Chapter Title: Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the Post-war Art Film

Book Title: Framing Pictures

Book Subtitle: Film and the Visual Arts
Book Author(s): Steven Jacobs
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r25nv.6

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 CHAPTER 1

Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the

Post-war Art Film

PRE-WAR ART DOCUMENTARIES

Documentary explorations of art and artists can be found early in film history.
Already in the late 1910s, German film studios such as Deutsche Lichtbild
and Welt-Kinematograph produced documentary shorts on the sights and
monuments of historical cities such as Munich and Seville.1 Strikingly, when
visual art started to become the subject of films, it appeared only in the form
of architecture and monumental sculpture. Having the advantage that they
could be filmed in natural light, churches, palaces and monuments were the
pre-eminent subject of early films on art. In spite of the vast majority of films
on painting among later art documentaries, it seemed easier to justify filming
three-dimensional works, such as sculpture and architecture, as movement
of the viewer in space is necessary to see and experience them. Films on art,
after all, confront the paradox that art objects are still while films trace move-
ment in space and time. Through editing and camera movements, film added
movement to the static artwork. This was the advantage that film was sup-
posed to have over photography. ‘We feel the necessity of movement in order
to grasp the statue’s immobility,’ famous French art historian Henri Focillon
asserted. ‘When we do not have the work itself, but an image of it, cannot it
be imagined that the latter, through a clever artifice, will move at our pleasure
before us who remain motionless?’2
A way to circumvent the problem of the static artwork was to combine
it with movement by showing some sort of activity. Made at the time when
museums were supplementing their lantern slide collections with motion
pictures, many films on art of the 1920s and 1930s showed, for instance, how
to make pottery, how to weave baskets, how Indians made their blankets and
so forth.3 Another possibility to make static artworks interesting for cinema
was to show famous artists at work – a motif that, as will be demonstrated in
the following chapter, would also turn into one of the characteristics of artist
biopics. Already in 1915, Sacha Guitry made Ceux de chez nous (Those of Our
Land), a twenty-two-minute film on leading French writers and artists includ-
ing Degas, Monet, Renoir and Rodin. Each artist was shown at work in a

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 2 Camera and Canvas

lively mixture of close-ups and long shots. Guitry’s film, however, presented
portraits of the artists rather than showing the creation process of paintings
or sculptures. More information on the work process and act of creation can
be found in the short films Elias Katz produced in the United States in the
late 1930s, although these are no more than simple ten-minute glimpses of
artists such as Lynd Ward, William Gropper and George Grosz at work.
Undoubtedly, the most fascinating pre-war film project dealing with
artists at work originated in the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for
Cultural Education), which was founded in Berlin in 1919. Under the direc-
tion of art historian Hans Cürlis, this Institute was one of the first organisa-
tions that favoured film as a mediator for art.4 In 1922, Cürlis started the
film cycle Schaffende Hände (Creating Hands), showing prominent artists such
as Liebermann, Corinth, Slevogt, Kollwitz, Pechstein, Kandinsky, Rohlfs,
Dix, Grosz, Mataré and Belling at work. Being the first to use the ‘over the
shoulder’ shot to give the spectator the same view as the artist, Cürlis showed,
in the words of Rudolf Arnheim, ‘the process of a work’s creation and the
nature of the technique used – for instance colour mixture, hand posi-
tions, and hand motions, et cetera.’5 The footage dedicated to Otto Dix, for
instance, revealed his technique for modelling in his Three Women (1926), for
which he used white paint on the underdrawing. Cürlis, however, filmed not
only artists but also artworks. From 1919 onwards, the Institute made several
films containing shots of sculptures grouped under titles such as ‘Heads’,
‘Negro Sculpture’, ‘Old-German Madonnas’, ‘German Saints’, ‘Kleinplastik’,
‘Indian Crafts’ or ‘East-Asian Crafts’. Filmed in natural light, each sculpture
was put on a pedestal and slowly rotated on its axis. Cürlis, too, considered
paintings and drawings unfilmisch. By means of the moving camera, film, in the
first place, had to increase the expressive powers of sculptural art – a feature
also prominent in the documentary shorts on ‘Nazi sculptors’ Arno Breker
and Josef Thorak that Cürlis made together with Arnold Fanck in the 1940s.6
Apart from Cürlis’s Institute, smaller studios as well as UFA, Germany’s
major studio, produced films on visual arts during the interwar period. UFA
even comprised a unit that produced popular educational shorts for both
theatrical and non-theatrical release, and listed art subjects in its catalogues
as early as 1922. An often noted UFA Kulturfilm was Steinerne Wunder von
Naumburg (Stone Wonders of Naumburg) (1935) by Rudolph Bamberger and Curt
Oertel, in which the camera gently moved among the sculpted Gothic figures
on the façade and in the interior of the Naumburg cathedral. According to
Arthur Knight, it was the first film ‘that suggested the possibility of grant-
ing an art experience through the medium of motion picture’.7 A few years
later, Oertel realised another impressive film on sculpture with Michelangelo:
Das Leben eines Titanen (1940). In several respects, this film announces the

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 Reconstruction and Reproduction 3

innovations that characterise the art documentaries made by filmmakers such

as Storck, Emmer and Resnais shortly after the Second World War. First of
all, Oertel turned the contemplation of art into a thrilling cinematic experi-
ence. With both his mobile camera and skilful lighting, Oertel succeeded in
retaining the plasticity of sculptures and the texture of marble surfaces. On
the occasion of the American release of The Titan, a critic stated that ‘most
people would actually understand the work of Michelangelo better after seeing
this movie than they would if they were dropped down in front of the origi-
nals. The camera makes you see more than your eyes would even discover.’8
In addition, Oertel uses animation techniques. In the sequence on the Sistine
Chapel, for instance, Oertel shows us first the ceiling without any paintings.
Then one by one they flash into view while the narrator tells the story of the
creation of the frescoes. Furthermore, like the art documentaries by Resnais
of the late 1940s, The Titan is not a film simply showing works of art. In the
first place, the film tells the story of the dramatic life of the artist without
recourse to living actors, sets or dramatics. By means of light, sound effects
and (subjective) camera movements, Oertel carries us along through intrigues
of popes, conspiracies against the Medici, the death of Savonarola and civil
wars. Critics reacted enthusiastically to the sensation that Michelangelo is
‘moving just beyond camera range and that is tremendously exciting’.9 In
retrospect, however, this is unmistakably the weakest part of the film. Iris
Barry spoke of ‘the rather kittenish fashion in which the camera pretended to
be trotting at the heels of the artist’ as a result of which ‘the technique verged
on an abuse of the mobile powers of the medium.’10 Nonetheless, this experi-
ment in telling a story exclusively by using artworks proved very influential.
Its impact was also the result of its wide distribution. Soon after the film was
released, the Nazis showed The Titan throughout Europe as an example of
German culture. At the end of the war, the film was captured in France by the
U.S. Army. Recognising the unusual cinematic qualities of the film, famous
documentarist Robert Flaherty supervised a re-edit. According to Flaherty,
‘even once in a museum you can’t see what’s there. Only the camera, which
catches so much more than the eye, can properly illuminate these subjects.’11

RECONSTRUCTION AND REPRODUCTION

Despite the fascinating experiments by filmmakers such as Cürlis and Oertel,
the art documentary only developed into a specific genre after the Second
World War. What is more, preceding the breakthrough of the medium of
television, the late 1940s and early 1950s can be considered as the golden
age of the art documentary. The importance of this genre in that era can be
linked with the conditions of a society recovering from the traumas of the

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 4 Camera and Canvas

Second World War. After the barbarism and obscurantism of Nazism and
the devastation of war, film, in its capacity of a mass medium, was called in
for the accomplishment of a humanist ideal of cultural emancipation through
education. This ideal was also at the basis of the foundation of UNESCO in
November 1945. International cultural organisations such as UNESCO and
the Fédération internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) played an impor-
tant role in the support of the production, distribution and critical contextu-
alisation of art documentaries, which were presented as devices for cultural
and educational reconstruction.12
Furthermore, the golden age of the art documentary coincides with a
politics of popularisation of the fine arts. During the same years, the cultural
participation of the middle and lower classes was expanding – a phenomenon
resulting in increasing number of visitors to museums as well as in the break-
through of the art book, which had already undergone some major changes
shortly before the war. Kenneth Clark, for instance, who would much later
write and present the milestone BBC television art documentary Civilisation
(1969), had published One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery
in 1938. The book turned out an instant success and was followed by the
publication of More Details from Pictures in the National Gallery in 1941. Inspired
by the improvement of photographic reproduction techniques, both books
were made for the pleasure of the eye. Although a few details had been
selected ‘for historical or iconographical reasons’, most details ‘have been
chosen chiefly for their beauty’, Clark emphasised in the introduction. Clark
further remarked that the book contained many details that viewers had
never noticed. This means that ‘we do not look at pictures carefully’ and
that ‘the great value of these photographic details is that they encourage us
to look at pictures more attentively, and show us some of the rewards of
patient scrutiny.’13 After the war, both the art documentary and new types
of art books encouraged this patient scrutiny. The 1940s and 1950s were the
heyday of publishers such as Skira and the years in which André Malraux
wrote his Musée imaginaire.14 According to Malraux, in an era of globalisation
and proliferation of industrial techniques of reproduction, only photography
was capable of preserving and making accessible the world’s cultural herit-
age. The traditional physical museum could be succeeded by a kind of virtual
all-encompassing photographic archive, which could be embodied in the
phenomenon of the art book. In contrast with the traditional museum, which
stimulated the contemplation of unique and isolated masterpieces, the Musée
imaginaire was rather based on the juxtaposition of artworks of divergent
styles, periods and cultures. Whereas, according to Walter Benjamin, pho-
tography and film had a revolutionary potential because they were capable of
violating normal perception and destroying the aura of the traditional work of

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 Reconstruction and Reproduction 5

Figure 1.1 André Malraux with the photographic plates for Le Musée imaginaire, Paris, 1947

art, for Malraux, modern techniques of mechanical reproduction had a rather

ambivalent role. Photography was unmistakably capable of disconnecting
the work of art from its original context but it could also reinforce its aura by
revealing a kind of immaterial affinity with the entire world heritage or with
human creativity as such. Strikingly, for Malraux, the medium of photogra-
phy supplies the materials for the art book but it is cinema that provides its
organisational model. According to Malraux, the art book was, just like a film,
a succession of images arranged on the basis of montage.15
Malraux’s notion of the imaginary museum perfectly coincided with the
golden age of the art documentary. Its importance for both the film culture
and the art world of the 1940s and 1950s is demonstrated by several phe-
nomena. Leading filmmakers such as Flaherty, Dreyer, Grémillon, Clouzot
and Alekan contributed considerably to the development of the genre.16 Art
documentaries were a prominent issue at film festivals and several of them
won Oscars and other important film awards in these years.17 In addition,
prominent critics and film theorists such as Bazin, Francastel, Lemaître,
Kracauer and Arnheim paid attention to the phenomenon of the static
artwork registered by the moving film camera.18 Furthermore, the encounter
between cinema on the one hand and traditional media such as painting and

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 6 Camera and Canvas

sculpture on the other was also discussed extensively at international confer-

ences, in professional film and art journals and in publications of professional
associations.19 Some even mentioned a veritable movement of the film d’art
or art film and FIFA (Fédération International du Film sur l’Art) was called
into being in 1948. An important subject of discussion popping up regularly
in these circles was the question to what extent the art documentary should
be considered as an independent phenomenon, which possesses a relative
autonomy vis-à-vis the artwork being the subject of the film. Although some
stated that the medium of film remained ‘predominantly a machine for seeing
better, a remote cousin of the magnifying lens, a periscope, a pair of opera
glasses’,20 leading filmmakers presented their ‘documentaries’ not as mere
registrations – something that remained the case in the reproduction of art by
still photography, including in the model developed by Malraux. Cinematic
reproductions of artworks resulted in new filmic artworks – a strategy that
in art photography was only developed much later in the works by Louise
Lawler or the museum pictures by Thomas Struth, for instance.

