Intermedial Resonances
Absorbing the Painterly
There has been much written about intermediality and film, of course, from Agnes Petho’s work, to Steven Jacobs, from Marion Schmid to Martine Beugnet. Yet, rather than chiefly engaging with the various and useful debates around the subject, what interests us is simply what we will call intermedial resonances, how a film absorbs an art form into its texture, so that it becomes a work of art itself. Many films have no interest in seeing themselves as part of an ongoing aesthetic project, and others are perhaps too interested in doing so to the detriment of that absorption. If films such as The Death of Stalin or Dunkirk seem to exist within the parameters of film form, others seem to exist almost outside such expectations - Drowning by Numbers or Jarman’s Caravaggio. It is as if the respect for the art contains potentially a contempt for cinema, encapsulated in Peter Greenaway’s claim that “in melancholy moments, I often feel that neither you, nor me, nor anybody else has truly seen a film yet.” (Mubi) Elsewhere, he says, “Cinema is wasted on cinema – most cinema is bedtime stories for adults.” (Independent) Greenaway may insist, “I’ve always been interested in something we could call a nonnarrative cinema. I don’t really believe that cinema needs to tell you a story. I’m trained as a painter, and the very best paintings, I sincerely believe, are non-narrative. They are about statements, about ideas.” (Vulture) Yet there are reasons why cinema has chosen narrative in most instances. It might not be that the director is interested chiefly in the story, but they are interested in rhythm and time. Narrative can bring out ideas through temporality and tempo, by drawing upon a manifold interest that makes us curious about the eventful, which we will distinguish from the event. The event has no before or after, even if in many a painting or photograph we can infer the eventful from it. But film as a temporal medium is eventful, no matter if some films want to curb that eventfulness and many other films want to accelerate it, turning the film into a constant work of pace. But to understand painting as Greenaway no doubt does, needn’t mean he understands cinema, and one of the weaknesses of his work is that he often acknowledges painting in his films, yet doesn’t absorb its influence. It is as if the films get stuck in the event, rather than offering the meditative to bring out the eventful.
Our question really is how do films absorb rather than acknowledge paintings and photography, well aware that though, like film, they are mediums of the visual, they are not mediums of the temporal. Occasionally, films resolve this by making them moving paintings — Loving Vincent offers an animated narrative based on the specifics of Van Gogh’s work, while Shirley, Visions of Reality, uses 13 Edward Hopper paintings that it faithfully renders in narrative form. Yet the films seem gimmicks, homages to great painters without quite reenergising the possibilities of cinema. In a different way from Greenaway and Jarman, but with some of the same problems, we sense that film is subordinate to the art, rather than cinema using painting to augment its own form.
By this reckoning, what films generate these possibilities? We have no shortage of examples: Edvard Munch, Vagabond, The American Friend, Mirror, Pierrot le fou, The Phantom of the Liberty, Days of Heaven, Barry Lyndon, Red Desert, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Heaven’s Gate, The Godfather, La Collectionneuse, The Leopard and The Spider’s Stratagem. All these films fall under the painterly, as opposed to the photographic or the architectural, which would respectively perhaps bring to mind Carol, Moonlight, Saving Private Ryan, The Killing or Aftersun, and Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, The Parallax View, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, The Last Woman, and The Passenger. But what matters isn’t the influence chiefly on the filmmakers of painters, photographers or architects, but how directors work with the thought of painting, photography or architecture in the given film. For our purposes, we will hold to painting and focus on five films: Heaven’s Gate, The American Friend, Barry Lyndon, Mother and Son, and Blue Velvet, while referencing a handful of others. Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino came from a background in art: he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1961 and then, in 1963, a Master of Fine Arts. Both were in painting. “I’m not someone who enjoys talking about movies the way Quentin does”, he says of chatting with Tarantino, and he felt the same way discussing films with Scorsese. “He’s like Scorsese. They’ll talk about every old movie that was ever made, know every line that was ever written. I don’t do that.” (Hollywood Reporter) His cinematographer on Heaven’s Gate was Vilmos Zsigmond, who would say: I think it helped me a great deal that in Hungarian film school … we studied the history of painting. We went to museums at least once a week. It helps to learn feelings for compositions, lights, colors and all that. If you start living in an artistic world, you start thinking like an artist. …” (Masters of Light)
What matters isn’t that the filmmaker shows in the work the specific paintings which have influenced them; more how they have thought beyond the parameters of film technique and absorbed into their work art practice. We have many film terms that are part of the industry or parts of film theory, and sometimes both, but what they are all instances of is film vocabulary: pan, tilt, cut, montage, sequence shot, establishing shot,and close-up. Some will have their equivalent in painting, like a portrait resembling a close-up, or an establishing shot sharing similarities with a landscape. But it’s often when we sense a filmmaker thinking beyond the film vocabulary that the image takes on a quality greater than the functional demands of filmmaking. It may be the case that near the end of Heaven’s Gate, there is a shot which looks a lot like Thomas Hill’s Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite, 1872. It comes after the film’s closing battle scene and the central character James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) walks away from the battlefield and towards the forest, as Cimino slowly pulls back in a telephoto shot that shows us the forest in the bottom third of the frame, the mountains in the distance covering the middle of the frame and the sky and clouds the top third. We have, of course, used a word that covers both painting and film (the frame), but frequently film believes its purpose is to make the frame as invisible as it can. The most common way to do this is to match on action, so that when a character leaves the frame, we are in the next shot. If they leave the frame and the film holds to the image, this gives the impression of an empty frame, even if there are many things like chairs, tables, curtains and so on within it. By refusing to cut on the action of a character getting up and leaving the shot, the frame becomes apparent. If the film immediately cuts to the person going from the living room, and then into the kitchen, the frame remains invisible.
