Screening the Art World 9789048553662

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Screening the Art World

Screening the Art World

Edited by Temenuga Trifonova

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Nocturnal Animals (dir. Tom Ford, 2016) Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 485 2 e-isbn 978 90 4855 366 2 doi 10.5117/9789463724852 nur 670 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction

Temenuga Trifonova

7

Part I  Cinema’s Vision of Art: Aspirational, Satiric, Philosophical 1. Art, Truth, Representation: Lois Weber’s Dumb Girl of Portici

31

2. Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Modern Art and Money on Screen, 1963–1964

47

3. Cinema as Philosophy of Art

65

Katherine Manthorne

Susan Felleman

Temenuga Trifonova

Part II  The Aura of Art in (the Age of) Film 4. Ineffability? The Several Vermeers Brigitte Peucker

85

5. The Joker at the Museum in Tim Burton’s Batman: Artistic Vandalism in Hollywood

101

6. Chaos ex machina: The Art of Jean Tinguely and the Documentary Image

115

7. China’s Van Goghs: Documentary Production, International Taste, and Artistic Labor

133

Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

Des O’Rawe

A. T. McKenna

Part III  Affective Historiography: Negotiating the Past through Screening Art 8. A World Made of Art

149

9. Art and History in Woman in Gold (2015), The Monuments Men (2014), and Francofonia (2015)

165

Gillian McIver

Christine Sprengler

10. Examining Public Art in Parks and Recreation’s Pawnee, Indiana 181 Annie Dell’Aria

Part IV  The Figure of the Artist: Between Mad Genius and Entrepreneur of the Self 11. Homicidal and Suicidal Artist Figures in Film

203

12. Blood Lust: Realism, Violent Inspiration, and the Artist in Horror Cinema

219

Bruce A. Barber

Kate Robertson

13. Picturing Picasso: Revisiting Paul Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso (1950) 235 Steven Jacobs and Joséphine Vandekerckhove

14. This Is the End of High Entertainment: Tiny Furniture and This Is the End

253

15. Screening Performance: Curating the Artist Persona

269

16. Peter Greenaway’s Artist-Entrepreneurs

287

Bibliography

305

Index

327

Kelly Lloyd

Susan Flynn

Marco de Waard



Editor’s Introduction Temenuga Trifonova

Most studies of art in cinema tend to approach the subject from the perspective of medium specificity and/or intermediality.1 William Chapman’s Films on Art (1952), Charles Eidsvik’s Cineliteracy: Film among the Arts (1978), Gary Edgerton’s Film and the Arts in Symbiosis (1988), Philip Hayward’s Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists (1988), Nadine Covert’s Art on Screen: A Directory of Films and Videos about the Visual Arts (1991), and John Walker’s Art and Artists on Screen (1993) were among the first studies to consider the ways in which film mediates, and is mediated by, the other arts. These general studies have since been enriched by theoretically sophisticated analyses of: film’s pivotal role in the development of modern art;2 the phenomenological affinities between cinema and painting,3 cinema and architecture,4 cinema and sculpture,5 cinema and photography;6 institutional histories of cinema and the museum;7 representations of the museum in cinema;8 cinematic and museal strategies in the representation of history;9 the role of art documentaries in the development of visual literacy; 10 the ideological ramifications of dominant stereotypes about 1 Artists, too, are fascinated by the intermedial relations between cinema and the other arts. Consider, for instance, the work of London-based artist Jason Shulman, whose series of long-exposure photographs, titled Photographs of Films, condense entire films into single photographs (https://www.jasonshulmanstudio.com/photographs-of-films), or Vugar Efendi’s three-part Film Meets Art videos, which juxtapose classical paintings with iconic movie scenes (https://vimeo.com/vugarefendi). 2 Lawder, The Cubist Cinema; Elder, Harmony and Dissent. 3 Bonitzer, Décadrages; Peucker, Incorporating Images. 4 Lamster, Architecture and Film. 5 Jacobs et al., Screening Statues. 6 Andrew, The Image in Dispute; Campany, Photography and Cinema; Beckman and Ma, Still/ Moving. 7 Wasson, Museum Movies. 8 Louagie, “‘It Belongs in a Museum’”; Fisher, “Museum Tropes”; Jacobs, “Strange Exhibitions.” 9 McIsaac and Mueller, Exhibiting the German Past. 10 Durgnat, “The Cinema as Art Gallery”; Wechsler, “The Filming of Art.”

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_intro

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art and artists; 11 the cultural economics of “artist-enterprises”12 and the mediatization of the artist;13 the commercial film production of artists14 and the experimental film production of moving-image artists;15 the visual arts practices of various film auteurs;16 the role of art in history films;17 the “cinematic turn” in contemporary art 18 and the emergence of “movingimage art”;19 the reimagining and recycling of Hollywood iconography in contemporary art,20 and so on. In her seminal studies of the relationship between painting and cinema – Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (1996) – and of the intersections between art history and f ilm theory – The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (2002) – Angela Dalle Vacche explores the rich pictorial sources of f ilms by Godard, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Antonioni, Rohmer, Murnau, and Minnelli, as well as the particular ways in which different arts map the senses. Along similar lines, Brigitte Peucker’s Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (1995) foregrounds the intermedial relations between cinema and the other arts, drawing attention to the ways in which films regularly figure the encounter between painting and literature (or “the literary”) in terms of adultery, incest, miscegenation, vampirism, and bisexuality. Analyzing the effects of intermediality on narration, temporality, and narrative closure in both art films and mainstream films, Peucker invites us to see cinema’s appropriation and subversion of literary and painterly tropes as an attempt at self-legitimation. In her later book The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (2006), she reframes her analysis of intermediality within the broader context of “representation” that other arts are equally concerned with, and identifies tableaux moments in film (e.g. in the work of Scorsese, Greenaway, Wenders, Kubrick, Fassbender, and Haneke) as central both to the staging of intermediality in film and to the attainment of the “effect of the real.” Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film (2019), Peucker’s latest book, continues to interrogate the effects of cinema’s 11 Barber, Trans/actions; Olsin, “Life as Art, Art as Life.” 12 Greffe, The Artist-Enterprise. 13 Esner and Kisters, The Mediatization of the Artist; Mitchell, Art and the Public Sphere. 14 Chang, “Mind over Matter.” 15 Zinman, Making Images Move; Bellour, “Of an Other Cinema.” 16 French, Art by Film Directors. 17 Tashiro, “When History Films.” 18 Brougher, The Cinema Effect. 19 Balkema and Slager, Screen-Based Art; Leighton, Art and the Moving Image. 20 Rubin, Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives; von Fürstenberg, Collateral.

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appropriation of painterly and/or theatrical conventions on cinematic space, spectator, frame, color, lighting, décor, and actor. The dialogue between cinema and art, specifically between silent cinema and early American modernist art, is also the focus of Katherine Manthorne’s Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting (2020), which traces the professional and personal exchanges between film-makers and visual artists at the beginning of the twentieth century and the influence of such exchanges on the language of cinema and painting, before reading these intermedial relationships through a sociopolitical lens, particularly with reference to “the new woman” and “the new negro.” The relationship between film and the visual arts has also been at the center of Susan Felleman’s work, from Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006), which draws attention to the structurally similar kinds of anxieties produced by the presence of women and of fine art in popular film – anxieties often manifesting on the level of film form as self-reflexivity – to Real Objects in Unreal Situations: Modern Art in Fiction Films (2014), which delves into the rich but thus far neglected social, economic, and material life of art objects in cinema, a life that, Felleman argues, exceeds their narrative function of mere props, copies, pastiches, or reproductions. Other notable studies include those by Jinhoon Kim, Angela Ndalianis, and Lynda Mead: Nead demonstrates the significance of intermedial studies of the mutual “hauntings” between visual media at the turn of the twentieth century;21 Kim illuminates the ways in which cinema has been “remediated” in the artistic practice of filmmakers and artists like Ken Jacobs, Stan Douglas and Fiona Tan;22 and Ndalianis examines mainstream cinema’s remediation of baroque aesthetics.23 Focused studies of the relationship between cinema and the visual arts either during a specific historical period (e.g. Mowll Mathews zeroes in on this relationship at the turn of the twentieth century24) or in a particular place (e.g. Ehrlich and Desser on the influence of scroll painting, printmaking, and calligraphy on East Asian cinema25) have been supplemented by broader historical surveys of this relationship such as Hollander’s survey of the proto-cinematic work of artists from the fifteenth to the twentieth century,26 or Pelfrey’s analysis of the emergence of mass 21 Nead, The Haunted Gallery. 22 Kim, Between Film, Video, and the Digital. 23 Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics. 24 Mowll, Moving Pictures. 25 Ehrlich and Desser, Cinematic Landscapes. 26 Hollander, Moving Pictures.

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media in the context of art historical developments.27 Going beyond such concerns with intermediality, Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2002) traces the broader cultural history of cinema in relation to visual arts, architecture, and travel culture, underscoring film’s haptic qualities and linking the anatomy of movement engendered by early cinema to flânerie and modern bodily architectures, while Jacques Rancière’s The Future of the Image (2007) theorizes a politicized aesthetics grounded precisely in cinema’s relation to art. A number of studies have explored the question of art in cinema in terms of cinema’s potential to provide the general audience with a kind of “celluloid art history.” Doris Berger’s Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art (2014), which traces cinema’s mediation of post-war American art history for mass consumption, illuminates popular (cinematic) art history’s pedagogical power. Using two case studies – film biopics on Jackson Pollock and Jean-Michel Basquait – Berger identifies the particular art historical and biographical narrative patterns given preference in most films’ vision of art history, focusing on representations of the artistic process, the myth of the artist, and the role film stars play in impersonating that myth. Along similar lines, Gillian McIver’s Art History for Filmmakers (2016) traces cinematic techniques – from composition through color theory to lighting – back to key moments in the history of Western painting, drawing fascinating parallels between particular genres in painting and the work of filmmakers like Peter Greenaway, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, and Stan Douglas. In Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), Steven Jacobs surveys the history of art in both fiction and documentary cinema, focusing on the golden age of art documentaries (late 1940s to early 1950s), particularly on Belgium’s and France’s contributions to the genre. Jacobs argues that while architecture and sculpture were the pre-eminent subject of early films on art, later art documentaries focused on painting; indeed, cinema’s version of art history has been mainly a history of painters. In the second part of his book, Jacobs traces the history of what has become known as “the cinematic turn” in art and the increasing ubiquity of projected moving images in contemporary art exhibitions. The cinematic turn continues to dominate recent scholarship on cinema and art, as evidenced by the proliferation of studies of “expanded cinema” and “museological cinema” e.g. Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies (2005), A.L. Rees’s Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (2011), and Rinella Cere’s Museums of Cinema (2020), to mention a few. 27 Pelfrey, Art and Mass Media.

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A third object of study in the scholarship on art in cinema (in addition to intermediality and celluloid art history) has been cinema’s representation of the spaces of art, including museums, art galleries, and artist studios. Analyzing the historically based cultural stereotypes of museums in a number of American movies, Kimberly Louagie has demonstrated the extent to which the image of the museum as a space of exclusivity and cultural capital persists in cinema despite recent changes in museological practices emphasizing inclusivity and interactivity.28 Conversely, Jennifer Fischer considers the museum in cinema as a trope of class, libidinal affect, and epiphany, arguing that while popular movies continue to code the spaces of art as belonging to “high” culture, museums in films are often the site for transgressive experiences like vandalism, seduction, epiphany, class transgression, and encounters with alterity.29 Steven Jacobs’s work on museums and galleries as not only physical spaces but institutions that embody specific economic, social, and cultural values and thus play an active role in the construction of national identities and collective memories, also testifies to the “otherness” of museums – often appearing as sites of death, witchcraft, and necrophilia, and populated by neurotic, decadent, or criminal characters –that grants them a transgressive, in-between status.30 Unlike the above-mentioned studies of art in cinema, which tend to focus either on medium specificity or on cinema’s ability to function as a kind of “celluloid art history,” Screening the Art World considers a rarely explored subject – art in cinema rather than the art of cinema – across different genres and historical periods in order to reflect on cinema’s fluctuating imaginary of art and the art world and the social, political, and cultural reasons for it.

The Art World In her study of the excesses of the contemporary art world Seven Days in the Art World, published in 2008, journalist Sarah Thornton drew on interviews 28 Louagie, “‘It Belongs in a Museum’.” 29 Fisher, “Museal Tropes.” 30 Jacobs, “Strange Exhibitions.” In a later book, written in collaboration with Lisa Colpaert and framed as a guide to an “imaginary museum” à la André Malraux, Jacobs analyzes 1940s and 1950s films, in which a painted portrait plays an important part in the plot. Malraux’s Le Musee Imaginaire is also the inspiration for Dalle Vacche’s edited volume Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? which explores the art historical tropes of face and landscape in early cinema, Soviet f ilm theory, the avant-garde, installation art, performance art, and the new genre of “the museum film.”

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and personal experience to explore the global art scene – from Christie’s and Art Basel to the Venice Biennale and the Turner Prize – only to conclude that, in the contemporary art world, it is art itself that has become marginalized. Thornton’s conclusion was far from controversial: in his 1975 book of art criticism The Painted Word, American novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe had already argued that modern art had degenerated into an illustration of various art theories promoted by critics, many of whom (notably “the kings of Cultureburg” as Wolfe called them: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg)31 had become more significant than the artists they were writing about. As different in style and tone as these two books might be, they both assume the existence of an “art world,” a term coined by another art critic and philosopher, Arthur Danto. In an essay titled “The Artworld,” published in The Journal of Philosophy in 1964, Danto argued that it is aesthetic theories that confer on certain objects the title of “artworks”: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”32 What, he asked, is the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box? His answer was that, “it is the theory that takes [the work of art] up into the world of art and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is.”33 Developing Danto’s ideas further, George Dickie would later formulate what has come to be known as “the institutional theory of art,” which defines the work of art as an artifact “on which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation,”34 and the “art world” as a network of representatives, “a loosely organized, but nevertheless related, set of persons including artists [. . .] producers, museum directors, museum-goers, theater-goers, reporters for newspapers, critics for publications of all sorts, art historians, art theorists, philosophers of art, and others.”35 If Danto and Dickie were concerned with the role of the art world in defining what “art” is in the first place, in his classic sociological study Art Worlds (1982) Howard Becker turned his attention to the rules and procedures – “contained in the conventions and patterns of cooperation by which art worlds carry on their 31 While the art world’s response to the book was hostile, reviewers from outside the art world noted that Wolfe’s observations were essentially correct. Ironically, by the 1970s Wolfe himself had become “more of a celebrity than the celebrities he describes.” Davis, “Crying,” n.p. 32 Danto, “The Artworld,” 580. 33 Ibid., 581. 34 Dickie, Aesthetics, 101. 35 Ibid., 36

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routine activities”36 – that govern the art world’s process of legitimation. Becker argued that the four modes of being oriented to an art world, as an integrated professional, maverick, folk artist, or naïve artist, “suggest a general scheme for interpreting the way people can be oriented to any kind of social world,”37 i.e. that the representation of art worlds in cinema can reveal the principal rules of social and political organization of the society in which these art worlds have come into existence.38 Although the notion of “the art world” is referenced in the title of the present volume, the book is not specifically concerned with either defining “the art world” or with tracing the history of this concept. Nor is it concerned with providing a sociological analysis of the art world or analyzing the rules and conventions of legitimation through which it operates. Instead, assuming the existence of the art world, contributors to the volume demonstrate the ways in which the art world in cinema condenses and dramatizes longstanding conflicts and tensions between (the idea of) “cinema” and (the idea of) “art.” When cinema becomes interested in art it is often in relation to the “art world,” which means that the main questions raised by the idea of the “art world” – questions about authenticity or “aura,” historical accuracy, subjectivity, aesthetic value, and the rules and conventions of legitimation – are also those raised in films screening art or explicitly/implicitly set in the art world. Insofar as art almost always figures in cinema in the form of a question (or a problem) – what is art, who or what defines what art is, what is the value of art, how do we distinguish authentic from inauthentic artworks, and so on – we could perhaps see cinema as occupying the position aesthetic theory occupies with respect to art (see my chapter in this volume). While some of the chapters engage with the idea of the “art world” explicitly while others approach it obliquely, they all pursue existing lines of research on the relationship between cinema and art while offering new insights into that relationship. For instance, the chapters by Peucker, Pellerin, McKenna, De Waard, and Trifonova inscribe themselves in a well-established tradition of Benjamin-inspired scholarship on f ilm in relation to “aura.” Flynn, Lloyd, Jacobs and Vandekerckhove explore the notion of the artist as an entrepreneur of himself, a line of inquiry that clearly intersects with scholarly work on artist biopics. McIver, 36 Becker, Art Worlds, 163. 37 Ibid., 371. 38 As Becker reminds us, art worlds change constantly, with new ones coming into existence and old ones disappearing, often as a result of artistic revolutions. On multiple art worlds and the notion of a “pluralistic art world,” see also Danto, The Madonna of the Future.

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Sprengler, Dell’Aria, and De Waard take up some of the main issues at stake in research on intermediality, but they approach them from a new perspective, paying particular attention to the socio-cultural and political tensions produced by the different temporalities of art and cinema: e.g. Dell’Aria’s and Sprengler’s reference to “metamodernism” registers the diff iculty of identifying the “appropriate” affective stance with respect to historical and/or art historical objects/events as a continual oscillation between parody and sincerity, while McIver draws on Hans Kellner’s notion of “untimely history”39 to elucidate the way in which artworks in f ilm not only recreate a familiar image of the past, but can also help us understand the past in new ways. Finally, all contributions to this volume, but especially those by Manthorne, Felleman, Dell’Aria, Robertson, Jacobs and Vandekerckhove, O’Rawe, Lloyd, Barber, McKenna, and De Waard engage (self-consciously or not) with the ways in which “aura” (or the search for it) is inflected by the vastly different f ilm genres, historical periods, media, and platforms discussed in this volume, from silent cinema, Hollywood, and documentary cinema, through horror f ilms and public art, to digital f ilmmaking and the influence of social media on mainstream f ilms.

Aura A cursory look at films about, or featuring, art reveals the great divide between artist biopics, the majority of which perpetuate the artist-as-genius myth – and occasionally mimic a particular artist’s style, as in Nightwatching (Peter Greenaway, 2007), The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, 2011), and Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, 2017) – and, on the other hand, films that parody or satirize the pretensions and inauthenticity of the art world. Comedies set in the art world are particularly revealing about cinema’s ambivalent vision of the art world as they regularly depict artworks on the verge of falling back into “objecthood” or “commodification,” and the art world as forever oscillating between a distant, inaccessible (except to the rich and the beautiful), auratic space and, on the other hand, an aristocratic, decadent, class-bound, “European” space usually contrasted 39 Drawing on Hayden White’s distinction between historical and biological systems Kellner analyzes the “untimely histories” offered by painting, film, and video, all of which work through chronological fragmentation, juxtaposition, and parataxis, allowing us new ways of seeing the past. Kellner, “Is History Ever Timely?”

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with the brash and unrefined American spirit. 40 In this respect, American comedies set in the art world can be productively read in the context of what Richard Hofstadter calls American “anti-intellectualism” – the perception of intellectuals (and, by extension, of the art world) as “pretentious, conceited, effeminate and snobbish,”41 in short, “European.” Consider, for instance, William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million (1966) and Michael Lehmann’s Hudson Hawk (1991), set in Paris and Rome, respectively. In Wyler’s film, the lavish production design, Audrey Hepburn’s elegant wardrobe designed by French luxury brand Givenchy, and the visually opulent museum scenes code the art world as a magnificent realm of art, beauty, luxury, high fashion, eroticism, and “European sophistication.” Hudson Hawk offers the reverse of this image of the art world as “European,” mocking its extravagance and exclusivity (“Is looking like a constipated warthog a job prerequisite in the art world?” asks Hawk).”42 The film’s opening sequence – in which Leonardo da Vinci decides to postpone work on the Mona Lisa to focus instead on his new invention, the Macchina dell’Oro – condenses in a nutshell the artwork’s ambivalent status between “art” and “commodity.” The plot revolves around the transformation of the artwork into a commodity as Hawk, a master cat burglar, is blackmailed by a gangster family, the CIA, and the Mayflowers, a pair of fascistic billionaires, to steal an assembly of crystals (hidden in three of Leonardo’s works) needed to make the Macchina dell’Oro functionable. Like Wyler’s film, Hudson Hawk consistently codes the art world not only as “European” but also “un-American”: a mafia henchman in charge of getting the stollen Sforza sculpture to the Mayflowers is mocked for his lack of taste (represented by his preference for “lesser” works like the American artist Coolidge’s Poker Sympathy), while he himself mocks the British butler Alfred (working for the Mayflowers) calling him alternatively “British” and “French,” a quasi-Freudian slip that speaks volume to Americans’ perception of Europe as one homogenous entity signifying “culture,” and it is hardly a coincidence that when Anna, the Vatican art historian, falls for Hawk she sheds her “art historical”/European persona. Skipping ahead from the 1960s and 1990s to the twenty-first century, we encounter no significant change in cinema’s vision of art as both auratic and commodified. For instance, The Art of the Steal (Jonathan Sobol, 2013), which follows aging art burglar Crunch Calhoun as he tries to pull off one last heist with his estranged brother, 40 The cultural coding of “vulgarity” varies: the Euro-art world can be coded as attractive and classy or as vulgarly extravagant and exclusive, or as both at the same time. 41 Hofstadter, 19. 42 http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/h/hudson-hawk-script-transcript-bruce.html.

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contrasts Crunch with another old art thief (Winter) – coerced into helping Interpol in exchange for a reduced sentence – whose motivation for stealing art is not money (Crunch) but aesthetic appreciation. In one scene, Winter tells Crunch that he was first drawn to art when, as a child, his working-class mother took him to the V&A in London, and that he only started getting into trouble later when he wanted to possess art, rather than appreciate it. It is poetic justice, then, that the Seurat painting that everyone is after throughout the film ends up in the hands of Winter, the only person who cares about its aesthetic rather than monetary value. Another sequence in the film, in which Guy de Cornet, the French forger working with Crunch, tells a story about the greatest art theft of all time – Peruggia’s theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 – provides a similar comment on the “decline of aura.” According to one theory, the theft was masterminded by an Argentinian conman who had commissioned a famous French art forger to make copies of the painting with the secret intention of selling them to greedy American art collectors. Guy ends his tale by emphasizing the fact that all the conman needed was the news of the theft (to deceive American art collectors that they were in possession of the original Mona Lisa) – to him the Mona Lisa was worthless. If all these f ilms implicitly code the art world as “European,” while foregrounding the unstable status of art between aura and commodity, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve (2004) makes those associations literal and presents the commodification of art as a foregone conclusion. By moving the action from Las Vegas (in Ocean’s Eleven, 2001) to Amsterdam, Rome, and Paris, Soderbergh’s remake literally locates the “art world” in “Europe” and reaffirms the associations between “Europe,” art world, prestige, luxury, and style by making Danny’s biggest rival a decadent European aristocrat (Francois Toulour, an arrogant French baron known as the “Night Fox,” living in a luxury villa on Lake Como). The two main heists in the film no longer target artworks but two potent symbols of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism: the world’s oldest stock certificate issued by the Dutch East India Company, a megacorporation that became the world’s first global company and transformed Holland into a colonial power, and the Fabergé Imperial Coronation Egg made to commemorate Russia’s Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. In an article titled “Decay of the Aura: Modern Art in Classical Cinema,” which she later expanded into the book Real Objects in Unreal Situations, Susan Felleman observes that movies tend to “misrepresent,” “subsume,” or “diminish” art. The fact that “film studies tend to regard the art object as a symbolic or functional presence in film, of textual rather than material

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significance,” she argues, reflects “a blind spot, one created by the withering of aura, the transformation of objects into images.”43 Unsurprisingly, given that the present volume is concerned with the artwork and/or the art world in cinema – their status, representation, as well as the kinds of questions they raise – the notion of “aura,” with all of its historical and theoretical baggage, figures explicitly or implicitly in all chapters. Published during a period dominated by psychoanalytic and Marxist film theory, Dudley Andrew’s Film in the Aura of Art (1984), which seeks to redeem film from its bad name as “killer of aura,” is one obvious predecessor to the present volume, which however reverses Andrews’s perspective by exploring the work of art in (the age of) film. 44 Analyzing individual films (including Broken Blossoms, Sunrise, Diary of a Country Priest, and L’Atalante) as well as works by master auteurs (e.g. Welles and Mizoguchi), Andrew argues that certain films have the capacity to transcend their particular national, historical, political, and industrial context, 45 thus attaining the timeless value of “masterpieces” or, put differently, the auratic status of “Art.” Although the book’s title and one of its two opening epigraphs reference “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Andrew never actually returns to Benjamin in the rest of the book, despite the obvious relevance of Benjamin’s notion of ‘the decline of aura’ to his own argument. Screening the Art World takes up where Andrew’s book leaves off, returning to Benjamin’s ambivalent notion of “the aura” of the artwork – whose vanishing Benjamin both mourned and welcomed as clearing the path for a politics of aesthetics – to explore the cultural, political, and economic aspects of the struggle between art’s supposed “ineffability,” “authenticity,” or “aura,” on the one hand, and the ostensibly fleeting, fake, and massproduced experience that cinema delivers on the other hand. In one way or another, all chapters in this volume are concerned with this central question: Where do we locate “aura” in the age of advanced capitalism and digital technology? Has “aura” disappeared or has our understanding of it simply mutated, necessitating a revision of Benjamin’s “decline of the aura” argument? Douglas Davies, for one, believes so. He begins his 1995 article 43 Felleman, “Decay of the Aura,” n.p. 44 For a discussion of “the decline of aura” (framed in terms of “the loss of indexicality”) in the context of the transition from analog film to digital media, see Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. 45 On the two divergent tendencies in the study of aesthetics – the f irst viewing aesthetic value as unproblematic, the other viewing conceptions and criteria of aesthetic value as socially constructed and thus ideological, see also Wolff’s classic study Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (1983).

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“The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction” by acknowledging that, in light of the disappearance of any clear conceptual distinctions between originals and reproductions, “Benjamin’s proclamation of doom for the aura of originality [. . . ] is finally confirmed,” only to add later on that “in another sense, the aura, supple and elastic, has stretched far beyond the boundaries of Benjamin’s prophecy into the rich realm of reproduction itself.”46 In fact, Davies argues, not only does “aura” persist in the age of digital reproduction but it is “enhanced, not betrayed,” as evidenced by the emerging “fine-grained sensitivity to the unique qualities of every copy, including the digitally processed photograph.”47 And yet, the chapters by Dell’Aria, Barber, Felleman and Lloyd suggest that when it comes to how cinema relates to art – in a world where neoliberal pressures shape ideas of artistic freedom and agency – irony, parody and satire, rather than the reverence provoked by “the auratic” work of art, seem to be the only affective responses available to us. Lloyd’s chapter, in particular, illuminates cinema’s love-hate relationship with art, which – as the rest of the volume also demonstrates – remains surprisingly consistent in films that cut across genres, historical periods, national cinemas, and media platforms. Lloyd reads cinema’s incorporation of art and the art world to attain the status of “High Entertainment” – a middle ground between “the Art World” and “Mainstream Entertainment Culture” – as ultimately a failed response to the vanishing of aura in the age of social media. Although most of the contributors to this volume remain skeptical about the possibility of a “return of aura” in the age of advanced capitalism and digital reproduction, none of them gives up entirely the idea of “aura” – or the search for it – but keeps returning to it over and over again. How else to account for cinema’s contradictory vision of art as autonomous and powerful (Barber, Pellerin, Robertson, Trifonova) or ineffable/auratic (O’Rawe, Peucker) and, at the same time, as powerless, inauthentic, fake, or deprived of aura that we find in all chapters? Peucker’s contribution provides an eloquent demonstration of this back-and-forth movement between the “affirmation and denigration” of aura, in her case by challenging us to rethink the “aura” of Vermeer’s art in light of the knowledge of its technological production, in which the camera obscura played a crucial role. In other chapters the belief that something of “the aura” remains in the age of art’s commodification and museumification is more explicitly formulated. O’Rawe, for instance, ends his chapter by invoking a citation of Tinguely’s art (in a 46 Davies, “The Work of Art,” 381. 47 Ibid., 385.

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film by Godard), which he reads “as a reminder that despite everything there is always a glimmer of hope in the representation of [. . .] ‘something original’.” Indeed, O’Rawe’s chapter is a particularly intriguing meta-inquiry into the relationship between art and cinema, and between “aura” and “the decline of aura,” inasmuch as its object of study is a self-destructing artwork, whose “aura” depends on – is derived from – precisely the work’s destructibility. Here, the destruction of aura cannot be attributed to, or blamed on, the technical reproduction of the artwork; in fact, the opposite is the case, since the cinematic record of the self-destructing artwork is the only thing that guarantees its life beyond its self-destruction. At the same time, however, the cinematic record also destroys the aura of the work by making its self-destruction infinitely repeatable. Tinguely’s art provides a sort of a limit case, in which aura and the destruction of aura become fused or, indeed, mutually dependent. Another way in which film’s ambivalent view of art (and of the “auratic” work of art) manifests itself is through the tension that several of the chapters explore between 1) film’s attempts to compensate for its (allegedly) inferior status as a mass art by featuring artists as protagonists and drawing on art in its production design so as to approximate the idea of “high art” (Manthorne) or by using art to tell stories that raise philosophical questions about truth and authenticity (Trifonova), and 2) film’s attempts to position itself as superior to art by parodying or satirizing either particular artists/artworks or “the art world” in general (Barber, Felleman, Trifonova). Pellerin’s chapter is explicitly concerned with this tension between the “victimization” of art by film and, on the other hand, film’s potential to offer a critique of the “symbolic violence exercised by the aesthetic object as an instrument of cultural domination.”

Organization As we have seen, there are a number of recurring themes and concerns that echo through the entire volume: the “aura” of art in cinema; the challenge of negotiating between past and present, and between art and film’s different temporalities, theorized in strikingly similar terms, from “chronoschism” (McIver) and “archaeomodern temporality” (De Waard) to “metamodernism”48 and “deliberate anachronism” (Sprengler and Dell’Aria); the tension between different images of the artist, from the “mad genius” 48 See Vermeulen and Van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism”

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familiar cultural myths and stereotypes (Barber, Robertson, Pellerin) to the artist as “a self-entrepreneur”49 (Flynn, O’Rawe, Lloyd, Jacobs and Vandekerckhove); debates on intermediality explored in the context of both art documentaries (Jacobs and Vandekerckhove on Picasso documentaries) and fiction films (De Waard on the intermediality of Greenaway’s films as a meta-commentary on artistic creation in the age of digital reproduction); art as spectacle (O’Rawe, Robertson, Flynn, De Waard); (super)realism in cinematic renditions of artworks, especially with reference to the Dutch Golden Age (McIver, Sprengler, Peucker). The persistence of these themes suggests that there are numerous ways in which the chapters in this volume could be grouped. Since my purpose here is not to provide a linear (or, as Kellner would say, “timely”) history of cinematic representations of art and the art world, I have chosen to group together chapters that speak to each other in what I believe to be the most productive and surprising ways. Section I, Cinema’s Vision of Art: Aspirational, Satiric, Philosophical, opens with Katherine Manthorne’s chapter on silent film pioneer Lois Weber, widely known for her engagement with the fine arts. Focusing on the relationship between life and art, truth, and representation, Manthorne draws attention to the different ways in which we can read the presence of art in early cinema as a reflection of cinema’s aspiration to the status of art. In the next chapter, Susan Felleman analyzes the relationship between the art world and commercial cinema in the 1960s, a period that saw the simultaneous decline of Hollywood and the emergence of new avant-gardes. Here cinema’s aspirational vision of art gives way to the satiric as Felleman explores the ways in which a couple of late Hollywood comedies – The Wheeler Dealers (Arthur Hiller, 1963) and What a Way to Go! (J. Lee Thompson, 1964) – thematize contemporary art, ridiculing its pretensions and travestying its cast of characters, while highlighting its market value. Felleman reads these films as symptoms of Hollywood’s decline and as reflections of the growth of the art market and a variety of new avant-gardes, from Pop Art to underground film. In my own contribution, I draw attention to the ways in which films often use 49 Across the humanities and social sciences, neoliberalism is no longer viewed simply as a way of governing economies or states, but rather as a particular production of subjectivity, which constitutes individual subjects as “human capital” (Laval 18). Neoliberalism’s “homo economicus” – the individual subject defined as “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself” (Foucault 226) – constitutes a radical departure from “homo juridicus” (the legal subject of the state) in that the “homo economicus” is no longer defined in terms of “rights” and “laws” but in terms of “interest” and “investment.” Laval, L’homme economique; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.

