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.
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Review:
In this ground-breaking study, the author shows how eight films variously define painting as an art. . . . For all the wide range of art references, the readings of the films are rigorous and sensitive as film criticism. This art historian knows film."
From the Back Cover:
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.'
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- PublisherUniversity of Texas Press
- Publication date1996
- ISBN 10 029271582X
- ISBN 13 9780292715820
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages320
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Rating