There are many ways a filmmaker can emphasise the frame and suggest the presence of painting in the image, even if no particular painting happens to be invoked. What matters in this shot isn’t the similarity to the Hill painting, but the idea that Cimino is opening up cinematic expectation beyond the limits of the readily filmic. Cimino doesn’t cut from Averill leaving the frame to the shot we have described, but shows us various other images in the intervening few seconds, including a series of shots showing the aftermath. When it cuts again to Averill, he is so small within the image that we might wonder if this is him in the way we wouldn’t if the film had shown him to us leaving the frame in the previous shot, or shown him taking up much of the image so that we would know exactly who it is. Cimino wants us to see the context of the land, of what everybody has been fighting over, and this respect for the vista was an aspect of his work that was already there in his first feature, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and vital to his second, The Deer Hunter. Clint Eastwood, who starred in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, allowed Cimino to direct the film, even though Eastwood initially thought of doing it himself. Eastwood said to Cimino: “You’re one of the few people I’ve ever met who has an eye for scope…I’ve done so many films with great backgrounds and when I see the cut, it looks like it could have been shot in Burbank.” (Hollywood Reporter) Cimino thinks of both figure and ground, a Gestalt notion useful for thinking about painting but rarely used to discuss film, where technicist language tends to dominate. Instead, filmmakers will think of lens choices, deep focus or shallow focus: emphasising the character in the foreground, or giving space to the background by using a shorter focal length. Obviously, this is very important, but by thinking outside the box, and inside the frame, the filmmaker can absorb painting into their work as much more than just a homage to a particular artist.
In a scene much earlier in Heaven’s Gate, Cimino cuts from women looking out of the window at Harvard, all holding candles and giving the scene a burnished light, to Averill, on a train, as the light streams in through the window blinds. These are two different uses of chiaroscuro: the former closer to paintings by Rembrandt, Caravaggio and others, where candlelight would illuminate faces, and the latter more like Vermeer, with light coming in often at an angle from a window. Film noir made much of the latter, even if the films were unlikely to invoke Vermeer, and sometimes crime films would play up the distribution of light to show a character under strain during an interrogation, or to suggest villainy. But in each instance, the films may have been carrying no more than the distant ray of an art form they were using, but were unlikely either to invoke or to think through their relationship with fine art. While Kubrick would go on to make a film as absorbed as any in fine art with Barry Lyndon, in The Killing, the style is much more immediately associated with photography, including Kubrick’s own — in the years before becoming a filmmaker, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine. With Heaven’s Gate, Cimino more than perhaps any filmmaker before him, aside perhaps from Robert Altman with McCabe and Mrs Miller (also shot by Zsigmond), indicates that this is a genre that could become visual as well as iconic: it could put into the background the aspects that made the western recognizable and draw out the features which would absorb the painterly. If the Western was a genre based on horses, homesteads, desert landscapes and cowboy hats, Cimino didn’t only insist on a relative realism that became important to 1970s Westerns, but also insisted on the aestheticism of the realistic. When Averill sits on the train, the light doesn’t only come in realistically as we see it is much more plausibly realised than in many a classic Western, but it has also passed through a sensibility greater than the realism it seeks. One may not immediately see Vermeer in the image, but that is because there is a difference between homage and absorption, between recognising a similarity, though it may be there, and sensing a relationship with fine art that becomes part of the problematic of the film. “If you demanded which influences I have been subjected to”, Cimino says, ‘’I’ll say, among others, Ford, Minnelli and Degas, Kandinsky, Turner: more so painters than filmmakers.” (Cahiers du Cinema) We see this influence again shortly afterwards when Averill’s friend Nate (Christopher Walken) kills a suspected cattle thief. The man is stripping carcasses bare when Nate kills him, and the shot shows us the man in a pool of blood, collapsing against the stripped flesh. It might bring to mind Chaim Soutine’s Beef Carcass or Francis Bacon's work, perhaps Figure with Meat. This isn’t to suggest they are nods, even if Michael Henry notes in the film we see the presence of “the blood and viscera of a Soutine painting.” (Criterion) What we can claim with some confidence is that Cimino, like other ‘70s American filmmakers, including Coppola, Altman andd Kubrick, was interested in drawing upon an art form that wouldn’t reduce his work to a narrow notion of the cinematic.
Film, of course, is a two-dimensional image that must give the impression of depth, and maybe one reason why the three attempts at 3D in the 1950s, the 1980s and the 2010s haven’t been transformational is that film gives a good enough impression of three- dimensional reality within a two-dimensional technique. But occasionally a filmmaker will emphasise the two-dimensionality all the better to propose that a film is a work of painterly surface as readily as cinematic depth. While many filmmakers in the forties and fifties were trying to give images depth of field, painting often insisted on the depthless. "The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetition”, Clement Greenberg said, “seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility." (Art and Culture: Critical Essays) If Greenberg was right about painting, he would have been misguided to think the pictorial included the cinematic. Obviously there was experimental cinema interested in defying the ‘field’ work of most narrative filmmakers, with Jordan Belson’s films for example closer to Bridget Riley than they were to Antonioni, even if the brilliant Italian was obviously interested in Abstract Expressionism, and wished to convey through colour some of the same tensions to be found in the work of Mark Rothko — evidenced in a letter Antonioni sent to Rothko: “You and I have the same occupation. You paint, and I film, nothingness.’” (Daily Rothko)
The idea of filming nothingness was picked up by Wim Wenders, but took on a different form partly through the influence of a different painter. This isn’t to say that Rothko or Edward Hopper was such an enormous presence on Antonioni or Wenders, but it is to see that when thinking of each artist, we can distinguish an important difference in style, one which can then be comprehended partly by thinking of the artists who were important to them. Wenders said of Hopper that he “continually reinvented the story of lonely people in empty rooms or couples who live separate lives together without speaking…In the background are the impenetrable façades of a hostile town or an equally unapproachable landscape. And always windows! Outside and inside are the same inhospitable and unreal living spaces, radiating a similar sense of strangeness.” (Far Out Magazine) Here he could be describing an aspect of The American Friend’s story, as the apparently dying Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) ends up alienating himself from his wife and child and becomes ever closer to a shadowy and shady figure who involves Jonathan in committing a contract killing, one that will leave his wife and child with enough money to live on after he has gone. But, more especially, we are interested in the form the film takes, and Wenders (who helped Antonioni direct the latter’s last feature Beyond the Clouds) never quite had the yen for the abstract frame Antonioni could incorporate, even if Wenders always conveyed in the image a world greater than the characters’ ready existence. However, while some of his greatest early works (Alice in the Cities; Kings of the Road) were in black and white, The American Friend is a colour film that absorbs the Hopperesque: the greenish hue of Nighthawks, the reds and yellows of New York Movie. Later, Wenders would be much more explicitly homaging the artist’s work (End of History, Million Dollar Hotel and especially Don’t Come Knocking), but our purpose is partly to propose that filmmakers are not always at their most impressionable when the homage is at its most explicit.