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art to re-stage long-standing philosophical debates around “truth” and “authenticity” and, in doing so, perpetuate the illusion that the problems and questions that continue to trouble art are somehow “resolved” by cinema, ostensibly because by dramatizing them cinema demonstrates its awareness of them. In this way, I argue, cinema can be seen to (strive to) occupy the privileged position that philosophy of art has traditionally occupied with respect to art.50 Section II, The Aura of Art in (the Age of) Film, begins with Brigitte Peucker’s reflections on the notion of “ineffability” in art, which she analyzes against the backdrop of Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay. Rather than argue, however, that the work of art is ineffable, Peucker examines the way in which films like Tim’s Vermeer (Teller, 2013), A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985), and All the Vermeers in NY (Jon Jost, 1990) – all of them concerned with the relationship between the “original,” the “fake,” and “forgery” – move between the affirmation and denigration of this idea. Pierre-Antoine Pellerin then interrogates the aesthetic and political stakes raised by artistic vandalism through an analysis of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), which illuminates the intersection between the avant-garde, the movie industry, the art market, popular culture, and the art establishment. While many of the volume’s contributors (particularly Peucker and O’Rawe) challenge the idea of film as a “fallen” mass medium responsible for the destruction of aura, Pellerin goes as far as to read the Joker’s act of artistic vandalism as a revival of the notion of “true” art (or “the aura” of art), one that exists outside commodification. In the next chapter, Des O’Rawe explores the notion of “aura” and authenticity in the occasionally self-destructing works of avant-garde sculptor Jean Tinguely, as well as in the experimental documentary films made about his work. From avant-garde art, we then return to Benjaminian territory as A. T. McKenna examines the intersection of globalization, labor, and the art world through the prism of Yu Haibo and Yu Tianqi Kiki’s documentary China’s Van Goghs (2016) about Dafen oil painting village in southern China, home to thousands of peasant-turned-painters who hand-produce mass copies of Western masterpieces. Section III, Affective Historiography: Negotiating the Past through Screening Art, opens with Gillian McIver’s analysis of the ways in which film constructs historical art worlds. Focusing on two historical dramas set in seventeenth century Netherlands – Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber, 2004) and 50 This privileged position is, of course, perceived as such only from the point of view of philosophy of art. As Barnett Newman famously quipped, “Aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is to birds.”

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Admiral (Roel Reiné, 2015) – and drawing on film theory, art history, and visual rhetoric analysis, McIver examines the centrality of painting to the recreation of the historical past on film. The relationship between art and history is also the subject of the following chapter, in which Christine Sprengler rephrases Susan Felleman’s question of “real objects in unreal situations” to address the life and function of real artworks in ostensibly real (historical) situations. Looking at three recent films that suture art-world events into broader historical ones, both narratively and aesthetically – The Monuments Men (George Clooney, 2014), Woman in Gold (Simon Curtis, 2015), and Francofonia (Alexander Sokurov, 2015) – Sprengler reflects on the implications of endowing art with the power to confirm historical truths. Employing Alison Landsberg’s concept of “affective historiography,” she analyzes the limitations and critical potential of these films’ appeal to heavily mediated visual palettes to contextualize canonical artworks embroiled in “real” historical situations. The section closes with Annie Dell’Aria analysis of public art as a site for a critical encounter with the past – specifically with the legacy of settler colonialism, racism, and misogyny – in the NBC series Parks and Recreation (2009-2015). The last section, The Figure of the Artist: Between Mad Genius and Entrepreneur of the Self, begins with Bruce Barber’s reflections on the possible reasons for the ubiquity and persistence of the cinematic trope of the homicidal and/or suicidal artist, followed by Kate Robertson’s analysis on the figure of the artist in horror films spanning several decades, from Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933) to The Devil’s Candy (Sean Byrne, 2015). Steven Jacobs and Joséphine Vandekerckhove’s co-authored contribution, which focuses on the documentary Visite à Picasso (1950) by Belgian art historian and filmmaker Paul Haesaerts, dramatizes the tension between two competing understandings of art and the artist as both participating in and, at the same time, transcending “the age of mechanical reproduction.” Thus, while the chapter investigates this lyrical documentary as an instance of Haesaerts’s notion of cinéma critique, a form of lens-based art criticism, which recognizes that art has entered Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction, Jacobs and Vandekerckhove also identify the various ways in which Haesaerts presents Picasso as the ultimate embodiment of the image of the artist as a genius, alluding to both ancient myths of artistic creation and the modern celebrity cult of mass media. Although Kelly Lloyd’s chapter focuses not on art documentaries but on two recent fiction films, the self-reflexive comedies featuring real artists Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham, 2010) and This Is the End (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, 2013), it explores a similar tension by drawing attention to the way in which the films’ artist protagonists parody

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the pretensions of the art world and, in the same breath, seek to position themselves as superior to mainstream entertainment culture. Against the background of theories of performativity and Zygmunt Bauman’s work on “practices of selfhood,” in the next chapter Susan Flynn uses The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) as a case study to reflect on artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s self-curation onscreen. The volume closes with Marco de Waard’s chapter on Peter Greenaway’s “Dutch Masters” films Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), a case study of the complex relationship between art, commerce, and artistic entrepreneurship in cinema, and of the “aura” of the artwork in the digital age. Drawing on theories of affective labor, precarity, and entrepreneurial subjectivity in the new creative industries, and more broadly in contemporary public spheres, De Waard analyzes the eponymous character of Goltzius and the Pelican Company (based on the late-sixteenth-century Dutch painter, printmaker, and draughtsman) as a “virtuoso” figure, whose performance of himself in the cultural marketplace holds an ineradicably political potential. While Screening the Art World does not presume to be an exhaustive study of art in cinema, I hope that it will provoke new ways of thinking about (to echo Stanley Cavell) what happens to art when it is screened.51

Bibliography Andrew, Dudley. Film in the Aura of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Andrew, Dudley, ed. The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997. Balkema, Annette and Henk Slager, eds. Screen-Based Art. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Barber, Bruce. Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death. New York: Atropos, 2009. Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008 (1982). Beckman, Karen and Jean Ma, eds. Still/Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Bellour, Raymond. “Of an Other Cinema,” Black Box Illuminated, ed. Sara Arrhenius, Magdalena Malm and Cristina Ricupero. Lund, Switzerland: Propexus, 2003. 39–62. Berger, Doris. Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 51 Cavell’s book on cinema The World Viewed is concerned with the question “What happens to reality when it is projected and screened?” (16).

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Bonitzer, Pascal. Décadrages. Peinture et cinéma. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1985. Brougher, Kerry et al. The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn, 2008. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Campany, David. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Chapman, William. Films on Art. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1952. Cere, Rinella. Museums of Cinema and Their Audience. New York: Routledge, 2010. Chang, Chris. “Mind over Matter: The Artiste as Filmmaker.” Film Comment 32.5 (September–October 1996): 54–56, 58, 60–62. Covert, Nadine, ed. Art on Screen: A Directory of Films and Videos about the Visual Arts. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1991. Dalle Vacche, Angela. Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996. Dalle Vacche, Angela, ed. Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Dalle Vacche, Angela. ed. The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (Oct. 15, 1964): 571–584. Danto, Arthur. The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Davies, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991–1995).” Leonardo 28, no. 5 (1995): 381–386. Davis, Douglas. “Crying Wolfe.” Newsweek 88. 9 June 1975, n.p. Dickie, George. Aesthetics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: Pegasus, 1971. Dickie, George. Art and The Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Durgnat, Raymond. “The Cinema as Art Gallery.” Burlington Magazine 109, no. 767 (1967): 81–87. Edgerton, Gary R., ed. Film and the Arts in Symbiosis: A Resource Guide. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Ehrlich, Linda and David Desser, ed. Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994. Eidsvik, Charles. Cineliteracy: Film among the Arts. New York: McGraw Hill, 1978. Elder, R. Bruce. Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008. Esner, Rachel and Sandra Kisters, ed. The Mediatization of the Artist. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

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Farwell, Beatrice. “Films on Art in Education.” Art Journal 23, no.1 (Autumn 1963): 39–40. Felleman, Susan. Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006. Felleman, Susan. “Decay of the Aura: Modern Art in Classical Cinema.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 53 (Summer 2011), n.p. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/FellemanDecayAura/index.html. Felleman, Susan. Real Objects in Unreal Situations: Modern Art in Fiction Films. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. Fisher, Jennifer. “Museal Tropes in Popular Films.” Visual Communication 1, no. 2 (2002): 197–201. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, transl. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. French, Karl. Art by Film Directors. London: Octopus, 2004. Greffe, Xavier. The Artist-Enterprise in the Digital Age. New York: Springer, 2017. Hayward, Philip, ed. Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists. Bedfordshire: University of Luton Press, 1988. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. Hollander, Anne. Moving Pictures. New York: Knopf, 1989. Jacobs, Steven, and Lisa Colpaert. Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir Gothic Melodramas and Ghost Stories of the 1940s and 1950s. Ghent: Aramer, 2013. Jacobs, Steven. Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Jacobs, Steven. “Strange Exhibitions: Museums and Art Galleries in Film,” Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity, ed. André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist. London: Routledge, 2009. 297–317. Jacobs, Steven et al. Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Kellner, Hans. “Is History Ever Timely?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 234–243. Kim, Jihoon. Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Lamster, Mark, ed. Architecture and Film. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. Laval, Christian. L’homme economique. Essai sur les raciness du neoliberalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Lawder, Standish. The Cubist Cinema. New York: New York University Press, 1975. Leighton, Tanya. ed. Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader. London: Tate, 2008.

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Louagie, Kimberly. “‘It Belongs in a Museum’: The Image of Museums in American Film, 1985–1995.” Journal of American Culture (Winter 1996): 41–50. Manthorne, Katherine. Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting. New York: Routledge, 2019. Mathews, Mowll Nancy. Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills, 2005. McIsaac, Peter and Gabriele Mueller, ed. Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2015. McIver, Gillian. Art History for Filmmakers. New York: Fairchild Books, 2016. Mitchell, W.J.T. Art and the Public Sphere. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1992. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005. Nead, Lynda. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Olsin Lent, Tina. “Life as Art, Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 68–76. Pelfrey, Robert. Art and Mass Media. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1996. Peucker, Brigitte. Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Peucker, Brigitte. Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Peucker, Brigitte. The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. London: Verso, 2007. Rees, A.L., ed. Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. London: Tate, 2011. Rodowick, David. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Rubin, Robert M., ed. Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact. New York: Museum of the Moving Image, 2016. Tashiro, Charles. “When History Films (Try to) Become Paintings.” Cinema Journal 35, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 19–33. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1 (1 Jan 2010): 56–77. Von Fürstenberg, Adelina. ed. Collateral: When Art Looks at Cinema. Milan: Edizione Charta, 2007. Walker, John. Art and Artists on Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Wasson, Haidee. Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.

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Wechsler, Judith. “The Filming of Art.” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 141–159. Wolff, Janet. Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art. London: Routledge, 2021 (1983). Zinman, Gregory. Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2020.

1.

Art, Truth, Representation: Lois Weber’s Dumb Girl of Portici Katherine Manthorne

Abstract In 1916, the acclaimed silent film director Lois Weber made the big-budget epic The Dumb Girl of Portici starring ballerina Anna Pavlova. Based on an opera set in seventeenth-century Naples, the film problematizes the relationship between life and art, truth and representation. To analyze its pictorial power and especially the art-film intersections in Weber’s work, this chapter focuses on six themes: (1) movies that take visual artists as a main subject; (2) images of fine art and popular culture at the center of her narratives; (3) attention to the physical world of the characters and the close-up; (4) shooting on location to achieve maximum realism; (5) costumes, composition, and technical strategies; (6) sources of her knowledge of fine art. Keywords: Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley, Anna Pavlova, Blind Girl of Portici, silent cinema, women filmmakers

“‘To the greatest woman producer in the world – Lois Weber.’ Thus spoke Anna Pavlowa [sic], as she drained her glass at the Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles, on the night of Wednesday, September 8, 1915. The dinner was given in honor of the famous Russian dancer by Lois Weber, celebrated producer of the Universal Company who, in conjunction with Phillips Smalley, directed the production of The Dumb Girl of Portici, in which the great Russian played the many-sided role of Fenella, the dumb girl.”1

The above review refers to Lois Weber’s epic silent film The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), based on the opera in five acts by Daniel F. E. Auber. Although 1

Van Loan, in Norden, n.p.

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little-known today, from the time of its premiere in 1828 into the early twentieth century it was a much-performed production generally regarded as the earliest French grand opera. Convincing Pavlova to take on her first movie role was a coup for Universal Pictures. Assigning Weber to direct it demonstrated the faith both star and studio had in her to realize one of its most ambitious productions, with an oversized budget to match. Originally entitled Masaniello, ou La Muette de Portici, it told the tale of Fenella – a wordless fisher-girl – living during the Spanish occupation of Naples in the mid-seventeenth century. Her seduction and abandonment by a Spanish nobleman, coupled with the cruelty and crippling taxation of their foreign oppressors, incited her brother Masaniello to foment a revolution. The opera usually featured a prima ballerina in the role of the mute young woman rather than opera stars, as they would have no opportunity to sing. When it was first performed in Paris the dancer Lise Noblet played the title role, a part later taken by other dancers including Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. So, when Universal Studio’s head Carl Laemmle offered Pavlova the privilege of selecting her screen vehicle, she chose Dumb Girl of Portici, remembering that “ever since I was old enough to know what the stage meant, I have been possessed of a desire to play the role of Fenella.”2 This situated her in a long line of renowned ballet dancers who had appeared in this challenging role, with her contribution preserved in the new medium of film. Although Weber was still in partnership with her husband Phillips Smalley, she was asserting greater control, with the result that this silent movie represents a collaboration between two remarkable women.3 Weber was a screenwriter, director, camera operator, and star of her own silent movies, while Pavlova was a ballerina, choreographer, producer, and director of a large touring company. Together, they created a landmark picture that made movie history. Critic Kitty Kelly compared it favorably to the great epics of that moment: “[Giovanni Pastrone’s] Cabiria stood for spectacle, [D. W. Griffith’s] The Birth of a Nation for emotional thrill, [Cecil B. DeMille’s] Carmen for individual force, The Dumb Girl of Portici for artistic force.”4 A film reviewer for the Syracuse Herald remarked that, whatever “Miss Weber’s hand touches immediately scintillates with artistic f ire.”5 While some critics praised her artistry, however, others emphasized her commitment to realism and truth. One journalist called her “a worshiper of realism, 2 Stamp, Lois Weber, 47. 3 Stamp, Lois Weber, 88–90. 4 Kelly qtd in Norden, n.p. 5 The Film Girl, “Seen on the Screen,” Syracuse Herald, May 8, 1917, qtd in Norden, xviii.

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declaring she has never created a character in any of her pictures which she did not believe to be human and natural.”6 Another reported: “Lois Weber said impressively, ‘Remember that only reality and honesty can uplift our Art’.”7 Dumb Girl of Portici – like all her best movies – problematizes the relationship between life and art, truth and representation. Shelley Stamp and other scholars have focused extensively on Weber’s social issue films, which tackle such thorny topics as poverty, birth control, addiction, and capital punishment, while The Dumb Girl has yet to receive equal attention.8 Weber faced enormous challenges in creating this operabased film, orchestrating opulent sets, period costumes and artworks, live ensemble dance productions, a massive cast, and inventive special effects. The result was one of the most pictorially arresting productions of the silent era that demands art historical analysis. My aim, then, is to put Weber’s moving picture in dialogue with a broad range of visual culture. Art inspires cinema, cinema inspires art. Since the advent of moving pictures, the two distinct art forms have been engaged in complex dialogue. Unpacking its pictorial references and strategies, I identify sources of what contemporary critics have called its “artistic force” and “artistic fire” and weigh them against her mission to convey realism and truth.9 To probe the pictorial power of Dumb Girl and especially the art-film intersections in Weber’s work, my discussion is divided into six sections focusing individually on: (1) movies that take visual artists as a main subject; (2) images of fine art and popular culture at the center of Weber’s narratives; (3) the physical world of the characters and the close-up; (4) locations selected to achieve maximum realism; (5) costumes, composition, and technical strategies; (6) sources of Weber’s knowledge of fine art.

Weber’s Movies that Take a Visual Artist as a Main Character A number of Weber’s movies revolve around a visual artist as the principal protagonist. The space of the studio, competitive forces of the art world, and private struggles to produce artworks are added dimensions of this theme. This movie group showcases her dual interest, manifested throughout her work, in the artist and the creative process, and demonstrates her evolving 6 Squier qtd in Norden, n.p. 7 Marion qtd in Norden, n.p. 8 Stamp discusses The Dumb Girl of Portici, 75–77 9 Manthorne, Film and Modern American Art provides background.

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pictorial acumen. Fine Feathers (1912) features Phillips Smalley as Vaughn, a struggling artist, and Weber as Mira, who works as a maid cleaning in his building and who becomes his mistress and muse. After an evening out, Vaughn returns to his studio and spies Mira in her ragged work attire sitting in the moonlight. The scene inspires him to paint her portrait, which he subsequently exhibits to positive reviews that win him fame. There are the usual romantic entanglements, leading her to try on a handsome dress that she finds in the studio and prompting Vaughn to paint a second version of her in “fine feathers.” In her discussion of the film, Stamp rightly emphasizes Vaughn’s exploitation of Mira’s image and the reproduction, circulation, and commercialization of female imagery via paintings and other media.10 Concomitantly, we can identify a particular fascination on the part of the director with the very process of creating pictorial art. Beyond Fine Feathers, Weber and her husband made a string of movies that feature visual artists, including A Japanese Idyll (1912), James Lee’s Wife (1913), Hypocrites (1915), and Even as You and I (1917). While their focus on a male artist representing a female subject is undeniable, so too is the fascination with the alchemy of the studio, machinations of the art world, censorship of nudes, and the search for truth in representation. Her repeated return to that motif demands attention.

Movies with Fine Art and Popular Culture at Their Centre Weber took pride in cinema’s ability to speak to a broader public than other art forms could, but in many of her finest features she drew upon painting, photography, lithography, and sculpture to carry her narrative and convey meaning. A Japanese Idyll (1912) takes as its point of departure a travel postcard of an Asian woman. The best-known instance of this practice occurs in Hypocrites (1915), in which – according to Paul Young – the monk “Gabriel’s dream-visions of truth are motivated by his encounter with a Sunday newspaper that features a lithograph of the painting La Verite. Submitted by Adolphe Faugeron to the Paris Salon of 1914, La Verite “startled wicked Paris,” according to the lithograph’s caption, by portraying Truth as “a nude from whom people scurry away, blinded by the lamp she raises before them.”11 But the layers of aesthetic reference do not end there, as Young continues: 10 Stamp, 36. A restored film version is available on Kino’s Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. 11 Young, 99.

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Faugeron’s La Verite took its cue from a more famous allegorical picture, Jules Joseph Lefebvre’s 1870 painting of the same title which depicts naked Truth holding a mirror over her head as she confronts the viewer. The painting’s power lies in its direct address combined with its size, measuring nearly nine feet high by four feet wide. But Weber chose wisely when she alluded more directly to Faugeron’s painting, for it was both the trigger of a recent media scandal and a resonant image for the cinema in its intensive focus on def ining and expanding its audience. What Faugeron’s painting lacks in monumentality it makes up for in the scale of its representation of humanity as a crowd, running pell-mell from the light of truth.12

In her movie, Weber puts the mirror in the hand of Naked Truth, conflating the paintings of Lefebvre and Faugeron. Simultaneously, she used process shots to project the nude physical culturalist Margaret Edwards as translucent, fashioning an image of the female body that references fine art but is entirely cinematic. Roughly midway through The Dumb Girl of Portici another two-dimensional image appears to alter the course of events. Once Fenella and Alphonso have their romantic encounter Fenella becomes a liability to him and his family, who want to be rid of her. A plan is hatched to lure her away from her home and lock her in prison. They forge a note they want her to believe is from her lover that reads: “Fenella, I need you. If you have forgiven me, come. Follow the man who brings my likeness to you.” To her delight, the messenger presents her with a miniature portrait of Alphonso, which she reveals to the viewers of the movie in a close shot and then cradles lovingly to her breast. She then willingly follows the emissary, who sees to her capture and imprisonment. Once again, a two-dimensional work of art is embedded into the heart of the film narrative, in this case playing the mimetic role, supporting the “truth” of the written message.

Attention to the Physical World of the Characters and the Close-Up A film-maker’s commitment to her subject can be gauged by looking at the quotidian elements of a scene: clothing; shoes; hairstyle; jewelry, even food and drink. The more convinced the viewer is that appearances derive from observation, the more likely it is that they will become immersed in the 12 Ibid., 112. For a complete analysis of the film, see Young, “Yours Sincerely.”

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film’s fiction. Weber-Smalley were able to achieve that rare fusion between everyday reality and the world on the screen by paying scrupulous attention to the physical world of the characters. In movies like Shoes (1916), which were set in the early twentieth century, Weber shot on location in city parks and modest homes to secure the realistic effect she was after. But in the case of The Dumb Girl she had to convincingly transport her audience to seventeenth-century Naples, where the story oscillated between the excesses of the Viceroy’s palace and the spare cabins of the poor fisherfolk along the seacoast in the suburb of Portici, with brief interludes in a rugged prison. “This is really the most difficult period to do, Naples in the sixteenth [sic] century,”13 Weber declared, but then set to work re-creating it on an epic scale. To recreate these settings she could not simply film the world around her, but had to research the architecture, furnishings, costumes, and every other aspect of the material culture of an era more than 200 years earlier. For that she would have had to rely on paintings, prints, and books illustrating Neapolitan life under Spanish rule. Shelley Stamp tells us that when Weber and Smalley were filming Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1914) the year before, they relied on Victorian artists to guide them in designing their sets: Weber and Smalley based much of the look of their production on existing material, in particular a 1909 edition of the play illustrated by Sir James Dromgole Linton (1840–1916), a preeminent Victorian artist and past president of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour. Many of the costume designs bear strong resemblance to those illustrated in Linton’s volume, though Linton’s settings and stagings themselves do not appear to have been replicated in the Rex production.14

Parallel visual material was available for The Dumb Girl of Portici dating back to its debut in 1828 in the form of colored lithographs and extending through successive stagings of the opera. At the height of the opera’s fame, serial imagery of the story’s episodes moved into popular culture, appearing on a wide variety of objects from china patterns to trade cards (Figure 1). Interview after interview emphasized that Weber “plans to the minutest detail all the scenic effects.”15 One journalist quoted her description of this process: 13 Kelly qtd in Norden, n.p. 14 Stamp, 47–48. 15 Carter qtd in Norden, n.p.

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Figure 1. Set of Six Trade Cards, La Muette de Portici: Acts 1-5. Published for the Veritable Extraid de vivande Liebig company, ca. 1880s. Private Collection.

[T]he thing which has helped me the most has been an intangible something that I cannot define. I can only explain it by saying that I often know when there is something wrong with a set without knowing what the trouble is [. . .] A layman might think that any pair of old curtains would have a bedraggled appearance, but we tried two dozen pairs before we got the ones we wanted for this scene.16

Her contemporary D.W. Griffith famously used facial close-ups to isolate the character from their surroundings. She, by contrast, reserved close-ups for calling attention to things, and bestowed objects with symbolic meanings. 16 Peltret qtd in Norden, n.p.

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This approach might well have been learned from her study of seventeenthcentury still-life paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists, who painted with the finest brushes to achieve hyper-realistic depictions while relying on the emblematic significance of objects to convey the meaning of the painting. Similarly, Weber is training the audience to understand the image as both referential and symbolic, truth and allegory.

Shooting on Location to Achieve Maximum Realism Weber was known for her use of real locations instead of sets, a point often repeated by journalists: “If she wanted to film a kitchen, she rented one in somebody’s house; if she wanted a drawing room, a jail, or a church, she didn’t build the sets on the stage behind the studio, she went where they really were, taking her lights, electricians and actors along.”17 She further elaborated on her attraction to “the real house”: I guess I’m the originator of the idea of working in real houses instead of in sets, she explained. I’ve been doing it for some time now, but very quietly, because of course there isn’t a picture producer in the world who’ll admit that there isn’t a set, from a saint’s heavenly throne to a kitchen sink, which can’t be built. But you see I happen to know that every woman has her own particular way of keeping house. Take that funny little door opening into the dining room, with the slide for the dishes and those bits of old Dutch crockery. You wouldn’t find those things anywhere in the world but just here.

Her comments extended to the dwellings of the rich and famous: “Then take the millionaires’ homes. Most of those in pictures look as if they’d been furnished by mail order. I paid one thousand dollars for the use of a millionaire’s home for ten days not long ago, but it was worth it.”18 She was probably referring to her experiences with The Dumb Girl of Portici. Some of the scenes were shot at Castle San Souci, owned by Dr. A.G.R. Schoesser, formerly located at 1901 Argyle in Hollywood. Set in the foothills of a former lemon grove, the castle commanded breathtaking views, especially from the six-story tower.19 17 Squier qtd in Norden, n.p. 18 Ibid. 19 https://silentlocations.com/2017/06/12/chaplin-pavlova-lois-weber-at-the-castle-sans-souci/. The f ilming of The Dumb Girl of Portici moved from place to place, partly to accommodate Pavlova’s dance schedule: Chicago and Los Angeles, including the backlots of Universal Studio as well as homes scattered around the Hollywood Hills such as this one.

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Inside the artworks hanging on the walls, tapestries and sculptural ornaments established visually the lifestyle of the Spanish noblemen and women then occupying Naples. It stood in for the Viceroy’s castle. Early in the film we are introduced to the Viceroy, the head of the Spanish legation ruling Naples, as he and his wife ride through the marketplace in a carriage. The main thing we learn about him via a subtitle is that he is married to a younger woman. Subsequently, one of the interior scenes in the castle features the enthroned Viceroy ogling a group of white togaclad female dancers as they perform before him with murals of nudes and decorative medieval tapestries on the wall behind. Upon completion of their routine, they run to sit at his feet, surround and fondle him. The next shot is a close-up of his head topped by an ornate crown with his face culminating in a sinister expression. “By professing to be a patron of the arts, the Viceroy indulged his licentious nature,” we read in the intertitle that reinforces and expands upon the significance of the scene. Exposing him as a promiscuous and unprincipled man while dubbing him “patron of the arts,” Weber implies that, although his palace is filled with beautiful and costly objects, he has collected them for all the wrong reasons. He poses as a connoisseur of art in order to disguise his base character. Elsewhere in the film, he appears flanked by two nude female statues, one covering her breast while the other holds her hand in front of her pudenda: a warning that women have to be on their guard around him. One wonders if this commentary was partly personal for director and star, both of whom likely had experience with individuals who presented themselves as art lovers in order to pursue less noble interests. Significant for us here are the means by which the film conveys these big ideas. Unlike many movies of this era, the intertitles are minimal, authored by the director to convey her intentions in a few select words. Instead, she deploys art – both dance and pictorial arts – to expose the patron for what he really is. Using multiple visual tropes, Weber is once again pointing the finger at a hypocrite, a person whose false actions undermine truth. The opulent art and decoration of the crass Spanish aristocrats are brilliantly contrasted with the spare surroundings of the poor and oppressed Portici fisherfolk. The cramped seaside cabins (or huts) with their dirt floors and meager furnishings are filmed with intense attention to light and surface, so that the textures and materials are almost palpable. Worn table corners, a mat on the floor instead of a bed, and the kitchen that doubles as a sleeping chamber all convey their daily hardships. Especially striking is the way in which the director subtlety integrates their characteristic religious artifacts into the design of a costume or of a set. They speak eloquently of their lives and the differences between them and the

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so-called noblemen. Just inside the door of the cabin that Fenella shares with her brother Masaniello there is a small niche over the fireplace with a simple wooden crucifix hanging on the wall that serves as their domestic altar. More than once brother or sister paused there to say a prayer as they passed by, thus signaling their devout and spiritual nature. Fenella wears a tiny cross around her neck, one of her few pieces of jewelry. A friar whose robes were fabricated from the roughest of homespun is one of Masaniello’s regular companions. In an early scene set in the open marketplace in the center of Naples, Weber demonstrates her distinct comprehension of this place and the religious material culture of the lower class. Spanning across the open stalls she successively highlights fruits, vegetables, and grains for sale, the fountain where the women come to get water, and the disgruntled population mingling with one another and exchanging news of the latest tax. Then, she moves the camera in closer on one of the stalls selling religious paraphernalia. There sits a painted bust of Jesus wearing a short beard and crown of thorns; beside it is a veiled head of the Virgin Mary executed in a cheap plaster material and left unpainted. Rosary beads are laid out on the table with the culminating crosses hanging down over the edge. In this one shot she summons the faith of Neapolitan Catholics in these divine figures and their dire economic circumstances that make even these modest objects beyond the means of most of them.

Costumes, Composition, and Technical Strategies Anna Pavlova’s expressive performance is the centerpiece of this extraordinary film, but that performance is buttressed by an amazing array of pictorial details and effects that keep the viewer riveted throughout what is (in the restored version) a two-hour film. Like Naked Truth in Hypocrites, Fenella is the prime mover of the film. Even with a cast of hundreds in swirling motion – be it in dance or bloody revolution – our eyes seek Pavlova making her way through the fictive spaces. Weber guides the viewer’s attention just where she wants it, both by photographing the five-foot tall dancer mostly in full length and fashioning sets so that they frame and amplify her diminutive figure. This is a movie of contrasts: the poverty of the masses of Portici versus the privileged Spanish rulers. Hair and costume establish the distinction, but Weber also draws upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century composition strategies to reinforce their circumstances. Scenes of the nobles are

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composed in classic, Renaissance style: strict verticals and horizontals convey stasis. They are shown mostly indoors confined to the palace, or occasionally in their carriages. They are seen seated, framed by forms left and right that lock them in place. Analogously, they wear clothing that conceals their entire body and for collars, they don ruffs so stiff that they force upright posture. For the Portici fisherfolk she switches to diagonals, dynamism, and swirling movement characteristic of the Baroque period. Fenella exemplifies this sensibility. One of the opening scenes shows her on the beach, dancing, picking up dried seaweed as if it were a garland of beautiful flowers. In spite of economic oppression and the challenge of her inability to speak, she embodies energy, openness, and freedom. Kitty Kelly from the Chicago Tribune provided a glimpse of the filming of one of the mob scenes from the movie: “Yesterday official action began, though preliminaries have been in process for a fortnight. Mrs. Smalley stood in the midst of a band of knee-trousered, barelegged, bandanna-headed chorus, her eyes flashing up and down and over and around.”20 This occurred on her visit to the temporary studio they had set up at Chicago’s San Souci Gardens while Pavlova was performing in her Midway Gardens engagement, prior to their move to Los Angeles. The journalist’s account continues: “Rip some of those trousers part way up the leg. Do it just on one side and, mind, on the seams, so they can be sewed up again,” she ordered crisply. Then, turning to the shadow at her side: “O, my dear we have quantities of clothes. We spent thousands of dollars renting costumes from an opera company, and here they are, all alike as peas in a pod. You know what chorus things are. It’s the last time I ever buy a pig in a poke. Now we have to plan some way to make them all different, and it is a dreadful proposition. I’ve never been stumped in my life yet, but I don’t know about this. However, we’ve got to do it.”21

Kelly’s words provide rare insight into Weber’s on-set scrutiny of every particular: “Let’s see, how would some of those trousers be turned wrong side out? This is a real mob scene and you’ve got to look as though you have been through something. Some of you go and put dirt on your face. […] O, I wish you all had shirts you had worn two years and that they were all ragged, with real rags.”22 20 Kelly qtd in Norden, Interviews, n.p. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.