LUCIANO EMMER
During the years immediately following the Second World War, some film-
makers specialising in the genre of the art documentary made their public
appearances. Strikingly, although the post-war era also saw the production
of interesting films dealing with sculpture – Visual Variations on Noguchi
(Marie Menken, 1945), Thorvaldsen (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1949), L’Enfer de
Rodin (Henri Alekan, 1959) – painting replaced sculpture and architecture as
the favourite subject of art documentarists. The major figures of the golden
age of the art documentary were Luciano Emmer, Henri Storck and Alain
Resnais, working in Italy, Belgium and France, respectively – countries with
a rich artistic (particularly pictorial) past. Emmer, Storck and Resnais, each
of them having close contacts with the avant-garde in one way or another,
developed new formulas for the genre of the art documentary that remained
customary for decades. All three of them, albeit in divergent ways, set the
tone by using a more analytical approach instead of glorifying the artwork as
an expression of a divine or human soul.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the painter Luciano Emmer joined
forces with Enrico Gras, an early experimentalist in the cartoon film, to
produce a series of experiments in surrealist film, attempting to develop a
poetic documentary form.21 After the Fascist Ministry of Culture condemned
these films, Emmer was exiled in Switzerland whereas Gras was forced into
the army. Together again after the war, they realised a series of innovative and
commercially successful short art documentaries. In the first place, Emmer

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 Luciano Emmer 7

Figure 1.2 Luciano Emmer, technical indications for the filming of Fra Angelico’s Legends of Saints
Cosmo and Damian (1940s)

and Gras attempted to transpose the narrative aspects of certain paintings

into film. In many paintings, after all, within the confines of a single frame or
by means of a cycle of paintings, a story is told and the main characters are
depicted more than once. Emmer was convinced that cinema had inherited
the narrative functions that painting had once exercised. By reviving those
popular legends, which were so often recounted in episodic pictures, a new
public interest in painting could be created.22 Not coincidentally, most of
Emmer’s films deal with the rich tradition of trecento and quattrocento
painting, which exchanged the iconic stasis of the medieval and Byzantine
tradition for an outspoken narrative character. During the 1940s in particu-
lar, Emmer aimed his camera at fourteenth- and fifteenth-century painters
studied by the Italian leading art historian and critic Lionello Venturi, whom
Emmer befriended after the war. Both Racconto da un affresco (1938) and Il
Dramma di Cristo (1948), for instance, deal with Giotto’s frescoes at the Arena
chapel in Padua, while Cantico delle creature (1943) has the murals attributed to
Giotto in Assisi as its subject. Guerrieri (1943) focuses on battle scenes painted
by Simone Martini, Paolo Ucello and Piero della Francesca. Piero’s work, par-
ticularly his fresco cycle in Arrezzo, is also the subject of L’Invenzione della croce
(1948). In addition, Fratelli miracolosi (1946), La Leggenda di S. Orsola (1948) and
L’Allegoria della primavera (1948) deal with works by Fra Angelico, Carpaccio
and Botticelli, respectively.
In most of these films, Emmer was no longer satisfied by simply showing
works of art, he liked to reveal their narrative and dramatic potentials. To

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 8 Camera and Canvas

Emmer, reproducing a painting in its visual entirety by a simple process

of camera recording constituted an ignoble use of the cinematic medium.
Instead, he transposed only the thematic entirety of the original painting,
subjecting it to a re-interpretation through specifically cinematic techniques.
Breaking down the frescoes thematically, he analysed and culled each section
for the plastic elements that would most eloquently express the strongest
values of story content.23 ‘It was no longer simply a question of producing a
short film with a series of photographs of a painting because there is a human
content, a continuous drama which might come alive in the film,’ Emmer
stated in 1945.24 Emmer and Gras therefore exploited the ‘filmic principle’
that determines a certain kind of (narrative) painting. In various films, Emmer
extracted dramatic moments of a painting in order to connect them again
in a cinematic way. With a sophisticated feeling for concentration, Emmer
directs the eye of the spectator to these dramatically significant elements by
means of rhythmic editing, pans, tilt shots and close-ups. According to Lauro
Venturi, it was simply the purpose of Emmer and Gras ‘to make a short
subject by using (for financial reasons) painted images instead of humans,
dogs, or landscapes’.25 Impressed by the vivid expressiveness of the paint-
ings as seen by the apparently ubiquitous eye of Emmer’s camera, Francis
Koval noted that ‘elaborate camera movements and dramatic editing make
the figures almost three-dimensional.’26 In Racconto da un affresco, which deals
with Giotto’s murals in Padua, for instance, the scene of the kissing of Christ
opens with a long shot of the fresco, establishing the site of action. Then
Emmer cuts into the picture with a medium shot on the isolated fragment
of a robed man pointing to Judas about to kiss Christ. This is followed by a
close-up reaction shot of a soldier; two close-ups of bystanders in the crowd;
and a close-up of Judas taken from a different fresco. Emmer subsequently
cuts to a reaction close-up of Christ and part of a menacing soldier behind
him. This is followed by a dramatic close-up of the kiss itself, with the eyes of
the two men meeting. Finally, Emmer cuts to a still of a later fresco showing
Christ’s hands bound.
Similarly, the purpose of a film such as La Leggenda di S. Orsola was ‘to
tell the legend of St. Ursula seen by Carpaccio, and not to make a short
about Carpaccio’s painting. The latter would have been an entirely differ-
ent film.’27 In the first place, Emmer transforms Carpaccio’s static paintings
into a cinematic love story about a young princess who has agreed to marry
a foreign prince and is converted to his religion. She leaves with him to his
distant country, knowing that she and her escort of eleven thousand virgins
will be massacred before they arrive. Rather than giving us information on
the art or artist, Emmer’s films narrate the legends, fables or events that the
painter himself had illustrated in his paintings, by using camera movements

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 Luciano Emmer 9

to point out details, by using editing rhythm to impart action to the static
actors, and by working very closely with the musical score (often composed
by Roman Vlad) and the commentary. In so doing, most of the shots of an
Emmer film focused on narrative elements in the paintings – elements that
painters had used themselves in order to create a narrative such as gestures,
facial expressions or the positioning of the characters. As in making a feature
film, Emmer inserts shots of details from the painting with no narrative
function but that help to create an atmosphere and a setting for the story.
In a 1950 essay as well as in later interviews, Emmer emphasised that there
was no essential difference between his films on art and his first feature
film Domenica d’Agosto (1950).28 Both were marked by the same humanism
that also marked contemporaneous Italian neorealist cinema. In Domenica
d’Agosto, Emmer simply looked for the same faces and emotions on the
beaches of Ostia as the ones that are depicted in the art of the masters of
the Early Renaissance.
In a sense, by breaking down the storytelling paintings into their nar-
rative elements, the filmic storytelling is done through the painter’s own
eyes. Emmer simply attempted to give to each element a ‘duration in time’
corresponding to the ‘duration in space’ given to that same element by the
painter. However, Emmer quickly realised that it was impossible to respect
pictorial composition and space determination because a cinematic logic
required these elements to be seen in a narrative sequence. The composition
of Carpaccio’s painting of the dream of Saint Ursula, for instance, is such
that the eye is led immediately to both the sleeping princess and the angel
entering the room. In his film on La Leggenda di S. Orsola, however, Emmer
first concentrated on Ursula and established her setting before revealing the
presence of the angel. The angel’s appearance being unsuspected, the scene
gained in the film an element of suspense that is purely cinematographic and
anti-pictorial. Strikingly, Emmer did not show the total of the painting before
moving in for close-ups (as many art historians criticised him for not doing).29
As a result, Emmer gives the painted figures a purely cinematic movement
instead of a movement derived from the surface composition of the painting.
According to Lauro Venturi,
for this reason the whole picture is rarely seen in his films. The movement
of the composition would destroy the cinematic movement of the details
because details from different sections of the paintings are combined to
express ideas or emotions which they could not separately express.30

According to Herbert Margolis such an ‘isolation of parts from the whole

purposely disturbed the equilibrium of the original paintings in order to form
a new cinematic equilibrium’.31 Images, which have no meaning or balance

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 10 Camera and Canvas

in themselves, are combined through a shot juxtaposition creating a story

continuity that rises to a dramatic climax.
Although unmistakably based on the narrative organisation of the paint-
ings, Emmer’s films presented themselves as translations or transpositions
rather than reproductions. Instead of simply showing the original paintings,
Emmer revealed their hidden meanings. For Lauro Venturi, the cinematic
narration of Emmer’s films
is so persuasive that, when we see the painting after having seen the film, we
spontaneously look for those hidden details which the camera has revealed,
and we are able to understand the painter’s poetry and dramatic construction
far better.32

Furthermore, Emmer not only combines otherwise unrelated details, he

sometimes even contradicts the original paintings. Two characters, for
instance, who are back to back in the painting, are facing each other in the
film. In other instances, Emmer mixes faces and actions from different
paintings. In Giotto’s depiction of the Dream of Joachim, for instance, he
introduced two soldiers that are part of the Resurrection. In Giotto’s fresco
showing the mourning of Christ, Emmer selected five progressive phases of
angles in motion from different Giotto frescoes. When viewed in rapid suc-
cession, one dissolving into another, they create the cinematic illusion of an
angel in continuous flight. Referring to Il Paradiso terrestre (1946), which deals
with Bosch’s triptych of the Garden of Delights, Emmer stated that:
the film [. . .] is not and must not be a cinematographic translation of the pic-
torial work. It would have been an absolutely pretentious and arbitrary expe-
rience to attempt to violate an autonomous artistic reality. Bosch’s painting is
harmony in space. The makers of the film have taken those painted images,
freed them form their pictorial bonds, and used them as new objects.33