As Harold Bloom notes that “every major aesthetic consciousness seems peculiarly more gifted at denying obligation as the hungry generations go on treading over one another down”, this he would see as a problem, with artists’ orphaned in their own work of less interest than those who are involved in a complex relationship with that past. As Bloom says, “…the profundities of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images.” (Anxiety of Influence). Whether an artist admits or denies the influence isn’t chiefly what is important — what matters more is that they have become part of an imagistic set of possibilities that give to their chosen art form (and perhaps especially so if those images partly come from another one) the renewable. Early in The American Friend, Jonathan is going to work, and Wenders offers what in film terms would be a transition shot as we see him approaching his shop. It is more than that, since the postman has, just before he arrives, dropped off a letter, and we see him drive away in his yellow Volkswagen. The letter is an important piece of narrative information: it is from Tom Ripley, making contact, and asking him if Jonathan needs money. But what interests us is the shot as a frame: the moment when we see Jonathan walking towards the shop just as the Beetle drives off. On the left-hand-side of the frame, the colours are grey; on the right side, blue, yellow and red. From a pro-filmic perspective, this is just another Hamburg street, with the shop at the bottom of it. Wenders would be far from uninterested in this given reality, as he says, speaking of Kings of the Road, where, determined to attend to a sense of place, he “would have the freedom of making up the story as we — literally — went along. A film that, even when we were halfway through shooting it, could still change totally.” (The Logic of Images) In this sense, The American Friend is much more constrained: it is an adaptation of Patrica Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game and is in colour, unlike Kings of the Road. Much of the film’s odd tension comes from this modest fidelity to its source material, and the colours that make the image more than a capturing of reality. Ir is also a colourist exploration of what it means to frame in film.
If we are so resistant to the cause and effect of influence, to the painting and its manifestation in cinema, it rests on a more complex relationship between images that aren’t only representationally explicit. One way to think about this is to invoke Robert Hughes on Hopper. Speaking of Nighthawks and other Hopper paintings of the city, Hughes says these “are now as solid a fixture of the American imagination as the novels of Raymond Chandler. Hopper’s European contemporaries especially in Weimar Germany, had also dealt with this theme — the city as a condenser of loneliness.” (Nothing if No Critical) It is as if Wenders drew on Hopper rather than German expressionists ,all the better to find a loneliness that was not subjective but that would neither be hard-boiled, as though he wanted to make a noir thriller that would keep at bay the generic, while also invoking the United States. It isn’t just that there are scenes set in the US, like the opening where we see the World Trade Centre on the edge of the frame, and later in the film when Ripley returns to the States and we see the New York skyline; it is more that Wenders seeks a sensibility that is nether quite American nor German, but an amalgamation that cannot then be distinguished. When Wenders says of Dennis Hopper’s character, Tom, that he commutes between Europe and America the way other people commute between home and work, Wenders wonders what “does that do to him?” — as he might soon have been wondering what it was doing for him as he became, increasingly, an American filmmaker with Hammett and Paris, Texas. But this was always Wenders’ problematic, and never pertinent to Fassbinder or Herzog: of all the New German filmmakers, Wenders was the one with the most convoluted relationship with the US, and Hopper became the artist who perhaps best exemplified this relationship. As Wenders says, “The greatest mystery is how Hopper manages to make us wonder what is going on and what is going to happen next[…] His characters are in a state of expectation.” (SWI) If Pauline Kael could say of The American Friend that Wenders “wanted to tell a story but couldn’t quite keep his mind on it” (New Yorker), a fair take might be that he wants that Hopperesque sense of expectation, but doesn’t want the obligations of a resolution. Painting as an atemporal medium can keep us in that suspension; film as a medium through time usually feels obligated to put causality and continuity into the image. Yet painting can give cinema the awareness of images that suggest a moment in time within a story that it cannot complete, and if Wenders can say that Hopper makes us wonder what will happen next, how can Wenders do so as well without arriving at the inevitability of what will come to pass? Few watching The American Friend will think that Wenders is adapting the same author as Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train), and this is because Hitchcock brilliantly knows that an image can easily invoke another image, creating a causal chain that Gilles Deleuze aptly linked to English empiricism and relations. “Hitchcock introduces the mental image into cinema….” as we notice a glass of milk is never just a glass of milk, a key never just a key, and a windmill never only a windmill. They are images making us think how they are linked to other images, a series that makes us develop the story in our head, often before it has been developed on the screen. We infer Marion will take the money in Psycho and, sure enough, she does.