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The scene in which the Revolution bursts forth in a frenzy of action is a production highlight. Compared to various filmic treatments of armed struggle that appear relatively controlled, Weber allows the action to go full force, conveying the utter chaos that most participants must have experienced via a long tracking shot through the crowd. The poor people turn bloodthirsty, and the more blood they taste the more they desire. The uncontrolled mob driven by rage display heads on pikes in a scene that resembles a painting by Spaniard Francisco Goya. Blood saturates the scene via sophisticated red tinting. And in the finale Fenella’s death scene relies on double exposure – her soul ascends to heaven, a vision of Pavlova in her white ballet costume now disengaged from Neapolitan Fenella.

Sources of Weber’s Knowledge of Fine Art Employed in the carpet and decorating business, Weber’s father George Weber was described as “artistically inclined, with a fine feeling for line and color.”23 He might have impacted her attention to set furnishings, as she hints: “We were great pals. He used to yank me out of bed as a mere baby and take me riding with him to see the sun rise. He decorated the Pittsburgh Opera House and when it was finished mine was the first opinion he wanted.”24 Weber’s husband Phillips Smalley, too, arguably played no small role in the fine art references of the moving pictures they made together. In press interviews, husband and wife presented a relatively united front in terms of their collaboration at home and in the studio. They emphasized a harmonious and equal partnership without giving away too many particulars. Stamp postulates that, initially, they shared much of the decision-making and direction but gradually Weber came to dominate their productions. We may never know exactly who did what, or how they operated together. Evidence suggests, however, that Phillips Smalley possessed a lifelong familiarity with fine art and artists and would likely have brought that expertise to bear on the moving pictures they made together. In 1921 – perhaps as their circumstances were changing and a break-up was looming – Weber herself revealed: “Mr. Smalley had always traveled and knew men and women of the world – Whistler and other famous artists. I had been brought up in an entirely different atmosphere.”25 A journalist added further detail: 23 Dunning qtd in Norden, Interviews, n.p. 24 Peak qtd in Norden, Interviews, n.p. 25 Lynn qtd in Norden, Interviews, n.p.

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“Mr. Smalley was a highly cultured man, graduate of Oxford and Harvard, grandnephew of the editor of the London Times, and grandson of Wendell Phillips. Until their tragic divorce a few years ago, the Smalleys […] worked in pictures.”26 Phillips Smalley was, in fact, an educated and worldly man with a distinguished pedigree and a trans-Atlantic upbringing that contrasted sharply with Weber’s accounts of her experiences with the Church Army and chorus girls on the popular stage. He became acquainted with the artist James McNeill Whistler through his father George Washburn Smalley, a widely read American foreign correspondent who worked for more than 35 years for the New York Tribune and later for the London Times. Friends with Whistler for several decades, he wrote in his defense during the Whistler-Ruskin trial and on other occasions, and through him would have met many other artists and figures in the London art scene. Father and son likely attended exhibitions, visited the studios of painters, and were clearly involved in contemporary aesthetic controversies.27 Others too might have left a mark. Screenwriter Frances Marion broke into the movie business in 1914 as an assistant to Lois Weber. At the time, Marion was a commercial artist, and later recorded in her memoir her entreaty to Weber: “I do want to get into the picture business. Frankly, I can’t understand why I have such a fierce urge when I really have so little to offer to it. All I can do is paint. I’m a fair artist. That might help with sets and costumes.”28 The applicant’s commercial art credentials were impressive. After attending Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco from 1904 to 1906, Marion found employment in a succession of positions that allowed her to put her artistic skills to practical applications: assistant to photographer Arnold Genthe, where she tried her hand at photographic layouts and color film; commercial artist for the Western Pacific Railroad; and poster artist for the Morosco Theater in Los Angeles.29 Weber hired Marion on the spot, and likely benefited from this moving picture novice’s extensive background in both fine and popular art. They worked congenially together until Weber moved over to Universal Studios. She invited Marion to come with her, but Marion instead accepted an invitation from her close friend Mary Pickford to join Famous Players-Lasky. This timing means that Marion was not in Weber’s employ during the production of The Dumb Girl of Portici. But in 26 Peak qtd in Norden, Interviews, n.p. 27 Mathews, George W. Smalley provides background. 28 Marion qtd in Norden, Interviews, n.p. 29 Beauchamp provides background on Marion’s career.

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1914–1915, during the long hours when Marion was assisting Weber, she was simultaneously learning the ins and outs of screenwriting from her boss. It is easy to imagine the conversation going both ways, with the two women also discussing various visual choices being made film after film and Marion sharing her fine arts wisdom and popular culture savvy. Both women understood that visual imagery and movie text – from screenplay to intertitles – reinforced one another, and they shared their respective knowledge to the benefit of both.

Conclusion: Cinematic Paragone Paragone (Italian for comparison) refers in the art-historical context to theoretical discussions that informed the course of sixteenth-century Italian art but came generally to refer to the debates about the relative merits of painting and sculpture. Artists’ responses to this dilemma would take the form of paintings that imitate sculpture and sculptures that imitated painting, in the effort to support claims about the unique characteristics of one over the other. In his famous Treatise on Painting (1435), Leon Battista Alberti laid out the arguments for the superiority of painting – that it was the ideal medium for imitating the natural world because it could represent an entire scene as if looking through a window. He also postulated a painting’s superiority based on the idea that it was best suited for representing complex narratives, considered the noblest subject matter. Subsequently, Filarete pointed out that painting has greater potential for naturalistic depictions because it could employ color and texture to simulate the appearance of any object. Others also pointed out that painting required more mental ability than physical work and therefore signaled the higher intelligence of the painter.30 I introduce this history here because when cinema comes along, it represents a challenge to the painter and sculptor, requiring that it too be brought into the paragone discussion. The Dumb Girl of Portici is the perfect vehicle for movies to enter this visual arts competition. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo proposed that painters excelled because they could imitate the three-dimensional qualities of sculpture and use systems of linear and aerial perspective to give the illusion of real space. Creating a moving picture with sweeping scenes of the marketplace and royal palace 30 “Renaissance Paragone: Painting and Sculpture,” Oxford Art Online provides a useful summary.

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grounds, frequent focus on wall paintings and even a portrait miniature, and three-dimensional sculpture indoors and outdoors, Weber was working in the spirit of those Renaissance painters. She was appropriating art for her epic movie. Two- and three-dimensional fine art played an integral part in her production, and never functioned as mere decoration or staffage. Working in what was regarded as a popular or mass culture medium, she like other film directors in the 1910s, strove fiercely to elevate the status of movies. She expressed this need not only in interviews and lectures, but also in each phase of the production of her movies – from screenplay and set design to direction and subtitles. She used every means at her disposal to uplift both form and content in moving pictures. Formally, she achieved this aim by drawing up on the fine arts to enhance the look of her pictures and educate her audiences. The Dumb Girl of Portici stands as her entry into the paragone and demonstrates the pictorial power of her silent movies.

Bibliography Beauchamp, Carl. Without Lying Down. Berkeley, CA: University of University of California Press, 1997. Carter, Aline. “The Muse of the Reel,” Motion Picture (March 1921), reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Dunning, Charles S. “The Gate Women Don’t Crash,” Liberty (May 14, 1927), reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Kelly, Kitty. “No Sinecure, This Film of Pavlowa’s,” Chicago Tribune (July 7, 1915), reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Lynn, Frankie. “What the Matter with Marriage?,” Movie Weekly (April 23, 1921), reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Manthorne, Katherine Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting. New York & London: Routledge, 2019. Marion, Frances. “Under Lois Weber’s Wing at Bosworth,” Memoir, 1914, reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Mathews, Joseph J. George W. Smalley. Forty Years a Foreign Correspondent. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 (1973). Norden, Martin F., ed. Lois Weber: Interviews. Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2019. [Kindle edition; no page numbers] Oxford Art Online, “Renaissance Paragone: Painting and Sculpture,” https://www. oxfordartonline.com/page/renaissance-paragone-painting-and-sculpture. Peak, Mayme Ober. “Only Woman Director Owes her Career to a Broken Piano Key,” Boston Sunday Globe (September 12, 1926), reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p.

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Peltret, Elizabeth. “On the Lot with Lois Weber,” Photoplay (October 1917), reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Squier, Emma-Lindsay. “What Do Men Need?” Picture-Play Magazine (May 1921), reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Stamp, Shelley. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Van Loan, H. H. “Lois the Wizard,” Motion Picture, July 1916, reprinted in Norden, Interviews, n.p. Young, Paul. “Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber: Hypocrites and the Allegorical Mode of the Transitional Feature Film,” Cinema Journal 55 (Fall 2015): 95–119.

Filmography Weber, Lois, dir. Fine Feathers, 1912. Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. Kino Lorber, 2018. Weber, Lois, dir. The Dumb Girl of Portici, 1916. Milestone Films, 2016.

About the Author Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Modern Art of the Americas in the Doctoral Program in Art History, Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book on film is Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting (2019).

2.

Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Modern Art and Money on Screen, 1963–1964 Susan Felleman

Abstract Two late Hollywood comedies – The Wheeler Dealers (MGM, 1963) and What a Way to Go! (Twentieth Century Fox, 1964) – thematize contemporary art, ridiculing its pretensions and travestying its cast of characters, while highlighting its market value. Released into a milieu in which much that set the stage for coming ruptures in American society occurred – civil rights actions, the escalation of war, and assassination – all mediated by the increasingly assertive medium of television, these films are symptoms of Hollywood’s decline and reflections of the growth of the art market and a variety of new avant-gardes – from Pop Art to underground film. Keywords: Art Market; Hollywood; comedy; Niki de Saint Phalle; Jean Tinguely

Much that set the stage for huge ruptures in the fabric of American society by the late 1960s happened in 1963: the March on Washington; sit-ins; the Birmingham campaign and other civil rights actions; the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam; the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; and the assassination of President Kennedy, all experienced with televisual immediacy. But, according to Andy Warhol, “everything went young in 1964.”1 That next year, as President Johnson launched his war on poverty, Americans were distracted by the British Invasion and the opening of the New York World’s Fair. Mass culture was on the minds of public intellectuals Marshall McLuhan and Susan Sontag, who introduced cool media and camp to mainstream audiences.

1

Warhol, 1983, 69.

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch02

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Amidst the endings and beginnings of these years, which seem like the last before American society and culture became hopelessly fractured, Hollywood cinema – the institution that, as perpetuated by the studio system, had held American audiences spellbound for half a century – was in a kind of death throes, as James Morrison put it, “a still-powerful institution, so recently new but quite suddenly old, trying to confront unprecedented social and cultural pressures while struggling perversely to maintain an equilibrium that was clearly already gone.”2 Meanwhile, television, McLuhan’s “cool” medium, was hot – it had reached over 50 million US households – as was the art market. Prices for contemporary works had been climbing to unprecedented levels since the mid 1950s.3 Pop Art, Underground cinema, and other conspicuously new avant-gardes – no doubt made conspicuous by television – were causing bemusement and outrage in full view of larger audiences than the avant-garde had previously imagined possible. As if in a funhouse mirror, one can watch these two trends unfold simultaneously in a couple of late Hollywood comedies that thematize avant-garde art, ridiculing its pretensions and travestying its cast of characters while highlighting its market value – The Wheeler Dealers (MGM, 1963) and What a Way to Go! (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1964). The Wheeler Dealers, written by George Goodman and Ira Wallach, based on Goodman’s 1959 novel of the same name, was directed by Arthur Hiller and produced by Martin Ransohoff. 4 It opened on November 14, 1963, one of the last releases by a major studio before the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, and was playing on Dallas screens, among others, that fateful day.5 Ironically perhaps, the film is a romantic comedy about a Texas wheeler dealer – Henry Tyroon (James Garner), a speculator in wildcatting – who travels to New York to scare up capital when drilling he has invested in has come up dry. In New York, wheeling and dealing at 2 Morrison, “1964: Movies,” 113. 3 Cras, The Artist as Economist, 6. 4 George Goodman (1930–2014) was creator, anchor, and editor-in-chief of Adam Smith’s Money World, which ran on PBS from 1984 to 1997. He had been assigned the pseudonym Adam Smith in 1968 for his regular Wall Street column in New York magazine. A member of the editorial board of The New York Times, an editor of Esquire, and a writer for Fortune, Goodman’s focus on economics and talent for making it accessible predated his journalistic career. He wrote fiction, beginning in 1955 (a novel, The Bubble Makers, was written in lieu of a thesis at Oxford, where he studied political economy as a Rhodes scholar). The Wheeler Dealers was his last novel and his only screenwriting credit. He subsequently published non-fiction books about economic themes and journalism. Douglas Martin, “George Goodman, Who Demystified the World of Money, Dies at 83,” New York Times, January 3, 2014. https://nyti.ms/1av5FRr. 5 Lubin, “Oil on Canvas,” 66.

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securities firm Bear, Osgood, and Whitby, Tyroon meets Molly Thatcher (Lee Remick), an ambitious, young stock analyst, the only woman employed as such by Bullard Bear (Jim Backus), who assigns her to make good with Universal Widget, unbeknownst to her, “a dog” of a holding, obsolete and worthless. Bear is in trouble and wants an excuse to fire Molly, although she is his best analyst, to cut costs without alarming clients or the market. Henry, clearly charmed by Molly, may or may not need an excuse to spend time with this future president of the National Society of Women Security Analysts but offers her help with Universal Widget, quickly edging out Molly’s pretentious and neurotic boyfriend, art critic Leonard (Elliott Reid), but not before being introduced to the contemporary art scene. Henry’s instinct for wildcatting inspires him to buy a French restaurant that Molly likes and – after an illuminating conversation with abstract artist Stanislas (Louis Nye) at an opening – to invest in expressionist painting. Mockery is not reserved for bohemians in The Wheeler Dealers; it is liberally poured over everyone: the Wall Street types; provincial New Englanders; big city maître d’ and PR guys; a federal securities regulator; a judge; and three Texan sidekicks of Henry’s – Jay Ray (Chill Wills), Ray Jay (Phil Harris), and J.R. (Charles Watts) – high-flyers who follow Tyroon around, trying to get a piece of the action, convinced his instincts are foolproof. At some point, the plot points converge on matters and misunderstandings romantic, commercial, and legal, but not before some extensive consideration of the art world and market. “The great interest in painting and sculpture (versus poetry) arises precisely from its unique character as art that produces expensive, rare, and speculative commodities.” ‒ Meyer Schapiro, 19606

The scene in which Stanislas and the art world are introduced begins in a gallery in a townhouse, as a young man with flagrant gay affect and a cardigan comes running down an elegant staircase, exclaiming, “Nardo, Nardo… wait for Chuck!” Nardo, it turns out, is Leonard, Molly’s art critic boyfriend, who has just arrived and is soon be found at the center of a circle of hangers-on, Chuck included. The camera wanders around the gallery with Henry and Molly, encountering and overhearing various types: matrons in pearls; suave sophisticates; beaded beatniks; barefooted bohemians; hipsters in turtlenecks; and a dead ringer for Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia. 6 Schapiro, “On the Art Market,” 204.

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A  stout woman says to a thin man, “but I can’t this Saturday, Spike; I’m going to the Cape to expand.” A man wearing sunglasses opines with a strong German accent, “oh, his work is ghastly, but it does have a certain obscene power!” One over-dressed middle-aged woman in fur says to another, “I don’t think what Ted is doing is awful at all; after all, Dede and Sally are twins.” Pressed by his devotees for his opinion of the large, abstract paintings on view, Leonard offers, “this exhibition is going to make history [. . .] What Stanislas has achieved here is essence rather than appearance [. . .] by using space on light, instead of light on space. And that, of course, is the whole mystique, or Geist, if you will, of the Stanislas method. He’s brought mysticism to painting but he hasn’t fallen into the trap of bringing painting to mysticism.” As Nardo’s acolytes affirm and applaud his insight, a cutaway reveals Henry listening, dubious. Leonard continues: “one thinks of Baudelaire and the other fin-de-siècle poets because [. . .] [he pauses, appearing to have baffled himself] well, one just does think of Baudelaire so often these days,” he concludes, taking a soulful drag of his cigarette. Henry has walked away and found himself standing next to a thin young man, with thin hair, thin lapels, and a thin tie, weeping before one of the artworks. He apologizes for making a scene and walks away, leaving Henry before the picture, perplexed. A man in tweed, with goatee and cravat, walks up and quickly sizes up Henry, who remarks, “seems this picture broke that young fellow up.” “Oh, don’t worry about him,” the tweedy gentleman responds. “He’s a paid weeper, one of the best.” It turns out that Henry’s new companion is Stanislas, the painter of the canvases on display, and, presumably, the employer of the paid weeper. Henry tries out Leonard’s formulations (about space on light and mysticism) on Stanislas, who looks Henry up and down again and asks, “what are you, some kind of religious nut?” Soon, Stanislas, a cynical character and smooth operator, is illuminating Henry Tyroon about the art market. Collecting, is “not a hobby. It’s an investment,” says Stanislas in a low, conspiratorial tone, as he leads Henry toward a corner. “Remember that Rembrandt that sold for $2 million a bit ago?” Henry and most of the 1963 movie audience would certainly remember the much publicized, record-setting $2.3 million that the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid for Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653) at Parke-Bernet Galleries on November 15, 1961. “You know, you could have bought that once for 20 bucks,” Stanislas confides. “From whom?” Henry wonders. “From Rembrandt, when he painted it,” Stanislas responds, adding, “now, my stuff goes for five-hundred clams, but it has a thousand percent profit potential.” Within a few minutes, Stanislas has inspired Tyroon to invest and has inveigled a job as his curator. The

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Figure 1. Stanislas (Louis Nye), Molly (Lee Remick), Henry (James Garner), and art in The Wheeler Dealers.

action takes place before an array of modern art. Although the scenario expresses some skepticism about it and even more about modern art critics, the works speak for themselves, as seemingly authentic and not ridiculous contemporary abstract canvases (and some sculptures).7 Insofar as the plot develops around – among other schemes – art collecting as investment, it seems some care has been taken to cast art of sufficient stature (in terms of scale and style) to make this plausible. Next, Molly sees Henry, he and Stanislas are together in Tyroon’s hotel suite, with Stanislas in full-on curatorial mode (or wildcatting foreman, to use the metaphor that sold Henry on him), having traded in his tweed and cravat for a Tyrolean jacket and Gamsbart hat, wrangling dozens of paintings, and also Kathy Madison, who is writing up Tyroon and his collection for Art World, the same magazine for which Molly’s ex Leonard writes. Miss Madison is moved to tears by the collection and Henry’s coached speechifying, exclaiming to him, before being ushered out by Stanislas, “the art world owes you a debt of gratitude.” It unfolds that Henry has spent a few busy days buying up German and other Expressionist paintings (following the novel), has even flown to Europe. Names dropped include Kandinsky, Nolde, and Gorky, the latter not associated with German Expressionism and not 7 The paintings resemble the work of numerous artists active in the 1950s and 1960s. A sculpture seen in one shot is almost certainly by Ibram Lassaw. Access to the film’s production files – planned but not possible due to COVID-19-related closures – might reveal the artists and sources of works seen in the film, which appear to be a mix of authentic contemporary art and studio copies/pastiches.

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mentioned in Goodman’s novel, although Gorky’s near contemporary, Matta, was. The potential dissonance between the art seen and the names dropped is ameliorated by the fact that there are, in fact, two Gorky-like works in the scene; a rather large, blueish one is prominently displayed above the mantel and some action centers on and around it.8 There is nothing that actually looks much like German Expressionism but there are many expressionist canvases of the more mid-century sort: Abstract Expressionist and other New York School types, and works that reflect European movements, such as COBRA, Tachisme, Nouveau réalisme, and Surrealism (including a close copy of a 1933 Miró that was by 1963 long in the collection of the MoMA). Improbably, the dialogue implies that Henry has acquired a work from the collection of London’s Tate Gallery and may be close to wrangling a couple from the “Rothschild collection.” After Molly’s incredulity and astonishment have registered, Tyroon’s Greek chorus of Texas wheeler dealers appear, always hot on his trail, sniffing out speculations. Cornered, Henry confesses that he has found a new sort of oil to invest in and gives Jay Ray, Ray Jay, and J.R. a quick lesson in art appreciation: Boys, did you ever hear of a fellow named Renoir? [. . .] Well, once upon a time, this fellow Renoir, he painted pictures and he couldn’t sell ‘em to save his life. He gave ‘em away for supper. Sold some for 50 cents. Why? That’s because they was all kind of fuzzy. People laughed. People weren’t ready for fuzzy pictures. Do you know what one of those fuzzy ol’ Renoirs will bring today? One million dollars! [. . .] Yeah, I know, you’re gonna to say that these pictures don’t look fuzzy; they look scratchy. Well, I may be wrong, but when people get ready for scratchy pictures, these are gonna go up, right through the ceiling.

After just a bit more explanation, the Texans seem very interested. “What’s the depletion allowance?” one asks. “Well, I’ll tell you, J.R.,” Henry replies. “It’s not depletion but it works out the same. You buy the paintings, you give them to the museum, and then you take a deduction on the appraised value, which is going up. I figure I can save you, oh…say, ten cents on the dollar off income.” The view of the commodity value of art reflected in The Wheeler Dealers was very topical in 1963 and corresponds to the relatively recent but already widespread public conception of an art market. “In both Europe and the 8 This picture, except for its pervasive blue palette, is an acceptable pastiche of Gorky’s work of the mid-1940s. It may have been made or acquired by MGM for the film. In any case, it seems to have become MGM property, as it can be seen on a set in Viva Las Vegas the following year.

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United States, the second half of the 1950s inaugurated an unprecedented era of growth in the display and purchase of art,” a boom that persisted into the 1970s and, from as early as 1955, the popular press had covered this development enthusiastically.9 In a December 1955, Fortune Magazine article, “The Great International Art Market,” Sophie Cras notes, speaking of artworks as ‘commodities,’ they suggested that the art market combined risk with opportunities for profit in exactly the same way as financial markets. Thus Old Masters were the equivalent of gilt-edged securities, virtually risk-free investments. […] The Impressionists were blue-chip investments. [. . .] Contemporary artists were speculative investments (‘growth issues’), riskier but over time possibly more profitable still: Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Bernard Buffet were cited as examples.10

Henry’s explanation to J.R. is obviously ripped from recent headlines, more recent at the time of production than the 1959 novel from which the movie was adapted, but certainly ripped by George Goodman himself, who within a few years would be associated with the very magazines and papers in which they appeared. “Tax Deductions on Donated Art to Get Closer Federal Scrutiny; Revenue Chief Cites Abuses in Valuations as Prices Continue to Soar,” reads the headline of a front-page article in the New York Times of January 17, 1962. This article explained the US tax law that allows the “fair market value” of a donated artwork to be deducted and how the law is abused, cited the record-breaking Rembrandt auction price, and quoted Sir Colin Anderson, Chairman of London’s Tate Gallery, who “blamed the American tax-concession system for the steep rise in prices in the international art market,” adding that “other British art leaders blame the American system for hastening the departure of art treasures from Britain in recent years.”11 One can hardly doubt that Sir Colin’s lament was adopted as a small, seemingly preposterous plot point in The Wheeler Dealers.12 The last scene centered on art in The Wheeler Dealers leaves Molly, Henry, and the marketplace behind. It is set in Stanislas’s studio, where Leonard 9 Cras 2019, 6. 10 Ibid.,103. 11 Bracker, “Tax Deductions,” 1, 24. 12 Taxes and Art, a booklet published for art dealer French and Company in 1961, and the Art Market Guide and Forecaster, a 1962 periodical that advertised its advice for achieving “super profits in art” (DeMott, “An Unprofessional,” 449; Cras, 104), reflect the ubiquity of this discourse in the years just preceding the film’s production.

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Figure 2. “Modern technology demands new means of artistic production,” says Stanislas (Louis Nye) to art critic, Leonard (Elliott Reid), in The Wheeler Dealers.

sits and smokes, watching as Stanislas rides a tricycle that dispenses paint (bright red, yellow, and blue, one color per wheel) around a huge canvas on the floor. The dialogue pillories contemporary art, but knowingly. “You’re a great talent, Stanislas,” says Leonard, “and look at you now.” “Don’t you like the way I ride?” Stanislas asks. “It’s people like you who give the North Mediterranean Neo-realist movement a bad name,” Leonard replies. “The brush is outmoded as a tool of art.” Stanislas maintains. “Modern technology demands new means of artistic production,” he continues, before changing the subject to what he knows is really bothering Leonard: Molly’s having thrown him over for Henry Tyroon. Leonard confirms this, bemoaning that his psychiatrist will not speak to him when she learns he has been dumped, for a “half-educated, sun-dried, prairie Marshall.” Stanislas divulges that Henry Tyroon is not really a Texan but “strictly a Yale type from Boston,” who majored in Romance languages and went to Texas to rub up against money, adopted the Texan trappings, and finally “caught the accent.” “North Mediterranean Neo-realist” movement may sound ridiculous, but it reflects the contemporary movement most likely to engage the tricycle and other “new means of artistic production”: Nouveau réalisme. Coined in 1960 by French critic Pierre Restany, the realism practiced by signatories of a joint declaration that year – including Yves Klein, Arman, Raymond Hains, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and others, joined in 1961 by César, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Gerard Deschamps – was “‘new’ in the sense that there was a Nouveau Roman in fiction and a New Wave in film: in the first place it connects itself to the new reality deriving from an urban

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consumer society [. . .] it no longer is identified with a representation.”13 Like Pop Art, its Anglo-American cousin, Nouveau réalisme was a movement that captured mass media attention through high-profile exploits, appropriation, recycling, and remixing – collage, assemblage, décollage – and other allusions to and techniques that borrowed from contemporary commercial, popular, and industrial culture. The Nouveaux réalistes exhibited collectively for only a few years, from 1960 until 1963, and most reached their maximum visibility precisely in the period during which The Wheeler Dealers was in preparation and production, with the “International Exhibition of the New Realists,” a survey of American Pop Art and New Realism at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York at the end of 1962. Among the most unifying principles and proclivities associated with the short-lived movement was destruction, which took many forms. Two members of the Nouveaux réalistes who were particularly visible in the US during this period were a couple, both of whom garnered attention for acts of destruction: Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely and French-American sculptor and painter Niki de Saint Phalle. Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960), a sculpture designed to self-destruct at the Museum of Modern Art, was described in a MoMA press release: “A machine, 23 feet long and 27 feet high, conceived and built by the Swiss-born artist Jean Tinguely so that it destroys itself when set in motion, will be shown in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art Thursday evening, March 17 from 6:30 to 7:00 p.m. before an invited audience.”14 While Homage to New York only partially self-destructed, a later Tinguely project, Study for an End of the World No. 2, was commissioned for an episode of David Brinkley’s Journal and detonated successfully in front of cameras and a desert audience outside Las Vegas on March 21, 1962.15 These spectacular, self-destructing kinetic sculptures were an outgrowth and culmination of Tinguely’s Métamatics, a series of machines he created during the second half of the 1950s that produced artworks without human touch, drawings and 13 New Realism dossier. Centre Pompidou, Direction de l’action éducative et des publics, April 2005, updated August 2007. http://mediation.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ ENS-newrea-EN/ENS-newrea-EN.htm 14 The press release contains a detailed account of the proposed action, by which dozens of cast-off objects will be mechanized to self-destruct, as a “piano controlled by a rheostat will be played at 5 speeds by mechanical arms while a radio will be tuned to local news.” Museum of Modern Art press release, no. 27, March 18, 1960. https://assets.moma.org/documents/ moma_press-release_326185.pdf. 15 David Brinkley’s Journal (NBC), April 4, 1962 episode can be seen at “Burners.Me: Me, Burners and The Man.” https://burners.me/2013/10/17/burning-man-1962-jean-tinguely-blazes-the-trail/.

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paintings that implicitly questioned the expressivity of the artist’s gesture in the age of Abstract Expressionism, and received considerable notice. Thus, the seeming silliness of Stanislas’s trike-riding action painting and his assertion that “modern technology demands new means of artistic production” reflect aspects of Nouveau réaliste approaches to art: the substitution for the human hand of the machine and an embrace of violence and chance inherited from Dada and Surrealism. At least one of the artworks seen in the Tyroon collection, one unwrapped and held up by Stanislas, suggests that the film’s reference to the new realists is no coincidence; it is either a Tirs by Niki de Saint Phalle, or a pastiche of one; it features vertical streams of colorful paint and what appear to be a number of bullet holes. Le Tirs (shooting pictures) were just that, action paintings made by the action of paint bursting over and dripping from polythene bags below a plastered surface, when shot, either by the glamorous former fashion model Saint Phalle herself or participants at the shooting events she staged in Europe and the US between 1961 and 1963, garnering at least as much attention as her high-profile partner. During the same US sojourn that produced Tinguely’s Las Vegas extravaganza, Saint Phalle held two public shooting performances involving large Tirs, one in the hills near Malibu, and another near the Sunset Strip in LA, both in Spring 1962. Both were attended by audiences that included Hollywood celebrities, journalists, and art world personages.16 “The new bloodbath of red, yellow, and blue splattered over the pure white relief metamorphosized the painting into a tabernacle for DEATH and RESURRECTION. I was shooting at my own violence and the VIOLENCE of the times.” ‒ Niki de Saint Phalle17

Tinguely’s and Saint Phalle’s avant-garde shenanigans – widely covered in the media for their inherent entertainment value but often with an aura of incredulity about the political and philosophical seriousness of the undertakings – are perhaps even more evident as sources for a film released in 1964. Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, from a story by Gwen Davis, What a Way to Go! was directed by J. Lee Thompson and produced 16 See Whiting, 2014, 14; and Woods, 2015, who notes that attendees at the event hosted by Virginia Dwan in Malibu included Jane Fonda, Peggy Moffit, John Houseman, Henry Geldzahler, Ed Kienholz, and others. 17 In a letter to Pontus Hulten, qtd in Woods, “Pop Gun Art”

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by Arthur P. Jacobs for Twentieth Century-Fox. A big-budget, star-studded, black comedy, the film stars Shirley MacLaine – in a role meant for Marilyn Monroe, who died when the film was in development – as Louisa May Foster, who, at the start of the movie, dressed in widow’s black and bereft, attempts to give more than $211 million to the IRS. This irrational act lands her on a psychiatric couch, where she relates to a flummoxed Dr. Victor Stephanson (Bob Cummings) the story of her four marriages. Three of these – to smalltown merchant-philosopher Edgar Hopper (Dick Van Dyke), artist Larry Flint (Paul Newman), and performer Pinky Benson (Gene Kelley) – despite Louisa’s modest desires and unconditional love, turned poor men ambitious and rich, then killed them, wrecking each happy marriage with success and premature death, while the fourth made a rich man, tycoon Rod Anderson, Jr. (Robert Mitchum), richer, then killed him. Although Shirley MacLaine dazzles in Edith Head’s many extravagant outfits, the preternatural effect Louisa is supposed to have on men would have fit Marilyn Monroe better. Each marriage is framed by MacLaine’s voice-over narration and accompanied by a cinematic vignette. Louisa’s first marriage is to Hopper, who, inspired by Henry David Thoreau, lives a simple small-town life. Their marriage is poor but happy. Louisa remembers it as like a “wonderful old silent movie” (in which Van Dyke and MacLaine channel Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp and Mary Pickford, respectively). Their idyll ends when Hopper gets ambitious after being shamed by Leonard Crawley (Dean Martin), the wealthy local playboy and cad who had earlier wooed Louisa (and who returns at the end, paradoxically, as her humble, successfully unsuccessful, fifth husband). Hopper finds his capitalist “religion,” builds his small store into a successful emporium, ruins the Crawley family business, increasingly neglects Louisa, and ultimately works himself to death. Widowed and wealthy, Louisa escapes to Paris, where her first encounter is with a cab driver who turns out to be American artist Larry Flint (Paul Newman), a bearded bohemian, who seems always to be eating and gesticulating with phallic food (banana, carrot, celery, chicken leg) and believes that “money corrupts; art erupts.” Larry introduces Louisa to some artist friends and neighbors, including Frieda, a chimpanzee-painter, and Frieda’s teacher René (Maurice Marsac). He declares Frieda’s just-finished abstract canvas a “masterpiece” and “testament to the human spirit,” nearly taking Louisa’s head off when she asks whether Frieda’s work sells: “Sell?!” he yells, “do you think Frieda cares whether her work sells? Do you think I care whether my work sells?!” Interrupted by the sound of gunfire, he drags Louisa to the courtyard where they find neighbor Polly (Jane Wald) shooting with a semi-automatic rifle at a large canvas covered with balloons, which

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Figure 3. “It’s destruction, pure and simple,” says Larry of Polly’s (Jane Wald) work in What a Way to Go!

disgorge and drip paint, to the evident pleasure of a considerable crowd. When Louisa, reacting viscerally to the spectacle, exclaims that the painting makes her sick, Polly responds, pleased, “thank you; thank you very much,” swapping out her rifle for a couple of pistols, as Larry declares, “good, feel sick! It should make you feel sick. It’s destruction, pure and simple. It’s what today is all about. That technique is her way of expressing it.” Played strictly for laughs, the script seems nonetheless well-informed about the philosophy of Niki de Saint Phalle and the Nouveaux réalistes. Writers Comden and Green had certainly been known to turn historical research into comedy (cf. Singin’ in the Rain) but making fiction out of reality was even more the modus operandi of Gwen Davis, who is credited with the story of What a Way to Go! Davis became rather a specialist in roman à clef and even had to settle a libel lawsuit over her 1971 novel, Touching.18 Like George Goodman, she had obviously been reading the papers and watching television. On December 13, 1961, David Brinkley’s Journal had aired a report on art that featured Nouveaux réalistes, including Arman, Raymond Hains, and Niki de Saint Phalle – who discussed her Tirs – along with stories about the art of children and chimpanzees.19 After What a Way to Go!’s parodic avant-garde spectacle, voice-over relates Louisa’s sudden conviction that she is fated to marry Larry and so she does, at his behest leaving her fortune behind in America. She remembers their 18 Gorner, “An Author’s Fiction” 19 Sawelson-Gorse, “sound bites,” 81–81 [?]. It seems likely that this reportage led to the commission of the 1962 Tinguely “End of the World” work and episode.