Emmer’s films were carefully planned, as demonstrated by the technical

indications for filming that are drawn on photographic reproductions of
the artworks. They were also made with very limited means. Dozens of still
photographs of an artwork were filmed with an old 1913 Pathé camera on
an animation stand in a way similar to the making of an animation film. For
his art films, Emmer used photographs by Fratelli Alinari, the Italian pho-
tographic studio that already in the nineteenth century had established itself
as the leading firm for photographic reproductions of historical monuments
and artworks. Published widely, and widespread among connoisseurs all over
the world, Alinari pictures played an important part in the development of the
discipline of art history and they had become part of the collective memory of
art lovers. Creating new connections between individual Alinari photographs,

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 Luciano Emmer 11

Emmer situates himself in a project hypostasising the age of mechanical

reproduction, not unlike Malraux. Comprising numerous sentimental depic-
tions of love, Destino d’amore (1942) even presents photographic reproductions
as such as the subject of the film. This unique satire of a romance between a
chambermaid and an Italian soldier at the Front was created through ingen-
ious editing of the couple’s picture-postcard exchanges. It was immediately
banned by the Ministry of Popular Culture for being ‘a ridiculous insult to the
love life of the heroic fascist soldier’.34 Massimo Ferretti sees this film as an
instance of the surrealist influences on Emmer, who uses the postcard as a
ready-made or an objet trouvé that acquires a new meaning in a way similar to
the photographic practices of the avant-garde.35
Emmer’s films were widely discussed in the contemporaneous publica-
tions of the film d’art movement and they became very influential, particularly
in French film circles, where Emmer had close contacts with people such as
Henri Langlois, Marc Allégret, Marcel Carné and Jean Cocteau. But Emmer’s
films were also widely shown in many other countries. When the Arts Council
of Great Britain organised its first Art Film Tour in the autumn of 1950,
operating as a mobile unit, its catalogue contained a list of twelve art films,
six of them by Luciano Emmer.36 John Read, who started making television
documentaries on art for the BBC in the early 1950s, acknowledged Emmer’s
influence. Emmer’s reliance on linear narrative, his focus on the individual
and his preference for feeling over analysis also became crucial elements in
British television’s framework for the arts.37
Emmer’s works, however, were the target of criticism as well. The con-
centration on the narrative of artworks was both the strength and weak-
ness of Emmer’s films. In some of his later films such as Leonardo da Vinci
(1952), Goya (1952) and Picasso (1954), Emmer even abandoned his focus on
narrative and dealt with entire oeuvres that were even presented as cultural
manifestations of an entire era. Some critics also reproached him for the
fact that his camera took charge of the pictorial form and distorted it by its
ingenuity, whereas others described the typical Emmer formula already in
the early 1950s as tedious and nearing exhaustion.38 In 1955, Lotte Eisner
wrote that:
the method of filmmakers with true intuition and sensibility, like Luciano
Emmer and Enrico Gras – whose films on Giotto and Bosch discovered the
possibilities of treating a picture like a scene in the studio without the element
of the third dimension – has now become stale with imitation and abuse.39

Nonetheless, some of Emmer’s films are characterised by a highly per-

sonal and poetic dimension. His account of the Legend of Saint Ursula, for
instance, can indeed be interpreted as the simple telling of a story but it is

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 12 Camera and Canvas

unmistakably also marked by a surrealist fascination for terror and oneiric

elements, which certainly can be found in the original Italian version but
which were even more elaborated in the French version of the film that has
a voice-over commentary written by Jean Cocteau.40 As Raymond Durgnat
noted, in Emmer’s films, ‘the camera, paradoxically, takes the works of art
out of the context of art appreciation, and attempts to give back to them
an interest which is not so much literary as a religious holism of eye, mind,
and heart.’41 First and foremost, Emmer experimented with the narrative
potential of the still image in a cinematic context. Consisting of a montage of
shots of details of a painting combined with varied camera movements and
a soundtrack, his films not only precede similar works by Storck or Resnais,
they foreshadow experimental films such as Marker’s La Jetée (1962), which
is also based on a mechanism of movement or animation of the still image.

CAUVIN, STORCK, HAESAERTS AND THE BELGIAN SCHOOL

In the late 1940s, Henri Storck and Paul Haesaerts were carrying out similar
experiments that belonged to a rich Belgian tradition of art documentaries
including remarkable films by Charles Dekeukeleire and André Cauvin,
among others. In one of the contemporaneous books on the phenomenon
of the art film, published by UNESCO, Paul Davay stated that the Belgian
cinema ‘has made relatively few blunders in the domain of the film on art’.
In addition, Davay noted that Belgian filmmakers abandoned the ‘tradi-
tional sanctimonious contemplation of art and introduced their spectators
into an unknown realm, obliged them to see, revealed the secrets of what
they before had only looked at mechanically’.42 In Belgium, the art film had
already flourished before the war. Although the genre reached back as early
as the mid-twenties with films such as Gaston Schoukens’s Nos Peintres (Our
Painters, 1926) on artists from the Flemish Primitives to Rubens, Belgium in
particular produced some seminal and highly original art documentaries in
the late 1930s. Dekeukeleire’s Thèmes d’inspiration (1938) compared portraits
of Old and Modern Masters with footage of real people to demonstrate
‘that throughout the ages the soul of the people had not been changed’.43
Constantly shifting between the past and the present, Thèmes d’inspiration is
marked both by the avant-garde (to which Dekeukeleire had contributed
earlier with film poems inspired by Germaine Dulac and a series of montage
films) and by the new documentary trends of the 1930s.44 Focusing on the tel-
luric alignment of characters in paintings by Pieter Bruegel, Joachim Patinir,
Jacob Jordaens, Constant Permeke and Frits Van den Berghe, among others,
Dekeukeleire’s film also comprised images of the countryside and farmers
at work, connecting them to the land by means of low camera positions. A

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 Cauvin, Storck, Haesaerts and the Belgian School 13

highly lyrical film, Thèmes d’inspiration won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film
Festival in 1938.
The most influential pre-war Belgian art film, however, was André
Cauvin’s L’Agneau mystique (The Mystic Lamb, 1939), which dealt with the
famous fifteenth-century altarpiece by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck. In this
landmark short film, the verbal narrative was confined to a minimum of fact
and description in favour of the sensuality of excellently vibrant lighting and
the moving camera, which brought the static painting to life. Entirely shot
in the cathedral of Ghent, Cauvin’s film prefigured the camera mobility that
characterises many of the post-war documentaries on painting. After an
establishing shot of the cathedral, the camera leads us impressively through
the gates that guard the chapel in which the Van Eyck polyptych stands.
Subsequently, it scans the side-panels shielding the painting, then these swing
open and the camera begins to examine the central panels. From a careful
overview we are led on to a closer analysis. The camera moves slowly so that
there is time to contemplate the many details rendered in close-up. For the
first time, an art film draws attention to the aesthetic coherence of a complex
piece of art, enabling the viewer to make a formal analysis of a single work.
Moreover, the spectator is invited to look for himself. ‘For the first time
spectators began to see a living world in a painting,’ Paul Davay stated. ‘No
one had ever before seen the city of Ghent through this window. No one had
noticed that the angel musicians are little Belgian country girls with bright
but rather ugly faces.’ Davay further remarked that the world that Cauvin
revealed is not essentially pictorial. ‘The camera always works on a limited
field, so the profound structure of the painting constantly escapes us, the
play of volumes is only approximately realised, and the colour relationships
hardly at all.’45 Cauvin’s film is essentially a cinematic exploration of the world
depicted by Van Eyck. Light, rhythm, camera movement and sound – all
contribute to an all-over poetic effect. Together with a similar film on Memling
(1939), The Mystic Lamb was produced by the Belgian government specifically
for showing in its pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where it made
a lasting impression. Calling it a ‘true art experience on film’, Arthur Knight
described The Mystic Lamb as ‘probably the first of the new art films on an
adult level to be seen by any considerable audience in America’.46 Writing in
1952, Iris Barry stated that The Mystic Lamb ‘has not even now, after so many
other cinematic studies of paintings, been surpassed. [. . .] Cauvin was truly
exploring unknown country here: his calmness and clear perception made for
brilliant pioneering.’47
Cauvin’s experiments were taken a step further by Henri Storck, who
specialised in the genre of the art documentary from 1936 onwards, when he
realised Regards sur la Belgique ancienne (Views of Old Belgium, 1936). Dealing with

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 14 Camera and Canvas

the medieval treasures produced by religion or a new emerging civic culture,

the film mobilises static imagery by means of forward and backward travell-
ings as well as lateral and vertical pan shots. Storck’s more important contri-
butions to the development of the genre, however, date from the late 1940s
with his landmark films on Delvaux and Rubens. In contrast with Cauvin’s
film on Van Eyck’s Mystic Lamb and most of Emmer’s films, Storck did not
base his films on individual paintings but rather on a collage of details from
various works. In so doing, Storck exceeded Emmer’s ambitions by putting
film at the disposal of an analysis of both the content and the form of the
artwork. While Emmer wanted to tell stories that were also the subject of
his filmed paintings, Storck rather developed film essays that were aesthetic
treatises or studies in the history and theory of art.
As the title suggests, Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (The World of Paul Delvaux,
1946), which Storck made in collaboration with poet and essayist René Micha,
deals with surrealist painter Delvaux’s entire oeuvre rather than with his biog-
raphy or a specific painting. Delvaux’s famous nudes and uncanny cityscapes
merge with other figures, objects and fragments from various of his can-
vasses, crystallising into an oneiric and melancholy universe. Accompanied by
the voice of Paul Eluard and music by André Souris, Le Monde de Paul Delvaux
presented itself as a modern Gesamtkunstwerk. Paul Davay called it:
an almost perfect meeting and fusion of different artistic disciplines subject
to a new means of expression – the cinema. Under Storck’s direction, the
painter Delvaux, the script-writer René Micha, the musician André Souris,
and the poet Paul Eluard found a common ground.48

Storck’s camera gently and subtly moves over Delvaux’s paintings, scrutinis-
ing as well as cherishing them. On the one hand, the filmmaker focuses our
attention on the material aspects of the paintings. Arthur Knight stated that
‘more than any other art film has yet succeeded in doing, Storck creates an
awareness of texture, of technique, of how the paint is laid on.’49 On the other
hand, Storck manages to evoke the almost immaterial and dream-like world
of Delvaux’s art. In order to achieve this effect, Storck and Delvaux did away
with the frames of the pictures and in some cases lined them up one next
to the other so that Storck’s camera could pass without interruption from
one to another.50 Perfectly fit for black-and-white film, Delvaux’s uncanny
nudes in haunted nocturnal cityscapes show certain resemblances to films of
that era such as late instances of Surrealism, like Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête
(1946) or Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1946), as well as to con-
temporaneous Hollywood productions, such as One Touch of Venus (William
Seiter, 1948), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1949) and several
Gothic and noir films featuring haunting portraits.