Wenders’ images lack, or eschew, according to taste, that type of imagistic anticipation, and would be as good a reason as any for Kael’s claim. But we’re inclined to think of Wenders insisting we observe the image rather than anticipate the next one, just as when we look at a painting, we are forced by virtue of the atemporal medium that it is, to look at this one rather than think about the next one. Obviously, Wenders films are films: one image does flow into the next one, but equally the verb to flow seems too fast a word to describe how Wenders’ images move from one to another. Early on, he shows us what would seem to be an establishing shot of Ripley’s Hamburg house, but he shows it to us after we have been with Ripley inside the house, and it is a long shot of him on his balcony. The film cuts to central character Jonathan working in his picture frame shop, and he takes from the safe a painting that will then be sold at auction the next day. Now ,in the first few minutes of the film, there is clear continuity: Ripley and a painter are involved in a forgery scheme in New York; Ripley goes to his place in Hamburg and sells the fake painting that Jonathan has framed, and Jonathan makes clear the painting’s blue isn’t quite right. He refuses to shake Ripley’s hand after the painting is sold, and someone says to Ripley that he shouldn’t worry too much about Jonathan: he is no longer as astute as he was, now that he is ill. This detail interests Ripley, as it leads him to involve Jonathan in the murder plot.
There is, then, a story Wenders is telling here, but it is as if he wants us to attend to the image primarily and the story secondarily, rather than the other way round. One needn’t undermine the brilliance of Hitchcock’s images, but we might be more inclined to call them shots, with the suspense maestro making shot choices and Wenders making image choices. Hitchcock’s work could in this way be regarded as ‘pure’ cinema, while Wenders insists on an impurity that absorbs painting more readily into his images than Hitchcock, not just as reference points but as a different aesthetic priority. “I started making movies as an extension of painting. I worked as a painter, I wanted to be a painter, but it is difficult to catch the element of time in images,” Wenders says. “So as a painter, it made a lot of sense to start using a camera.” (The Talks) Wenders’ best work has often retained this sense of a painter working with time, and it is partly what has given his work a quality a little different from a filmmaker who has been influenced by paintings. His images suggest that he has put time into them rather than that he has proposed a painterly attention to the shot. To understand an aspect of Wenders’ relationship with cinematic pace, that he insists must be a dawdle, one can do worse than look at his work as the tension point between painting that demands contemplation, and film, which emphasises momentum.
To make a film set in the 20th century based on paintings might seem like a necessary homage, while to make one set in the late 18t century need be no more than an acceptance of using the available records of the time. Painting now may be subordinate to photography as a way of capturing a moment, but we might, as a consequence, underestimate painting as part of comprehending a given period. Watching Barry Lyndon, we can see that Hogarth, Gainsborough and others have influenced Kubrick’s images, but this needn’t mean Kubrick wished chiefly for us to get the references. It is as much, if not more, that he wants them as reference points. It is well known that Kubrick went to enormous, even inordinate, lengths to get the period right, well explored in Vincent LoBrutto’s book on the director. It might have been having Leonard Lewis spending “six months researching the period hairstyles that he designed for Marissa Berenson and the other women in the film”, while “Kubrick remained adamant about shooting on location and became more and more obsessed with the concept of acquiring what he called the patina of the period interiors.” (Stanley Kubrick) But also “…massive research was done on eighteenth-century painting. The film used painters like Watteau and Zoffany, while “Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Chardin and Stubbs were also highly influential on the look of Barry Lyndon.” (Stanley Kubrick) Stubbs and Zoffany are far less well-known than Watteau and Hogarth, and a filmmaker seeking chiefly a knowing relationship in the viewer between painting and film would be more inclined either to use the most established of names or to play up the idea of obscure artists all the better to have the most knowledgeable of viewers get the nods. That doesn’t seem Kubrick’s intention, and it would appear that what he wanted was to use the paintings the way he would use drawings of the time. Cinematographer John Alcott said, “the actual composition of our setups were very authentic to drawings of the period.” (Stanley Kubrick)
Many filmmakers homage paintings specifically, and perhaps no one more deliberately than Godard in Passion, using Rembrandt's Night Watch, Francisco Jose de Goya's The Third of May, Eugene Delacroix's Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders, as well as El Greco's Immaculate Conception. But while Godard’s clear attempt to film specific paintings was contained within a story of the frustrations involved in filmmaking, and the degree to which a filmmaker is expected to tell a story, he would have been well aware that the director must add to painting and not detract from cinema. It is partly this tension that the film explores, but if one regards the film as an inevitable failure, one that Godard has incorporated into its very making, it might be that what makes a painting great is not what makes cinema an important art form. Kubrick understands that many viewers watching the film will be aware of the art made during the period in which it is set. Yet this needn’t be the recognition of connoisseurship, but the awareness that our perceptions of the time will be so reliant on painting generally. It isn’t the specific Constable, Gainsborough or Watteau, but that this documentation was then subjective as it can now be objective. This means no more than that the human hand no longer needs to learn how to master perception to render an image: merely clicking a button will arrive at a far greater likeness than even the most skilled painter of two or three centuries ago The painter would be at the very least a skilled craftsman, yet the history, psychology and education of that painter would be more important than that of someone who just happens to be taking a photograph.
Again, let us not overly simplify: a photograph may be easy to take, but that doesn’t mean it won’t reveal the prejudices, assumptions and expectations of the person taking it. But especially now, with 85 per cent of people over 16 with a smartphone, according to Uswitch, the capturing of images is a much more democratic process than it was in the 18th century. Almost all images would have then been ‘taken’ by people of privilege, or at least reliant on the approval of the powerful. John Berger puts it well when saying of Millet and his depiction of the peasant: “no other European painter had treated rural Labour as the central theme of his art.” (About Looking) Why would an artist concentrate on the poor, when they were reliant on or products of wealth? To regard art as a necessary privilege, and to see in film’s use of it a nodding cultural capital that elevates the newer art by making clear the earlier one, is to add to the problem that was present because few people had the skills and financial power to represent the world. When Berger says that “the art of the past is being mystified because of a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such justification can no longer make sense in modern times” (Ways of Seeing), we might feel that the filmmaker using art as elevation is using it too as mystification. When a filmmaker uses the art of the past to film the past, then what matters more is the history of perception over the history of painting. Painting is vital to how we perceive the past because it was available.