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Figure 4. Louisa (Shirley MacLaine), Larry (Paul Newman), and his painting machine in What a Way to Go!

marriage as one of those “wickedly romantic French movies” (MacLaine does B.B., in a black-and-white pastiche of the European art film, with sexy jump cuts and clever subtitling jokes). Briefly, they are poor but happy, living “la vie de bohème,” she recalls; Larry trades the occasional painting for food rather than be compromised by Louisa’s fortune. His artistic practice is as transparently modeled on that of Jean Tinguely as Polly’s was on Niki de Saint Phalle’s. He makes abstract paintings with machines that translate sound (sirens, alarms, jackhammers, bongos, etc.) into art.20 Larry explains his “sonic palette” to Louisa when she asks if he must make so much noise when he paints: “sound – the sonic vibrations – they go in there; then those get transmitted to that photoelectric cell, which gives those dynamic impulses to the brushes and the arms and. [. . .] [I]t’s a fusion: a mechanized world and a human soul. It’s the only affirmative statement being made in the world of art today.” Louisa wonders what would happen if they played a record for the sonic palette, and she does: Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song.” The two mechanized painting arms with brushes balletically move to the music and Larry watches with wonder as they cover the canvas in gesture. Recognizing on Larry’s face the fire she has inadvertently lit, Louisa urges him to revert to his own funny noises, but after a customer at the butcher’s, where he brought 20 Tinguely had incorporated noise into his process in Relief Metamécanique Sonore, 1955.

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Spring Song to barter, offered him 40,000 francs (“almost $200”) for it, Larry is soon creating paintings from recorded music from Beethoven to jazz. In no time, he is given a one-man show at Beau Pres Galerie, “a smashing success,” Louisa recalls in voice-over, as onscreen, at the opening, with posh art patrons fawning over her puffed-up husband, she poses in an Abstract Expressionist dress by the artist. “Larry was famous and rich overnight,” the voice-over continues, as we see their new house, a fairytale château on Île Saint-Louis, where Louisa languishes, neglected, in avant-garde outfits created by her husband, and Larry’s incredible new studio near Paris, where he temperamentally conducts an increasingly elaborate painting machine. Finally, the device, now with eight gilded arms, rises up against and encircles its irascible, imperious creator, throttling him, and explodes, in the midst of a monumental commission ($150,000) for Nieman Marcus. Louisa’s inheritance, including the valuation of unsold work, is $4 million. The movie has transformed Tinguely’s métamatics from machines operated by gallery visitors, who could walk away with the cyber-scribbles on which they had collaborated, into the monstrous cybernetic creation of a megalomaniacal ego that produces immense, expressionist paintings worth thousands.21 What a Way to Go! was the first film produced by Arthur P. Jacobs, who worked as a publicist at MGM, then Warner’s, and founded his own public relations company in 1956. Among his clients were Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe. Jacobs financed the film on the strength of Monroe’s agreement to star in it, and after her death, spared no expense or effort in producing and promoting it.22 These efforts are hyped in “What a Way to Go!: An Extravaganza In The Making,” an episode of David Wolper’s series Hollywood and the Stars that aired on NBC, April 20, 1964.23 Narrated by Joseph Cotton, it highlights the movie’s lush budget (ironically, as one of the movie’s own parodic vignettes is a spectacular “Lust Budget Production”): star-studded cast; award-winning writers, Comden and Green, and director J. Lee Thompson, who are interviewed; the technical wizardry of Herb Cheek and his crew, who had to create a 6 ½-foot-tall champagne glass in which Shirley MacLaine and Robert Mitchum float in a fantasy sequence; the arrangements for a sequence around and aboard Anderson’s (Mitchum) private jet, which involved making up a real commercial jet 21 On Tinguely’s “do it yourself” exhibitions of métamatics, see McNay, “Jean Tinguely” 22 Arthur P. Jacob papers, Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University. 23 Hollywood and the Stars, “What a Way to Go!: An Extravaganza In The Making,” April 20, 1964. YouTube video, 21:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB8GEr8a3NE.

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overnight in between flights and creating a full-scale interior on set; Edith Head’s purported $500,000 budget and 73 costumes for MacLaine; the casting and success of Candy, the three-year-old chimp who plays Frieda, “a veritable Picasso among apes”; and “a machine that creates modern art [. . .] a scriptwriter’s brainstorm that becomes a prop man’s headache. It reportedly takes 12,000 man-hours to make ten of these complex contraptions”; an extravagant song and dance number with MacLaine and Gene Kelly; and lastly, the publicity event in which a special, decorated subway car took the cast and special guests to the film’s world premiere at the New York World’s Fair. Like The Wheeler Dealers, What a Way to Go! has fun at its own expense but not quite enough fun and at too much expense. Excessive production values and parody seem symptomatic of late Hollywood comedies. One wonders whether the psychiatric storyline that figures in both plots (and numerous other movies of the day) bespeaks an institutional neurosis. Both films exude ambivalence and confusion about art and capitalism. And is it merely coincidence that both feature oil strikes that turn out to be breaches of existing oil conduits? Somehow, this plot point seems an apt metaphor for the strained, self-reflexive camp and kitsch on display. As Joe McElhaney says of the American cinema of 1963, connecting the demise of Hollywood with the emergence of its underground celebration, “while Hollywood continued to serve as a repository of dreams, the dreams it now tapped into are more closely tied to a collective unconscious, its ‘latent’ content and repressions increasingly exposed through a variety of means, including camp. Hollywood is lovingly perceived as a rotting organism, now available for plundering and appropriation.”24 Plundering and appropriation of Hollywood and mass culture abound in the avant-garde of 1963–1964, around the iconicity of Marilyn Monroe (Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Mimmo Rotella) and JFK (Warhol, Conner, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg) – whose auras and recent deaths hover around the edges of both movies – and the queer nostalgia for movie icons from Maria Montez to James Dean expressed in underground films by Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, and the Kuchars. Reciprocally, for this brief time, before the ascendancy of New Hollywood, in the senescence of the old, the mass-mediated notoriety of the avant-garde and a burgeoning market for modern art became the silly stuff that box office is made of. 25 24 McElhaney, “1963: Movies and the Little Soldiers,” 104–105. 25 For information, inspiration, and invaluable assistance with this chapter, I express my sincere thanks to Rebecca Shaykin, Christopher Weedman, Shane Pangburn, David Lubin, and Simon Tarr.

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Bibliography Bracker, Milton. “Tax Deductions on Donated Art to Get Closer Federal Scrutiny; Revenue Chief Cites Abuses in Valuations as Prices Continue to Soar.” New York Times (January 17, 1962). https://nyti.ms/1Hf3yqU. Carrick, Jill. “Phallic Victories? Niki de Saint‐Phalle’s Tirs.” Art History 26, no. 5 (2003): 700–729. Cras, Sophie. The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s. Transl. Malcolm DeBevoise. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. DeMott, Benjamin. “An Unprofessional Eye: Donors: Dollars: Dolors.” The American Scholar 31, no. 3 (1962): 448–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41208971. Goodman, George. The Wheeler Dealers. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1959. Gorner, Peter. “An Author’s Fiction May be Celebrity’s Fact,” The Chicago Tribune (June 27, 1986). https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-06-278602150916-story.html. McElhaney, Joe. “1963: Movies and the Little Soldiers of the New Frontier.” American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, ed. Barry Keith Grant. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 89–109. Lubin, D.M. “Oil on Canvas: Texas Art Collectors and the President’s Visit to Fort Worth, November 1963,” Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, ed. Clare Griffiths. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. 64–77. McNay, Anna. “Jean Tinguely: Machine Spectale,” Studio International (March 2016). https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/jean-tinguely-machinespectacle-review. Morrison, James. “1964: Movies, the Great Society, and the New Sensibility.” American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, ed. Barry Keith Grant. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. 110–129. Sawelson-Gorse, Naomi. “sound bites & spin doctors.” The New Frontier: Art and Television, 1960–1965, ed. John Alan Farmer. Austin, TX: Austin Museum of Art, 2000. 81–81. Schapiro, Meyer. “On the Art Market” (1960). Worldview in Painting: Art and Society, Selected Papers. New York: George Braziller, 1999. 202–204. Warhol, Andy and Pat Hackett. POPism: The Warhol ‘60s. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Whiting, Cecile. “Apocalypse in Paradise: Niki de Saint Phalle in Los Angeles.” Woman’s Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2014): 14–22. Woods, Nicole L. “Pop Gun Art: Niki de Saint Phalle and the Operatic Multiple.” Art Expanded, 1958–1978, ed. Eric Crosby and Liz Glass. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2015. http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/art-expanded/pop-gun.

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About the Author Professor of Art History and Film and Media Studies at the University of South Carolina, Susan Felleman is the author of Botticelli in Hollywood: The Films of Albert Lewin (1997), Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006), Real Objects in Unreal Situations: Modern Art in Fiction Films (2014), and co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017), among other writings.

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Cinema as Philosophy of Art Temenuga Trifonova Abstract This chapter explores the cinematic imaginary of art, specifically the ways in which contemporary cinema uses art to stage debates around truth, authenticity, and aura. Through an analysis of a number of representative films, it demonstrates that whenever art “enters” cinema it automatically introduces into a film’s narrative (and often its style) the long-standing philosophical debate around truth and authenticity. Frequently, art and the spaces of art (galleries, museums, artist studios) in cinema are overdetermined by the history of the philosophy of art and the main questions that have informed it, including the questions of “truth,” “authenticity,” “reproducibility,” and “value” (e.g., cult value versus exhibition value). Keywords: truth, authenticity, aura, philosophy of art, heist film

Philosophy (or “theory”) of art is concerned with defining and classifying “art” and related concepts such as “mimesis,” “interpretation,” “aesthetic properties,” and “aesthetic value.”1 Generally, formalist theories privilege art’s formal properties in defining and evaluating works of art, institutional theories consider the definition of art as a product of an artworld,2 aesthetic creation theories underscore the importance of aesthetic intention in defining “art,”3 historical theories hold that for something to be considered “art” it must bear some relation to previously established artworks, 4 while anti-essentialist theories view art as an “open concept” that cannot be defined in terms of a static, univocal essence.5 1 For a survey of major writings on philosophy of art, see Hofstadter and Kuhns, Philosophies of Art. 2 Danto, “The Artworld,” 580–581. 3 Zangwill, Aesthetic, 57. 4 Levinson, “Defining,” 232. 5 Weitz, “The Role,” 28.

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch03

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The notion of “mimesis,” along with the idea of “truth” in/of art, remains a highly debated topic in philosophy of art and aesthetic theory, from Plato’s warning about the dangers of mimesis, through Aristotle’s affirmation of art’s potential to convey universal truths and strengthen moral character through an emotional catharsis, to the Romantics’ passionate defense of the power of art to produce emotional/moral insights and knowledge about the world that cannot be expressed in propositional terms. In the twentieth century and beyond, art critics and philosophers of art have remained ambivalent about the idea of “truth in/of art,” as evidenced by the divergent positions taken by three major studies on this subject: Eric Auerbach’s classic study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) sought to demonstrate Western literature’s progress, from antiquity to the twentieth century, toward increasingly naturalistic and democratic forms of representation; Jay Bernstein’s The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1993) described the experience of art in the age of modernity, in which art has finally lost its truth-function, as one of “aesthetic alienation”; while Lambert Zuidervaart’s Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (2009) tried to redeem the notion of “artistic truth” from twentieth-century skepticism.6 What does philosophy of art have to do with cinema, you might ask. To begin to answer this question we might recall Arthur Danto’s observation that, “[w]hen philosophy first noticed art, it was in connection with the possibility of deception.”7 Danto refers to this possibility of deception as “the Problem of Indiscernible Counterparts”: A philosophical question arises whenever we have two objects which seem in every relevant particular to be alike, but which belong to importantly different philosophical categories. Descartes for example supposed his experience while dreaming could be indistinguishable from his experience awake, so that no internal criterion could divide delusion from knowledge. Wittgenstein noted that there is nothing to distinguish someone’s raising his arm from someone’s arm going up, though the distinction between even the simplest action and a mere bodily movement seems fundamental to the way we think of our freedom [. . .] In all these cases one must seek the 6 On “mimesis” and related issues, including the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, the ontological status of fictitious beings, and emotional investment in imaginary events, see Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the types of knowledge claims art gives rise to, see Freeland, “Art and Moral Knowledge.” 7 Danto, “Art, Philosophy,” 1–2.

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differences outside the juxtaposed and puzzling examples, and this is no less the case when seeking to account for the differences between works of art and mere real things which happen exactly to resemble them.8

Deception and illusion are constitutive not only of philosophy – “A problem is not a philosophical problem,” argues Danto, “unless it is possible to imagine that its solution will consist in showing how appearance has been taken for reality”9 – but also of modern art, “for when art attains the level of self-consciousness it has come to attain in our era, the distinction between art and philosophy becomes as problematic as the distinction between reality and art.”10 And if we go back to the early years of cinema we would recall that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, cinema’s status as an art was premised precisely on its unique power to represent alternate realities, identities, and temporalities; in short, its power to deceive11 – consider, for instance, horror films in the fantastic tradition exploring the themes of the doppelgänger, the ontological confusion between life and art, and between original and copy, and the unreliability of perception and memory.12 It is not surprising, then, that whenever cinema takes an interest in art, it is almost always in connection with the possibility of deception. Like art documentaries, from those seeking to capture the dynamic explosiveness and ineffability of artistic creation (e.g. Kevin Macdonald’s 2016 Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang and Andrey Paounov’s 2018 Walking on Water) to those bent on exposing the artworld’s collusion with market capitalism and neoliberalism (e.g. Ben Lewis’s 2009 The Great Contemporary Art Bubble and Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 The Price of Everything), most fiction films set in the artworld promote either the idea of art as truth (where the notion of “truth” is itself internally divided between its association with the ineffable, the transitory and the contingent on one hand, and with the essential, the immortal, and the indestructible on the other hand13), or the opposite yet 8 Ibid. 9 Danto, Connections, 6. 10 Idem, “Art, Philosophy,” 1–2. On modern art’s self-consciousness, see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory and Greenberg, “Modernist Painting.” 11 For a detailed analysis, see Trifonova, Warped Minds. 12 For instance, The Student of Prague (Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener, 1913), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Lucius Henderson, 1912), The Golem (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, 1920), The Other (Max Mack, 1913), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), and many others. 13 In the words of Baudelaire, the work of art has to answer to two different aesthetic ideals; it must be both antique and modern at the same time: “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of the art. The other half is the eternal, the immovable.” “La Modernité,” 797–798.

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complementary idea of art as deception, which can be traced back to Plato’s critique of art. The mutual imbrication of art, truth, and deception provides the matrix for films as different as Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), in which clues in a painting lead to a tragic story about lost love, obsession, and voyeurism, and Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code (2006), in which the truth about the foundations of Christianity turns out to depend on the “correct” interpretation of clues in Da Vinci paintings. As we shall see by looking at a number of films set in the artworld – The Thomas Crown Affair (John McTiernan, 1999), Headhunters (Morten Tyldum, 2011), The Best Offer (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2013), Trance (Danny Boyle, 2013), Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016), The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017), The Burnt Orange Heresy (Giuseppe Capotondi, 2019), and Velvet Buzzsaw (Dan Gilroy, 2019) – when art appears in cinema, whether it is in the form of particular artists, artworks, art practices, or in the form of the spaces of art (galleries, museums, and artist studios), it never does so as a neutral subject; rather, it seems to automatically introduce into the narrative, and often into the film’s style as well, questions about truth, authenticity, “cult value,” and “exhibition value” (Benjamin) with which philosophy of art has traditionally concerned itself. Films set in the artworld tend to be variations on the same general theme: the conflict between reality and illusion, authenticity, and forgery. Perhaps no other genre makes this clearer than the art heist film. Regardless of how central the art robbery is to the main plot – some films focus on the preparation for the robbery, its execution, and its consequences (The Thomas Crown Affair) while others foreground the symbolic function of the stolen artwork (John Crowley’s The Goldfinch, 2019) – the function of an artwork in these films, its raison d’être, is to frame the central conflict in terms of an opposition between reality and illusion, authenticity and forgery, truth and falseness. The artwork is thus used as a representational tool: a representation (an artwork) is used to “represent” the conflict in the film. By using art to stage long-standing philosophical debates cinema carves out for itself a privileged place supposedly “outside” such debates, creating the illusion that the questions that continue to trouble art are “resolved” by cinema since by dramatizing these questions cinema demonstrates its “awareness” of them. This allows cinema to occupy, however tentatively, the “superior” position philosophy of art has traditionally occupied (or believed itself to occupy) with respect to art. Ironically, as we shall see, even as films set in the artworld question, mock or condemn the ontologically ungrounded nature of art – which remains forever torn between truth and illusion – many of them end up affirming art’s Janus-faced nature as, in fact, the only guarantee of truth. As soon as art “enters” cinema it brings

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with it the threat of inauthenticity, deception, and illusion; yet, this threat is ultimately revealed as indispensable to any notion of truth in the realm of lived experience, regardless of whether “lived experience” refers to romantic feelings (The Thomas Crown Affair, The Best Offer, The Burnt Orange Heresy, Nocturnal Animals, Headhunters) or to moral/ethical integrity (The Burnt Orange Heresy, Velvet Buzzsaw, The Square). In Norman Jewison’s Thomas Crown Affair (1968), millionaire businessman-sportsman Crown organizes a $2 million bank robbery, but McTiernan’s 1999 remake raises the stakes by having Crown leave the Metropolitan Museum of Art (after orchestrating an impressive Trojan horse robbery) with Monet’s $100-million-worth San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908). When Crown donates a Pissarro to fill the space left by the Monet on the museum wall he attracts the suspicion of Catherine Banting, an insurance investigator appointed to the case. Sensing that Crown is motivated by the thrill of risktaking rather than by greed, Catherine convinces the chief detective leading the NYPD team to place the tycoon under surveillance. After a pre-credit scene, in which Crown’s session with his therapist (played by Faye Dunaway, who appeared in the original film14) establishes him as a lone wolf with trust issues, the film follows Catherine and Crown’s cat-and-mouse game as they try to outsmart each other without allowing themselves to fall in love. What makes this otherwise formulaic romance intriguing is that the film posits the authenticity/falseness of art (paintings presented as authentic turn out to be fake, or vice versa) and the authenticity/falseness of romantic feelings as two sides of the same coin: the authenticity of an artwork is used as a sign of the authenticity of romantic feelings. Every plot twist in The Affair revolves around love and art as two parallel and mutually determined sign systems: as long as Crown’s feelings for Catherine or her feelings for him remain suspect, the authenticity of the artworks that keep swapping hands and places cannot be verified. It is only in the final robbery sequence, which has Crown, disguised as Magritte’s immediately recognizable anonymouslooking man in an overcoat and bowler hat, cleverly evade the Met police by blending into a crowd of Magritte’s Son of Man (1964) lookalikes, that Crown’s feelings for Catherine are finally confirmed as “true”: once Crown disappears the museum’s fire sprinklers wash the paint off of the Pissarro 14 The casting of the same actors in many of the films set in the artworld – Claes Bang is an art curator in The Square and an art critic in Heresy; Rene Russo is an art insurance investigator in The Affair and an art gallery owner in Buzzsaw; Zawe Ashton is a wannabe art curator in Buzzsaw and an art gallery assistant in Nocturnal Animals; Jake Gyllenhaal is a novelist previously married to an art gallery owner in Nocturnal Animals and an art critic in Buzzsaw – could perhaps be seen as a comment on the incestuous nature of the artworld.

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that Crown had earlier donated to the museum, revealing underneath the real Monet he stole at the beginning of the film. Surprisingly, even as the film’s high production values and artworld setting acknowledge the commodification of art – the replacement of the bank robbery in the original film with an art robbery in the remake clearly spells out the difference between “real money” (the familiar image of hundreds of bills in a suitcase) whose value, no matter how great, remains the same, and art as a repository of speculative value and thus worth infinitely more – the film also posits art as a kind of ur-value that determines other values (such as the value or authenticity of romantic feelings or a character’s moral integrity) while remaining itself “outside” the realm of commodity capitalism. This ambivalence underlying the film’s image of art as, at one and the same time, thoroughly commodified and outside commodification, is evident in the figure of Crown himself. Although there is always something revolting about excessive wealth there is nothing vulgar about Crown: his main reason for stealing is not greed but the old-fashioned thrill a gambling addict feels at the sight of the casino roulette. That Crown is not your run-of-the-mill thief but a “real art lover” is hinted at in an early scene, in which Crown is sitting alone in the museum, admiring van Gogh’s Noon: Rest from Work (After Millet) (1890). When a museum guard jokes that everyone else is lining up to see the Monet, Crown responds that he prefers “his haystacks.” We are meant to see Crown as a true “art connoisseur” with a personal taste that does not necessarily overlap with the public’s taste, someone for whom the value of art is personal (“my haystacks”) and thus unquantifiable. The ambivalence of Crown’s character – a man whose appreciation of art’s exhibition value has allowed him to amass a fortune, which, in turn, allows him the luxury to appreciate art for its cult value – is just one instance of the multiple reversals of an artwork’s cult and exhibition value in The Affair, whose narrative revolves around one major question: what is for sale, and what is not. Although the very presence of Catherine, an art insurance investigator, foregrounds the exchange/exhibition value of art (her profession exists because under capitalism art is a hot commodity) the film also draws on a long tradition of art as a metaphor for romantic love. Ironically, Crown’s ostentatious gestures of stealing very expensive paintings, only to return them later, draw on art’s exchange value to signify that which supposedly has no exchange value – romantic love. The film playfully turns on its head the assumption, central to discourses of art forgery, that “the original” is always to be found underneath “the copy/forgery” when the painting Poker Sympathy (Cassius Coolidge, 1903) turns out to conceal not a real but a fake Monet. It also invites us to witness the swapping of an artwork’s exhibition

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value (the original Monet hanging in the museum) with its cult value: when Crown returns the stolen, real Monet to the museum it remains for a brief period of time invisible, covered by a fake Pissarro, i.e. the Monet’s “exhibition value” remains, paradoxically, hidden, becoming visible again only when Crown sets off the museum sprinklers. Ultimately, as formulaic as The Affair is it also succeeds in popularizing philosophical questions about reality and appearance, original and copy, cult value versus exhibition value, offering a playful lesson in philosophy of art that takes us from Plato’s writings on “truth” and “art” as “mere imitation” to Benjamin’s reflections, in The Work of Art essay (1936), on the decline of aura and the substitution of “cult value” with “exhibition value.”15 In Headhunters, too, the artworld – framed in the familiar terms of truth/ authenticity versus illusion/falseness – provides a symbolic frame within which to explore a married couple’s feelings, whose authenticity is judged in terms of the authenticity of an artwork. A successful headhunter (Roger Brown) for the company Pathfinder uses his position to lure in wealthy executives, learn about their assets (art), and schedule appointments for them with other clients, during which he breaks into their homes and swaps their artwork for a counterfeit. Roger’s wife (Diana), an art gallery owner, introduces him to a former executive (Greve) for a Danish GPS tech company, and shares with Roger that Greve has asked her to authenticate a lost Rubens painting that he inherited. While stealing the painting from Greve’s home Roger discovers that his wife is having an affair with Greve. The rest of the film follows Roger and Greve as they pursue each other relentlessly until Roger eventually kills Greve – who, it turns out, was still working for his Dutch company and trying to steal corporate secrets from Pathfinder – and repairs his broken marriage. Headhunters reverses the value of authenticity that The Affair assigned to artwork and personal feelings. When, early in the film Greve fabricates an emotional backstory for the Rubens involving a German officer’s forbidden love affair with a Jewish woman, thus foregrounding the painting’s aura at the expense of its exchange value, Roger and Diana’s marriage is shown to have a mere “exhibition value” (their feelings are not sincere) as becomes evident when Diana literally exchanges her husband for Greve. However, the later revelation that the Rubens is a counterfeit immediately triggers an inverted reaffirmation of the authenticity of Roger and Diana’s marital 15 Benjamin uses the term “aura” to describe the cult value of an artwork, which relates to the physical presence of the art object in time and space and thus to the object’s history. Benjamin, “The Work of Art.”

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love, which is now presented as not exchangeable: “It was a mistake. It’s you that I want,” Diana tells Roger. Thus, when the artwork is assumed to be authentic the authenticity of the marriage is put into question, but as soon as the painting is revealed to have been forged the authenticity of the marriage is reaffirmed. At first glance, The Best Offer, set in a generically European world of high-end art auctions and focusing on the misanthropic director of an esteemed auction house (Virgil Oldman), seems to have nothing in common with art heist films like The Affair and Headhunters. Virgil is hired by a mysterious young woman (Claire Ibbetson), a severe agoraphobic who has never left her room, to auction off the collection of art and antiques left to her by her parents. Virgil’s initial resentment for the woman gradually melts away as he finds himself drawn to her reclusive ways. A side story involves a young mechanic (Robert) helping Virgil reassemble some odd mechanical parts he finds among Claire’s belongings, while also giving him advice on how to get closer to her. Eventually Virgil falls in love with Claire and convinces her to move in with him. He is so smitten with her that he shows her his spectacular secret collection of women portraits acquired through an ongoing scam with the help of his aging artist friend Whistler. One day Virgil returns home to find Claire and his collection (worth millions) gone, except for an automaton constructed from the mechanical parts Virgil gave to Robert, which plays a message (from Robert) that “there is something real in every forgery.” Virgil now realizes (to his surprise though hardly to ours) that feelings, like art, can be forged and that he is the victim of an elaborate scam by Robert and Claire. Like The Affair and Headhunters, The Best Offer uses its artworld setting to interrogate the authenticity of romantic feelings, exploring the nature of “forgery” both in its figurative and art-historical sense: Virgil’s magnificent collection of women portraits is the result of years of forged appraisals of artworks, while his romance with Claire, in the course of which he “forges” the woman of his dreams, unaware that she is playing him all along, can be read as a version of the Pygmalion myth, refracted through the real historical figure of Jacques de Vaucanson, an eighteenth-century French inventor-artist famous for his impressive automata. But, as Virgil tells one of his clients, all forgers inevitably betray themselves since they are irresistibly tempted to modify the original, thereby revealing their own artistic sensibilities: this is true not only of the art forgers Virgil prides himself on being able to expose, or auctioneer forgers like Virgil himself, but also of Virgil the man, whose “artistic sensibility” and non-existent relationship to women not only finds expression in his forgery of the real Claire into the ideal woman of his

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dreams, but also makes him vulnerable to Claire’s emotional counterfeit. Paradoxically, like in many of the other films analyzed here – note the similarities with Nocturnal Animals, in which, too, art becomes the vehicle through which something real (“authentic feelings”) emerges – The Best Offer exposes various kinds of forgery only to find the greatest truth (Virgil’s love) at the very heart of forgery. Trance follows another, this time younger, art auctioneer (Simon) who gets mixed up with a gang that he helps steal Goya’s Witches in the Air from his auction house. When later the gang leader discovers that the package Simon helped them steal contains only an empty frame, he hires a hypnotherapist (Elizabeth) to force Simon to remember where he hid the painting. Although not explicitly concerned with authenticity and forgery in the artworld, Trance uses art in ways similar to The Affair, Headhunters, and The Best Offer, specifically by drawing a parallel between the interpretation of artworks and the unreliability of memory and feelings, although it is not the stolen painting but another Goya painting – Nude Maja (1795) – that serves as the criterion for evaluating the authenticity of romantic feelings, which, in this case, hangs, rather absurdly, on the representation of pubic hair: the authenticity of Elizabeth’s feelings for Simon depend on whether her shaved pubic hair matches or not Simon’s recollection of his own analysis of the art historical role of pubic hair in Nude Maja (which serves as evidence of the painting’s modernity). The Burnt Orange Heresy, an art scene noir that also explores emotional forgery in terms of art forgery, and vice versa, opens with James Figueras, a charismatic (former) art critic, lecturing to American culture buffs in Milan about art and authenticity. The sequence, which shows James concocting a story about a painting and seducing his largely female American audience into believing every single word of it, dramatizes popular film’s anti-intellectualist tendencies: films set in the artworld suggest repeatedly that art criticism is nothing but pretentious mumbo jumbo. When a charming young woman (Berenice), a former small-town teacher from Minnesota on a European tour, sneaks into one of these lectures James realizes he has met his match. Once James and Berenice become lovers, they travel to the Lake Como estate of a powerful art magnate, who entrusts James with the task of stealing a painting from the studio of Jerome Debney, a famously reclusive artist whose work is worth millions. The story sticks close to the Thomas Crown formula of two lovers playing a cat-and-mouse game with each other and with the spectator as they (and we) try to guess whether or not they are faking their feelings. As in the other films considered here, faking love is intimately connected to forging art: when, at the end of the

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film, James finds himself forced into a corner his only means of escape is to pretend to be an artist and pass off a painting he painted himself as an original Debney. After all, if art is nothing but clever gibberish anyone can be an artist. Insofar as it satirizes art as whatever the gatekeepers of the artworld (critics, curators, historians, and gallerists) say it is, the film offers an art history lesson on institutional theories of art. In Nocturnal Animals, a successful but disenchanted Los Angeles gallery owner (Susan) unhappily married to a businessman (echoes of Headhunters) unexpectedly receives a gift from her first husband Edward, whom she has not heard from in twenty years – the manuscript of his yet unpublished novel. As she begins reading, the film dramatizes scenes from the novel, a brutal crime thriller about a family man (whom Susan imagines as Edward himself), his wife and their teenage daughter terrorized by a gang of violent young men on a road trip through the desert. The film continues the “tradition” of exploring artistic forgery in terms of emotional forgery, and vice versa; however, this time truth and falseness are aligned with particular types of art and art discourses rather than being properties of individual artworks: the LA artworld is presented as inherently false (with Susan’s professional success in it, coupled with her personal unhappiness, as simply another “proof” of its falseness) and juxtaposed with the supposedly “authentic” world of the struggling literary artist (Edward). Ironically, it is precisely through art – albeit through a different art, literature, which is here (naively) positioned as a matter of individual talent rather than an institution with its own internal logic and dominant discourse similar to the “artworld” – that Susan begins to shed her “fake” art persona and becomes emotionally vulnerable. By reawakening Susan’s real feelings, which have presumably been supressed by years of living in the “fake” artworld, only to crush them – setting up a romantic rendezvous and then not showing up – Edward finally takes his revenge on Susan, both for leaving him and for never believing in his literary talent. Significantly, and unlike The Affair, Headhunters, and The Best Offer, Nocturnal Animals presents forgery, both in its art historical and figurative sense, not as the result of certain actions – forging artworks or faking feelings – but as a property of certain discourses, specifically art institutional discourses, or “the artworld” more generally. The story in Velvet Buzzsaw, an artworld satire with horror and supernatural elements, revolves around the usual artworld suspects: art critic Morf Vandewalt; his seasoned art curator friend Gretchen; up-and-coming curator Josephina; and art gallery owner Rhodora Haze. When Josephina stumbles upon the paintings of deceased outsider artist Ventril Dease she decides to put them on the market against his express wishes; before

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long, Dease becomes the artworld’s new darling. Although most artists would die to enjoy this kind of universal critical acclaim Dease spends the rest of f ilm taking methodical revenge, from beyond the grave, for this disrespectful treatment of his work: all who profit from his work (art critics, gallerists, and dealers) meet a horrible though always inventively staged death (paintings come to life and literally attack their victims). Like Nocturnal Animals, Buzzsaw sets up an opposition between “real” art and “fake” art, aligning the former with “outsider art,” depicted as “naturally” expressive, i.e. not requiring special training (Dease uses real blood in his paintings to deal with his trauma of abuse by his father, whom he eventually murdered) and the latter with the kind of elitist, pretentious art courted by the artworld.16 Like Heresy (as well as The Square), Buzzsaw’s satire of the artworld can be said to have a pedagogical function: when a gallery owner mistakes a pile of garbage bags for a brilliant art installation, or when a group of kids on a school trip to the art gallery mistake the dead body of a curator lying in a pool of blood next to an art installation called “Sphere” as part of the exhibit, the film is not just poking fun at the difficulty of telling art from life, but also commenting on the status of art in the post-conceptual condition. While the accuracy of the film’s portrayal of an art critic’s life as one of luxury and prestige is questionable, the more relevant question here has to do with the possible reasons for the film’s depiction of art (and of the artist) as powerful in a very real way. How do we account for the fact that even as it mocks the irrelevance, vulgarity, willful esoterism, and navel-gazing of the artworld the film also insists that art is powerful and dangerous, even physically so (witness the series of violent “death-by-artwork”)? While Nocturnal Animals also explores the question of art’s power or relevance – the question whether art can make one feel something, anything – it does so in a personal/psychological key. The genre of satire, however, has the power to translate such private, psychological questions into broader questions about the role of art in a neoliberal society, one in which profit determines the “value” of art. Buzzsaw does this through the structuring absence at the center of the film – Dease – about whom two facts are significant: he is an outsider artist, and he is dead. It is not just that through Dease the film perpetuates the myth of the tormented artist, whose art is considered more “authentic” not because it is particularly original or technically accomplished but because it expresses his traumatized personal experience (where trauma 16 In yet another film that centers around this dichotomy, Junebug (Phil Morrison, 2005), an art dealer in outsider art tries to convince an outsider artist in a small Southern town to represent him.