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 Cauvin, Storck, Haesaerts and the Belgian School 15

Figure 1.3 Henri Storck and Paul Haesaerts, Rubens (1948)

With Rubens (1948), which Storck realised in collaboration with Paul

Haesaerts, cinema entered into the realm of art analysis. Rather than dealing
with the narrative of a certain painting (as in many of Emmer’s films) or
with a fictitious world created in many works of a painter (as in Le Monde de
Paul Delvaux), Rubens attempted to give both an art historical reading and a
formal analysis of the work of the baroque painter. In order to analyse the
style, composition and iconography of the artist, Storck called in the entire
repertory of the film medium – from split screens and multiple exposures
to parallel editing and animation techniques. In Rubens, Storck frequently
isolates a fragment of the painting through the device of an iris. A subse-
quent shot shows a close-up of that fragment for a more detailed analysis.
In other instances, a moving camera and rapidly rotating images reveal
Rubens’s predilection for spiral-shaped movements. Animated lines point
out the characteristics of Rubens’s compositions – his focal points, divi-
sions and the sweep of his movements. Rubens is presented as a master of
ultimate flexibility and movement by means of animated circles and ovals.
Dissolves to footage of water, clouds and flames evoke Rubens’s idea of
both a universe in motion and a fertile nature. By means of split screens,
Storck and Haesaerts compare Rubens with other masters. On the one hand,
split screens make clear that Rubens sought and found other solutions to
depict the world than the ones used by earlier Flemish painters such as Van
der Weyden, Van der Goes, Memling, Van Eyck, Bosch or Bruegel. On the

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 16 Camera and Canvas

other hand, split screens are also invoked to demonstrate Rubens’s affinities
with other painters or his influence on later artists such as Titian, Veronese,
Van Dyck, Jordaens, Delacroix, Wiertz, Watteau and Renoir. Furthermore,
Storck and Haesaerts also make comparisons between similar details from a
number of works by Rubens himself. A sequence, for instance, juxtaposes
a series of hands painted by Rubens and investigates their significance in
the construction of a narrative. In this film, in short, Storck does not evoke
Rubens through a series of anecdotes but recreates his works before our
eyes. According to Paul Davay, Storck and Haesaerts ‘oblige us to remain
in front of the picture, to see it, with their eyes, but they give us the right to
protest, to disagree, and to join in a discussion which is always open to our
intelligence’.51 While Storck and Haesaerts may be using virtuoso textbook
techniques, they also intrude in the stories depicted in the paintings directly
by their glorious travelling shots, statically filmed details, and close-ups of
characters or their features.
With Rubens, Storck clearly demonstrated that the medium of film was
suitable for formal analyses of artworks. Moreover, with his large formats
and compositions characterised by movements and spatial depth, Rubens is
almost presented as a precursor of cinema. This aspect is even made explicit
when a view of the interior of a Jesuit church with an altar painted by Rubens
is almost transformed into a cinema theatre. Suddenly, the image is underex-
posed apart from the altar that illuminates as a cinema screen. Rubens’s art, in
short, is presented as a proto-cinematic spectacle – an idea that is not absurd,
knowing that the proliferation of his prints was particularly important for
nineteenth-century academic painting, which, in turn, is echoed in the spec-
tacular and lavish shot compositions of Hollywood directors of the late 1910s
and 1920s such as Cecil B. DeMille.
Rubens is appropriately described as a landmark art documentary by
many commentators.52 According to Kracauer, ‘Rubens combines cinemati-
cally brilliant camera penetrations of the painter’s world with an attempt to
drive home his predilection for gyrational movements. Note that this film
is neither pure cinema nor merely a teaching instrument. It is a glamorous
hybrid.’53 More explicit than Emmer, Storck presented the art documentary
as an autonomous cinematic work. His documentaries on Delvaux and
Rubens were not conceived as educational projects but as pure cinema or
something in between. As such, they were often criticised by art critics and
historians. Storck simply employed artworks as raw material that needed to
be transformed in order to become cinematic elements. In this process, he
attempted to realise effects that sometimes had little to do with the original
work of art. H. W. Janson, author of a well-known and popular survey of art
history, wrote that:

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 Cauvin, Storck, Haesaerts and the Belgian School 17

Figure 1.4 Paul Haesaerts, De Renoir à Figure 1.5 Paul Haesaerts, De Renoir à
Picasso (1950) Picasso (1950)

ambitious and successful films such as the Belgian-made Rubens and Le Monde
de Paul Delvaux have demonstrated how effectively the moving camera can
guide the beholder’s eye so as to focus his attention and heighten his percep-
tions. There is a strange excitement about viewing paintings thus spread out
upon the movie screen. A new dimension, we feel, has been added to our
experience, and we find ourselves in a state of visual alertness that makes the
forms speak to us with particular eloquence and intensity.54
After Rubens, Storck continued making art films such as La Fenêtre ouverte
(The Open Window, 1952), which can be described as a short history of land-
scape painting in Technicolor. Storck’s collaborator on Rubens, the art histo-
rian and critic Paul Haesaerts, also realised other art documentaries in the late
1940s and early 1950s. In De Renoir à Picasso (1950), Haesaerts adopted the
techniques that were used in Rubens. Split screens, diagrams and animation
help us to analyse the forms and structures of paintings. In this case, these
techniques are invoked to make statements about modern art in general since
De Renoir à Picasso attempts at tracing three inspirational sources of modern
art – the so-called sensual or carnal (Renoir), the cerebral (Seurat), and the
instinctual or passionate (Picasso). Evoking what Henri Lemaître, in his 1956
book on fine arts and cinema, called film’s power to make a ‘confrontation signifi-
cative’ between artworks, Haesaerts juxtaposes works in order to demonstrate
artistic affinities and contrasts. Decades later, the film looks deadly didactic
but Haesaerts certainly still amazes us by his attempts at developing new
ways of analysing artworks in cinematic ways. At the time, it made a lasting
impression. According to André Thirifays, Haesaerts uses
a technique which is perfectly adapted to the film medium, and which, more-
over, in this case, is more efficacious than the written word. By using graphs,
pointing quick contrasts, or introducing music, he succeeds in giving forceful
expression to his critical opinions, whilst at the same time, with a few swift

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 18 Camera and Canvas

touches, he indicates various influences and successive trends in the realm of

art and dwells on the dramatic aspects of the works mentioned.55
The only master still living in Haesaert’s genealogy of modern art De
Renoir à Picasso was also the subject of another landmark documentary that
the Belgian art historian-cum-filmmaker realised in 1950. Strikingly, Visite à
Picasso opens with a travelling shot showing numerous books on Picasso. In
so doing, the film not only evokes Malraux’s imaginary museum, it also con-
tributes as well as refers to the veritable cult of Picasso portraits that emerged
after the Second World War. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Picasso
came to embody modern art as such. Both his persona and his work were
discussed and reproduced extensively in both art journals and popular media,
and they also became the subject of other films such as Guernica (Resnais,
1950), Picasso (Emmer, 1954) and Le Mystère Picasso (Clouzot, 1956).56 After
the opening images of Picasso books, Haesaerts shows us a series of works by
Picasso in chronological order. Then the film switches to images of Picasso’s
studio in Vallauris. The artist walks outside and enters the studio to work
on a piece of sculpture and a drawing. By holding the sculpture, the artist
projects its shadows on one of the studio’s walls. In the remarkable following
sequence, Picasso paints various forms (a bird, a vase with flowers, various
zoomorphic figures) on a sheet of Plexiglass stretched between himself and
the camera. Sometimes, the artist looks straight into the lens through the
drawing. The effect is striking – certainly because the pane of glass occupies

Figure 1.6 Paul Haesaerts, Visite à Picasso (1950)

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 Resnais’s Early Studio Visits and Artist Portraits 19

the entire frame or covers an entire door opening. Shown against a dark
background, it looks as if Picasso draws white lines into the space in which
he finds himself.
The use of a glass pane in order to show the creation process itself proved
very successful and it was adopted by several other landmark art documenta-
ries of the 1950s. Haesaerts himself fell back on this procedure in his Quatre
peintres belges au travail (Four Belgian Painters at Work, 1952) dealing with Edgar
Tytgat, Albert Dasnoy, Jean Brusselmans and Paul Delvaux. However, the
process led to better results in the American production of Jackson Pollock
(Paul Falkenberg and Hans Namuth, 1951) simply because Pollock’s action
painting involved a more physical dimension and also implied a new relation
between the painting and its creation process. In the often-quoted voice-
over, Pollock himself emphasised the importance of being physically part of
his paintings. Similarly, The Reality of Karel Appel (Jan Vrijman, 1962) features
the artist flicking paint at a glass screen in a frenzy of apparent creativity
accompanied by a Dizzy Gillespie soundtrack. The use of filming through
glass sheets, in short, proved very useful for documenting painters with a
heavy brush technique and an outspoken physical way of applying paint on
their canvas (as in Pollock’s drippings). Since their paintings present them-
selves as almost seismographic registrations of their bodily movements,
they became favourite subjects of filmmakers who endorsed what Philip
Hayward described as an ‘extreme fetishisation of the actual moment of crea-
tion’.57 The most famous variation on Haesaerts’s technique, however, was
also used in a film dedicated to Picasso. In the feature-length film Le Mystère
Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso, 1956), established French fiction film director
Henri-Georges Clouzot showed Picasso at work in a film studio.58 Shot in
noirish black-and-white, this footage was altered by long takes in colour of a
porous white screen on which Picasso made nineteen paintings or drawings.
The screen was filmed frontally from behind so that Picasso himself remains
invisible. As a result, the screen is transformed into a kind of automatic paint-
ing – an effect particularly suited for Picasso’s working process since as he
works on a painting, he changes his mind about its central subject. The initial
image of a flower becomes a fish, which in turn becomes a hen, before being
transformed into a human face and finally the head of a faun. More than in
Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso, Clouzot’s long takes reproduce the duration of the
painting process.

