. In later chapters, she examines films like Klimt (2006) that portray the style in relation to the art world and ends by discussing the Art Nouveau revival in 1960s cinema. Fischer's analysis brings into focus the partnership between Art Nouveau's fascination with the illogical and the unconventional and filmmakers' desire to upend viewers' perception of the world. Her work explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities can flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality, and the exotic.

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.