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is assumed to be more “valuable” than other kinds of experience), or that the film dramatizes the revenge fantasy of every living artist spurned by the establishment – although it certainly does both of these things. More importantly, however, Dease’s double absence – his outsider and posthumous status – can be seen as an attempt to imagine a place outside the artworld, outside the “fake” art market. What is at stake here is not how to tell an original work of art from a copy/forgery, or art (illusion) from reality, but how to tell “true art” (true illusion) from “fake art” (fake illusion). The criterion for doing so, Buzzsaw suggests, is not internal but external to the artwork: it is a matter of the status of the artwork vis-à-vis the artworld, its place “inside” or “outside” it, and of the artwork’s social and political meaning and use. Indeed, films like Nocturnal Animals, The Burnt Orange Heresy, Velvet Buzzsaw, and The Square are no longer concerned with distinguishing art from reality, deception from truth, but rather with distinguishing “real art” from “fake art.” They introduce audiences to what Peter Osborne calls “the post-conceptual condition, or the logic of high capitalism.”17 Osborne defines contemporary art as “post-conceptual art,” a term that, contrary to the term “postmodern,” “is not to be understood in either a merely chronological or even an exclusively temporal sense [although its referents can be chronologically charted].”18 The defining features of the post-conceptual condition, derived from the critical legacy of conceptual art, are the lack of any limitations on art’s possible material means, the absence of clearly definable criteria for aesthetic evaluation in accordance with which particular objects can be classified as “art,” and the impossibility (or irrelevance) of historical periodization.19 Insofar as it is not conditioned by, or explainable through, a pre-existing idea of art, post-conceptual art “is not the name for a particular type of art so much as the historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general.”20 It is this post-conceptual territory that The Square explores. The opening sequence, in which a journalist (Anne) interviews Christian, chief curator of a modern art museum in Stockholm, about the challenges of running a museum – is a veritable lesson in post-conceptual art and relational aesthetics. When Anne asks Christian to explain to her the catalogue 17 Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/thepostconceptual-condition. Borrowing the title of his book from Lyotard and Jameson, Osborne argues that capitalism appears far from entering a phase that could usefully be described as “late.” 18 Ibid. 19 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 48. 20 Ibid. 3, 51

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description of the museum’s exhibition of post-conceptual artist Robert Smithson,21 Christian struggles to respond. Eventually he points to her bag: if we were to move your bag from “here” (outside the space of exhibition) to “there” (inside the space of exhibition), he asks her, would that transform the bag into a work of art? This question, along with the catalogue references to “space and non-space,” “site and non-site,” “exhibition and non-exhibition,” foregrounds the power of institutional discourse to define the nature and boundaries of art, a subject the film continues to explore by raising questions about “authenticity” (e.g. the question about the difference between “art” and “marketing”), which double as moral and ethical questions pertaining to Christian’s personal and professional integrity. In line with the other films examined here, even as The Square satirizes art in the post-conceptual condition – its lack of an essential, definable nature and its imbrication with the laws of the market – it continues to use art as a criterion for ethical and moral evaluation by rendering the question of the social function of art synonymous with the question of Christian’s moral redemption.22 While in The Affair “authenticity” and “truth” were still embodied in something real and tangible (e.g. a real Monet versus a fake Monet), in The Square, Heresy, Buzzsaw, and Nocturnal Animals they are relegated to the realm of intentions, beliefs, attitudes and moral choices; in short, what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics.” Although Bourriaud is not explicitly referenced in the film, the artwork “The Square” is a perfect example of Bourriaud’s “relational art,” an artistic practice that aims to promote new emancipatory social relations.23 “The Square,” of course, references another controversial artwork, Malevich’s “Black Square.” As similar as the two artworks appear to be, however, their respective aesthetics – relational aesthetics and Suprematism – could not be more different. Compare the artist’s statement accompanying “The Square,” proclaiming the square “a sanctuary of trust and caring” within which “we all share equal rights and obligations,” with Malevich’s description of “Black Square” in his 1927 book The Non-Objective World: “In the year 1913, trying desperately to free 21 “Exhibition: Non-Exhibition, an evening conversation that explores the dynamics of the “exhibitable,” and the construction of publicness in the spirit of Robert Smithson’s Site/NonSite. From non-site to site, from non-exhibition to exhibition, what is the topos of Exhibition: Non-Exhibition in the moments of “mega exhibition”? 22 The connection the film draws between the personal and the political is especially evident in rehearsal scenes – scenes in which characters practice alone a speech they will deliver later publicly – which feature both in The Square and Heresy. 23 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics.

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art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.” Relational art’s self-proclaimed ethical ambitions could not be further from Suprematism’s credo of “art-for-art’s sake,” the search for a new painterly language made up solely of shapes and colours. The Square offers a critical commentary on the pitfalls of relational art, whose emphasis on “interactivity” and “process,” taken to its logical extreme, removes the artwork from lived experience, rendering it as abstract as Suprematist art, which insisted on the supremacy of colour and shape in painting and refused to be “distracted” by representing real scenes or real people. As an instance of relational art, “The Square,” the promotional campaign for which consists of a video showing a sweet, Scandinavian looking little girl getting blown up to pieces, seems to be successful. Its success is measured by the liberal outrage it triggers both in print and online media: at the end of the film, Christian, having resigned from his curatorial post, is seen giving a press interview during which he struggles to defend himself both from angry audience members who support his resignation (where is your solidarity with the most vulnerable members of society, a woman in the audience chastises him) and from journalists who view his resignation as a form of self-censorship. And yet, even as “The Square” appears to have attained the goal of relational art – raising awareness, sparking public debate – the film comes down squarely on the side of the visceral, unapologetically aggressive, unmediated by pity or indignation antagonistic aesthetic of Oleg’s “monkey-man” (which it shares with Dease’s “killer paintings”) and thus on the side of critics of relational aesthetics like Claire Bishop.24 Relational art like “The Square” turns out to be so worked out conceptually in its attempt to collapse the border between art and lived experience – to be “true” – that it ends up hermetically sealed from any notion of artistic truth. Like Buzzsaw, which aligns art with inauthenticity and “outsider art” with truth, because of its lack of sublimation or even aggression (Dease’s paintings literally kill people) and because of its location outside the art establishment (whose attempts to appropriate it are brutally punished), The Square is also preoccupied with the difference between “real art” and “fake art” and with art’s growing social and political irrelevance. It is because art’s power or relevance seems to be dwindling that the desire to regain it takes either the form of fantasy (a dangerous art that can literally kill you, as in Buzzsaw) or the form of “relational art,” whose 24 According to Claire Bishop, relational art and aesthetics ultimately enhance the power and status of the curator. Bishop, “Antagonism.”

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relevance is measured in similarly literal terms by the number of clicks, likes, and comments in response to the social media marketing campaign for “The Square.” Insofar as films set partially or entirely in the artworld continually stage debates about truth, authenticity, deception, and illusion, and explore the philosophical problem of the “value” of art – both its “vulgar,” material value (how much a certain artwork is “worth”) and its immaterial, i.e. political, moral, metaphysical, or spiritual value – they can be seen as instances of a cinematic philosophy of art. We can distinguish two versions of this cinematic philosophy of art: 1) films that, like philosophy, associate art with the possibility of deception and use art as a way of introducing the “Problem of Indiscernible Counterparts” into the narrative; and 2) films that dramatize what Peter Osborne calls “the post-conceptual condition”, in which the main philosophical question is no longer how to distinguish art from reality but, rather, how to distinguish “real art” from “fake art”. Thus, while some films (The Thomas Crown Affair, Headhunters, The Best Offer, Trance) still construe this dichotomy in traditional art historical and Platonic terms25 – in terms of the difference between a “true original” and a “copy”/”forgery” – other films (Nocturnal Animals, The Burnt Orange Heresy, Velvet Buzzsaw, The Square) reframe this dichotomy in terms that go beyond art history, beyond the issue of technological reproducibility for instance, and touch upon questions of ethics, moral integrity, and social or political responsibility. These films no longer ask whether a given artwork is an original or a copy, but rather whether the social, political, or moral function and role of a particular artist, artwork or art practice is authentic, true, or morally desirable: here, descriptors like “true” and “authentic,” along with their opposites, no longer pertain to the artwork itself, but rather to the attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and intentions surrounding the artwork and endowing it with a particular meaning or importance. We cannot but wonder to what extent cinema’s growing preoccupation with art’s social and political (ir)relevance might disguise cinema’s own anxieties, anxieties that cinema disavows by regularly taking stock of art’s precarious place in the neoliberal landscape in films like the ones discussed here. 25 The Goldfinch (2019) also explores Art, Beauty, Love, and Immortality in explicitly Platonic terms: consider, for instance, that the most important part of Theo’s apprenticeship at Hobie’s antique shop involves learning to distinguish authentic antique restorations from forgeries patched together from parts of different antiques to create fake antiques that look real. Also, we find out that precisely at the time of Theo’s unfortunate lapse into shady dealings in antique forgeries, the Goldfinch painting, supposed to represent Truth, Beauty, Immortality, was stolen (by Theo’s friend Boris) and replaced by a school textbook. A coincidence? Hardly.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 (1970). Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013 (1946). Baudelaire, Charles. “La Modernité,” Oeuvres completes. Paris: Robert Lafont, 1980. Benjamin, Walter (1968), “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. 217–253. Bernstein, J.M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002. Danto, Arthur. “Art, Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Art,” Humanities,4, no. 1 (February 1983): 1–2. Danto, Arthur. Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” A Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–584. Freeland, Cynthia. “Art and Moral Knowledge.” Philosophical Topics 25, no.1 (Spring 1997): 11–36. Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. eds. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. New York: Routledge, 1982. 5–11. (1965). Hofstadter, Albert and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Levinson, Jerrold. “Defining Art Historically.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 19, no. 3 (1979): 232–250. Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso, 2013. Osborne, Peter. The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays. London: Verso, 2018. [Online] https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-postconceptual-condition. Trifonova, Temenuga. Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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Weitz, Morris. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (Sept. 1956): 27–35. Zangwill, Nick. Aesthetic Creation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Zuidervaart, Lambert. Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

About the Author Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University. She is the author of the monographs The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema (2020), Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (2014) and The Image in French Philosophy, the edited volumes Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (2018) and European Film Theory (2008), and the novels Tourist (2018) and Rewrite (2014).

4. Ineffability? The Several Vermeers Brigitte Peucker Abstract This chapter focuses on the concept of “ineffability” in the reception of Vermeer and how it plays out in the cinema. Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility is the backdrop for my discussion. One area of concern involves the “handmade” copy that is also technological, focusing especially on the use of the camera obscura in Vermeer. The second and related area is “the fake” – the representation in films by Greenaway and Van den Berg of Han van Meegeren, the man who faked Vermeer’s work. The chapter examines the way films about Vermeer move between the affirmation and denigration of ineffability in art and what this means for their self-understanding. Keywords: Vermeer, ineffability, camera obscura, the fake, Walter Benjamin

The word “ineffability” is first cousin to the French expression “je ne sais quoi,” both in the area of literal taste – in gastronomy, say – or in the reception of a work of art. In its primary meaning, then, “ineffability” suggests a certain something that exceeds our linguistic grasp. A secondary meaning associates the term with the Bible, where it occurs in formulations such as “the ineffable name of Jehovah,” which is taboo. Ineffability’s connection to both religion and art brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s notion of “aura.” Benjamin connects aura with the traditional artwork, which, in its earliest forms, was a cult object used in ritual. To the term “aura” there accrue multiple definitions in Benjamin’s writing: time and again he encircles it with descriptive language that never fully grasps it, that never fully elucidates its meaning. In The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility, aura famously appears as a “strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be,”1 a formulation that likely 1 Benjamin, The Work of Art, 23.

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch04

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derives its terms from Georg Simmel’s observation that “all art brings about a distancing from the immediacy of things: it allows the concreteness of stimuli to recede and stretches a veil between us and them just like the fine bluish haze that envelops the mountains.”2 But when for Simmel, I suggest, a veil stretches between observer and the work of art – when he describes it as enshrouded by a veil — Benjamin, in turn, relies on a Romantic metaphor from a fragment by Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798). Novalis’s fragment tells the story of aspirants to the cult of Isis (or the Egyptian Neith, of Sais), a goddess who, for the German Romantics, personified a Nature whose veil cannot be lifted. Veiling the origins of his formulation of the aura, Benjamin recurs to the Romantic tradition he is struggling to leave behind in this essay about technological reproduction. Like Nature, then, for Benjamin the traditional work of art is, at its core, ineffable and it is apprehended in contemplative immersion. Benjamin’s project of de-sublimation is to replace this work with the products of technology, especially film, whose spectator has, perforce, a different relation to the work. Benjamin famously disdains the legendary Chinese painter Wu Daozi who, sitting before his painted landscape in contemplative immersion, gets up and enters its space. He references this story on several occasions in his writing, most notably in the 1936 version of the Work of Art essay, where the painter’s entry into pictorial space figures the mode of spectatorship promoted by the auratic art of painting.3 In Benjamin’s reading, the Chinese legend illustrates the immersive contemplation elicited by painting rather than Benjamin’s preferred analytical attitude, an attitude generated by the mass medium of film. This propensity for immersive gazing is brilliantly illustrated by two episodes in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). Here, a young painting student wearing Kurosawa’s signature hat is lost in the contemplation of Van Gogh paintings in a museum – only to become literally immersed in them as the student makes his way through several animated Van Gogh landscapes, themselves products of technology. But at the conclusion of this vignette the student extricates himself from the paintings in which he has been entrapped, rejects immersion, picks up his painting materials and leaves the museum. The implication is that he will henceforth pursue another art form, illustrating Kurosawa’s own rejection of painting for moviemaking.4 An original painting, unlike a reproduction, is “authentic,” Benjamin argues: it is the “here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a 2 Simmel qtd in Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 115. 3 Benjamin, 40. 4 Prince, The Warrior’s Camera, 310.

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particular place”5 that confers authenticity. No technological reproduction has access to authenticity. If made by hand, a reproduction is termed a forgery, which likewise cannot participate in the authenticity of the original, the “here and now” of the work, the history to which it has been subject. Technological reproduction removes the art object from tradition and “substitutes a mass existence for the unique existence”6 of the “authentic” work.7 It is well-known that for Benjamin and other adherents of the Frankfurt School, “authenticity” is a bad object, a term associated with Heidegger, Jaspers, and other German writers whose politics are unacceptable. Interestingly, for Theodor Adorno these writers reach for something behind language, something that evades its grasp.8 But they can only gesture towards the ineffable. It is this tradition of the work of art as unique, auratic – and finally, ineffable – within which Western art criticism and connoisseurship have traditionally functioned. As Benjamin sees it, film has the welcome capacity to undermine that tradition. Mass-produced, a product of technology, it severs its ties with traditional culture, creating a potentially emancipated spectator whose vision is not veiled, not immersed, and who does not participate in the cult of art. If Benjamin’s views on film in his Work of Art essay are based on pre-1910 films and the 1920’s avantgarde, it should also be noted that Benjamin was aware that film may deliberately seek to align itself with high culture, that it may aspire to the auratic status of the cultic object,9 thus denying its technological basis and – for Benjamin – its political efficacy. As we shall see, films that take artists as their subject enter into a complex relation with the artist and the technological determinants of the medium as Benjamin understood them. Using Benjamin’s juxtaposition of painting with film, this chapter takes up some ways in which “reproduction” – technological or otherwise – may be understood in relation to Vermeer’s work, asking what happens to the aura in the process. It looks at documentary and narrative films that focus on his work, films that vary in their response to the notion of ineffability as it applies to painting, a notion that underpins connoisseurship, art history and the art market alike. Posing questions about the nature of Vermeer’s work, the fraught issue of the camera obscura in its 5 Benjamin, 21. 6 Ibid., 22. 7 Ibid. 8 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 48. 9 See Peucker, Aesthetic Spaces, 10–14.

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production, and the reverential response it elicits, these films do not fully resolve – as Benjamin never did – the enigma of the aura. Does film strive to participate in painting’s ineffability, or to destroy it? Some films that focus on Vermeer participate in the reverence that many art historians feel for his work. Vermeer: Master of Light (Joseph Krakora, 2001), a documentary narrated in an awestruck tone by Meryl Streep, asks the question “what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer?” It opens with a montage of images from Vermeer’s View of Delft (1659–1661), interspersing close-ups of the painting with photographic images of the city. The camera moves into, over, and out of Vermeer’s painting in the style typical of the art documentary. Fragments of interiors – carpets, chandeliers – are used to illustrate Vermeer’s masterful use of light and color. The word “intimacy” is repeatedly invoked to describe the pull of these interiors: art historians from Harvard (Seymour Slive) and Oxford (David Ball) describe the paintings as “magical and mysterious,” and Streep as narrator concludes that there is “no single answer” to the question of what makes Vermeer’s paintings unique. As in the work of art historians Lawrence Gowing and Bryan Wolf, mention is made of the self-contained absorption of the women who are Vermeer’s subjects.10 A pinhole in the canvas of Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (1670–1672) that either marks Vermeer’s use of a perspective aid – or the use of a camera obscura – is mentioned but downplayed, and it is suggested that the artist was attempting to emulate the effects of the camera obscura, – but that he did not paint from it. In various ways, it is claimed, there is a manipulation of the image that marks Vermeer’s paintings as “originals,” works not produced with machines of vision. What is unique about Vermeer’s work is celebrated – one might almost say “worshipped” – and Vermeer’s art is seen as ineffable, incapable of being captured in language. Streep’s voice-over and the opinions of Vermeer experts encircle but do not penetrate the work. Nevertheless, the soundtrack sutures the film into a whole, despite its heterogeneous images consisting of talking heads, close-ups of paintings, and real landscapes. Sound covers over and contains a fragmented film form. In keeping with Master of Light’s ideas concerning Vermeer, but different in terms of its formal program, Jon Jost’s All the Vermeers in New York (1990) depicts the contemplative spectatorship of Vermeer paintings against the backdrop of a turbulent financial world and an art world at odds with the 10 Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer, 43; Bryan Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing, 173. It should be noted that Wolf’s book couches its remarks about the inviolability of women in an argument about commodity culture and modern forms of seeing.

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view of art on which it is posited. The film is centered on young women who aspire to be practitioners of the arts and on one in particular, Anna, who regularly visits the Vermeer Room of the Metropolitan Museum, where she sits in silent contemplation before his paintings. There, a stockbroker, for whom this same room is a refuge from “the money racket,” becomes fixated on a perceived resemblance between Anna and the girl in Vermeer’s Portrait of a Young Woman and promptly falls in love. Interestingly, the Vermeer Room’s function as shelter from the commerce that constitutes New York for this film and the auratic view of art held by the film stand in contrast to a deliberately disjunctive film form that calls attention to its disjunctive nature, especially in its soundtrack. There are overlapping sounds in the manner of Robert Altman, irritating noises, cacophonous but cool jazz riffs, a disconnect between sound and image track, and Anna’s silence, which links her to Vermeer women versus her monologue at the end of the film. These means of creating a disharmonious soundtrack suggest a film form that disrupts and fragments in the manner of Benjamin’s preferred definition of the medium. Further, the film’s narrative never quite comes together. Its trajectory ends in Anna’s return to France, pictured as a flight from American greed despite the fact that she has bilked the stockbroker out of $3000 for her plane ticket. The stockbroker, returning to the Vermeer Room to meet her, has an attack that produces bleeding from the ear (related to the soundtrack, one wonders?) and dies. Ideologically, and in other ways, the film is a mixed bag.11 (A self-styled Indie director, Jost was imprisoned for draft dodging in the 1960s and has identified with the far left, but his current blog argues that the coronavirus is a conspiracy.) The point is that at the center of a film form that is almost avant-garde, there is a valorization of the mystery and aura that surround Vermeer’s paintings. And while the art biz is deliberately demystified in this film, Vermeer paintings in their high-art, museum setting are represented as worthy of being communed with, somehow free of the taint of capital. Perhaps that is because Jost styles himself not just as a film-maker, but also as a painter – roles he clearly keeps separate, however. This is not a film that aspires to be auratic. It is true to its medium. Against the backdrop of Benjamin’s thinking, we ask ourselves how the notion of ineffability is staged against verisimilitude and naturalism in Vermeer’s art-historical and cinematic reception. A major area of concern is the status of the original painting that is also technological, a tracing, as it were, of reality, since Vermeer is thought by many to have used a camera 11 A self-styled Indie director, Jost was imprisoned for draft dodging in the 1960s and has identified with the far left, but his current blog argues that the coronavirus is a conspiracy.

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obscura in creating his work. David Hockney, Philip Steadman, and Martin Kemp, among others, embrace this view, which is opposed by Vermeer scholars like Jean-Luc Delsaute and Jorgen Wadum.12 In Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001), David Hockney, having read about the use of such practices by Canaletto and Vermeer, elaborates his ideas concerning the use of optical equipment to create living projections for paintings in the early fifteenth century and onward.13 Hockney himself experimented with a camera lucida (patented by William Hyde Wollaston in 1806) for drawing portraits, learning over time how to light them while studying the work of other artists for optical effects. New technology, specifically the use of the computer, makes such techniques newly visible, enabling us to see these works in a new way. Using color photocopiers and desktop printers, works separated in time and place were put side by side, revealing stylistic connections that had escaped notice. The angry reactions of most art historians to Hockney’s suggestion that the use of optical equipment and projected images was widespread was unsurprising since such practices undermined notions of original genius, of the “magic” and “mystery” – the ineffability and auratic nature – of traditional works of art, Vermeer’s in particular. But Hockney counters with the view that optical projections do not make marks, that only the hand of the artist can do that. As Hockney puts it, “artists had a tool and [. . .] they used it in ways previously unknown to art history.”14 In his amply illustrated book, Hockney enumerates the painterly characteristics produced when machines of vision are introduced into the painted image. With reference to Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1657–1661), Hockney cites the relatively large size of the foreground figure versus the objects painted in soft focus or out of focus. For Hockney, the contrast between the out-of-focus basket in the foreground and the carefully painted basket hanging on the wall is “a distortion Vermeer would not have seen with the naked eye. Nor could he have rendered the ‘halo’ effect of the out-of-focus highlights seen here on the basket, the bread, the tankard and the jug, unless he had seen it!”15 Peter C. Sutton, an American specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch art, with whom Hockney corresponded, points out the convergence of parallel lines at the edges of Vermeer’s canvases as evidence for his use of the camera 12 Hockney, Secret Knowledge, 12; Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera; see also Snyder, Eye of the Beholder, 143–179. American photographer Joseph Pennell was the first to suggest that Vermeer used the camera obscura, in 1891. 13 Hockney, 1. 14 Ibid., 17. 15 Ibid., 58.

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obscura.16 Hockney also entered into a correspondence with Martin Kemp, art historian at Oxford, which is reprinted in his book. Applauding Hockney’s explorations, especially as they are consonant with Hockney’s own work, Kemp emphasizes the reliance of artists on geometrical foreshortening and perspective devices, arguing that it is difficult to know why earlier artists resorted to perspectival geometry if lenses could have been used to do the work.17 After 1555 however, during Vermeer’s time, Kemp argues that the representation of complex objects made a reliance on perspective alone increasingly difficult. Kemp added that the lack of evidence concerning the practice of the artists mentioned by Hockney – especially Caravaggio and Vermeer – suggests that some representational strategy has been suppressed. In the case of Vermeer, the absence of any extant drawings, the lack of information about his early life and whether and where he studied painting, contribute to the enigma. The painter actually at the center of Hockney’s research is Caravaggio and his study suggests the missing links between Vermeer and northern Caravaggism explored by Rudolf van den Berg’s film A Real Vermeer (2016), discussed below. In his book Vermeer’s Camera (2001), Philip Steadman meticulously explores the fraught topic of Vermeer and the camera obscura.18 His argument is based on the perspective geometry of a number of the artist’s interiors. Steadman reconstructed the three-dimensional spaces of ten Vermeer paintings and determined a common scale for these spaces, focusing on the dimensions of the architecture and the scale of the furniture and objects in the rooms. The conclusion Steadman came to is that the ten paintings he examined depict the same room, most likely Vermeer’s studio in his mother-in-law Maria Thins’s house.19 Steadman reports that he easily located the perspectival vanishing point and the visual pyramid at the apex of the vanishing point in all ten paintings. If the perspective lines are carried back to meet the back wall of the room, Steadman argues, they form a rectangle on the wall the exact size of Vermeer’s canvases. From this astonishing discovery, Steadman postulates that a cubicle form of camera obscura was used in making the works, with a camera lens at the viewpoint of each painting and the back wall of the room forming a projection screen. Says Steadman: “The projected images are the same size as Vermeer’s canvases, 16 Ibid., 241, correspondence with Peter Sutton. 17 Martin Kemp, letter to Hockney of 1 October 1999, in Hockey, 234. 18 At that time, Steadman was a professor Of Urban Built Form Studies at University College, London, with a specialty in geometry in architecture. 19 Steadman, Art Optics, 2.

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because he has traced them,”20 arguing that only the geometrical optics of the camera obscura account for this peculiarity of the paintings. In order to arrive at his conclusions, Steadman and assistants built a scale model of the room – Maria Thins’s house was destroyed by fire – and also made use of a model of the room built by the BBC for a documentary on Vermeer in 1989.21 For Steadman, what is at issue is Vermeer’s astonishing naturalism – he does not argue that Vermeer never departs from what he sees before him. Like Lawrence Gowing, Steadman believes that Vermeer resorted to the camera obscura for purposes of style, not in order to achieve mimetic accuracy.22 In an interview of 2003, Steadman says he will resort to computer simulations in his continuing research on seventeenth century Dutch optical methods.23 Steadman’s desire was notably acted upon by Tim Jenison, a Texan who designs computer graphics and 3-D modeling software, and documented in the film Tim’s Vermeer (2013). Tim is intent on proving that he can produce “a Vermeer” if the material conditions and optical devices he designs and constructs are accurate. Both Steadman and Hockney are influences; Hockney appears several times in the film, where he serves as a sounding board for Tim concerning his findings. At the beginning of his experiments, Tim’s view of Vermeer as an “unfathomable genius” belongs to the discourse of ineffability surrounding the artist: he mentions the auratic “glow” that emanates from the “self-contained” Music Lesson (1662–1665), which he is determined to reproduce. But for Tim, “Vermeer painted like a camera sees” and the “glow” is compared to that of video images on a screen. It is not surprising that a video engineer, used to light emanating from the image itself – to the interior “glow” of video – would be especially fascinated by Vermeer’s use of light: “every subtlety of light is recorded,” he says in voice-over. “Could Vermeer have seen absolute brightness the way a light meter can?” Tim asks. Tim’s project is as obsessive as Hockney’s and Steadman’s. Modestly referring to himself as a “video guy” – not a painter – Jenison spent five years and seemingly limitless funds on his project (2008–2013), painstakingly utilizing only materials that would have been available to Vermeer. Despite the use of intricate measurements derived from the paintings to determine 20 Ibid., 3. See also “An Interview with Philip Steadman, “Essential Vermeer 3.0, 1–5. Here, Steadman also addresses the objections made to his conclusions by art historians Walter Liedtke and Jorgen Wadum who, he claims, failed to understand “the central geometrical argument” of his book, Vermeer’s Camera, 4. 21 Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera, 133. 22 Steadman interview, 3. 23 Ibid..

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the contours of the studio room, its construction alone took 213 days. The furniture and windows were meticulously constructed by Tim himself, while the carpet and other objects were reproduced by Dutch artisans, and so forth. No expense was spared; no shortcuts were taken. For the human figures – necessarily not the figures in the actual painting – Tim enlisted his daughter and a friend. Tim used his knowledge of digital imaging and light to construct a camera obscura of his own design, fitted out with mirrors that could reproduce Vermeer effects. And Tim is, in fact, able to produce a rather creditable “Vermeer,” a technological reproduction of The Music Lesson. Critical of those for whom “art and technology must never meet,” Tim sees himself as a “technologist” who uses digital technology to learn all he knows about Vermeer. One hundred and thirty days were devoted to the careful painting of the images cast by Tim’s camera obscura and, at the end of this process, Vermeer was no longer an unfathomable genius for Tim: instead, he became a “fathomable genius.” Then, almost miraculously, after Tim applied varnish to the finished painting, the glow appeared and “everywhere was magic,” as Tim puts it. Although produced according to what Tim knew about Vermeer’s formula, it is nevertheless the varnish that confers the auratic glow. For Walter Benjamin, Tim’s attempt to use technology and carefully researched materials to reproduce an “authentic” work would be both impossible and misguided. But does the project perpetuate the cult of the aura? When we take Tim’s process into account, it becomes clear that he has de-auraticized the work and affirmed his own medium, even if Vermeer remains a genius in his eyes. Tim’s technological reproduction of The Music Lesson is far removed from the fake Vermeers made by the infamous art “faker,” Han van Meegeren. As far as we know, no optical equipment was used to produce his fakes: they were handmade, the product of craft, if not art. They are not forgeries, says the Van Meegeren of Rudolf van den Berg’s film A Real Vermeer, A Story That Is Almost True (2016): they are fakes. A forgery is the handmade reproduction of an extant work, while a fake is a new work painted in the spirit and style of the artist imitated – a point made time and again by the world’s most notorious “fakers,” including Elmyr de Hory and Guys Ribes. Van den Berg’s film conforms in large part to the contours of Van Meegeren’s life story, give or take a few children, discreet name changes, and a suppressed politics. An artist who was condescended to by art critics for a popular early work, Princess Juliana’s Fawn (1922), Van Meegeren eventually takes to making “Vermeers” for profit as revenge against his critics. Having stumbled on an example of Caravaggism while in the south of France, Van den Berg’s Van Meegeren thinks he has found Vermeer’s link to Caravaggio and thus a key to Vermeer’s early religious work.