RESNAIS’S EARLY STUDIO VISITS AND ARTIST PORTRAITS

Clouzot’s film on Picasso is an indication of the high level that the art film
had reached in France by the mid-1950s. Besides Italy and Belgium, France

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 20 Camera and Canvas

contributed largely to the development of the art documentary between

1945 and 1955. Undoubtedly, the production of such films was encouraged
by a decree that obliged film exhibitioners to include short features in their
programmes during the late 1940s.59 After the introduction in 1955 of a new
system of grants, France continued to experience an era of flourishing of
short filmmaking which, together with the work of such sympathetic produc-
ers as Anatole Dauman (Argos Films) and Pierre Braunberger (Les films de
la Pléïade), favoured the production of art documentaries by experimental
filmmakers.
A key figure in the development of the post-war French art documentary
was Alain Resnais, who later became one of the major auteurs of French
post-war cinema with films such as Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L’Année
dernière à Marienbad (1961). Resnais even started his career as a filmmaker
with some remarkable art documentaries, which were heavily influenced
by ‘Robert Hessens and the Belgian School of Paul Haesaerts’.60 Already in
1946–7, more or less during the same years in which Malraux – who later was
to become Resnais’s father-in-law – was working on the first versions of his
Musée imaginaire, Resnais made, at the age of twenty-five, a series of film por-
traits of painters such as Henri Goetz, Hans Hartung, César Doméla, Lucien
Coutaud, Christine Boumeester, Félix Labisse, Óscar Domínguez (unfin-
ished) and Max Ernst. Since these films, each of them shot in 16 mm, were
not meant for commercial distribution, they fell into oblivion and they are
often lacking in Resnais filmographies. At the most, they can be considered
as modest finger exercises. With the exception of the film on Ernst, which
was shot in colour, they all are black-and-white films without synchronised
sound. A soundtrack with music was later added to the Goetz film to be
shown in museums and exhibitions. For the film on Hartung, a soundtrack
with music by Antoine Duhamel and a voice-over commentary by Madeleine
Rousseau was planned but only realised much later, when the film was saved
from oblivion in 2000.
The selection of subjects in Resnais’s early films is striking. In a 1960
interview, Resnais described his pictorial preferences, like his taste in other
artistic disciplines, as highly eclectic. ‘I like what I call theatrical painting –
Piero della Francesca, Félix Labisse, Paul Delvaux, etcetera. But then I also
like Hartung. My favourite modern painter is Ernst; he satisfies me on both
the theatrical and abstract levels.’61 For his first film portraits, Resnais invari-
ably chose painters representing the various trends within the so-called école
de Paris: post-cubism (Goetz), geometric abstraction (Doméla), figuration
inspired by Surrealism (Labisse, Coutaud, Domínguez) and expressive, lyrical
or organic abstraction (Hartung, Ernst, Boumeester). The fact that Resnais
based his career as a filmmaker on a preference for modern abstract painting

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 Resnais’s Early Studio Visits and Artist Portraits 21

already prefigures his future outspoken modernist commitment – during the

following decades, after all, Resnais not only became one of the protagonist
of European modernist art house cinema but also collaborated with promi-
nent modernist writers such as Cayrol, Duras, Semprun and Robbe-Grillet
and composers such as Milhaud, Eisler, Fusco, Henze and Penderecki.
These at first sight rather modest films can be described as studio visits
comprising images of the artist at work. Given this perspective, Resnais’s
early film experiments on the one hand connect to an old tradition reach-
ing back to the origins of the genre of the art documentary. On the other
hand, they foreshadow an important trend that would flourish in the fol-
lowing years with films already mentioned in the previous paragraph such
as Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso and Quatre peintres belges au travail as well as
Falkenberg and Namuth’s Jackson Pollock and Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso. In
the sequences showing artists in their studio, Resnais often used a succession
of shots characterised by a fixed framing, and some sequences are marked by
striking camera positions.
Resnais’s early artist films also contain a sequence consisting of a suc-
cession of static shots of various paintings, which enables the filmmaker to
show the stylistic evolution of a painter’s oeuvre as well as to emphasise the
specific obsessions of the artist. In the film on Goetz, for instance, Resnais
evokes an almost tormented and haunted atmosphere that is caused more
by the montage than by the registration of individual works as such. In addi-
tion, Resnais succeeded in immersing himself and the viewer in the pictorial
universe of a certain artist by means of various cinematic techniques. In
particular, in the film portraits of Goetz and Hartung, Resnais extensively
used the tracking shots that later would become the trademark of films such
as Nuit et brouillard, Hiroshima mon amour and L’Année dernière à Marienbad. As
François Thomas has noted, in the films on Goetz and Hartung, two different
kinds of use of travelling shots can be found.62 In the film on Goetz, camera
movements were deployed to suggest a continuity between shots showing
fragments of several works considered to be the most representative of the
painter. Camera movements facilitate, as it were, the selection of specific ele-
ments in these paintings and they give meaning to an entire series of works. In
the film on Hartung, by contrast, camera movements guide us within a single
painting. The camera follows axes in the composition and helps us to ‘read’
the painting. According to Resnais,

there is nothing like looking at a painter’s work through a camera viewfinder

to judge the cohesiveness of his painting as such. That was how I came to see
through Gauguin, for example – he just didn’t stand up – but it’s also how I
came to appreciate the formal values of Ernst.63

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 22 Camera and Canvas

In Resnais’s early film essays, static paintings are animated or brought to

life by montage and camera movements. According to Resnais, these early
films ‘had the intention to remove the paintings from the dusty rooms of
museums’ and they were experiments
to find out if painted trees, painted houses, and painted characters could, by
way of montage, fulfil the roles of real objects and if, in this case, it was pos-
sible to substitute for the observer the interior world of an artist for the word
that photography revealed.64

Labelled as ‘important and invaluable experiments in the crucial relationship

between montage and mise-en-scène’, these early artist portraits present them-
selves as autonomous artworks, which translate rather than merely register
the formal language and universe of the painter in question.65

VAN GOGH
This aspect is even more crucial in Resnais’s art documentaries made during
the following years, which were made for commercial distribution in contrast
with the early studio films. In films such as Van Gogh (1948), Guernica (1950),
Gauguin (1950) and Les Statues meurent aussi (with Chris Marker, 1953), a shift
in the selection of the art and artists can be noted.66 Whereas the early film
portraits were dedicated to artists who had come to the fore in the 1930s and
1940s and who, as a whole, embodied the most important currents in post-
war European painting, Resnais now harked back to prominent artists of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and African art. Nonetheless,
this preference for artists and art forms that, a few years earlier under the Nazi
occupation were considered still entartet or degenerated, indicates Resnais’s
modernist commitment.
The rediscovery of Vincent Van Gogh perfectly tallies with the artistic and
intellectual climate shortly after the liberation. Both the art and the figure of
Van Gogh seemed perfectly reconcilable with the then leading existentialist
art discourse – the shoes of Van Gogh, which turn up a few times in Resnais’s
film, were at the core, for instance, of Heidegger’s famous essay on the
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. During his military service in Germany in 1945–6,
Resnais had visited Heidegger.67 On the occasion of the big Van Gogh
exhibition at the Orangerie in Paris in 1947, several books were published,
some containing fragments of the correspondence between Vincent and his
brother Theo, which was also used in Resnais’s short feature.68 Van Gogh was
originally shot in 1947, commissioned by the Amis de l’Art, a circle founded
at the end of 1944 with the purpose of stimulating the proliferation of
modern art by means of lectures and didactic exhibitions as well as films. This

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 Van Gogh 23

society was presided over by the renowned art historian Gaston Diehl, who
also founded the Festival international du film d’art in 1948 and rendered his
assistance as a screenwriter to films such as Les Fêtes galantes (Watteau) (1950)
by Jean Aurel. Diehl spoke to Resnais about the Van Gogh exhibition and
asked the young filmmaker if he was interested in making a film ‘in the style of
Luciano Emmer’ for the Amis de l’art.69 Diehl also wrote the commentary for
Van Gogh and also for Resnais’s film on Gauguin. Also involved in the project
was Robert Hessens, who developed into a maker of art documentaries as
well as films on Malfray (1948), Toulouse-Lautrec (1950) and Chagall (1953).70
Resnais would also collaborate with Hessens on his film on Guernica and both
were also involved in the production of Pictura (1951), in which famous actors
such as Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck and Vincent Price spoke the voice-over
in episodes dedicated to Bosch, Goya, Carpaccio and Toulouse-Lautrec.71
Initially, Van Gogh was shot in 16 mm. Moreover, the budget was origi-
nally inadequate to provide for the soundtrack, comprising Diehl’s text read
by Claude Dauphin and music by Jacques Besse. Resnais, however, showed
the unfinished film to producer Pierre Braunberger.72 Impressed by it,
Braunberger, who was the driving force behind Panthéon Production (later
Les films de la Pléïade), gave Resnais the assignment as well as the financial
means to reshoot the film in 35 mm with sound. Eventually, the new version
of Van Gogh, which was made on the basis of photographic reproductions
instead of the original paintings used in the 16 mm version, premiered in May
1948.73 That year, it won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival and the
CIDALC Award. In 1950, the film won an Oscar for best documentary short.
It is striking that Resnais’s twenty-minute film was conceived and eventually
also shot in black-and-white, whereas Van Gogh is usually considered as a
great colourist. The film, however, should be situated in a context in which
the vast majority of art reproductions were in black-and-white. Moreover,
Resnais succeeded in turning this restriction into an advantage. The use of
black-and-white makes the graphic and even graphological element in Van
Gogh’s works more visible – the painting is presented as an embodiment
of a highly personal signature. Furthermore, the use of black-and-white film
enabled Resnais to create, in his own words, links between completely differ-
ent works as well as to focus more on the ‘architecture tragique de la peinture
de Van Gogh’.74
The tragic nature of Van Gogh is indeed the crucial topic of the film.
Already before the opening credits, we are assured that Van Gogh, in spite
of his universally recognised talent, struggled desperately against misery and
indifference. Van Gogh is not so much a visual essay analysing the content or
pictorial system of a certain painter – as is the case in some of the films by
Emmer. Resnais, in the first place, tells the story of the life of the artist. The

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 24 Camera and Canvas

opening image stipulates that ‘ce film tente de retracer, uniquement à l’aide
de ses oeuvres, la vie et l’aventure spirituelle de l’un des plus grands peintres
modernes.’ This life and spiritual adventure are unmistakably tragic. Already
in the 1940s, among the public at large, Van Gogh was the ultimate embodi-
ment of the misunderstood artist – an aspect fully developed in Lust for Life,
the popular novel published by Irving Stone in 1934 that became the basis
for the 1956 film directed by Minnelli. As will be demonstrated in the next
chapter, both Stone and Minnelli as well as later filmmakers presented Van
Gogh as an unrecognised loner, who was almost biologically determined to
deviant behaviour. Lust for Life is completely built on Van Gogh’s desperate
and futile attempts to become a respectable artist. The fact that he remains a
failure in the eyes of the community breaks his vulnerable and self-destructive
personality. As Griselda Pollock has demonstrated in several of her writings,
Van Gogh is the perfect embodiment of the romantic myth of the artist as an
unrecognised, vulnerable, tormented, self-destructive and tragic individual.75
It is precisely this myth that Resnais used as a point of departure for his
film essay. ‘We voluntary sacrificed the historical accuracy for the benefit of
the myth of Van Gogh,’ Resnais stated.76 Van Gogh is immediately presented
as a restless soul who is at home nowhere by means of a quote from the cor-
respondence with his brother Theo: ‘It seems that I am always a traveller who
always goes somewhere at some destination.’ It is this restless geographic as
well as artistic and mental journey that determines the structure of the film.
Van Gogh, after all, can be divided into four sequences coinciding with the
four places that played an important part in the painter’s life and that repre-
sent the four stages of his artistic development: Holland, Paris, Provence and
Auvers-sur-Oise. Strikingly, Resnais tells the story of Van Gogh’s life, which
remains part of a familiar discourse on the mental and social alienation of the
artist, exclusively by means of a cinematic manipulation of his paintings. On
the whole, the film consists of a masterful succession of 207 shots of paint-
ings, which suggest a continuity that is comparable with a feature film. Just
like a filmmaker constructs a scene with shots and an entire film with scenes,
Resnais composed Van Gogh by means of images of static paintings that are
animated in a certain way. In order to tell the story of the painter’s life, Resnais
rearranged dozens of paintings into a kind of storyboard or comic strip – later
in his career, Resnais touched on the relation between film and comics more
than once and, for his art documentaries, he recognised his debt to Emmer
on the one hand, and to Dick Tracey on the other.77 In order to construct a
link between the individual images, Resnais appealed to all kinds of montage
devices. He used several speeds and forms of transitions (from straight cuts
to slow overlap dissolves) between the individual images. In addition, static
images were brought to life by means of several camera movements – from

