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Moving Pictures
Anne Hollander begins with the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries―Van Eyck, Durer, Bruegel―and progresses through the history of European art to the advent of film in the modern era. She explores the interconnectedness of painting, prints, and film as modes of art that in comparable ways depict moments in the narrative flow of human life. Moving Pictures offers a new way of assessing the artistic, emotional, and psychological power of paintings and pictures―and of understanding our own deepest responses to them.
- GenresArt
528 pages, Paperback
First published June 24, 1989
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About the author
Anne Hollander
16 books21 followersAnne Helen Loesser Hollander was an American historian whose original work provided new insights into the history of fashion and costume and their relation to the history of art. She published numerous books on the history of fashion, modernity, and the body including Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits.
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October 24, 2020
Hollander traces how contemporary cinema -- rather than breaking a break/rupture from previous visual culture -- is an extension of the drama of painting. This is a must read for people interested in art history. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
The magic of cinema: “But a cinematic art also invests natural appearances with their own absolute meaning, and then incorporates the viewer into the universe these appearances create” (14)
Painted light predecessor to artificial light: “Painted light, imitating the action of seen light, can give this sense that the world of the picture is momentarily actual and in uncertain motion – becoming seamlessly part of our own shifting world, even while remaining a painting in a frame” (16)
Why light matters: “For human creatures dependent on the sun, the action of light has an obvious primal drama that compels the human imagination” (18)
On the Camera: “Ideally, the camera unerringly finds what the bodily eye and the mind’s eye are both unconsciously lusting for, or perhaps dreading” (21)
Paintings must move in order for us to be moved: “In art, for the soul to be moved, the eye must move, and so, quite apart from the light, the painting must move” (21)
Movies carry on legacy of painting: “The best film imagery, the stuff that makes movies the art they are, derives its power from the expressive methods used for centuries in the kind of realist art devoted to evoking subjective experience. The camera, being both a popular graphic medium and a reproductive mirror through which such art became accessible, has allowed the movies to carry it on” (32)
The magic of cinema: “But a cinematic art also invests natural appearances with their own absolute meaning, and then incorporates the viewer into the universe these appearances create” (14)
Painted light predecessor to artificial light: “Painted light, imitating the action of seen light, can give this sense that the world of the picture is momentarily actual and in uncertain motion – becoming seamlessly part of our own shifting world, even while remaining a painting in a frame” (16)
Why light matters: “For human creatures dependent on the sun, the action of light has an obvious primal drama that compels the human imagination” (18)
On the Camera: “Ideally, the camera unerringly finds what the bodily eye and the mind’s eye are both unconsciously lusting for, or perhaps dreading” (21)
Paintings must move in order for us to be moved: “In art, for the soul to be moved, the eye must move, and so, quite apart from the light, the painting must move” (21)
Movies carry on legacy of painting: “The best film imagery, the stuff that makes movies the art they are, derives its power from the expressive methods used for centuries in the kind of realist art devoted to evoking subjective experience. The camera, being both a popular graphic medium and a reproductive mirror through which such art became accessible, has allowed the movies to carry it on” (32)
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