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While he has a love of the Old Masters, Van Meegeren has no understanding of modernist art: predictably, Picasso is made the butt of Van Meegeren’s jokes. Unfortunately, his preference for the Old Masters and dislike of Picasso’s entartete Kunst (degenerate art) is one the real Van Meegeren shared with Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. After World War II, the real Van Meegeren was accused of treason for having sold his Supper at Emmaus to the Nazis (1937, later certified by critics as a Vermeer). As Van den Berg’s film would have it, Van Meegeren “confesses” to having faked The Supper at Emmaus in order to escape execution for treason. He must prove that he can imitate Vermeer’s work successfully by giving a painting demonstration before a committee. Acquitted of treason but convicted of faking a Vermeer (he made other “Vermeers,” as well as fakes of other Dutch Golden Age artists), Van Meegeren was given a light prison sentence and a large fine. Van Meegeren’s prison term was light because his crime was perceived not to be against the State, but against art critics such as Abraham Bredius, who was adamant that van Meegeren’s The Supper at Emmaus is a Vermeer, perhaps the best Vermeer, since “such unity of form is a hallmark of the highest art,” as he says in the film. Exposed as a Van Meegeren, the painting loses its value – except as a masterful fake. The film gives Van Meegeren’s already dramatic life a few additional spins and it omits others – recall the subtitle to the effect that the film’s narrative is “almost true.”24 Most notably, it neglects to add that Van Meegeren really did support fascist ideas, that his “confession” concerning tricking Hermann Goering was an act. Ultimately, the film wants to recuperate Van Meegeren’s skills at faking, still admired today. By postmodern standards, the film claims, they are works of art. But this is open to debate: while each Van Meegeren fake has a “unique existence,” it also has a falsified history, a falsified “here and now,” as Benjamin would put it. As Jonathan Lopez points out, fakes undermine history not least by interfering with the canon of Western art.25 And it seems obvious that Van Meegeren’s paintings can only be seen as postmodern pastiche if their status as fake were somehow acknowledged by the works themselves, such as in their imagery, signature or title. Since Van Meegeren’s paintings are not copies, they do not fall into the category of “appropriation art” as, for example, Sherrie Levine’s photographic 24 Two notable documentaries about fakers – Orson Welles’s F is for Fake (1973) and Jean-Luc Léon’s A Genuine Forger (2015) – both play with notions of truth, as though to imitate their subjects, De Hory and Ribes, respectively. A recent film, The Last Vermeer (Dan Friedkin, 2019), reveals the fascist politics of Van Meegeren. 25 Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers, 10. See also Haywood, Faking It.

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appropriations of Walker Evan’s photographs or her photographs of Van Gogh paintings do. In the case of Evans, Levine’s camera imposes another layer of technology on his photographs; in the case of the Van Gogh photographs, it remediates the originals. But can Van Meegeren’s fakes, which fooled so many experts, be partially redeemed for producing an uproar in the world of connoisseurship? Perhaps. Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), which includes among its characters a surgeon called Van Meegeren, should certainly be tarred with the brush of postmodernism. Vermeer’s work, Greenaway admits in an interview, has served as a “treasure chest” for his own images since the 1960s, guiding him in “project after project.”26 Following Godard’s lead, Greenaway agrees that Vermeer is the prototype of the film-maker, since his paintings represent a “world of light,” even if his rendering of temporality “pins the world down,” at once arresting and eternalizing the moment. In this same interview, Greenaway mentions another project, “Writing to Vermeer,” which takes up the relation of writing and image – one of the film-maker’s recurrent preoccupations – within the context of Vermeer’s letter paintings. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps to critique the tradition of mimetic accuracy that Greenaway reads in Dutch art, he is intent on locating the place of the real within signification. In The Art of Describing, Svetlana Alpers likens Dutch art to the “pictorial mode of photographs.”27 The realistic image can still serve as a lure for the eye, she argues, since “meaning by its very nature is lodged in what the eye can take in – however deceptive that might be.”28 It is as though Greenaway were playing out Alpers’s contention that, in its most extreme form, approaching trompe l’oeil illusionism, “Dutch art is notoriously subject to confusion with life.”29 Van Meegeren is prey to just such confusion: he creates his Vermeers in the flesh, transposing images of the human figure into the real bodies of tableaux vivants. A surgeon who fancies himself a painter, Greenaway’s Van Meegeren is obsessed with Vermeer’s women: they are said to be his “specialty,” both in the medical and in the aesthetic realms, embodying the voyeuristic attitude toward women in his work identified by art historians. In the earlier works, as Gowing puts it, Vermeer’s paintings record “man’s attention to women”30 in represented acts of spectatorship, 26 Kurpershoek, “Cinema begint bij Vermeer,” transl. Bruno Bollaert, from the Peter Greenaway website, December 1998. 27 Alpers, The Art of Describing, xxi. 28 Alpers, xxiv. 29 Ibid., xxvii. 30 Gowing, Vermeer, 54.

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while in the later paintings, Edward Snow claims, the voyeuristic attention and sexual investment of the artist himself are understood to permeate the scene.31 Van Meegeren as inauthentic Vermeer takes realism to an unprecedented extreme and grotesquely sculpts in human flesh: having amputated one of Alba’s legs, Van Meegeren is prompted by the lack of symmetry this produces in her body to remove the other. Vision spells entrapment for Van Meegeren. Wu Daozi’s immersive contemplation in his painting – scorned by Benjamin – was said to have moved him to enter his work. In postmodern parody, this movement is inverted by Greenaway: contemplative looking is discarded for desirous gazing and the entry into the work becomes the compulsion to bring Vermeer’s women out of the canvas and into the “real” of cinematic narrative. Emergence replaces immersion. In one tableau sequence, Van Meegeren’s recreation of The Music Lesson (1662–1665) is loosely construed, while evoking Vermeer’s painting cinematically in several crucial respects, including the mirrored image of the woman. Consulting a reproduction of the painting, as though to check on the accuracy of their “reproduction,” Catharina and Van Meegeren glance repeatedly from a print to the embodied scene, emphasizing that the surgeon’s art is second-hand. “Stitched and sewn to the music stool,” as Alba puts it, she complains that she is “an excuse for medical experiments and art theory.” The Van Baburen Procuress (1622) that hangs in the background of this scene, a notable example of Caravaggism, alludes to the surgeon’s obsession with illusionism and the real.32 If his mistress Catharina Bolnes (who bears the name of Vermeer’s wife in the f ilm) accedes to his will regarding the transformation of Alba into a Vermeer woman, the surgeon tells her, Catharina will have a place in his “operating theater” and his bed. With this (not unusual) formulation, Greenaway signals another set of art historical and theoretical allusions, allusions that layer the real and the representational.33 Ineffability is no longer at play. Along with Catharina, Van Meegeren himself enacts a tableau vivant: tellingly, it is The Artist in His Studio (1666–1668) with Van Meegeren in Vermeer’s striped, black-and-white doublet. Wearing a red hat and nothing else but earrings, Catharina takes the place of the sedate young woman who embodies Clio, the muse of History enacting an allegory of Fame in Vermeer’s actual painting. The laurel wreath that adorns Clio’s head is rejected in 31 Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 101. 32 Slatkes, “Utrecht and Vermeer,” 81–88. 33 Within the context of Dutch painting, surgery as performance calls to mind the foregrounding of spectatorship in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632).

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favor of the red hat of another erotically charged Vermeer woman, The Girl with the Red Hat (1665–1666) with Catharina’s headgear giving her naked flesh a pornographic cast. Greenaway’s Van Meegeren definitively puts aside the allegorical significance of the female figure in favor of the shock value produced by her naked flesh. Isis is unveiled, we could say. The film parodies the realistic effect that the presence of the human figure already has in Vermeer’s painting.34 Greenaway’s Van Meegeren, like Vermeer in his painting, is positioned with his back to the spectator. The sequence begins as the camera pulls back slowly from an extreme close-up of the black-and-white stripes of the doublet to reveal the entirety of the scene, clearly marking this sequence as cinematic. Periodically, we see the flash of a time-lapse camera, bringing its photographic nature into play. In this sequence, the distinct temporalities of several modes of visual representation are juxtaposed: the celebrated “phenomenon of temporal stasis” implied in Vermeer’s paintings35 is marked by the punctum of photography, subverted by the camera movement of cinema and the devolution of narrative in both cinema and theater. Further, in this recreation of The Artist in His Studio, the notion of Van Meegeren’s operating theater, the enactment of this painting in cinema – its sheer theatricality – and the movie theater are fused, intensifying an allegory of Greenaway’s film-making as postmodern and hybrid. The semantic resonance produced by these overlapping representational systems stresses simulation rather than making real, since the spectator’s awareness of its multiple textualities produces the pronounced artifice endemic to postmodernism that realism in art cannot tolerate. Van Meegeren’s realist project, with the naked female body at its center, is enclosed within Greenaway’s multiple representational brackets that enhance, but also expose, its simulations. The camera itself is bound to the Albertian perspectival system, a system not easily subverted. In A Zed and Two Noughts Greenaway chooses to expose the Albertian model by working within it, intensifying the effect of central perspective the camera produces by exaggerating symmetries in the arrangement of the pro-filmic, thus making his spectator constantly aware of the way the scene is laid out before the eye. In scene after scene, Alba recumbent on her bed is represented at the very center of a symmetrical mise en scène. One effect of juxtaposing a variety of representational modes – hence troping the very idea of representation – is that this excess of artifice creates a foil for the body’s physicality. In this way, Greenaway resembles 34 Alpers, 167. 35 Netta, “The Phenomenon of Time,” 262.

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his character, the second-hand artist and surgeon Van Meegeren, whose material is flesh. We must also ask: is a political point being made here, a reference to the cruel grotesqueries of the Nazis who created artefacts out of the human body? Was Greenaway, who is very well read in art history and theory, aware of the historical Van Meegeren’s sympathy for the Nazis in 1985, when he made the film? What would Walter Benjamin have thought of the kind of film-making Greenaway practices? It is not overtly political and does not dissect social reality in any obvious way, but its manner of calling attention to the cinematic apparatus might almost have redeemed it for Benjamin. Certainly, the form of spectatorship that it produces cannot be immersive, since it “cuts through” the “veil” of mystery, and nullifies the aura perceived to emanate from Vermeer’s works. The literalness of “realism” in the film takes the surgeon’s obsession with Vermeer into the realm of deviance and horror. Is there a sense, one wonders, in which Greenaway’s choice of a surgeon for his false Vermeer is another of the film’s multiple intertextual references – here to The Work of Art, in fact? In Benjamin’s essay, the surgeon or cameraman is the positive counterpart of the magician or painter, a dichotomy based on the difference between their respective relations to reality, imaged as a relation to the human body. Portrayed as a high priest of art, Benjamin’s painter indulges in magical practices and illusions that are distanced from and can have no effect upon reality, portrayed in the essay as a sick body. On the other hand, Benjamin’s cameraman, by cutting deeply into social reality by technological means – by regarding reality with an incisively critical lens, that is – redeems it by laying it open to the view. In an act of redemptive reversal, Benjamin’s gesture of putting the surgical knife into the hands of the cameraman reverses the power structure of painting and cinema. To Benjamin’s mind, the fragmentation produced by the surgeon’s knife is a dissection that enables analytical thinking. The deliberate lack of coherence in Greenaway’s postmodern film, with its borrowing from diverse media – its mediatic dissonance, that is – enables analysis even as it expands the terrain of the moving image. Can Greenaway’s false Vermeer, his surgeon who specializes in cutting, be viewed as a figure of redemption? Not at the level of narrative, certainly, but perhaps at the level of theory. The films we have addressed move between an affirmation and denigration of “ineffability” in the work of Vermeer, and lay bare the technologies and forms of obsessive behavior that are pressed into the service of “unveiling.” Technology – whether in the form of the camera obscura or the digitization effected by computer or video – is inimical to the notion of the self-contained, unique work of art on which the art market capitalizes. Marcel Duchamp

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had this insight, as did Andy Warhol, when they parodied uniqueness – and profited from their knowledge. The handmade fake – which imitates color, tonality, light, brushstroke, composition and other elements of a painter’s style – likewise offends against the originality we associate with “authentic” art, just as it offends against history by falsely inserting itself into a temporal moment when it did not yet exist. In these films, both the “authentic” work of art and the fake serve as foils against which the moving image, filmic or digital, seeks to define itself.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin. Transl. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Delsaute, Jean-Luc, “The Camera Obscura and Painting in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Vermeer Studies, eds. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 111–123. Gowing, Lawrence. Vermeer. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. New York: Penguin Group, 2001. Haywood, Ian. Faking It: Art and the Politics of Forgery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Kurpershoek, “Cinema begint bij Vermeer.” Dec. 1998. Transl. Bruno Bollaert. https://www.sbpg-projects.com/peter-greenaway Lopez, Jonathan. The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Netta, Irene. “The Phenomenon of Time in the Art of Vermeer.” Vermeer Studies: Studies in the History of Art, No. 55: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XXXIII, eds. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 1995. 257-263. Peucker, Brigitte. Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019.

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Prince, Stephen. The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (rev. and expanded edition) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Slatkes, Leonard J. “Utrecht and Delft: Vermeer and Caravaggism.” Vermeer Studies: Studies in the History of Art, No. 55: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XXXIII, eds. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 1995. 81-91. Snow, Edward. A Study of Vermeer (rev. and expanded edition). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Snyder, Laura J. Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2015. Steadman, Philip. Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Steadman, Philip. Art Optics.[Online] http://www.webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/ post/steadman.html. Steadman, Philip. “An Interview with Philip Steadman.” [Online] http://www. essentialvermeer.com/interviews_newsletter/steadman_interview.html. Wadum, Jorgen. “Contours of Vermeer.” Vermeer Studies: Studies in the History of Art, No. 55: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XXXIII, eds. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 1995. 201-223. Wolf, Bryan Jay. Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

About the Author Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. Her most recent book on cinema is Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film (2019).

5.

The Joker at the Museum in Tim Burton’s Batman: Artistic Vandalism in Hollywood1 Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

Abstract This chapter analyzes the aesthetic and political stakes raised by artistic vandalism as practiced by the Joker at the Flugenheim Museum in Gotham City in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). The starting point for this analysis is the use that Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay makes of this scene in Made to be Destroyed (2016), a video exclusively composed of film scenes showing artworks being burnt, smashed, or defaced. While Marclay’s editing work tends to reduce artistic vandalism to the compulsive repetition of the dialectics that connects creation and destruction, the Joker’s playful iconoclasm reveals the symbolic violence exercised by the aesthetic object and the universalist claims of the art museum as an institution. Keywords: vandalism, iconoclasm, avant-garde, museum, Batman, Marclay

“Gentlemen! Let’s broaden our minds!” ‒ The Joker, Batman (1989)

Christian Marclay’s Made to Be Destroyed, or the Joker at the Swiss Institute In the spring of 2016, New York’s Swiss Institute held the exhibition Fade In on the presence of art and the representation of the artist in film and television. 1 A French version of this chapter was previously published in Interfaces: Image-Text-Language 43 (2020). Used with permission of the publisher.

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch05

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Twenty-five artists, including photographer Cindy Sherman, conceptual artist William Leavitt, and video artist Michael Bell-Smith, explored the role of art on screen. In the last room of the gallery, the visitor discovered a film by SwissAmerican artist Christian Marclay entitled Made to Be Destroyed, a 24-minute video composed exclusively of shots showing artworks being destroyed, most often with spectacular violence – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa burnt with a flame-thrower by two totalitarian-looking soldiers in Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium (2002); a classical sculpture smashed with a hammer by a tormented poet in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1932); Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy ruined by a clumsy police lieutenant played by Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun (1988).2 Through extensive archival research, selection, and editing, Made to Be Destroyed reveals a motif to be found in almost every culture: violence against art; what Dario Gamboni refers to as “artistic vandalism,” namely, the “acts of violence carried out voluntarily, by individual or poorly organized agents, without any explicit theoretical or strategic framework, against objects that officially have the status of works of art.”3 While the exhibition aimed to map the influence of cinema and television on the way art is perceived in collective representations, Made to Be Destroyed makes cinema a witness, an archive of the repeated violence to which art has been subjected in history. At the same time, the acts of destruction that these scenes show are both transcended and remotivated by the montage that gives birth to Marclay’s f ilm: through a system of intermedial quotations everything happens as if contemporary art exploited the art of cinema, itself exploiting classical or canonical artworks, in order to articulate the complex dialectical relationship between creation and destruction. In other words, Marclay seems to use montage, “the only true invention of cinema”4 according to Jean-Luc Godard, against cinema itself and its spectacular exploitation of the destruction of artworks: his piece seems to denounce the way cinema compulsively – and literally – repeats the destruction of the aura of the work of art, appropriating its images and techniques and turning them against it. Made to Be Destroyed exposes the way in which a mass medium revels in representing the destruction of 2 Marclay’s piece includes many other scenes: e.g. Song of Songs (1933) by Ruben Mamoulian in which Lily, a young German peasant girl played by Marlene Dietrich, destroys a sculpture of herself made by her lover; An American in Paris (1951) by Vincente Minnelli, in which the character played by Gene Kelly erases a self-portrait he has just drawn in his attic room, and the sack of the church in the city of Vladimir containing the icons of Russian painter Andrei Rublev, in Andrei Tarkovksy’s Andrei Rublev (1969). 3 Gamboni, Un iconoclasme, 7, my translation. 4 Godard qtd in Aumont, “Que reste-t-il du cinéma?,” my translation.

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artworks presented as elitist, thereby adopting a victimized position. In one of the major venues for contemporary art in New York, Marclay does not simply question the relationship between creation and destruction but the way this dialectical relationship is structured by the interaction between the institution, the avant-garde, popular culture, and the market, resulting in an interplay of contestations and reappropriations. However, by extracting these scenes from their original context, his work obliterates the singular reasons that motivate each of these iconoclastic acts, be it the comic awkwardness of a character in a slapstick comedy such as The Naked Gun, the execution of a totalitarian and anti-humanist project in a dystopian society as in Equilibrium, or the expression of a poet’s raging vengeance in Cocteau’s film. In this context, one of the scenes included in Made to Be Destroyed deserves closer examination, as it allows us to consider the relationship between creation and destruction from the point of view of popular culture (rather than of contemporary art): I am referring to the scene in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) in which the Joker transforms himself into a performer and engages in a playful destruction of the art collection of Gotham City’s Flugelheim Museum. By resituating it within the narrative logic and historical context of the film from which it originates, the detailed analysis of this scene of artistic vandalism enables us to consider the silences in Marclay’s Made to Be Destroyed from the perspective of one of its own archives. In particular, it reveals the symbolic violence exercised by the aesthetic object and the way art can become an instrument of cultural domination. The Joker’s rampage through the museum appears to target the alleged universality of art’s humanist values and to denounce the socially determined inequality in the public’s access to art.

The Joker at the Flugelheim Museum, or Iconoclasm in Gotham City Batman traces the genesis of the eponymous character, that is, how Bruce Wayne, the son of a wealthy Gotham City family, became a masked vigilante, a half-man half-bat superhero fighting organized crime and police corruption. The cause of this transformation and vocation is the murder of young Bruce Wayne’s parents in a street mugging, a murder that, as the viewer learns later, was perpetrated by Jack Napier, one of the local mob bosses. During a confrontation with Batman at the beginning of the film, Napier falls into a vat of acid from which he emerges disfigured. Left for dead, he becomes the Joker, a psychopathic clown with green hair, blood-red lips, a dead-white complexion and, after failed surgery, a grotesque and terrifying

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smile. After getting rid of Gotham’s godfather and taking over his criminal organization, he terrorizes the city and intoxicates the population with a gas that causes lethal hilarity – people literally die of laughter. Batman’s early feats spark the interest of a local journalist and photographer, Vicky Vale, who starts investigating the case. As she attempts to meet Batman, Vale falls into a trap set by the Joker at the city’s museum. In this scene, which occurs about halfway through the movie, the Joker and his gang embark on a festive ransacking of the museum, whose imaginary collection includes some of the most celebrated works of Western art: Douglas Volk’s Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (1908, National Gallery of Art, Washington); Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669, National Gallery, London); Edgar Degas’s Two Dancers on Stage (1887, Courtauld Gallery, London) and Grand Arabesque (1880–1890, Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (1662–1663, National Gallery of Art, Washington); Edward Hopper’s Approaching the City (1946, Phillips Collection, Washington); Auguste Renoir’s Pink and Blue (1881, Museu de Arte, São Paulo); Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (1779, Huntington Library, San Marino, California); and Gilbert Stuart’s The Athaneum Portrait (1796, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) are slashed, spray-painted, thrown to the ground, splashed with paint and covered with inscriptions. Only Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954) is spared, perhaps because the character is dressed in purple like the Joker, because Bacon’s painting is inspired by Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, of which he represents a postmodern doppelgänger (just as the Joker is Batman’s evil twin), or because the dark, disturbing atmosphere of Bacon’s painting echoes the Joker’s psyche, creating a feeling of uncanny familiarity. Firstly, within the narrative logic of the film, this attack against sanctioned culture and canonical art makes it possible to present the Joker as the archetype of the “villain,” an essential ingredient in Hollywood superhero movies. After all, the Joker is a lawless criminal, a serial killer who embodies the dark side of American culture and consumer society, as illustrated by this danse macabre on the rubble of Western civilization: he believes in nothing; has no respect for anything; and destroys everything that stands in his way.5 By destroying the foundational works of Western 5 In her study of the figure of the trickster in contemporary cinema, Helena Bassil-Morozow sees in the Joker the embodiment of late capitalist consumer materialism as well as of the perversion of the American Founding Fathers’s democratic ideal: “Poisoned by chemical substances, mauled by plastic surgery, preoccupied with media and absorbed by conceptual art, the Joker

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culture, from Greek sculpture to the Dutch school, French Impressionism and New Realism, the Joker comes to stand for evil, savagery, and barbarism. This scene therefore contributes to the construction of a Manichean vision of the world, leading the spectator to side with Batman, a good man who defends the good people of Gotham City: he embodies law, justice, security and order, especially moral order. If we view this scene through the prism of gender, Batman represents – in spite of his leather suit – what the American literary critic David Leverenz calls the “last real man in America,”6 a supposedly fearless masculine identity that only partly conceals the repression of a more ambiguous identity: he wears a mask and a cape to conceal his identity when he goes out and returns home to live hidden and alone in the company of his old English butler Alfred, following a division between public and private that is reminiscent of the logic of the closet analyzed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. As for the Joker, he appears as a queer figure dancing a carnivalesque dance to the rhythm of a Prince song titled “Partyman,” Prince being himself an androgynous icon.7 This scene could thus be seen as an attack against the Western canon and a critique of the straight white male artists who make up art history (all the more so since only Francis Bacon’s painting is spared), the Joker embodying the violent return of the repressed in all its anti-social power. Given the intentional similarities between New York City and Gotham City, as well as between the Flugelheim Museum and the Guggenheim Museum, it is also quite tempting to read this scene in the context of the gentrification and urban renewal that southern Manhattan underwent in the mid-1980s. A text published the year of the film’s release in Housing, Space and Class Struggle, under the title “The Occupation of Art and Gentrification,” discusses the role of art in the gentrification of Manhattan at the time. In particular, the authors denounce “the characteristic process of capital accumulation with art as a major protagonist, leading to the general transformation of urban space.”8 The same year also saw the unfoldis a collective travesty of the body-conscious, image-obsessed American society. Or, rather, he reflects the dark, complacent ugliness of consumer culture.” Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster, 36. 6 “It was the summer of 1989 when Batman, the Last real Man in Gotham City, galvanized the highest short-term gross in movie history by dramatizing a double myth of man-making. To save hapless bourgeois cosmopolitans from their high-tech powerlessness, Bruce Wayne becomes half beast and descends into the underclass, a downward mobility that also gives steel and grit to his aristocratic boyishness.” Leverenz, “The Last Real Man,” 22. 7 For more on this topic, see Hawkins and Niblock, Prince, especially chapter 2, “Inscriptions of Otherness: Dandyism, Style and Queer Sensibility.” On the notion of camp, see Ross, “Uses of Camp.” 8 The text lays special emphasis on two distinct but related strategies ‒ “art as a factor of gentrification manipulated by the state” and “art as a new basis for the accumulation of capital

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ing of the Tompkins Square riots, following the violent police repression of a demonstration during which Bohemian artists and the East Village Lumpenproletariat marched behind a banner that read “gentrification is class war.” Such a context enables the following reading: since Batman is none other than Bruce Wayne, aristocratic patron of the arts and leading agent of Gotham City’s “cleanup,” the Joker’s vandalism appears as an act of protest against the city’s urban planning policy, embodied by the Flugelheim Museum itself, where members of the upper class come to admire the great masterpieces of Western art. In this scene, the Joker and his gang use practices from hip hop culture and street art against consecrated culture, such as graffiti and tagging, both of which were condemned as vandalism and were part of the subculture associated with the delinquency that the city was then trying to eradicate.

The Joker and the Avant-Garde, or Iconoclasm in Hollywood When the Joker launched his ironic injunction to “broaden one’s mind,” having murdered all visitors to the Flugelheim Museum, and before destroying some of the most iconic works in art history, the critique of the museum as an ideological institution and of art’s humanist ideals already had a long history. From Italian Futurism to Dadaism and Fluxus, most of the avantgarde movements of the twentieth century called for an offensive against a bourgeois conception of art that seemed to grant it an autonomous and privileged status by separating it from life. What is original about the Joker’s injunction is the specific moment of its enunciation: whereas the 1980s mark the end of the avant-garde and the triumph of postmodernism, a character from popular culture and the world of superheroes takes up this attack on the museum institution, in a film that was an unprecedented commercial and popular success: this first installment in a long series of films devoted to Batman was the fifth most profitable film in the history of the Hollywood studios at the time, with $400 million in worldwide sales for a budget of only $35 million and $750 million in revenue from merchandising.9 The act of vandalism carried out by the Joker and his gang is not so much directed against individual works of art, however canonical and emblematic of Western culture, as against what the museum does to artworks by in neighborhoods ravaged by the decline of traditional industry.” “The Occupation of Art and Gentrification,” 16. 9 Beaty, “The Blockbuster Superhero,” 427.

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transforming them into art: the museum consecrates, canonizes, sacralizes, and, at the same time, it institutionalizes, normalizes, and standardizes the creative gesture which, from Degas to Hopper, was often intended to be transgressive. As an institution that separates artworks from the rest of the world in order to establish them as art, the museum is a function that redraws the boundaries of time and space by bringing artworks together in place where they enjoy a privileged status. This autonomy assigned to art, henceforth separated from life and praxis, is precisely what became suspect in the eyes of the avant-garde, which thus became the bad conscience of the museum institution. Besides, the logic to which the gathering and ordering of artworks obeys in the museum (i.e. the great metanarrative of art history) is here denounced as a series of aesthetic conventions in a destructive chaos that breaks its order and linearity. To the mummification of past art and artists, the Joker opposes his present movement in an artistic performance that plays with the frozen representations of the past, a joyful dance that evokes the spirit of unbridled celebration rather than the solemn silence usually associated with the museum. The Joker’s vandalism thus carries out a desacralization of art that seems to fall from its pedestal, not unlike the statues that are smashed to the ground by his goons. The destruction of these works includes the destruction of their market value and the denunciation of the economic role of the museum and of the commodification of art. Just as the portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart was used to adorn the one-dollar bill – art putting itself at the service of money and power – money put itself at the service of art by giving it an exchange value; it is precisely this collusion that is denounced by one of the Joker’s goons tagging a dollar sign on Stuart’s painting. This act evokes that of Russian performance artist Alexander Brener, who famously tagged a green dollar sign on Kasimir Malevich’s White Cross on Grey (1927) at the Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam on 4 January 1997. In his defense, Brener stated that his performance was not an attack on Malevich’s painting per se, but rather aimed to establish a dialogue with the Russian painter and to restore the subversive force that the art market and the museum institution had drained: “Malevich was a revolutionary who wanted to change the world through art, but he was transformed into a pure commodity. [. . .] Art today is controlled by an elite that only seeks to become wealthier.”10 The Joker’s performance at the Flugelheim Museum seems to provide a comparable critique of the elite’s stranglehold on art in Gotham City, thereby establishing 10 Brener qtd in Hurkmans, “Jaar cel geëist tegen kunstkladder Brener,” my translation. Brener was eventually sentenced to five months in prison.

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a kind of dialogue with some of the great masters of Western painting to whom he restores their transgressive force. It is also interesting to note that all the gestures of the Joker and his gang seem to repeat those that marked the history of art throughout the second half of the twentieth century: the paint splashed on some of the paintings is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s dripping technique; the handprints on Rembrandt’s self-portrait evoke Yves Klein’s anthropometries; one of the Joker’s men about to slash Bacon’s painting is similar to Luciano Fontana’s trademark gesture; the use of spray paint brings to mind the works of Pop artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the phrase “Joker was here” written with a paintbrush on Edward Hopper’s painting echoes the way graffiti artists tag their name to gain visibility and recognition; the parodic imitation of the Degas statue recalls various performances such as Deborah Robertis’s reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World at the Musée d’Orsay on 29 May 2014; and the breaking of the classical statue located at the entrance of the Flugelheim Museum evokes performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli’s hammer attack on Duchamp’s urinal in January 2006 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, thirteen years after urinating in it when it was exhibited at the Carré d’Art gallery in Nîmes in May 1993.11 In other words, the Joker is not only an art critic, but should be considered as an artist in his own right: destruction becomes an act of creation, echoing not only the great gestures in the history of modern art and the avant-garde, but also the artistic vandalism that has marked its more contemporary developments. If we adopt the perspective of the film viewer, far from feeling outraged or uneasy, the sequence gives rise to a deep sense of exhilaration and enjoyment.12 This can be explained in part by the carnivalesque dimension of the 11 “I didn’t intend to break the urinal itself, but what the institution has done to it. It should not be forgotten that with this work, Duchamp wanted to shake up contemporary art. I wanted to pay tribute to him. My hammer blow was that of an auctioneer who wanted to give its provocative virtues back to the urinal.” Pinoncelli qtd in Chazot, my translation. 12 This fascination with acts of destruction can sometimes take a problematic turn, as when German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the 9/11 attacks as “the greatest work of art that is possible in the cosmos” (qtd in Lentricchia and McAuliffe, “Groundzeroland,” 96) or when André Breton declared that “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd” (Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 125). This fascination is even more problematic when one recalls that on July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, during the premiere of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, James Eagan Holmes, 24 years old at the time, stood up and shot at the crowd for several minutes, killing twelve people and wounding 58 others, having previously thrown two smoke grenades that released a thick cloud of smoke in the movie theater, just like the Joker does in the scene from Burton’s Batman. When he was arrested Eagan told police officers that he was the Joker, and a Batman mask was later found at his home.

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scene: the Joker is both a jester and a trickster who reverses the hierarchy of values in a profoundly liberating performance. He embodies the dark and formless chaos that lurks behind the symbolic order and emerges in a destructive impulse, somewhere between the clown’s laughter (as his name suggests) and the murderous madness of the serial killer. It can also be accounted for by the transgressive irruption of truth in the form of violence in a space – the museum – which produces and reproduces social norms and aesthetic canons. This irruption revives what is the very essence of art according to Michel Foucault, that is to say, “a relation to reality which is no longer one of ornamentation, or imitation, but one of laying bare, exposure, stripping, excavation, and violent reduction of existence to its basics,” a “manifestation of a scandalous break by which the truth becomes clear, manifests itself, and becomes concrete.”13 As such, the artistic performance of the Joker and his gang should not simply be interpreted as an attempt to destroy the museum, but as a reconciliation between art and praxis, the museum being precisely the place, the only place in truth, where this reconciliation can happen.