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 Van Gogh 25

Figure 1.7 Alain Resnais, Van Gogh Figure 1.8 Alain Resnais, Guernica (1950)
(1948)

right to left, from bottom to top, and from forward to backward (optical)
tracks. In Van Gogh, Resnais used an entire repertory of camera movements,
which he had tested earlier, in the films on Goetz and Hartung for instance, in
a more isolated context. Furthermore, rather than juxtaposing shots of paint-
ings, Resnais confronted parts of paintings to one another. Consequently,
Resnais destroyed the integrity of the individual artwork in two ways: by
focusing on isolated details on the one hand, and by jumping through an
entire oeuvre on the other. In Resnais’s film, Van Gogh’s complete oeuvre is
seen as a single vast painting.
Resnais not only employed these cinematic devices to enable us to get
acquainted with Van Gogh’s work in a ‘smooth’ way. In no way is his film like
a kind of art history slide show adorned by various image transitions. In the
first place, Resnais used cinematic devices to construct a drama. Given this
perspective, his film is more in line with the biopics by Minnelli and other
filmmakers than with most of the many art documentaries that were later
dedicated to the painter. Resnais only told his stories without actors and loca-
tions but only by means of paintings and their details. ‘What interested me in
Van Gogh was the possibility to treat a painting as if it was a real space with
real characters,’ Resnais stated.78
The film’s first images can simply be interpreted as a conventional estab-
lishing sequence. A series of overlap dissolves of the Dutch landscape take
us to a certain location in a conventional way: a panoramic landscape is fol-
lowed by sights of country roads bordered by trees, which in their turn are
succeeded by the exterior and eventually interior of a house. From the very
first, it is clear that Resnais employs paintings as components of a classical
découpage, which constructs a narrative and even dramatic relation between the
images. When the voice-over tells us that other horizons are calling and that
Van Gogh leaves Holland on a November evening, we get to see a painting of

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 26 Camera and Canvas

a landscape including a dorsal figure that we interpret as Van Gogh himself.

‘Van Gogh, solitaire, s’engage vers son destin.’ A dissolve to black is fol-
lowed by an iris on a painting representing Paris – ‘Paris l’acceuille. Un Paris
immense, peuplé d’espoir et de promesses . . .’ – and, subsequently, by a con-
ventional montage sequence of the French capital. Unmistakably, Resnais’s
camera work draws our attention to all kinds of plastic details but also results
in the construction of a plot, which violates the original works of art. The
camera, for instance, approaches a door of a building in a painting and sud-
denly enters its interior by means of another painting – an almost magical
effect used by Resnais at several instances in the film. Paintings are thus linked
in a way a director would use real locations. A forward track to the window in
the painting of La Maison jaune is for instance followed by a backward tracking
shot, which starts from a window and gradually reveals the entire interior of
La Chambre à coucher de l’artiste à Arles. This cinematic logic can also be found in
the sequence in which an old Dutch farmer’s wife enters a house and Resnais
even creates the equivalent of a reverse shot.
Supported by the ‘special effects’ of Henry Ferrand, Resnais also created
more dramatic moments. A super-fast succession of backward tracks of
trees, the flashing shift of landscapes, the restless use of the out-of-focus, the
reframing of a painting or the agitated alternation between sunflowers and
close-ups of eyes in self-portraits evoke both the insanity and the nervous
brush strokes and loud colour contrasts of the painter. In this perspec-
tive, Resnais combines the innovations of both Emmer and Storck. Like
Emmer, Resnais constructs a story by means of several details of paintings.
Simultaneously, however, like in Storck’s films, a mobile camera and an eye-
catching montage reveal the essence of the formal language of the artist.
The emphatic effects also indicate that Resnais did not have the ambition to
tell only Van Gogh’s biography by means of his paintings. At the most, the
film deals with a kind of imaginary life of the artist. The story is rather told
from within the painter’s mind and the world is seen through the eyes of Van
Gogh. This interest in the construction of narrative links between images of
an internal and mental world is also at the basis of Resnais’s feature films,
such as Hiroshima mon amour, L’Année dernière à Marienbad or Providence, in which
both characters and the spectator are immersed in the labyrinth of memory
by means of shock-like successions and seamless transitions of images.

GAUGUIN
After the success of Van Gogh, Resnais also dedicated an eleven-minute film
to the painter’s mate Gauguin (1950). For this purpose, Resnais collaborated
again with Diehl (but without Hessens). The voice-over, again based on

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 Gauguin 27

the artist’s writings, was spoken by Jean Servais. Henry Ferrand again took
care of the ‘special effects’ and this time the music was composed by Darius
Milhaud. With Gauguin, Resnais once more told the story of a tormented and
alienated artist by means of a montage of details of paintings. Even the struc-
ture and the important narrative elements of Gauguin remind one of the film
about Van Gogh that Resnais created two years earlier. Again, the film deals
with an artist who breaks with his environment and family to start a journey
(with Paris as first stop-over) to discover himself. Again, the artist retires
from society and this time he ends up in the timeless peace and quiet of the
Breton countryside and eventually in the paradisiacal environment of Tahiti.
To Gauguin, the Polynesian landscape is an almost magical world embody-
ing a strange combination of voluptuousness and fear. Gauguin, too, there-
fore, answers perfectly to the mythic image of the artist as a self-destructive
eccentric – not coincidentally, as will be noted in the next chapter, Gauguin
was the model for one of the first Hollywood biopics dedicated to a modern
visual artist: The Moon and Sixpence (Albert Lewin, 1942), based on a novel by
Somerset Maugham.79
Self-portraits of the painter were used in Van Gogh as well but in Gauguin
they receive more attention. By means of dissolves, Resnais shows us the
slow changes in the artist’s face. A vague self-assuredness makes room for
tormented pride and eventually mistrust and agony. Even the cinematic form
shows unmistakable resemblances to the film on Van Gogh. The camera
movements, according to Henri Agel, characterised by ‘a sobriety that is
always efficient and sometimes poetic’, already herald feature films such as
Hiroshima mon amour and L’Année dernière à Marienbad with which Resnais
developed into a master of the mobile camera.80 For the succession of the
117 shots of paintings or some of their details, Resnais again used a whole
spectrum of image transitions. The beginning of the film, for instance,
shows a little inspired series of wipes between a succession of paintings. At
other moments, Resnais uses editing effects more emphatically. By means
of an overlap dissolve, the painter’s self-portrait in the painting Bonjour Mr.
Gauguin (1889) is introduced in the landscape of another painting. As in Van
Gogh, at the end of the film we find a swirling montage comprising people,
animals and plants. The hectic rhythm has to evoke both the insanity and the
death of the artist. The perception of the world is disturbed but, at the same
time, the subject is immersed in it. On the one hand, the rhythmic editing
evokes the exaltation of sensuous forms and, on the other hand, the ways in
which the lonely individual loses himself in it. At the abrupt end of the film,
after the paradisiacal images of the Pacific, Resnais suddenly shows us a paint-
ing of a snowy European landscape. Gauguin dies with the memory of the
‘distant shores of France and a Breton village in the snow’ – an effect that is

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 28 Camera and Canvas

highly relevant for the artistic development of Resnais, who investigated the
functioning of memory in relation to cinematic time and the (film) image in
his following documentaries, such as Nuit et brouillard and Toute la Mémoire du
monde, as well as in most of his feature films.
Probably precisely because of the strong resemblances to Van Gogh, the
film was rather poorly received by both the public and critics. Resnais himself
later dissociated himself from this film. ‘To be of interest to me, a film must
have an experimental aspect – and this was precisely what Gauguin was lacking
and because of that it is a bad film.’81 Several critics noted that the subject was
much less suited to black-and-white than Van Gogh, who always remained
a draughtsman, whereas Gauguin manifested himself as a colourist in the
first place. ‘Shooting Gauguin in black-and-white was a terrible thing,’ Resnais
admitted, ‘and it contributed largely to its failure because I could conceive
this film only in colour and I shot it in black-and-white only for economical
reasons.’82

GUERNICA
The restrictions of black-and-white were less problematic in Guernica (1950),
which Resnais made in collaboration with Robert Hessens in the same year
as Gauguin.83 This is not only the case because Picasso’s painting with the
same name is more or less monochromatic – after all, the twelve-minute film
also comprises images of many other Picasso paintings and it deals with the
subject of the painting rather than with the painting itself. In the first place,
the film evokes the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by German
bombers in April 1937. As is generally known, this horrific event from the
Spanish civil war inspired Picasso to create the famous painting that was put
on display in the Spanish pavilion at the World Fair in Paris later that year.
After the fall of the Spanish Republic and Franco’s victory, Picasso entrusted
the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During and imme-
diately after the Second World War, it was exhibited in various American and
European cities, turning into a universal anti-war symbol. In the middle of the
Cold War, these associations were taken up by Resnais, who also dealt with
the traumas of war in Nuit et brouillard and Hiroshima mon amour. Moreover,
Guernica is a passionate meditation not only on the barbarism of war and
human hope and resilience, but also on the struggle against fascism, which
had to be continued after the Second World War in Spain; in La Guerre est finie
(1966), Resnais also dealt with this theme.
After the films on Van Gogh and Gauguin, who are at the basis of the
myth of the modern artist as an alienated and tormented individual, Resnais
focused his attention on the figure of Picasso, whose work, as mentioned in