One needn’t see in such a claim an eschewal of composition, form, colour and tone, or to ignore that many great filmmakers have seen in painting ways to augment cinema, to make it more than just about telling stories. It is why we have made much of Wenders’ use of the image, and Cimino’s use of the frame. It is as though Kubrick wanted to become an 18th-century perceiver, to become like a painter in the sense that he wished to understand what it would mean to make images at that time, while aware he was a 20th-century filmmaker making images with cameras and with time. When we say becoming like an 18th-century painter, we mean it as Deleuze and Guattari propose someone becomes a dog, a crab, a monkey. “Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, of the molecular proximity into which they enter.” (1000 Plateaus) By analogy, the filmmaker becomes 18th-century by generating a milieu that limits their perceptual possibilities, as a painter of the time would have their perceptions limited. One can see this as absurd, and it will only inevitably be partial: Kubrick is a modern director hardly reliant on the patronage of kings and queens, and whose images would be expected to reflect a benign aristocracy while hiding tyranny. But he did want to exist within the perceptual framework of the 18th century, and this was reflected in what might seem an absurd parti pris. His insistence on filming only with candlelight could have seemed like a bloody-minded rejection of cinema. A big-budget film is too technological a medium to lend itself to a fundamental notion of authenticity: a film like Barry Lyndon has hundreds of contemporary extras marching on battlefields, features as its leading man a heartthrob actor of the moment, and Kubrick had at his disposal an entourage of technicians. Yet if we keep in mind Deleuze and Guattari’s comment, creating the circumstances as well as one can to recreate the conditions of a given state, this would allow Kubrick and his cinematographer to become painterly in a deeper way than by replicating paintings from the past.
The technical details required make it all the more ironic: that to capture the past as accurately as he could, Kubrick needed technology that was more up to date than anything readily available. He needed the fastest available film stock, and the reason why films before couldn’t use candlelight without artificial lighting rested on the slowness of previous film. It wasn’t even as if it was available in the early seventies except as still photography designed for a Nasa space programme. Kubrick managed to access a lens intended for NASA use and got someone to mount it on a BNC Mitchell camera, no matter if in the process it destroyed the camera for any other application beyond Kubrick’s given specifics. The technical details are intricate and fascinating for the tech-inclined, but what comes through most strongly is Kubrick’s need to all but create the technology so that he can apply it to an aesthetic idea: that he wanted to film with the sort of light that the painters of the time were using. Pauline Kael might have said “this film is a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures.” (New Yorker)There was some truth to this claim, though it needn’t be viewed quite as negatively as Kael’s remark suggests. If many filmmakers wished to show in their references to paintings the painterly, Kubrick wanted to find in film the light that painters would traditionally have been forced to use for interior shots.
Some might see in Kubrick’s perfectionism a trivial pedantry, but where should fidelity to the period stop? Should the film be faithful to the wigs of the time, the costumes of the period, the mode of transport? Most would say of course and justify this by claiming too strong a presence of the anachronistic would fail to suspend disbelief. But Kubrick wishes to go further than that, and keeps us in the authentically luminescent, just as Terrence Malick wished to do something similar a couple of years later when paying such attention to magic hour in Days of Heaven. In each instance the film doesn’t want to invoke painting as homage, but to suggest the light that is authentic to the lived experience of the given characters. “Darkness is being stripped at a rate unprecedented in human history – the spectacle of the Milky Way in the night sky is now invisible to 80% of the world’s population (and 99% of the population of the US).” So says Jacqueline Yallop in a recent Guardian article. If a film chooses to strip away some of this illumination and try to capture as accurately as it can the sort of light artists would have relied upon, that is much more interesting than a filmmaker merely showing us images that resemble a well-known painting. When Peter Wollen says,|” postmodernism was to be defined as ‘art about art’, not in the modernist sense of ontological self-examination and research, the resting and probing of the foundations of painting, but in the new sense of creation, translation, ‘deconstruction’ and neoclassicism” (Raiding the Icebox), we can see Barry Lyndon as more modernist than post-modern, if we view the work as an attempt to comprehend its moment over the viewer comprehending given reference points.
In one scene, Barry deserts the army and ventures into Prussian territory, finding bed and bawd with a sweet Fraulein. There is a quiet humour to this scene, but when the following day Barry and the married woman, whose husband is away at war, say they love each other, Kubrick has convinced us of their affections less in the development of their affair (we have seen so little of it), but the softness of the light that manages to be both realistic and metonymic. It indicates the level of light we might expect in a farmhouse that burns a few candles in a compact space, and, associatively, a warmth to the images that contrasts later in the film when Barry takes up with Lady Lyndon, with the night scenes in the country house ghoulish and oppressive. The numerous candles lighting the scenes, and the thick foundation most of the characters wear on their face, creates a vampiric atmosphere that is more than merely a metonym. The odd candelabra and a face caked in pale makeup are sometimes all you need to signify a vampire, but, of course, Kubrick hasn’t made a horror movie (that will come next with The Shining), but he is registering the horrors of wealth that characters possess or scramble after. If the vampire film suggests metaphorically the wealth that the rich horde in the blood they insist on taking from others, Kubrick’s film is realistic and associative, rather than analogous. It is interested in capturing as accurately as possible the specifics of class power. In the earlier scene in the farmhouse, this is one of honest, momentary feelings. The husband is at war, the wife is lonely, Barry is horny, and while talk of love can seem ironic, it is also a direct reflection of an encounter that wasn’t cynical. Some might assume irony and cynicism are close cousins, and often they are, but here they seem more distant relations, as Kubrick’s use of candlelight in this instance shows a metonymic complicity within its realism, just as later the candlelight appears to be metonymically alienating. By using candlelight over camera lighting, Kubrick turns the image far back in time, even if he needed the latest developments to do so. He manages to make the period film realistic while still insisting on the aesthetic, as the candlelight can serve quite distinct metonymic purposes.