“Out with the old!”: The Joker at the Factory and the Destructive Character The idea that the Joker is a postmodern avatar of the avant-garde artist in this carnivalesque performance at the museum would not have seemed very surprising to the young TV viewer of the 1960s. In an episode of the Batman television series broadcast on ABC on March 22 1967 – “Pop goes the Joker” – the Joker finds himself unwillingly acclaimed by Gotham City critics after spraying paint on paintings exhibited in a Gotham City art gallery.14 What was meant as a deliberate act of destruction is celebrated as a bold and innovative work. A similar reversal of aesthetic hierarchies occurs in the episode broadcast the following day – “Flop goes the Joker” – in which the Joker and his gang axe an invaluable antique table: “Out with the old! In with the new!” the Joker shouts, adding that his destroying the old table should be viewed as an act of creation: “You’re not losing a table, 13 Foucault, The Courage of the Truth, 188. 14 Right from the first episode, the Batman TV series was a cult hit with both the general public and a small circle of intellectuals, with Andy Warhol and part of the New York intelligentsia joining the 13–15 million viewers of the series, at a time when approximately 53 million American homes were equipped with a television set. For a queer analysis of Batman’s reception in the 1960s, see Torres, “The Caped Crusader.”

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you’re gaining a masterpiece!” Though this intertextual nod is a way for Tim Burton to pay tribute to the television series of the 1960s, it also revives the postwar intellectual debates surrounding the conflicting relationship between “low culture” and “high culture” in a postmodern context. Indeed, at a time when Pop art was in its heyday, the TV series version of the scene offers a satirical commentary on the pretensions of Art with a capital A, as if popular culture, through this televised adaptation of the comic strip, was responding to its recuperation by the artists associated with the Factory. After all, Andy Warhol himself drew heavily on the Batman universe that fascinated him so much, whether as a visual artist or as a film-maker (Batman Dracula, 1964). If the deliberately theatrical performance of the actor playing the Joker (Cesar Romero) calls to mind a bad parody of Andy Warhol himself (just as the camp aesthetic of the TV series can be said to constitute a reaction to the reappropriation of TV culture by Pop art), the Joker’s vandalism appears at the same time as an extension of Pop art’s ethos in that it deconstructs the hierarchy between learned (or elite) culture and mass (or popular) culture. Herein lies the real act of destruction carried out by the Joker, in Burton’s film as in the TV series of the sixties: it is not so much a masterpiece or a precious antiquity that the clown prince of crime destroys, but the very criteria that make it possible to distinguish between high art and low culture. It is this blurring of codes that the Batman series, like Burton’s film, operates according to Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins: “Batman precipitated a questioning of critical hierarchies, because it selfconsciously placed itself within the pop art scene. [. . .] Batman presented these critics with the particularly chilling possibility that this childish text was in fact the ultimate in art circle chic.”15 In 1966, Life magazine already underlined how Batman bridged the gap between elite art and commercial culture: “Pop Art and the cult of Camp have turned Superman and Batman into members of the intellectual community, and what the kids used to devour in comic books has become a staple in avant-garde art.”16 Likewise, the Joker’s artistic vandalism in Burton’s movie borrows the gesture and ethos of the avant-garde to deconstruct aesthetic hierarchies and destroy the dividing wall separating “high culture” from “low culture.” While Marclay’s Made to Be Destroyed limits itself to the compulsive (and almost morbid) repetition of decontextualized images of destruction, transforming them into a pure aesthetic that exploits the spectacular force of cinema, the Joker’s artistic performance traces a carnivalesque path 15 Spigel and Jenkins, “Same Bat Channel,” 176. 16 Prideaux, “The Whole Country,” 23.

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through the rubble of the museum’s collection, embodying the “destructive character” celebrated by Walter Benjamin: “The destructive character’s only watchword is: make room; his only activity: clearing out. His need for fresh air and free space is stronger than any hatred. [. . .] He reduces the existing to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble but of the path that extends through it.”17 In this respect, Marclay’s video only accumulates f ilm extracts connected by linear juxtaposition and simply excavates cinematographic archives, whereas the Joker’s performance clears the rubble to make a clean slate and opens a path into the vestiges of the past. At once utopian and cathartic, the playful and joyful dimension of this destructive choreography delights the viewer, not simply for “the sake of the rubble” with which Marclay’s piece seems to be satisfied, but for the sake “of the path that extends through it.” In the face of the social elitism that characterizes the visitors of the Flugelheim Museum or of the Swiss institute, two institutions that separate artworks from reality in order to establish them as art, the destructive laughter and liberating movement of the Joker unleashes the subversive potential of art. In the words of Georges Didi-Huberman in his commentary on Benjamin’s text, “it is therefore necessary, in order to rise up, to know how to forget a certain present and, with it, the recent past that set it in place,” so as to “bring to light, to discover a certain past that the present state wanted to keep prisoner, blind, buried, inactive.”18 This “certain past” that the Joker’s iconoclastic gesture urges us to rediscover in the rubble of the museum is the destructive character of the avant-garde, which clears paths, opens up possibilities, and finally, without irony this time, broadens the mind.

Bibliography Aumont, Jacques. “Que reste-t-il du cinéma?” Rivista di Estetica 46 (2011). [Online] http://journals.openedition.org/estetica/1634. Bassil-Morozow, Helena. The Trickster in Contemporary Film. New York & London: Routledge, 2012. Beaty, Bart. “The Blockbuster Superhero.” American Film History. Selected Readings. 1960 to the Present. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015. 423–437. Benjamin, Walter. “The Destructive Character” [1931], Diacritics 8, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 47–65. 17 Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” 47–48. 18 Didi-Huberman, Désirer désobéir, 44, my translation.

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Brener, Alexander and Barbara Schurz. The Art of Destruction. Ljubljana: Blossom vs Fruit Samizdat, 2005. Breton, André. “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” [1930]. Manifestoes du Surrealism. Transl. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972. 117–194. Chazot, Sylvain. “La Clémence pour Pinoncelli.” L’Express (February 9, 2007). [Online] https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/la-clemence-pourpinoncelli_462832.html. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Désirer désobéir. Ce qui nous soulève, 1. Paris: Minuit, 2019. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The Courage of the Truth. The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the Collège de France. 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros. Transl. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gamboni, Dario. Un iconoclasme moderne. Théorie et pratiques contemporaines du vandalisme artistique. Lausanne: Editions d’En-Bas, 1983. Hawkins, Stan, and Sarah Niblock. Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Hurkmans, Marc. “Jaar cel geëist tegen kunstkladder Brener,” Ravage 229 (February 21, 1997). [Online] http://www.ravagedigitaal.org/1997/229/Jaar_cel_ ge%EBist229.htm. Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (Jul–Aug 1984): 59–92. Lentricchia, Frank and Jody McAuliffe. “Groundzeroland.” Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 95–105. Leverenz, David. “The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumpo to Batman.” Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, ed. Peter F. Murphy. New York: New York University Press, 1994. 21–53. Prideaux, Tom. “The Whole Country Goes Supermad.” Life (March 11, 1966): 22–27. Réau, Louis. Histoire du vandalisme. Les monuments détruits de l’art français [1959]. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994. Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp.” No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, eds. Alistair Ross and Andrew Ross. New York: Routledge, 1989. 135–170. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet [1990]. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. Spigel, Lynn, and Henry Jenkins. “Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory.” Many More Lives of the Batman, ed. Roberta Pearson, William Uricchio and Will Brooker. London: Palgrave, 2015. 171–201.

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“The Occupation of Art and Gentrification.” No Reservations: Housing, Space and Class Struggle. London: News From Everywhere, 1989. 16–23. Torres, Sasha. “The Caped Crusader of Camp: Pop, Camp, and the Batman Television Series.” Pop Out: Queer Warhol, eds. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and Jose Esteban Munoz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 238–255.

Filmography Burton, Tim (dir.). Batman. Polygram Pictures, Warner Bros, 1989. (USA, 126 minutes). Marclay, Christian (dir.). Made to Be Destroyed. Paula Cooper Gallery, 2016 (USA, 24 minutes). Waggner, George (dir.). Batman [TV series]. “Pop goes the Joker” and “Flop goes the Joker.” ABC, March 22 and 23, 1967 (USA, 24 minutes).

About the Author Pierre-Antoine Pellerin is Associate Professor at the University of Lyon where he teaches American literature and gender studies. He has published in Angles, Transatlantica, Interfaces, Transtext(e)s and Theatre Topics and was recently guest editor of an issue of the French Review of American Studies devoted to “The Art of Failure.”

6. Chaos ex machina: The Art of Jean Tinguely and the Documentary Image Des O’Rawe

Abstract This chapter explores the relations between Jean Tinguely’s autodestructive, kinetic, and architectural sculptures, and documentary film. In particular, it examines how D.A. Pennebaker’s Breaking It Up at the Museum (1960) and Robert Breer’s Homage to Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960) produce differing interpretations of Tinguely’s famed Homage to New York; the formal strategies adopted in Teshigahara’s Sculpture Mouvante (1963); and the significance of Tinguely’s Le Cyclop to Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s The Old Place (2000). In their respective engagements with Tinguely’s art, these f ilms expand the conventional notion of the documentary, rendering it as a modern art form in its own right, and comprising its own strategies of montage, and assortment of found, appropriated, “readymade,” and ephemeral images. Keywords: Art Documentary, Destruction in Art, Jean Tinguely, MoMA, Modernism

In January 1960, Jean Tinguely traveled to New York on board the RMS Queen Elizabeth, at that time still the largest ocean liner in the world. There can be a fine line between suspected arson and creative auto-destruction, and for this former passenger the manner of the Queen Elizabeth’s subsequent demise would have looked suspiciously like a case of life imitating art: in 1972, the ship – recently renamed Seawise University – capsized into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, engulfed in thick smoke and flames; a haze of water spraying from the fireboats gathering to pay their last respects. It was during his transatlantic voyage, after all, that Tinguely first “conceived of a plan, a sculpture whose sole purpose would be to self-destruct [. . .] ‘like

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a burst of Chinese firecrackers’ in the Museum of Modern Art!”1 Originally invited to exhibit at the newly opened Staempfli Gallery in Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side, Tinguely’s growing reputation as a kinetic artist had been further boosted by recent European exhibitions of his méta-matic machines; at the 1959 Paris-Biennale, for example, his “Méta-Matic No. 17” had produced 40,000 drawings. Meanwhile, the “sculpture whose sole purpose would be to self-destruct” duly became Homage to New York, a 23-foot-long by 27-foot-high white machine sculpture that became an immediate succès de scandale after its “suicide” in MoMA’s outdoor Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Even at this stage in his career, Tinguely was a shrewd opportunist who understood that in the new world of modern art – never mind the antic-orientated realms of Neo-Dadaism or Nouveaux Réalisme – cultural provocation and the promotion of a flamboyant public image seemed increasingly integral to artistic success.2 In exploring how various f ilm-makers have tried to make sense of Tinguely’s work and persona, this chapter focuses on the relations between his auto-destructive, kinetic, and monumental sculptures, and various documentary film forms – especially, those involving experimental approaches to montage, and the use of found, appropriated, “readymade,” and ephemeral images and sounds. Tinguely’s emergence as a significant figure in the post-war avant-garde coincides with the renewed and wider critique of structures of representation characteristic of other art “movements” at this time: Nouveau Réalisme, like the Nouveau Roman (writing) or the Nouvelle Vague (film-making), for example, also blurred the boundaries between fiction and document, fragment and whole, chance and certainty, order and chaos. Importantly, as Kaira M. Cabañas comments, “its rhetorical force served to signify the individual artist’s engagement with modern technological culture and challenge the preceding generation’s model of expressive, politically engagé, and Socialist Realist artists alike.”3 Beginning with a discussion of Homage to New York, the chapter compares the formal strategies adopted in D.A. Pennebaker’s Breaking It Up at the Museum (1960) and Robert Breer’s Homage to Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York” (1960), assessing how both films respond to this seminal moment in Tinguely’s international career – films made by figures who were themselves associated with the American avant-garde at this time. Staying within the ambit of the experimental sixties, the chapter then considers Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1 Selz, Unstill Life, 81; Hultén, Jean Tinguely, 68. 2 Berghaus, “Neo-Dada Performance Art,” 77–90. 3 Cabañas, Myth of Nouveau Réalisme, 17.

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Sculpture Mouvante: Jean Tinguely (1981 [1963]), which takes as its subject Tinguely’s 1963 solo exhibition at the Minami Gallery, in Tokyo. As well as emerging as a key figure in Japanese New Wave cinema at this time, Teshigahara (whose first major feature film, Pitfall/Kashi To Kodomo, was released in 1962) was at the forefront of new collaborations between Japanese and American avant-garde artists in his role as curator at Tokyo’s Sogetsu Art Centre. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s The Old Place (1999), a complex, associative, iconoclastic rumination on MoMA that incorporates images of kinetic and public sculpture, including Tinguely’s “indestructible” Le Cyclop (1969–1994).

Cinéma cinétique Critical and art historical approaches to Tingley’s relationship with film have tended to focus on television and his appearances in a variety of newsreel and arts magazine programs, often with Niki de Saint Phalle, his long-term partner and artistic collaborator. From the late 1950s onwards, for example, Tinguely featured several times on Schweizer Filmwochenschau (Swiss Weekly Film Show), and on Personnalités Suisses (Radio Télévision Suisse, 15 November 1962), and he was also no stranger to Italian, French, Dutch, and German news and arts programs. 4 His televisual appeal derived from both his association with figures like Pierre Restnay and Yves Klein, and from a desire amongst contemporary public broadcasters at this time to produce short documentaries on modern art exhibitions and artists. However, it was also the case that, as Kerry Brougher has noted, “Tinguely understood [the concept of spectacle supplanting genuine activity] and the potential of spectacle, as well as the power of television for relaying it.”5 In this regard, his attitude toward film and broadcast media differed markedly from that of Restnay, who “throughout the early 1960s, seized new media opportunities such as the television program En Français dans le texte, and the popular bi-monthly Revue Planète to promote Nouveau Réalisme as an entertaining but ultimately non-subversive avant-garde.”6 In discussing the importance of (color) television to Tinguely’s Study for an End of the World, No. 2 (1962) (which was broadcast on a NBC weekly magazine program, David Brinkley’s 4 Imesch, “Jean Tinguely and Le Corbusier,” 117–132. See also, Cabañas, Myth of Nouveau Réalisme, 137. 5 Brougher, “Radiation Made Visible,” 57. 6 Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 57.

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Journal), for example, Cabañas suggests that rather than simply “adapt[ing] his work completely to the homogenising pressure of the media [. . .] reducing art and its effects to a system of pure equivalency [. . .] divest[ing] these once radical forms of their materiality and force of negation,” Study for an End of the World, No. 2 instead foregrounds the “inability [of contemporary network television] to redress or dialectically negate an ever-expanding perceptual and commodified image regime.”7 For all his showmanship and headline-grabbing theatrics, Tinguely wanted to avoid being “framed” by the medium, becoming simply the subject of another documentary treatment or news item about modern art (and eccentricity). If anything, his preference involved making these promotional activities part of the spectacle itself, integral to the event and not kept at a safe distance from it: Tinguely was nothing if not alert to “how destruction could be repackaged as entertainment [. . .] how artistic production would increasingly become part of the culture industry, inhabiting its modes of distribution and image production.”8 Although de Saint Phalle was directly involved in making films – including two feature-length avant-garde works, Daddy (1973), and Un rêve plus long que la nuit/A Dream Lasts Longer than the Night (1975) – Tinguely’s relationship with the language and the apparatus of cinema tended to be more metaphysical than practical. As well as appearing in a short 1956 Swedish anarchist film, En Dag I Staden/A Day in the City, characters (caricatures) based on Tinguely featured in two Hollywood films from the 1960s – What a Way to Go! (J. Lee Thompson, 1964) and Arthur Penn’s Micky One (1965) – and frequent references to de Saint Phalle and Tinguely as “Les Bonnie et Clyde de l’Art” were undoubtedly inspired by the popularity of Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) rather than by any resemblance to real-life outlaws, or even de Saint Phalle’s Tirs series (an array of works she created throughout the 1960s involving her and others taking pot-shots at large canvasses concealing paint “bombs”). Aesthetically, the mechanical, silhouetting and other image-making (or méta-matic) properties of Tinguely’s “peintures cinétiques” and sculptures possess a certain cinematic quality. This kinetic kinship can also function as a commentary on the representational technologies of film production, projection, and consumption, as if taunting cinema (qua technology) by subverting its instrumental role in consumer culture. The description of Tinguely’s “kinetic performances” – especially, auto-destruct sculptures such as Homage to New York – as “an orchestration of duration, 7 Cabañas, Myth of Nouveau Réalisme, 148; Lee, Chronophobia, 139–153. 8 Cabañas, Myth of Nouveau Réalisme, 140.

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anticipation, and suspense to confront the audience with a new awareness of time” can likewise apply to much modernist cinema, as well as the popular films of a Hitchcock or a Charlie Chaplin, whose Modern Times (1936) is frequently invoked in relation to the post-industrial and anti-consumerist social philosophy behind Tinguely’s meta-machine art.9

Observation Often regarded as a pioneer of so-called Direct Cinema and co-founder of Drew Associates, D.A. Pennebaker’s formative years coincided with an era when the boundaries between documentary, avant-garde, and independent cinema were becoming increasingly blurred, providing him with opportunities to work closely with film-makers like Francis Thompson and Shirley Clarke. A qualified mechanical engineer, Pennebaker moved to New York in the late 1940s and soon began experimenting with Super-8 cameras, and various audio and sound recording equipment.10 His first film, Daybreak Express (1958), for example, is a jazzy, swirling filmic paean to New York’s iconic “Third Ave El” (elevated train line), a film comparable to other notable experimental city films from this period, such as Under the Brooklyn Bridge (Rudy Burckhardt, 1953), Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957), or Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round (1958). Pennebaker also worked with Willard Van Dyke on Clarke’s award-winning short, Skyscraper (1959), and several of his films in the 1960s and early 1970s involved collaborations with contemporary avant-garde figures such as Alfred Leslie, Merce Cunningham, and Yoko Ono, as well as other artists and counter-culture celebrities. Shortly after Pennebaker joined Drew Associates in 1959, he collaborated again with Clarke on Opening in Moscow, a documentary about the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, an exhibition that displayed all manner of “mod cons,” household utilities, and totems of post-war American consumerism – the antithesis of a Tinguely exhibition, in other words. Pennebaker’s relationship with the journalistic imperatives of Robert Drew’s project was pragmatic, and his significant contributions were ultimately technological rather than editorial and creative – especially in terms of his successful development of portable equipment for recording synchronous sound. In producing documentaries and television features for network and syndicated news programs, Drew Associates conceived of documentary as “the 9 Chau, Movement, Time, 49; Rolez, La Métaphysique, 402–403. 10 Beattie, D.A. Pennebaker, 3–11.

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visual telling of dramatic stories in order to secure popular acceptance in a way that would potentially supersede conventional forms of reporting.”11 While the fusion of faux informality with dramatic “crisis” narratives proved successful in films such as Primary (1960) or Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1962), the unceasingly formulaic nature of this approach constrained Pennebaker’s expressive curiosity, and his interest in exploring alternative modes of documentary engagement and representation. This is not to say that he ever fundamentally abandoned the tenets of the American Direct Cinema tradition (as Godard, for example, discovered in 1968, when he unsuccessfully tried to make One A.M. (One American Movie) with Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), or that his work can be excluded from the more general assessment that the problem with Direct Cinema “is essentially what its exponents said about what the films did, not necessarily what the films themselves achieved.”12 In initially agreeing to commit himself to Drew’s project – like his subsequent decision to join with Leacock in 1963 – Pennebaker further dissociated his work from its earlier avant-garde influences, revealing a tendency towards the more conventional style of documentary film-making that would become the hallmark of his later career. Breaking It Up at the Museum was made just three weeks before Primary, Drew Associates’ iconic portrayal of the 1960 Democratic Party presidential primary in Wisconsin. Shot by Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, Pennebaker’s role in the production of Primary chiefly involved “coordinat[ing] a portable sound editing and mixing machine that enabled him to add sound to silent footage as the five-day shoot progressed,” a technique that was also employed in Breaking It Up.13 Although just over six minutes in duration, Breaking It Up has a discernible four-part structure: an “interview” with Tinguely (prologue); the intact sculpture filmed as a marvel of movement and mechanical ingenuity (subject); the incomplete auto-destruction (climax); the fire being extinguished by Tinguely and Billy Klüver, and the authorities arriving (aftermath). The film largely conforms to the Direct Cinema style, although with a greater dependence on framing and montage rather than the hand-held cinematography that would characterize some sequences in Primary, and much of Yanki No! (Drew, 1960). Although not a Drew Associates production, or a Time Life Inc. commission, Breaking It Up was a typically collaborative enterprise: as the end-title acknowledgements indicate, in addition to Maysles and Clarke, the film also lists Tom Schwartz (the sound 11 Saunders, “The Triumph,” 159. 12 Bruzzi, New Documentary, 67. 13 Beattie, D.A. Pennebaker, 53.

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archivist), Marie Winn (a journalist and activist), and Nick Proferes (the cinematographer who would go on to work with Pennebaker on his projects with Norman Mailer, before shooting Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970)). After a title card, Breaking It Up opens into a white screen which – as the camera pulls back – turns out to be a full-screen close-up of a welding torch being used by Tinguely, as he constructs Homage to New York amidst the “junk,” noise, and disorder of his on-site studio (a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome left over from the previous exhibition in the Sculpture Garden). Tinguely removes his helmet and approaches the camera, answering Pennebaker’s question: “What is that machine?” Given the racket in the background (no doubt amplified by the acoustics of the dome) combined with Tinguely’s idiosyncratic English, it is perhaps surprising that Pennebaker stuck with his sync-sound hand-held camera during this sequence. In response to Pennebaker’s question, Tinguely nonchalantly refers to his “machine” as “a sculpture . . . it’s a picture . . . it’s an accompanist, it’s a poet . . . a declaration . . . it’s a situation . . . the intensity of the life of the machine is the cause of its destruction.” The next sequence comprises highlights of Homage to New York’s 27-minute “performance.” An establishing long shot frames the sculpture, before the film cuts to a series of close and medium shots of its principal mechanical and found components (gleaned by Tinguely, Billy Klüver, and Robert Breer from Manhattan junk shops, street markets, and even the Newark city dump): a piano clunking out notes; hammers frantically hitting the side of a large metal pot; numerous bicycle and pram wheels spinning; a deranged addressograph machine; electric motors coughing and clunking; smoke produced by a mixture of ammonia and titanium tetrachloride; a meteorological trial balloon, a money-throwing contraption (compliments of Robert Rauschenberg), bottles containing various pungent concoctions, a go-kart automatically pushed back and forth; the so-called suicide carriage (which Tinguely donated to MoMA the next day), and so forth. Even at this early stage, the cacophony of sounds seems overwhelming, and includes a loudspeaker blaring out a recording of Tinguely talking about the work, as well as gasps and cheers (or jeers) from the assembled spectators. Benefiting from Schwartz’s influence, the film’s soundtrack and use of noise offers a remarkably sympathetic sonic assemblage to accompany the images. Painted white and illuminated by various lights, the sculpture contrasts spectacularly with the darkness of night – although according to Klüver, “Tinguely was a little worried that the machine would look too beautiful.”14 14 Klüver, “The Garden Party,” 76.

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His anxiety was not misplaced: if anything, its whiteness gave Homage to New York a distinctly spectral, ghostly, appearance, and a certain photogenic potential that Pennebaker exploits throughout his short film. After a brief cut-away to the crowd of two hundred and fifty invited guests, the third part of the film portrays the sculpture’s attempted autodestruction, as flames appear in the center and begin to leap and consume it. Beginning with the same pattern of shots as the previous sequence, Pennebaker’s camera tilts up to follow the fire before cutting to another establishing shot of the sculpture, by now virtually invisible amidst the accumulating smoke, and mist. Another close shot of the piano follows as it too is soon engulfed in flames; the bathtub jumps fitfully, as if being electrocuted or primed for take-off. A press photographer is briefly silhouetted against the now clattering, burning, disintegrating machine sculpture, soon to be followed by a shot of a fire department officer talking to Klüver, before he and Tinguely are shown dismantling parts of the sculpture, and dosing the fires down with a hose. Pennebaker includes one final long shot of the scene (presumably taken from the opposite end of the garden) before Tinguely takes a bow, smiling and waving in front of his now smouldering, tangled, demolished Homage to New York. The crowd are heard clapping, and two “vox pop” interviewees praise the event. Tinguely is again seen talking with the fire department official and Peter Selz, MoMA’s curator of painting and sculpture exhibitions, before the discordant piano notes return to the soundtrack as the camera frames the rubble and the film cuts to a final aerial shot taken from the roof, showing the wreckage and a few loiterers and souvenir collectors. Famously – and despite Klüver’s best efforts to ensure the reliability of a special timer that controlled the various electrical circuits – Homage to New York did not auto-destruct as planned. Not that Tinguely appeared bothered by the evening’s flawed dénouement: art is not an exact science, and even failures fail to fail sometimes.

Animation Despite having a soundtrack that combines synchronous and asynchronous elements, Pennebaker’s Breaking It Up is consistent with the observationalnarrative methods typically associated with the Direct Cinema style. Eschewing Pennebaker’s confidence in the documentary as the purveyor of some objective, transparent representation of reality, however, Breer’s Homage to Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York” offers a more experimental and playful treatment, one that combines animation techniques with documentary

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(and documents), and a range of reflexive filmic practices in its attempt to capture the destructive – or, deconstructive – implications of Tinguely’s sculpture. Unlike Pennebaker, Breer had already known Tinguely for several years, and in 1955 they had been involved in organizing the acclaimed Le Mouvement exhibition of kinetic art, at the Galerie Denise René in Paris. Breer – who lived in France during the 1950s – had also collaborated with Klüver at that time, and he later recollected that it was while assisting in the construction of Homage to New York that Tinguely “suggested that I make a film [. . .] at the same time [as] he did his thing [. . .] not a documentary film of it, but something at the same time.”15 Breer’s film is not simply a quirky divertissement – or even a dutiful record of – Tinguely’s visit to MoMA. In its formal complexity and eclectic structures of relation it consciously translates a neo-Dadaist aesthetic into the language of film, while also representing a departure from the hand-drawn abstract style of his earlier animations, such as the Phases films, or A Man and his Dog Out for Air (1957). Thematically, Homage to Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York” emphasizes – for comic effect – the incongruous relationship between Tinguely’s seemingly anarchic and madcap methods and the regulated, demure environment of MoMA. The opening title sequence, for example, comprises a hand-held close shot that scans the event program, featuring Tinguely’s freely sketched plan of his sculpture, accompanied by the sound of a loud clattering metallic din (recorded during the event itself, or during the construction process); at this time, Breer was beginning “to explore [the] live-sound/animated image relationship more thoroughly.”16 This shot is followed by a close-up of Breer’s handwritten title, before the sequence returns to the drawing, now filmed in a more extreme close-up before the camera moves down the page and “zooms” in on the printed details of the venue, date, time, and full title of the event itself: “Homage to New York: A Self-Constructing and Self-Destroying Work of Art Conceived and Built By Jean Tinguely.” Breer opens his film, in other words, by inviting us to view the program rather than the exhibition, perhaps suggesting that Tinguely’s “self-destructing” machine sculpture was already being “conceived,” explained, and curated before it had been set in motion. The ironic tension between creativity and its institutionalization is sustained in various ways throughout Breer’s film. This opening title sequence, for example, cuts to an image of Tinguely standing with his arms folded (taken from a traced or rotoscoped photograph) that opens like a cut-out or 15 Cummings, “Oral History Interview with Robert Breer,” n.p. 16 O’Pray, Avant-Garde Film, 65.

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pop-up book to reveal behind it an animated sequence of cogs and spinning wheels, which is soon followed by a cut to an abstract animation based on one of Tinguely’s meta-mechanical paintings (“Relief Blanc sur Noir”, 1958). The soundtrack diminishes as the next sequence begins with documentary footage of various people milling around the dome; some talking to Tinguely as he constructs the work – most notably, MoMA’s Director of Collections, Alfred Barr. Here, as elsewhere in the film, the camera tilts upwards to frame the lattice of triangular panels that comprise Fuller’s geodesic dome – perhaps, another counterpoint to the intuitive, imprecise, serendipitous nature of Tinguely’s art. Like Pennebaker, Breer’s documentary footage also focuses on Tinguely welding, and while some of this documentary material may in fact be salvaged footage from that other film production, Breer reconfigures it as a montage of flash frames, repetition, stop-motion, and extreme undercranking to add to the impression of a comedic, chaotic mise en scène. Only in in the final few minutes, does the film offer images of the self-destructing Homage to New York, and the clean-up operation the following day, before returning to that initial cut-out image of Tinguely – now closing, like a door. Regarding Homage to Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York,” Sonia Bridge suggests that Breer’s take on the sculpture both “playfully celebrate[s] and at times mockingly redouble[s], quizzically reflecting on the 1960s rehearsal of avant-garde strategies.” While also pointing out that Breer’s film eschews “world-weary pessimism” in favor of “the comic unmelodious tinkering quality of the work,” Bridge implies that the satirical range of the f ilm extends beyond the trope of the heroic artist pitted against the tyranny of the establishment.17 It can be argued, as it was at the time, for example, that any artistic event or “happening” that takes place inside MoMA is already “thoroughly official”, an avant-garde protest in the form of “a garden party,” as the Nation’s editorial put it.18 This irony is also explored by Jacques Derrida in his 1996 lecture (delivered at MoMA) on its attempts to categorize (certify) Antonin Artaud’s drawings: “[This] canonizing institution, this place of sacralising legitimation of modern times, this pyramid of father-maternal and speculative commemomarketmummification, we call it, then, MoMA, M-O-M-A.”19 Perhaps, in its arresting configuration of documentary and animated forms, in its playful undercutting of the artist’s myth-making exploits and frantic acts of self-promotion, Breer’s film reminds us that an “homage” to Jean Tinguely without irony would be no homage at all. 17 Bridge, “Robert Breer,” 87–88. 18 Qtd in Lee, Chronophobia, 139. 19 Derrida, Artaud the Moma, 57.

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Jean Tinguely with his work “Homage to New York”, as it was set in motion and destroyed in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, March 17, 1960. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Photographic Archive, acc. n..: AP80. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photographer: David Gahr. © Photo SCALA, Florence

Installation In February 1963, Tinguely traveled to Tokyo for a two-week exhibition at the Minami Gallery, entitled Sounds of Sculpture. A small but influential centre of contemporary arts, founded by Kusuo Shimizu, the Minami was also at the forefront of promoting international avant-garde work in post-war Japan, especially by figures like Jean Fautrier, Sam Francis, and Jasper Johns, as well as emerging artists (for example, Kate Millett, whose solo exhibition, Things, opened a few days after Sounds of Sculpture).20 The gallery published an elaborate catalog to accompany Tinguely’s exhibition, which included an introduction by the art critic, Yoshiaki Tono, and a gramophone record, Tinguely-Sound, comprising music composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi, based on the noise generated by the sculptures.21 Nothing if not “site-specif ic,” Tinguely busied himself in the weeks leading up to the exhibition assembling new “Baluba,” méta-matic, and “radio” sculptures using junk collected from local scrapyards – his creative 20 Millett, Things, exh. cat. 21 Tinguely, Sounds of Sculpture, exh. cat.; Hultén, A Magic Stronger than Death, 137.