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 Guernica 29

the previous paragraph, was a favourite subject in the early 1950s in art films
by Haesaerts, Emmer and Clouzot among others. Guernica, too, elicited the
attention of several documentary filmmakers: Danish filmmaker Helge Ernst
made a six-minute film on the painting in 1949 and even Robert Flaherty
had similar plans in 1948.84 As in Van Gogh and Gauguin, Resnais used count-
less details from the oeuvre of a single artist – in this case from the period
1902–49 – in order to tell a story or to construct a drama. In contrast with
his two previous documentaries, this time Resnais did not tell the story of
the artist’s life but commented on a historical event that was the subject of
a single specific work. Consequently, in Guernica, the commentary was not
based on autobiographical writings but on a lyrical poem by Paul Eluard,
which is recited off-screen by Jacques Pruvost and María Casarès.85 The film
even opens with a still of the ravaged city and by means of an overlap dis-
solve, Resnais suggests that some figures are emerging from the ruins. The
figures are the characters from the painting La Famille de saltimbanques (1905),
who are followed by more images of the vulnerable and melancholy figures
of Picasso’s pre-cubist paintings.
In a second series of images, Resnais deals more with the bombing itself.
A montage sequence of 1937 newspaper headlines is followed by a series of
special effects (again executed by Henry Ferrand) suggesting a devastating
rain of bullets hitting wall drawings and various Picasso paintings. Supported
by the mesmerising voice-over, Guy Bernard’s inflammatory music and
diverse sound effects, this part of the film is characterised by hectic editing
and nervous camera movements that are much more agitated than com-
parable passages in Van Gogh and Gauguin. The famous painting from the
title only appears after about seven minutes, in the third part of the film. It
is introduced by a close-up of the lamp, which is situated in the middle of
the top of the composition. Resnais links the image of this lamp to flashing
light effects letting several figures emerge from darkness. In a rapid montage,
stirred up by the rhythm of the music, the distorted bodies of humans and
animals from the painting and from other post-cubist works by Picasso are
presented as victims of the bombing. In the film’s closing scene, which opens
with total darkness, the camera slides over sombre Picasso sculptures. The
lighting is dramatic and by means of a noirish effect, Resnais uses the restric-
tions of black-and-white film to advantage. By partially obscuring or closing
the image, hectic editing of fragmented image layers and restless tracks scan-
ning pictorial surfaces, Resnais created, as it were, a cinematic equivalent of
cubism. Picasso’s painting, which according to Rudolph Arnheim is charac-
terised by a principle of montage and can be considered ‘cinematic’ in various
ways, was resolutely transformed into an autonomous film consisting of 178
shots.86

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 30 Camera and Canvas

PAINTING IN FILM
In Guernica, this autonomy vis-à-vis the original artworks is much stronger
than in Van Gogh and Gauguin. More than in the previous films, images
are disconnected from their original context and charged with completely
new meanings. By means of techniques reminiscent of Soviet montage,
the original artwork is fragmented and even politicised – given this per-
spective, Guernica is an exercise in active and self-conscious art reception
perfectly tallying with Benjamin’s film aesthetics. This autonomisation in
relation to the original artwork was an important subject for debate among
the critical reflections on the art documentaries by Resnais, Emmer, Storck
and Haesaerts. The autonomisation also makes clear that these filmmakers
refused to make a clear-cut distinction between the film on art on the one hand
and the art film on the other. Writing in a 1950 issue of Sight and Sound, Jean
Queval explicitly denied the need for rigid delineations of type, arguing that
at ‘present, there is little to be gained from introducing rigid categories into a
genre that is still searching for principles’.87 Paradoxically, Siegfried Kracauer
situated the autonomy of the new experimental art documentaries in an art
historical tradition. Referring to the use of pieces of antique architecture in
Piranesi’s engravings or the presence of French and Italian fountain sculp-
tures in Watteau’s fêtes champêtres, Kracauer stated that objections against
these art films usually fail ‘to take into account the fact that within the tradi-
tional arts themselves, transfers of works of art from their own medium to
another are fairly frequent and are considered quite legitimate’.88 According
to Beatrice Farwell, however, art documentaries are confronted by a dilemma
by definition. ‘The more a film on art succeeds as a film, the less likely it is
to increase one’s understanding of painting.’89 Alluding to the film by Storck
and Haesaerts, Farwell deals with the example of the art of Rubens, which,
at first sight, seems like a natural for film treatment because his art is full of
movement. The point, however, is that Rubens was capable of creating this
movement in a static medium. When a painting is set into motion by means
of cinematic devices, the illusion Rubens skilfully created is lost. A new filmic
illusion is constructed, which, according to Farwell, falsifies Rubens’s art and
which can even lead to a misinterpretation of the art of painting in general.
In addition, the medium of film was often denounced by art historians
because films did not show the entire work in a single shot or at a single
glance – at the third FIFA conference in Amsterdam in 1950, an art critic
even argued for the obligation for filmmakers to show the artwork entirely
and in colour at the beginning of their films.90 Such demands, of course,
completely ignored the essence of the film medium, which exceeds or at least
questions the dichotomy based on Lessing between spatial and temporal arts.

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 Painting in Film 31

The complexity of film as both a spatial and temporal discipline is brought up

by the art film. This is already clear from the Emmer films in which various
stages of a narrative painting (such as The Legend of Saint Ursula by Carpaccio),
which are seen simultaneously by the beholder of the original artwork and
which are part of a single pictorial composition, are unfolded in time by
means of camera movements and editing techniques.
However, on a more fundamental level, the maker of an art film faces
other problems. Even when a shot attempts to record a painting entirely, the
artwork as a Gestalt is lost by definition because, almost always, the propor-
tion of the painting does not completely coincide with the aspect ratio of
the film camera and film screen. The filmmaker, consequently, has to crop
the image or his frame comprises a part of the world that falls outside the
painting. Strikingly, in the most interesting art films, filmmakers deal in a
highly conscious way with their framings and create new visual balances and
tensions within them. In the films by Emmer, Storck and Resnais, this even
becomes a conditio sine qua non. In this perspective, one should also notice that
not only the vast majority of art documentaries but also the most interesting
and innovating ones have painting as their subject, whereas the film medium
seems more appropriate for the registration of sculpture and architecture,
which imply a mobilised beholder. Resnais, too, almost completely concen-
trated on painting – only in the end sequence of Guernica sculptures appear in
his oeuvre for the very first time, visualised emphatically plastically by means
of a gliding camera and chiaroscuro lighting. His series of pictorial explora-
tions concluded in 1955 with Les Statues meurent aussi (with Chris Marker), his
only film dedicated to sculpture dealing with completely different topics (such
as the decay of African art as a result of colonisation).
This pronounced focus on painting cannot entirely be explained by refer-
ring to the prominent position the medium of painting has occupied since
the Renaissance. It is precisely the confrontation between the frame of the
painting and that of the camera as well as the interference of two kinds of
two-dimensionality that turn the film of a painting into an interesting artistic
challenge. Exactly at the moment when the avant-garde emphasises the integ-
rity of the pictorial surface (for example, the insistence on flatness throughout
Clement Greenberg’s writings of the 1940s and 1950s), filmmakers play on
the ambivalence of the film image, which, according to Arnheim, presents
each object ‘in two entirely different frames of reference, namely the two-
dimensional and three-dimensional’.91 By focusing on painting, Emmer,
Storck and Resnais presented the genre of the art documentary as a means
to investigate the boundaries of film by juxtaposing movement versus stasis,
narrative versus iconic images, and cinematic space versus pictorial surface.
The juxtaposition between two frames also determines the scope of one of

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 32 Camera and Canvas

the major essays André Bazin dedicated to the relation between painting and
cinema.92 According to Bazin, the fixed frame of painting enclosed a world
that entirely exists by and for itself; it draws the attention in a centripetal way
to a static composition. The frame of the film camera, by contrast, is mobile
and implies a centrifugal space extending beyond the frame into the smallest
and most remote corners of everyday life. When we show a part of a painting
on a film screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and it is pre-
sented as something borderless and hence as something that extends beyond
the frame. Apart from the (educational or democratising) fact that cinema
is capable of bringing a painting closer to a wider audience, film presents
a painting as part of the world. According to Bazin, Resnais precisely suc-
ceeded in introducing this centrifugal space of film into the centripetal space
of painting. By switching between paintings and by letting the camera glide
over surfaces the limits of which remain invisible, Resnais breaks through the
spatial restraints of painting. According to Bazin, Resnais’s art documentaries
are therefore hybrid or symbiotic works. On the one hand, they cannot simply
be considered as documentary registrations of another art form because the
material provided by the other medium is transformed. On the other hand,
they are not autonomous films since they remain dependent on other arts.
It is striking that Bazin, who usually dismissed a montage aesthetics
in favour of mise-en-scène, long take and deep focus, expressed himself
favourably on the art documentaries by Resnais. It is clear that, for Bazin
and Resnais, paintings are intriguing and obstinate themes and motifs which
lend themselves only with great difficulty to a Bazinian realism celebrating
the indeterminism of everyday reality. Confronted with two-dimensional, flat
entities that create their own spatial illusions, both a deep focus technique
and a notion such as mise-en-scène become quite meaningless. As spatial
and static objects suggesting a kind of immobility and timelessness, paintings
become attractive topics for the film medium, which precisely in that era
exchanges, in Gilles Deleuze’s terminology, the paradigm of the movement-
image for that of the time-image. Contributing importantly to the develop-
ment of modernist cinema that presents duration rather than movement as
its essence, Resnais as well as Emmer, Storck and Haesaerts experimented
with new relations between stasis and movement. In an era of increasing
camera mobility in both American and European cinema, these filmmakers
embarked on a private cinematic project aimed at animating static images.
Resnais would later transform the tension between stasis and movement,
which he explores in Van Gogh, Gauguin and Guernica, into the use of tableaux
vivants and ingenious manipulations with time in L’Année dernière à Marienbad
– a film that screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet described as a ‘documentary of
a statue’.93

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 Notes 33

The revolutionary experiments with camera movements, montage and

animation in the art documentaries by Emmer, Storck, Resnais and others
in the late 1940s and early 1950s soon turned into conventions of the genre.
In recent decades, interesting and innovative documentary films on painting
such as Une Visite au Louvre (2004) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
precisely ignored these conventions in an emphatic way. Moreover, the tech-
niques to bring static images to life by means of camera movements, montage
and music, which were self-consciously developed within the film d’art
movement, were also extensively used in contemporaneous feature films.
Several noir films and gothic melodramas of the late 1940s and early 1950s,
for instance, contain scenes in which a ‘haunted portrait’ plays an important
role. With the help of comparable montage effects, pans, tilts, and forward
and backward tracking shots, the painted portrait marks the presence of an
important absentee. In films such as Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), Laura
(Otto Preminger, 1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945), Scarlet
Street (Fritz Lang, 1945), Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948) and many
others, a painted portrait functions as a memento mori of a deceased person,
invoking a restless sense of fate. Through camera positions, camera move-
ments, and editing, a close relationship between the portrayed person and the
characters looking at the portrait is established. Often, the illusion is thereby
created that the portrait reflects the gaze of the characters and the spectator.
A similar situation can be found in scenes situated in a museum, which will be
further discussed in one of the following chapters.

Notes

1. Examples are Brunnen und Denkmäler der Kunstmetropole München or Die weltberüh-
mten Bauschöpfungen des Mittelalters in Sevilla, Spanien. See Thiele, Das Kunstwerk im
Film, p. 14.
2. Focillon, ‘The cinema and the teaching of the arts’, p. 3.
3. See Knight, ‘A short history of art films’, pp. 8–9.
4. See Cürlis, ‘Das Problem der Wiedergabe von Kunstwerken durch den Film’,
pp. 172–85; and Thiele, Das Kunstwerk im Film, pp. 15–18. See also Ziegler, Kunst
und Architektur im Kulturfilm 1919–1945, pp. 35–40, 45–54, 302–9.
5. Arnheim, ‘Painting and film’, pp. 86–92.
6. Cürlis and Fanck made Josef Thorak: Werkstatt und Werk in 1940 and Arno Breker
in 1944.
7. Knight, ‘A short history of art films’, p. 10. See also Ziegler, Kunst und Architektur
im Kulturfilm 1919–1945, pp. 290–1, 315–17.
8. Mabel Scachen, quoted in Marble, ‘The Titan reveals hidden camera possibilities’,
p. 14.
9. Crowther, ‘About art films’.