Mother and Son might appear the most painterly film ever made, if we qualify this hyperbolic claim with a modest acceptance that the director Alexander Sokurov wanted to suggest the two-dimensionality of the image, while films usually try to indicate a three-dimensional space. It is, of course, why filmmakers have, on occasion, over the last seventy years, flirted with 3D. Writing on the film, Jeremi Szaniawski says, “Sokurov exalted the bi-dimensionality and flatness of the cinematic image, relating it to the painterly tradition – specifically to that of the religious icon – elevating cinema as art. As Elena Gracheva notes, in Sokurov, art is what renders the invisible visible, but without stirring or breaking down the flatness of the cover that warrants the mystery’s integrity…” (Senses of Cinema) Or, as Sokurov himself said: “There is just one principle, and I think that this is a very important one. I have stopped pretending that the image onscreen is dimensional.” (Film Comment) One way of looking at this is to see an image that is representationally more realistic as also more profane, and thus far removed from the sacred. The more one removes the image from trying to emulate the everyday world, the more it can seem to take on an elevated aspect. It was no surprise when Paul Schrader came out as one of the film’s greatest admirers, saying, in the preface to an interview with the director, that Sokurov's films define a new form of spiritual cinema. “Sokurov mixes elements of Transcendental Style — austerity of means, disparity between environment and activity, decisive moment, stasis — with other traditions: visual aestheticism, meditation, and Russian mysticism.” (Film Comment) In his book, Transcendental Style in Film, from the early seventies, Schrader noted that “Why do austerity and asceticism stand at the gates of the Transcendent; cannot the Transcendent also be expressed through exuberance and expressionism? Why is Ozu preferred to Mizoguchi, Bresson to Resnais, Dreyer to Bergman?” The answer won’t lie in a greater interest in art, of course, but it might lie partly in accepting that, to reduce the dimensional space of cinema, film can subsequently reduce the figure in the frame to a spiritual being over a quotidian one. At the beginning of Mother and Son, we see the son of the title leaning over his mother as she expresses the fear she feels when she dreams. The image isn’t so much flattened as smeared, as it becomes clear Sokurov doesn’t want to mimic painting, but remove cinema’s illusion of three dimensionality. Sokurov acknowledges the importance of painting in his work, but seems to suggest it is more about an apprenticeship than a need to homage. “I would say it's Russian painters of the 19th century. It's Romantics of the 19th century from Germany, and of course Rembrandt. I like the American Andrew Wyeth. I like old painters because they're incredibly skilful. I think that apprenticeship is a very important component of becoming a real artist. That's why I think in the cinema there are not so many masters.” (Film Comment)
A master, though, isn’t someone who makes us clearly aware of great paintings in their work, but is one who is well aware that cinema is not making images in a vacuum. Some might see in Sokurov’s images a debt to Russian icon paintings and the flatness they offer, next to later art that indicates a more voluminous space. But Tarkovsky had already addressed the question of iconic art in contrast to cinema at the end of Andrei Rublev, with the black and white cinematic image containing depth, giving way to the flat images of the titular character’s icons in colour. In a later shot in Mother and Son, the son has taken the mother out of the house and lays her on a bench. While he kneels next to her, Sokurov’s image becomes so flat that the bark of the tree behind the mother looks like it is almost part of her. What volume in film usually does very understandably is separate objects from subjects, subjects from other subjects and objects from other objects. Yet if a director were to claim they wanted to show a person at one with nature, then how better to do this than all but dissolve the plane between the subject and the nature, the mother and the tree?
This becomes a formal question, and not just a narrative or thematic notion. Matthew Plouffe says, ‘’It may be…that Sokurov, as Tarkovsky suggests of the artist, has seen something sooner than the rest of us. Incredibly, he’s found a way to put it on film.” (Reverse Shot) If we propose that there is a technique to this, that Tarkovsky and Sokurov have kept in mind painterly perspective and registered in film form a definition of the sacred, without homaging established works, then we would only be half right. As Schrader says, quoting Jacques Maritain, “there is no style reserved to religious art, there is no religious technique. Anyone who believes in the existence of a religious technique is on the high road to Beuron.” (Transcendental Style in Film)
It seems that what might create the religious style is a resistance to the profane, the singularity of the given artist in that resistance, and that an awareness of the history of art is an important aspect of this eschewal. To see any art form in its exclusivity can also lead to assumptions about what makes it work. The filmmaker may think that, obviously, one starts with an external establishing shot of a building and then moves into the interior, before showing a shot/counter shot as the characters in medium-close-up converse. However, if the filmmakers hold the shot, seeing in it a potential mystery the interior will resolve, it will give the film more than just the content of an establishing shot. A great example is the house in Days of Heaven, with Terrence Malick showing us it several times before we see the interior, when, almost half the way through the film, a woman working the land marries the owner of it. “As in all my films,’ cameraman Nestor lmendros says, ‘‘I was inspired by works of great painters. For this particular project, I was influenced primarily by American painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper” (American Cinematographer). We can see more specifically, for the house, Hopper’s House by the Railroad. But what is no less important is that the paintings contains an inevitable mystery that film usually resolves, and that the film delays. Not any house would work, and the echo of Hopper adds to the mystery rather than dilutes it in a ready homage.
