Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film

by Angela Dalle Vacche

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.

Genres: Film, Art

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Angela Dalle Vacche is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She has written extensively on the representation of history in film; on Italian women and early cinema; on intermediality and color. She is the author or editor of such works as Film, Art, New Media: Museum without Walls? (2012) and Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Cinema (2008), and is currently developing a book on African cinema.

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

My reaction is mixed. I liked the parts about Antonioni's Red Desert & Godard's Pierrot Le Fou best.