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 34 Camera and Canvas

10. Barry, ‘Pioneering in films on art’, p. 3.

11. Robert Flaherty, quoted in Marble, ‘The Titan reveals hidden camera possibilities’,
p. 14.
12. See the volumes published by UNESCO such as Films on Art (1949); Films on Art
(1951); and Bolen, Films on Art: Panorama 1953. See also Guermann, ‘Le film sur
l’art’, p. 27; and Lemaître, Beaux-arts et cinéma, pp. 139–40.
13. Clark, ‘Introduction’, pp. v–vi.
14. Le Musée imaginaire was originally published in 1947 as the first volume of
Psychologie de l’art and was later adapted to become a part of Les Voix du silence
(1951). In 1965, the text was republished as Le Musée imaginaire. The three
volumes of Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale were published in 1952–4.
In 1947–50, publisher Albert Skira and filmmaker Luciano Emmer published a
series of luxury art books the square format of which evoked a 16 mm film can.
The idea was to sell the book together with a documentary.
15. See Smith, ‘Moving pictures’.
16. See, for instance, The Titan: The Story of Michelangelo (Curt Oertel/Robert Flaherty,
1950), Thorvaldsen (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1949), Les Charmes de l’existence (Jean
Grémillon and Pierre Kast, 1950), La Maison aux images (Jean Grémillon, 1955),
André Masson et les quatre éléments (Jean Grémillon, 1958), Le Mystère Picasso (Henri-
Georges Clouzot, 1956) and L’Enfer de Rodin (Henri Alekan, 1959).
17. In 1950, Resnais received an Oscar for ‘Best Short Subject’ for Van Gogh,
whereas Flaherty won the Academy Award for ‘Best Documentary Feature’ for
The Titan. 1848 (Marguerite de la Mure and Victoria Mercanton) and Rembrandt:
A Self-Portrait (Morrie Roizman) were nominated in 1949 and 1954, respectively,
as best documentary shorts. For the importance of art documentaries for the
Venice Film Festival, see D’Alessandro, La Mostra del cinema di Venezia e la fortuna
del documentario d’arte in Italia.
18. The two most important texts by Bazin on this topic are ‘Peinture et cinéma’
(written between 1943 and 1951) and ‘Un film Bergsonien: Le Mystère Picasso’
(1956), which are both included in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, pp. 187–92, 193–202.
See also Arnheim, ‘Painting and film’, pp. 86–92; Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp.
195–201; Francastel, ‘A teacher’s point of view’; and Lemaître, Beaux-arts et
cinéma.
19. See, for instance, Burton Cumming et al., ‘Motion pictures for the history of
art’; Bowie, ‘About films on art’; ‘Editorial: the film on art’; Venturi, ‘Films on
art’; Chapman, Films on Art; and Queval, ‘Film and fine arts’, p. 35. The August–
September 1950 (XI, 8–9) issue of Bianco e nero contains several articles on art
documentaries. The first International Art Film Congress took place in 1949 at the
Louvre in Paris; the second was held in 1950 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in
Brussels and the third in 1951 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
20. Barry, ‘Pioneering in films on art’, p. 1.
21. Emmer and Gras, ‘The film renaissance in Italy’, p. 353.
22. Venturi, ‘Italian films on art’, p. 33.
23. See Margolis, ‘Luciano Emmer and the art film’, p. 2.

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 Notes 35

24. Emmer, ‘Pour une nouvelle avant-garde’.

25. Venturi, ‘Films on art’, p. 387.
26. Koval, ‘Interview with Emmer’, p. 354.
27. Venturi, ‘Films on art’, p. 389.
28. Emmer, ‘Dieci anni di lavoro e di vita’. See also Lorenzo Codelli, ‘Un sandwich
par jour’, p. 101. For Emmer and Gras’s attitude towards neorealism, see also
Emmer and Gras, ‘The film renaissance in Italy’.
29. Venturi, ‘Films on art’, p. 388.
30. Venturi, ‘Italian films on art’, p. 34.
31. Margolis, ‘Luciano Emmer and the art film’, p. 2.
32. Venturi, ‘Italian films on art’, p. 36.
33. Emmer, ‘Pour une nouvelle avant-garde’, n.p.
34. Margolis, ‘Luciano Emmer and the art film’, p. 1.
35. Massimo Ferreti (2004), as quoted in Paola Scremin, ‘Luciano Emmer’, p. 57.
36. Loukopoulou, ‘Films bring art to the people’.
37. See Wyver, ‘Representing art or reproducing culture?’, pp. 29–30.
38. See ‘Editorial: the film on art’, p. 93; and Thirifays, ‘The potentialities and
limitations of films about art’, pp. 9–10.
39. Eisner, ‘The painter Reveron’, p. 105.
40. See Agel, Répertoire analytique de 80 courts-métrages (en 16mm), pp. 184–5.
41. Durgnat, ‘The cinema as art gallery’, p. 83.
42. Davay, ‘Compelled to see’, pp. 10–11.
43. Jungblut et al., Une Encyclopédie des cinémas de Belgique, pp. 31–2; Sojcher, La
Kermesse héroique du cinéma belge, p. 38.
44. On Dekeukeleire’s earlier work, see Thompson, ‘(Re)Discovering Charles
Dekeukeleire’.
45. Davay, ‘Compelled to see’, p. 14.
46. Knight, ‘A short history of art films’, p. 11.
47. Barry, ‘Pioneering in films on art’, p. 2.
48. Davay, ‘Compelled to see’, p. 16.
49. Knight, ‘A short history of art films’, p. 13.
50. Davay, ‘Compelled to see’, pp. 16–17.
51. Ibid. p. 17.
52. See Montgomery and Covert, ‘Art on screen: films and television on art – an
overview’, p. 4; and ‘Rubens’, in Covert, Art on Screen, p. 153.
53. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 198.
54. Janson, ‘College use of films on art’, p. 40.
55. Thirifays, ‘The potentialities and limitations of films about art’, p. 9.
56. For Picasso and film, see Hagebölling, Pablo Picasso in Documentary Films; Bernadac
and Breteau Skira, Picasso à l’écran; and Scremin, ‘Picasso e il film sull’arte’. Biopics
dedicated to Picasso are The Adventures of Picasso (Tage Danielsson, 1978) and
Surviving Picasso (James Ivory, 1996). He also appears as a character in biopics of
other artists such as Modigliani (Mick Davis, 2004).
57. Hayward, ‘Introduction’.

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 36 Camera and Canvas

58. On Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso, see Smith, ‘Moving pictures’; and Fauvel, ‘Le
Mystère Picasso’.
59. See Odin, L’Age d’or du documentaire, pp. 9–15; and Berthomé, ‘Les court-métrages
d’art en France 1946–1961’, p. 96.
60. Oms, Alain Resnais, p. 12.
61. Burch, ‘A conversation with Alain Resnais’.
62. Thomas, ‘Sur trois film inconnus d’Alain Resnais. Portrait de Henri Goetz,
Hans Hartung, Christine Boomeester’. Included in Goudet, Positif, revue de cinéma,
pp. 37–41.
63. Burch, ‘A conversation with Alain Resnais’.
64. Resnais, ‘Une expérience’.
65. Monaco, Alain Resnais, p. 18.
66. For a detailed description and analysis of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Guernica, see
Cieutat, ‘La “caméra-pinceau” d’Alain Resnais’.
67. The visit is described in Towarnicki, À la Rencontre de Heidegger. See also Liandrat-
Guigues and Leutrat, Alain Resnais, p. 41.
68. The exhibition at the Orangerie in Paris took place in January–March 1947. In
1946–50, large-scale Van Gogh exhibitions were organised in Brussels, London,
Glasgow, Geneva, Oslo, New York and Chicago.
69. See Liandrat-Guigues and Leutrat, Alain Resnais, p. 212. In the interview included
in this volume, Resnais mentions that he started Van Gogh before having seen a
film by Emmer. He recognises the latter’s influence though on Guernica.
70. The opening credits of Van Gogh mention ‘un film de Gaston Diehl et Robert
Hessens’ and ‘réalisation: Alain Resnais’. Resnais also did the montage of Malfray
by Hessens.
71. Pictura (also released as Pictura: Adventure in Art) was an American produc-
tion directed by Ewald André Dupont, Luciano Emmer and Robert Hessens.
Enrico Gras, Lauro Venturi, Alain Resnais and Marc Sorkin are mentioned as
co-directors of specific parts. Resnais contributed to the part on Goya. Gaston
Diehl was one of the screenwriters.
72. See Porcile, ‘Commandes avouées, commandes masquées’, p. 16.
73. See Liandrat-Guigues and Leutrat, Alain Resnais, p. 213.
74. Alain Resnais (1948), quoted in L’Avant-Scène Cinéma, 61–2, July–September
1966, p. 33. See also Breteau Skira, ‘Esquisse de l’œuvre’, p. 11.
75. See Pollock, ‘Artists mythologies and media genius’; and Pollock, ‘Crows,
blossoms, and lust for death’.
76. Alain Resnais (1948), quoted in L’Avant-Scène Cinéma, 61–2, July–September
1966, p. 33.
77. See Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, p. 37; F. L., ‘Alain Resnais et les bandes
dessinées’.
78. Fleischer, L’Art d’Alain Resnais, p. 42.
79. See the appendix to Chapter 2.
80. Agel, Répertoire analytique de 80 courts-métrages (en 16mm), p. 147.
81. Alain Resnais in Avant-Scène Cinéma, 61–2, July–September 1966, p. 33.

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 Notes 37

82. Martin, ‘Voix off’.

83. The chronological order is unclear. In most filmographies, both Gauguin and
Guernica are dated 1950. Guernica, however, premiered in Paris in June 1950
whereas Gauguin had its first Paris screening only a year later.
84. See Marble, ‘The Titan reveals hidden camera possibilities’, pp. 14–16.
85. The poem La Victoire de Guernica by Paul Eluard is part of the collection of poems
entitled Cours naturel (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1938). It was adapted for the
Resnais film.
86. Arnheim, The Genesis of a Painting, pp. 26–7.
87. Queval, ‘Film and fine arts’, p. 35.
88. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 197.
89. Farwell, ‘Films on art in education’.
90. Bolen, ‘Le film à la rencontre des arts plastiques’, p. 7.
91. Arnheim, Film As Art, p. 59.
92. Bazin, ‘Peinture et cinéma’, in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, pp. 187–92.
93. Labarthe and Rivette, ‘Entretien avec Resnais et Robbe-Grillet’, p. 17.

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