Returning to Sokurov, and offering just a few thoughts on Fassbinder and Bresson, what we find is the respect for painting that needn’t be an over-respect, which would subordinate film to the finer art, when instead what Sokurov sought, perhaps, was a way of making characters become figures. Painting doesn’t have characters; films don’t have figures. Yet film can suggest the figure without falling into mannerism, a danger when a filmmaker offers a tableau without a filmic problem behind it: when we sense it is mimicking painting. If Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a great director of the tableau, it rested on showing characters as a collective prejudice, fixed in their movements and categorical in their judgments. In the context of the figure, the filmmaker can escape the naturalistic animation of the film actor by proposing a relative restriction of their agency. Robert Bresson, of course, referred to his actors as models and made his performers deliberately limited psychologically. The sort of emotional memory that interested the Method school becomes, in Bresson, the unemotional memory. Sokurov, meanwhile, reduces the characters to figures all the better to bring them out as spiritual beings. This is an idiosyncratic faith: “Most of the things that I do come through intuition. I never met anyone who helped me to develop my spirituality and my soul. Let's put it this way: I never had a priest to whom I would go for confession.” (Film Comment) In Mother and Son, faith is as readily cinematic as religious, as though Solurov seeks to find, in the images of painting, the spiritual possibilities in cinema, and does so by proposing that the actor becomes chiefly a figure in the frame.
Partly what makes the character in a film psychological is that they exist in time and are thus often given to cause and effect. A medium with no temporal aspect doesn’t have the opportunity to show causality, even if it might imply it or find a way to register it on a rudimentary level. A person with their hands up, indicates they wish to surrender, even if we don’t see the person who we assume is pointing a gun at them. A triptych could show the man with his hands up, the person pointing the gun, and then the man shot, and many a newspaper comic strip offers such a format. But if the triptych work or the three-panel comic strip hints at cinema, Sokurov is more interested in the reverse process. He seeks to still the characters by making the actions minimal and the time involved in them vastly expanded. Around eight minutes into the film, the son takes the mother out of the house and into the surrounding forest, cradling her in his arms, and they return almost thirty minutes later. The scenes in between show her lying on the bench, shots of nature, and the son carrying her again to a different spot and back home. In them, there is almost no need for the temporality that cinema usually cannot function without. When a film moves from scene to scene, its purpose is most of the time to show the efficiency of narrative, and this needn’t only be in commercial films; it is pertinent just as much, and sometimes more so, to the rarefied.
In Bresson’s L’argent, for example, a shop assistant has been lax in receiving false banknotes. The manager chastises her, tells her to get rid of them as quickly as possible and, when our central character Yvon delivers oil to the shop, he gets paid in these false notes. He then obliviously tries to pay for food at a restaurant, is accused by the waiter of trying to fob off forged notes, and there is an altercation, Yvon is arrested, and a police officer takes Yvon to the shop as he tries to prove his innocence, and the shop assistant and the manager, who were both present when he delivered the oil, claim they haven’t seen him before. Bresson brilliantly elides key moments in our description — the fight is but a hand gesture and an overturned table, and the scene where he would be explaining to the cops what happened is removed altogether. It need only be inferred. But what Bresson insists on is very strong cause and effect, the very aspect paintings needn’t at all concern themselves with, and that Sokurov has also all but removed. Certainly, we could say there is the narrative progression of the son taking the mother to the bench, the son taking the mother back to the house, but this is cause and consequence at its most rudimentar,y and nobody would be inclined to regard it as a plot. Narrating Yvon’s terrible circumstances in L’argent very much would be. But if Bresson wanted to limit mise-scene in L’argent as we don’t see the fight scene except as an elliptical account in two shots, Sokurov wants to expand the mise-en-scene to the point of obliterating the narrative event. Mise-en-scene is, of course, a theatrical term now applied to the cinematic, but we can see, too, that the painter creates a mise-en-scene as they will also think of light, positioning of objects and subjects, and the angle of view. Usually, however, while this is the inevitable limit of the painter’s work, the filmmaker then sees this establishment of space as the catalyst for the development of the story that the space will help illustrate. Bresson in L’argent pushes this in one direction as he minimises the mise en scene and tells a story with the minimum amount of visual elaboration. In contrast, Sokurov seeks the minimum amount of story, all the better to pay attention to the visual properties of the image. Bresson insisted, “Painting taught me to make not beautiful images but necessary ones.” (Harvard Film Archive). Sokurov in Mother and Son might offer a variation of it: painting taught him to make not narrative images, but images of beauty. Yet what is clear is that both filmmakers understood the importance of painting, that it helped define the sort of images that cinema could create within a broader framework than only film and its conventions.
David Lynch may have studied painting and continued to produce art, but our interest doesn’t rest on this fact, but on our own perceptions of the presence of artistic form in his cinema, albeit aided by some of the director’s own comments, especially as he thinks of painters cinematically. “If Bacon had made a movie, what would it have been and where would it have gone?” Lynch wonders. When admiring Hopper, he says “Edward Hopper is another guy I love, but more for cinema than for painting.” (Lynch on Lynch) When looking at Blue Velvet, it isn’t hard to see the influence of both these painters. The film’s widescreen frame resembles Hopper more than Bacon, despite the latter’s liking for triptychs, but what is more interesting is that it was as if Lynch wanted simultaneously to lighten and darken Hopper, playing up a gregarious Americana that Hopper’s work resists, but to absorb as well a depravity Hopper was never drawn toward. Hopper showed desolation; Bacon showed dissolution. The subjects were whole in Hopper, but isolated. The figures in Hopper appeared lonely, but they weren’t fragmenting. In Bacon’s, the self often seems to be leaking out of the frame.
In Blue Velvet, we see Lynch pushing the gregarious when he cuts from a Hopper-like image of a pantone rust warehouse to American footballers in training, viewed through a wire fence, then to the character of Sandy, back to the footballers, and then to the film’s main character Jeffrey pulling up in a convertible. The opening shot indicates the alienated; the other shots, the sociable. But Lynch’s main purpose is to move between the two, all the better to show a small-town world that has a weird one underneath the apparent normality. What Hopper can lend to Lynch’s world is the mysterious, which may, from a certain perspective, be a dimension of many paintings, and is most famously evident in the ambiguity of Mona Lisa’s smile. It is deemed enigmatic, of course, and there are scientists who have explained why this is so. Different cells in the retina transmit different categories of information or “channels” to the brain. These channels encode data about an object’s size, clarity, brightness and location in the visual field. “Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don’t see the smile’’ (New Scientist), says Luiz Martinez, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, who conducted the study along with Diego Alonso Pablos. It has been one of several scientific studies working on the enigma, but let us ignore such neoroscientific claims, however fascinating, and return to the more cinematic experiments of Kuleshov. He, too, would show an ambiguous (in this case neutral) expression on a face, all the better to propose that meaning comes from the cut and not the shot: that when you have an expression you cannot read in itself, you can then read it in the counter-shot. All it would probably have taken to reveal the mystery of the smile would have been the cut to what the figure is looking towards. Is it a handsome man, a person being executed, a child in a cot? We do not know, but if the counter shot can reveal so readily what in a single shot remains enigmatic, we might wonder if most paintings possess it as an ontological given, as a condition of its form. This wouldn’t only be true of portrait paintings, but of landscapes and buildings as well. If the portrait resembles the close-up that awaits its counter-shot, the painting of the landscape, or a building, is an establishing shot awaiting its interior, as we noted when discussing Hopper and Days of Heaven.
To return to Blue Velvet, the medium long-shot of the warehouse is a counter-shot itself: it comes after we see Jeffrey looking out of his car and, a little later, he will explain what he has seen there. We never get the interior shot, and part of the mystery is what Jeffrey can glean from observations, not what the film chooses to show us. The film remains close to Jeffrey’s point of view as it has made much of his need to observe earlier in the film, when he finds himself looking out from inside a woman’s closet. But what interests us isn’t the plot, nor the characters and their motives, but the film in the context of painting. If the exterior shots of various places in the town of Lumberton potentially invoke Hopper, it is less homage than coincidental sensibility. While we acknowledge that paintings generally have a mystery in the singular image that film will then explain, in the multiple images it has at its disposal, nevertheless, some painters’ work possesses this mysteriousness more than others, and Hopper more than most. It rests perhaps on many of the paintings resembling establishing shots whose interior shot can never be revealed, even if there have been attempts to create those other shots within the context of the original paintings: the ambitious and endearing, but perhaps a little too kitsch, Shirley, Visions of Reality that we earlier invoked.
Yet let us think for a moment of three Hopper paintings: Nighthawks, Gas and Cape Cod Morning. In the first, much of the painting’s mystery could be alleviated by a cut to the interior, as we would hear perhaps the conversation between the solitary figure and the barperson, and the couple speaking to each other. In Gas, this could be a shot from The Postman Always Rings Twice, just before Frank Chambers shows up. Cape Cod Morning could be a mother waiting for her grown-up children to come home from college; maybe a son coming back from the war. Our point is that all three have immense narrative potential and invite shots that could explain further the initial image. Part of Hopper’s ongoing appeal to filmmakers must rest partly on such a claim.
In contrast, Bacon shows the moment of impact, not the mystery of the suggestion, and the presence of Bacon in Lynch’s work is often evident when a character is in a state of decomposition. It is partly what gives Lynch’s scenes of rage and transformation their power, whether it is Robert Loggia enraged by a tailgater in Lost Highway, Laura Dern walking towards the camera in Inland Empire, or, of course, Dennis Hopper when he abuses Dorothy in Blue Velvet. There is also the Baconesque in scenes of characters transforming in Lost Highway, Diane’s apparent suicide in Mulholland Drive, the booth in the last Twin Peaks series, which resembles a little the booth in Bacon’s Head IV, and the protuberances on The Elephant Man that resemble numerous Bacon paintings, including the self-portraits. While Hopper gives Lynch’s work the stillness that contains the mystery, Bacon’s paintings usually give them the released tension, the violence to be found in his oeuvre.
Lynch isn’t interested in the homage, but in what thinking about painting can do to the images one creates. To replicate a painting on screen, while only interested in the techniques and expectations of cinema, is to simplify both painting and film. There is little productive tension between the two art forms, while what we have been seeking out are examples where this is very much apparent. Of course, we can look at Barry Lyndon and see Gainsbourg, De La Tour and others, just as we can observe Hopper’s influence on The American Friend. But we see the direct influence of art works far more in later Wenders films that are less aesthetically interesting, just as a work like Shirley Visions of Reality is about as faithful a rendering of Hopper’s paintings can be imagined as it offers a series of moving reenactments, or in a similar way Loving Vincent, a work that animates numerous Van Gogh paintings as it tells a story about a Van Gogh letter trying to reach his brother Theo. Both films are meticulous and careful, but their existence relies almost exclusively on the work of the artists to whom they pay respect. When Shirley director Dustav Deutsch says, “my main idea was to ‘vivify’ the pictures” (Criterion), we might come away from the movie feeling it has made cinema moribund. Perhaps the best way to vivify an artist’s work isn’t to respect the artworks, but find, in the first principle in their creation, what might be useful in expanding cinema. Heaven’s Gate, The American Friend, Barry Lyndon, Mother and Son and Blue Velvet are works that all brilliantly absorb the painterly image.
© Tony McKibbin