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foraging assisted by the gallery’s proximity to construction sites involved in the building of the city’s new Metropolitan Expressway. By the opening of the exhibition, Tinguely had completed 26 works, including a large centrepiece: a wall-mounted motor-driven structure, “Le Chant du Cygne du Bambous” (“The Bamboo’s Swan Song”). As this title suggests, various works in the exhibition reflected his imaginative appropriation of Japan’s recent history and popular culture, including his admiration for its motorcycle industry: for example, sculptures such as “Casoar (à deux têtes)”/(“Cassowary (with Two Heads)” and “Ma Fraiseuse” were exhibited alongside “Suzuki (Hiroshima)” and “Honda, No. 1.” Some of these works also coincided with the last phase of Tinguely’s “Baluba” period – a term he coined in honor of the recently murdered Congolese Prime Minister and African nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba, and the Luba peoples: the spontaneous, forceful, shaking motions of the sculptures representing the tragic violence of that struggle. However, working in Tokyo also introduced him to more traditional Japanese arts and crafts, such as floral art or ikebana. Tinguely recognized affinities between his own work and that of those artists who were adopting experimental and avant-garde approaches to ikebana, especially the founder of the Sogetsu School, Sōfu Teshigahara (who purchased “Casoar (à deux têtes),”22 and his son, Hiroshi, whose short documentary, Sculpture Mouvante: Jean Tinguely, is ostensibly about Tinguely and this particular exhibition.23 Although Teshigahara is generally associated with the trilogy of feature films he directed in the 1960s (especially, Woman of the Dunes/Suna no Onna, 1964), he was also a documentary film-maker of note, and the austere cinematographic style developed across the trilogy (also in collaboration with Hiroshi Segawa) typically foregrounds the unstable relationship between reality and subjectivity, a disparity or gap that Teshigahara continually explored through his documentary practice.24 Although more formally conventional than his other art documentaries such as Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1957), or his later Antonio Gaudí (1984), Sculpture Mouvante shares their tendency toward visual whimsy and an emphasis on particular features of given objects, their existence as fragments or “documents” being observed with an ikebana artist’s eye for detail, juxtaposition, ironic incongruity, and alternative realities. For example, although the film shows Tinguely at work (outside bending iron rods, welding metal bolts, affixing V10 electric motors, 22 Bischofberger, Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné, 219. 23 On Tinguely’s enthusiasm for ikebana, see Hultén’s Tinguely-Méta, 281. 24 O’Rawe, Regarding the Real, 163–175.

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drilling holes into bamboo, or just talking with Ichiyanagi at the opening night), these sequences are incidental to Teshigahara’s main cinematic concern: how to capture something of the strangeness and apparent absurdity of these sculptures. Sculpture Mouvante is framed at either end by montage sequences comprising shots of sculptures from the exhibition, and their key parts shaking, spinning, rattling, and jolting. These sequences are characterized by a preponderance of close and extreme close shots. For example, the film opens with the plume from “Casoar (à deux têtes)” shaking violently and loudly, followed by an image of the smoothly spinning wheel from “Honda, No. 1,” then a lid is seen (and heard) rattling automatically with Tinguely’s welding helmet clearly visible hanging on the wall behind it, like a Samurai kubuto, before cutting to a longer shot of “Suzuki (Hiroshima)” with its rotating (alarm) bell mechanism. At the end of the film, extreme close-ups of details and particular components from sculptures – such as “Mautz II” (with attached golf ball), and especially “Tokyo Gal” – are juxtaposed in medium and longer shots, before the sequence opens into wider views of the exhibition, followed by a final close-up of a spinning object that turns out to be a mechanical toy frog – a Japanese lucky charm associated with returning something, or to somewhere. Teshigahara’s documentary aesthetic was clearly shaped by post-war Japanese film culture and its debates about social commitment and the problem of realism; nevertheless, the film’s playful subjectivity, tendency towards fragmentation, and fixation on textures and abstractions, exemplifies an approach to the documentary form that successfully conveys something of the remarkable peculiarity of Tinguely’s art. Meanwhile, back in Basel, Tinguely would continue to recognize the little god of returns in his own inimitable way: In 1987, it was scrap from a particularly fashionable kind of deadly toy – Japanese motorcycles – that Tinguely repatriated as hanging chandeliers for a coffee-house in Kyoto. These ikebana-like lighting f ixtures mix the brutal with the incandescent, combining images of speed and death with the message of light. The chandeliers were intended as a double homage, to honor a country that abounds in contradictions and to honor an old friend, the filmmaker and ikebana master Hirsohi Teshigahara.25

25 Violand-Hobi, Jean Tinguely, 133.

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Citation Le Cyclop (1994) is a 75-foot-high steel “walk-around” sculpture situated amongst the deciduous treescapes of Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris. It began life in 1969, when the Franco-American art collectors, John and Dominique de Menil, donated a plot of forest land to Tinguely for a proposed project, “La Tête.” Over the ensuing twenty years, Tinguely, de Saint Phalle, Bernhard Luginbühl, Eva Aeppli, Daniel Spoerri, Larry Rivers, and others worked intermittently on the massive structure. With Tinguely’s death in 1991, de Saint Phalle devoted a considerable amount of time and money to its completion; in its monumental scale and “walk-around” design, not to mention its mirror-mosaic veneer, it is both reminiscent of her own art works (such as Hon: En katedral/She: A Cathedral (1966), or the Gaudiesque The Tarot Garden (1998)), and a testament to the collaborative, contrary, absurd, utopian nature of the entire enterprise. Amidst its various mechanisms, wheels, gears and contraptions, Le Cyclop contains memorial features dedicated to fellow artists who have died (Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, and Louise Nevelson, for example), and small rooms, including: a “replica” of the Paris hotel room a penniless Tinguely and de Saint Phalle once shared with Spoerri; a Holocaust railway car; and a Noh-inspired theater space: “Both frightening and funny, Le Cylop is a total experience – an art funhouse.”26 At the end of Godard and Miéville’s The Old Place, Le Cylop appears on screen as Miéville’s voice tells the story of the Á Bao A Qu, from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings/Manual de zoología fantástica (1957). Commissioned by MoMA, the film – although, “video poem” is perhaps a more accurate description – ruminates on the meaning of art, and its relevance to the realities of twentieth century history, or to the gap between the realities and horrors of historical experience and the silence of art. While its aesthetic preoccupations and sceptical tone are not new to the cinema of Godard and Miéville, its origins and obliquely acknowledged relationship to MoMA does create an added complexity. Throughout its montage of ironically juxtaposed images and sequences, Godard and Miéville speak to one another about these matters in the form of a conversation rather than a dialogue, which is especially appropriate given the etymological scope of the former (conversari = “to live, dwell, live with, keep company with”). “The Old Place” is both familiar and strange, a domain of the old in search of rejuvenation, or perfection – like the Á Bao A Qu. Is it modern art itself, or the twentieth century, MoMA, cinema, language, or all of the above? 26 Tiso, “The Public Art of Jean Tinguely,” 167.

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The sequence begins with another comment on the commodification of art (Citroën naming its latest car, “Picasso”) before Miéville’s tone changes: “Even so, I have a feeling something is resisting, something original, that the origin will always be there, and that it resists.” The next shot frames a white mechanical sheet, jumping frantically like a demented shroud or ghost, a kinetic variation on Man Ray’s striking 1920 photograph, “Sculpture Mouvante” (or “La France”). Created by Patrick Bokanowski and “Pitch” (Christophe Cardoen) for a 1997 exhibition at Le Fresnoy (Projection, Les Transports de L’Image), the work wistfully generates its own drama – a loud, berserk, and seemingly unpredictable presence in the darkened museum space.27 It is also emblematic of that “resistance” which contradicts the assumption that The Old Place is simply a counsel of despair, a pessimistic elegy to defeated causes and corrupted ideals. The iconic close shot of the fictional “No Trespassing” sign from the opening (and ending) of Citizen Kane fades to an actual “Défense d’entrer, propriété de l’État” sign on the perimeter fence surrounding Le Cylop, a juxtaposition Godard would use again in his controversial 2006 exhibition at the Pompidou, Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006, In Search of Lost Theorem. As Miéville continues with the tale of the Á Bao A Qu, other images, and fragments of sounds and music, contradict or complement the words and intertitle text: shots showing the sculpture sparkling in the sunlight are intercut with an image of books from an oil painting, pressed leaves, Francis Bacon’s “Study of Man Talking” (1981), a nineteenth-century drawing of monsters and dragons, Goya, Witold Wojtkiewicz’s “Jesus Christ and the Children” (1908) gather around the story extending the film’s constellation of visual and cultural associations. Le Cylop, however, remains a constant point of reference. A multiform steel sculpture at home with nature, a museum of sorts that is also a play park, a machine that is also a memorial. In The Old Place, the presence of Le Cyclop serves as a reminder that despite everything there is always a glimmer of hope in the representation of the “something original” that Tinguely’s art represents.

Coda In its concern with technology, time, movement, politics, and play, the work of Jean Tinguely clearly raises questions about what art is. In this sense, 27 De Baecque, Godard, 887, n304. Godard and Miéville also included this sequence in their 2001 short Darkness of Time/Dans le noir du temps.

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his sculptures and meta-machines also share something with post-war film modernism, and its critique of the documentary image as necessarily representing reality and truth. If Pennebaker’s approach to filming Homage to New York, for example, is ultimately constrained by an underlying confidence in – or nostalgia for – the objective integrity of the documentary form, Robert Breer’s whimsical, ironic, and intermedial method succeeds as a film because it stays in harmony with the disharmony of its subject matter. The ability to remain available to Tinguely’s seemingly anarchic sensibility is also a feature of Teshigahara’s Sculpture Mouvante, which combines conventional and abstract documentary techniques to convey the bewildering cacophony of movements, interactions, and sounds produced for – and by – a Tinguely exhibition. Godard and Miéville’s The Old Place, meanwhile, is a disruptive archive in its own right, a museum of modernity that foregrounds fragments and associations (the reality of images rather than images of reality). In so doing, it discovers in Le Cylop a kindred spirit, a home from home inhabited by remembrance and metamorphosis, order and chaos.

Bibliography Beattie, Keith. D.A. Pennebaker. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Berghaus, Günter. “Neo-Dada Performance Art.” Neo-Avant-Garde, eds. David Hopkins and Anna Katharina Schaffner. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 75–96. Bischofberger, Christina. Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné. Sculpture and Reliefs, 1954–68. Vol. 1. Zürich: Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, 1982. Breer, Robert, dir. A Man and his Dog Out for Air. 1957. US. 3 min. 16mm, b&w. — Homage to Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York”. 1960. US. 10 min. 16mm, b&w. Bridge, Sonia. “Robert Breer: Single-Frame Aesthetics and Inherited Modernisms in Relation to the Neo-Avant-Garde and Debates on Film Animation.” PhD diss. University College London, 2016. [Online] https://core.ac.uk/download/ pdf/132226004.pdf. Brougher, Kerry. “Radiation Made Visible.” Damage Control Art and Destruction Since 1950, exh. cat., ed. Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson. London: Prestel, 2013. 12–103. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2000. Cabañas, Kaira M. The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and Performative in Postwar France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Carrick, Jill. Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Topographies of Chance and Return. London: Routledge, 2010. Chau, Christina. Movement, Time, Technology, and Art. New York: Springer, 2017.

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Cummings, Paul. “Oral History Interview with Robert Breer.” Smithsonian Archives of American Art (July 10, 1973). [Online] https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_ transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_212084. De Baecque, Antoine. Godard: Biographie. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010. De Saint Phalle, Niki, dir. Un rêve plus long que la nuit/A Dream Lasts Longer than the Night. 1975, FR., 95 min. — with Peter Whitehead, dirs. Daddy. 1973. FR/GER/UK. 83 min. Derrida, Jacques. Artaud the Moma: Interjections of Appeal. Transl. Peggy Kamuf. Ed. Kaira M. Cabañas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Godard, Jean-Luc and Anne-Marie Miéville, dirs., The Old Place. 1999. CH. 47 min. Hultén, Pontus. Tinguely-Méta. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. — Jean Tinguely: A Magic Stronger Than Death. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987. — and Hans Nordenström, dirs. En Dag I Staden/A Day in the City. 1956. SWE. 19 min. b&w. Imesch, Kornelia. “Jean Tinguely and Le Corbusier in Swiss Weekly Film Newsreels and Television.” Constructions of Cultural Identities in Newsreel Cinema and Television after 1945, ed. Kornelia Imesch, Sigrid Schade, and Samuel Sieber. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016. 117–132. Klüver, Billy. “The Garden Party.” Jean Tinguely: A Magic Stronger Than Death, ed. Hultén, Pontus. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987. 74–77. Lee, Pamela M. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. Millett, Kate. Kate Millett: Things. exh. cat. Tokyo: Minami Gallery, 1963. O’Pray, Michael. Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes, and Passions. London: Wallflower, 2003. O’Rawe, Des. Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Pennebaker, D.A, dir. Daybreak Express. 1958 [1953]. US. 5 min. Col. — dir, Breaking it Up at the Museum. 1960. US. 6 min. 16mm, b&w. Rolez, Anaïs. La Métaphysique dans la Sculpture de Jean Tinguely: Mécanique, Contradiction et Métamorphose Comme Principes Générateurs. Rennes: Rennes Université, 2015. Saunders, Dave. “The Triumph of Observationalism: Direct Cinema in the USA.” The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston. London: BFI, 2013. 159–166. Selz, Gabrielle. Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction. New York: Norton, 2014. Teshigahara, Hiroshi, dir. Sculpture Mouvante: Jean Tinguely. 1981 [1963]. JAP. 15 min. 16 mm. b&w. Tinguely, Jean. Tinguely. exh. cat. [Mar. 20-Apr. 6, 1963, inc. 45 r.p.m. phonograph record]. Tokyo: Minami Gallery, 1963.

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Tiso, Elisabeth. “The Public Art of Jean Tinguely, 1959–1991: Between Performance and Permanence.” France and the Visual Arts Since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 155–168. Violand-Hobi, Heidi E. Jean Tinguely: Life and Work. Munich: Prestel, 1995.

About the Author Des O’Rawe is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses chiefly on comparative approaches to the study of film, and his publications include: Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts (2016); and Post-Conflict Performance, Film, and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory (with Mark Phelan, 2016).

7.

China’s Van Goghs: Documentary Production, International Taste, and Artistic Labor A. T. McKenna

Abstract Dafen oil painting village in southern China is home to thousands of peasant-turned-painters who hand-produce copies of Western masterpieces in huge quantities to sell to an international clientele. China’s Van Goghs (Yu Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu, 2016) follows the lives of a group of these painter-workers, and poses fundamental questions about the value of art and labor. It also examines the artists’ intimate and complex relationship with Vincent van Gogh, who is at once their hero, mentor, and kindred spirit. This chapter is based on interviews with the production team, and my own experience as associate producer of the film. Utilizing production studies methodologies and paratextual analysis, it investigates the relationship between subject, audience, and intermediaries in both the on-screen art world and the international documentary industry. Keywords: Documentary, production, paratexts, film festivals, independent Chinese cinema

Looking beyond traditional textual analysis can provide valuable insights into the portrayals of art worlds in cinema. Using mixed methodologies – including participant observation, textual and paratextual analysis, and production studies methods – in the following analysis of the multi award-winning documentary, China’s Van Goghs (2016), directed by the father-daughter team of Yu Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu, I investigate the relationship between subject, audience, and intermediaries in both the on-screen art world and the international documentary industry. In doing

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch07

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so, I demonstrate the intricate negotiations required to strike an acceptable balance between art, authenticity, and accessibility. China’s Van Goghs is an intimate portrait of the peasant-painters of Dafen, which lies in a suburb of Shenzhen in southern China. Dafen is the world’s largest oil painting village, where thousands of migrant workers produce copies of Western masterpieces for sale. Dafen has received some media attention and is the subject of a scholarly study by Winnie Win Yon Wong, whose research was aided by the directors of China’s Van Goghs, and whose book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade is illustrated by photographs by Haibo Yu – one of China’s most celebrated photographers.1 It is incumbent on me to declare an interest here: I acted as associate producer on China’s Van Goghs, and most of the key production crew are members of my family-in-law. It was produced by my wife, Kiki Tianqi Yu (hereafter Tianqi), who directed alongside her father Haibo Yu (hereafter Haibo); the executive producer is my mother-in-law, Lijun Zhao, and my brother-in-law, Weiqi Yu, composed the music. For my own part, I have always believed in this project, from first seeing some extraordinary footage, learning the stories of Dafen and Shenzhen, meeting the painter-workers, observing the devotion and dedication of the production team, and seeing the film’s reception at international film festivals. I believe China’s Van Goghs provides a fascinating insight into a little understood aspect of the art world and stands as a work of art in its own right. Nonetheless, this compromise in objectivity is compensated for by privileged access insofar as I worked very closely alongside the film-makers, and was thus able to use my involvement to analyze the production of the film from the perspective of a participant-observer – albeit not a wholly disinterested one. The first section of this chapter introduces Shenzhen, Dafen, and China’s Van Goghs, in order to contextualize the film and address its dominant themes, those being domestic and financial tensions, entrepreneurialism, social class, cultural legitimacy, artistic ambitions, and the collective belief in the transformative power of art. The second section delves into the production of the film; it positions both the funding pitch and the film’s title as paratexts that enable a deeper understanding of how the film was constructed and the forces that shaped it. China’s Van Goghs is at once an independent Chinese documentary and an international co-production, with production personnel and funding sourced from Asia, Europe, and North America, and this section examines how a specifically Chinese “art world” was captured and packaged for an international audience. 1 Wong, Van Gogh on Demand.

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Contextualizing China’s Van Goghs Shenzhen is situated on the south coast of China, just over the strait from Hong Kong. It is China’s modern metropolis, which grew from a fishing village into a megacity in less than forty years. In 1979, the population of Shenzhen was around 30,000; at the time of writing, it is estimated to be more than twelve million. Shenzhen’s place in modern Chinese history is assured. It was China’s first Special Economic Zone in 1980, and allowed to adopt a more market-orientated economy, thereby fulfilling a key role in China’s “opening up” policy led by Deng Xiaoping, a policy that marked the end of the era of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. Alongside Beijing and Shanghai, it is often listed as one of China’s most liveable cities for foreigners. It has vibrant, cosmopolitan culture, and is littered with skyscrapers, museums, bars, shopping malls, and green spaces. A wander around Shenzhen reveals little of its reputation in the international imagination, in which it is synonymous with factories, workshops, and exploitative labor practices, under which Chinese workers suffer and Western consumers benefit. Apple’s iPhones are made at the Foxconn City industrial park in a suburb of Shenzhen, which often draws international attention because of workers’ conditions and all-too-frequent suicides. Shenzhen has been called the “Silicon Valley of China,” and is powered by both corporate and entrepreneurial capitalism; as the population explosion over the last forty years makes clear, it is a migrant city, and one of vast inequalities. Among the world’s cities, it has the seventh highest concentration of billionaires,2 higher than London, but its suburbs are dominated by factories that employ migrants in harsh conditions, on low pay for long hours, as they leave their ever-more sparsely populated rural hometowns to earn a living amid China’s rapid process of urbanization. In the suburb of Buji, near Longgang Metro station, is Dafen. It is a web of alleys and studios, and home to thousands of peasant-painters, migrants from rural areas who have moved to Shenzhen and trained in oil painting techniques to produce copies of Western masterpieces. As the brainchild of Huang Jiang, a Hong Kong businessman, Dafen oil painting village was established in the 1990s with around twenty painters, who were trained in oil painting techniques that are uncommon in China, with its rich art history dominated by watercolor and calligraphy. By the 2010s, there were more than 10,000 painters working in the village producing copies of everything from da Vinci to Monet to Van Gogh to Warhol. 2

Tognini, “Richest Cities,” n.p.

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In Dafen, you can easily pick up a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers for a reasonable price. The painters there will also take orders. On one visit to Dafen, I gave one of the painters a small photograph of Tom Finney, my father’s favorite football player, who had played outside left for Preston North End in the post-war years. Two days later, I received a splendid portrait of the man they called the Preston Plumber for less than one hundred pounds, which my wife and I presented to my father for his seventy-fifth birthday. But it is the international mail order business that provides the bulk of the painter-workers’ income, and this is the world that China’s Van Goghs explores. China’s Van Goghs is an intimate, ethnographic portrait of the lives of the peasant-painters of Dafen. They work in cramped conditions, fulfilling orders for Western clients. Orders can come in in their thousands, and the painters, working in small teams often linked by family, can complete up to six paintings a day. Quality control is highlighted throughout the film; it opens with one the film’s main characters, Zhao Xiaoyong, inspecting a large order of Van Gogh copies that are due to be shipped to Europe; he compliments his team on their good work, or orders retouching where necessary. Later, another character, Zhou Yongjiu, faces down a rebellion from one of his young apprentices when he demands that he conduct signif icant and time-consuming corrections on a large Van Gogh Self Portrait. In this scene, and others, the painters are sweating and stripped to the waist, making palpable the stifling summer heat in which they work. Indeed, when Haibo began documenting Dafen as a still photographer, the heat was a notable problem: “‘It was very hot [. . .] [the painters] were topless, quietly, calmly and day in day out while working. I could hardly to move.”3 In the heat and cramped conditions, surrounded by Western masterpieces in various stages of completion, there are domestic and financial tensions. Zhao’s young daughter hates her school and complains tearfully and bitterly; Zhou worries that his teenage son is unprepared for the hardships of working life. Money is an ever-present problem. Financial pressures have been exacerbated for the Dafen painters because of the 2008 financial crisis in the West, which resulted in a severe reduction in orders from Western clients. These problems are compounded by rising costs, and the difficulty of finding young apprentices willing to accept low pay for being trained in the skilled labor of copy painting, when they could find unskilled work in one of Shenzhen’s many factories for similarly low pay. 3 Yu, Blurring Boundaries, 308.

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Haibo has called the painters “a new kind of artistic proletariat.”4 Their work is repetitive, labor-intensive, and undertaken on a production line under immense pressure to meet deadlines. The painters are not, however, wholly alienated from the product of their labor, in a Marxist sense. They are entrepreneurs whose income is directly related to their efforts. Also, the painters create their copies from beginning to end; they are not assembled sequentially as in the Fordist production line, so the workers retain an affinity with their own creations, and develop their own special skills (Zhao’s wife, for example, is particularly good at Van Gogh’s Starry Night). They also feel a strong emotional connection to the artist they are copying; Vincent van Gogh is both their hero and mentor. Given the intensity of their relationship, one could argue that their bond with Van Gogh is far stronger than that of the average gallery goer, art critic, collector, or dealer. For Haibo and Tianqi, it was this spiritual connection to Van Gogh that made for such as compelling story. As Tianqi says, “they are continuing the soul of van Gogh in their work.”5 However, after more than twenty years of copying Van Gogh’s work, neither Zhao nor any of the other Van Gogh copyists featured have seen an original Van Gogh painting, and the film’s domestic and financial tensions are most dramatically evident in Zhao’s long-held ambition to travel to Amsterdam to visit the Van Gogh museum. With money tight, Zhao’s wife argues against Zhao’s planned trip; Zhao’s counterarguments reveal, once more, a concern with quality and an artistic ambition, as he contends that the trip will improve the quality, and therefore profitability, of his paintings. Zhao eventually fulfills his dream and travels to Amsterdam, where he experiences an artistic epiphany. Firstly, he encounters his own paintings in a gift shop near the Van Gogh museum. Having believed that his paintings were for sale in a higher-end gallery or museum, he is crestfallen; then, he discovers that his paintings are being sold for more than ten times what he is paid per item. Shortly after this discovery, and the night before he visits the Van Gogh museum, the affinity Zhao feels with Van Gogh is made explicitly when his friend, Li Peng, notes that Van Gogh was drawn to the poor, and Zhao and his friends are poor. Zhao’s visit to the Van Gogh museum is no less dramatic. Zhao and the camera crew were allowed in to film one morning, before the museum opened, so Zhao is able to study the paintings without the crowds. He examines Van Gogh’s brushwork and notes how different it is to his own. But it is not just technical skills that he compares, and he is 4 5

Ibid., 256. Author interview with Tianqi Yu, November 5, 2020.

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left desolate when he unfavorably compares Van Gogh’s originality to his own lifetime of copying. Nonetheless, Zhao is energized by his encounter with Van Gogh’s work, as is memorably and movingly depicted when Zhao is shown in Arles, later in his European trip, drunkenly and elatedly wandering the streets, telling his friends what he would say to Van Gogh should he appear. He also resolves to devote himself to creating more original works of art. Upon his return to Dafen, we see that others in the painting village are keen to commit to creating their own original works of art, being similarly inspired, and perhaps rendering the truth of something we see Zho say to Zhao before his departure for Europe: “Now that you are going, it is like we are all going.”

Production and Paratexts Haibo Yu is one of China’s most famous photographers. He has won numerous prestigious awards, and his work has been collected by institutions such as the V&A Museums in London and Shenzhen, and the San Francisco MoMA. In 2004, he began photographing the painter-workers of Dafen, which formed the basis of a collection that won him the World Press Photography Award in 2006. Tianqi is a film-maker and scholar. Her films include, as producerdirector, Memory of Home (2007), Photographing Shenzhen (2009), and, as producer, The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019); as a scholar, she is a leading expert in the field of independent Chinese documentary. As for me, as a scholar with significant expertise in the field of production studies, I have sifted through the personal and business papers of many film producers and, upon realising the sheer number and magnitude of the problems encountered in bringing any project to fruition, I became assured that I would never wish to become involved in the production process. Thankfully, my family-in-law had other ideas and I put up little resistance. Haibo has been documenting the growth of Shenzhen since the 1980s, photographing migrants and businessmen, billionaires and prostitutes. A key theme of his photography is the dynamism and consequences of entrepreneurial capitalism. It is this theme that is perhaps the founding myth of Shenzhen, and one that runs through China’s Van Goghs, its subject matter and production contexts. As noted, the painters in the film are working-class entrepreneurs and, similarly, independent documentary production is an inherently entrepreneurial endeavor. Van Gogh himself was a successful art dealer prior to devoting his life to painting. Though he failed to sell more than a few of his own paintings during his lifetime,

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his work has become the basis of an entire sub-industry, encompassing art dealerships, museums, books, biographies, and biopics. At one end of the scale, his original works go for many millions, at the other, T-shirts, tea towels, and trinkets go for a few euros. This is the world that the painters in China’s Van Goghs, and the film itself, are a part of. The sheer potency of the Van Gogh image and industry goes some way to answering a key question about the film: Why China’s Van Goghs? Haibo’s original series of photographs documenting the painter-workers of Dafen includes many different painters copying a wide variety of classic paintings from many artists other than Van Gogh. Indeed, when Haibo transitioned from photography to film to further his documentary exploration, he applied his camera in a similarly indiscriminate manner. A 90-minute narrative documentary, however, needs a focal point to hang the story on, and Tianqi, aware of Van Gogh’s popularity in the West, felt that he would be an ideal focal point for a documentary seeking an international audience and reliant on international funding to get made. In order to attract funding, Tianqi pitched the unmade China’s Van Goghs at film festivals, a “pitch” being a short speech, sometimes accompanied by a trailer, designed to attract investment. It is an aspect of film-making that receives little scholarly attention, partly because pitches go largely unrecorded and unarchived, but access to them can enable deeper understandings of textual meanings and the production process. In their study of screenplay pitches to Hollywood studios, Kimberly D. Elsbach and Roderick M. Kramer outline a phenomenon in which investors, “came to see themselves as creative artists who were involved in the mutual creation [. . .] of the proposed products. They reasoned that, if the pitchers were able to inspire creativity in them, those pitchers must have creative potential themselves.”6 This observation is particularly applicable to the world of independent documentary, where the perceived importance of the story being told can be a motivating factor to an investor who will, in turn, promote the film within their network in terms of social value. Despite their ephemeral nature, pitches should be understood as paratexts, a concept developed by the literary theorist Gérard Genette to understand textually related material such as titles, book covers, author bios, back matter, etc.7 The meaning of the term has been expanded in recent years, most notably by Jonathan Gray, who, in applying the term to film and television, uses it to encompass all manner of material related to 6 Elsbach and Kramer, “Assessing Creativity,” 294. 7 Genette, Thresholds of Interpretation.

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a text, with a significant emphasis of promotional material.8 Pitches may not be publicly accessible, but they are promotional tools that help the researcher decipher a text or production. Positioning a pitch as a paratext, then, is quite correct. China’s Van Goghs was pitched four times at documentary festivals, winning Tianqi three pitching awards. Pitches are, inevitably, reductive simplifications, because of the restrictions of time, medium, and intent. They are often delivered at film festival pitching forums, which means that an individual pitch will appear amongst many other pitches in a forum that may last for a morning, afternoon, all day, or longer. The pitch must, then, stand out and distinguish itself among dozens of other pitches; a memorable hook is therefore key, such as the story of a man who has spent most of his adult life copying Van Gogh’s paintings travelling to Amsterdam to see the originals for the first time. But it is not enough to merely stand out; the purpose of the pitch is to gain support from within the industry in the form of what is politely called “funding”, but bluntly called “money.” Commercial imperatives drive the documentary world in ways that are less conspicuous than in the world of narrative film-making, but the people involved still have to make a living and get paid for their work. Commercial considerations will play a significant role in an investor’s mind when deciding whether to fund a project. An investor’s interest may be piqued by what they consider to be the “best” project, or by a project they find personally appealing, but they will also have to consider its appeal to others – distributors, exhibitors, broadcasters, and audiences – and this is where commercial considerations come in. If commercial considerations play a part in guiding the investor’s response to a pitch, then they should also play a significant role in shaping the pitch itself. This is part of the first pitch for China’s Van Goghs delivered at the CCTV Pitching Competition in Chengdu in 2013: Directors Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu, the father-daughter team, followed one of the painters, Xiaoyong Zhao. He and his family have painted around 100,000 Van Goghs. After all these years, Zhao feels a deep affinity with Van Gogh. Having never seen Van Gogh’s original paintings, Zhao’s biggest dream is to travel to Amsterdam to see the works of his legendary associate. After struggling and saving, he fulfills his dream. In Europe, his encounter with Van Gogh’s paintings brings an epiphany [. . .] Zhao is inspired by Van Gogh’s paintings and the hardships he suffered and 8 Gray, Show Sold Separately.

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resolves to dedicate himself to his own original art, searching for his own authentic voice in order to be true to the spirit of his hero and mentor – Vincent van Gogh.9

I have written elsewhere about the importance of generating and maintaining momentum on a film production, and this is as true of an independent documentary as it is of a big budget production.10 In addition to raising the required funds, the pitching process can help generate the sense of momentum required to push the film forward through the production process, as well as finding the finances to do it. According to Tianqi, “[t]he world of independent documentary is small. You get used to seeing the same faces at different places around the world when seeking funding or on the festival circuit. This means that funders who may have had their interest piqued by a project pitch at one festival, may seek out the same project at a later festival to see how it is progressing.”11 This means, of course, that a project must be progressing in order for a funders interest to be maintained; if a project has not progressed, then interest may cool. This means that film-makers should not be delivering the same pitch twice, because this will imply that the project has stalled, and the best way to avoid giving the impression of a stalled project is to ensure that the project does not stall. Giving a sense of the progression and forward momentum in a project helps to inspire confidence in a project and increase the likelihood of investment. The pitching process, then, directly impacts a project’s development in ways beyond the financial. Pitching, fielding questions, entering into discussions, hearing expressions of interest, or being given advice by industry insiders can all be beneficial in ensuring a project remains live. At the CCTV China Pitch Forum in 2013, Tianqi met with representatives of numerous Chinese and Western broadcasters and companies, which generated interest in the project in the documentary world generally, and attracted particular interest from representatives of the Netherlands Film Fund – who would eventually provide significant funding for the film; later that year, the pitch at Guangzhou DocFest initiated contact with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which subsequently bought distribution rights to China’s Van Goghs. The following year, pitching at Asian Side of the Doc brought 9 Kiki Tianqi Yu, China’s Van Gogh pitch delivered at CCTV Pitching Competition at Century City, Chengdu, China, 16 November 2013. 10 McKenna, Showman of the Screen, 181–192. 11 Author interview with Tianqi Yu, November 5, 2020.

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investment from Denmark’s DRTV, and pitching at IDFA generated further investment and industry interest. One significant way in which the project progressed in 2014 was that the hook of the pitch became real, in that in the summer of 2014 Zhao had fulfilled his ambition to see the original works of Vincent van Gogh at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Tianqi says that the project’s forward momentum generated by the pitching process was instrumental in this: the production team making Zhao’s dream public made him more determined to reach his goal, and it was his trip to Amsterdam that precipitated his artistic rebirth, and that of his friends and colleagues in Dafen.12 The pitch, then, is not merely an overture to get money, it can act as a catalyst within a production, and this was clearly the case with China’s Van Goghs: the pitch led to interest, which led to funding and other support, which, in turn, led to a focusing of enthusiasm and harnessing of intent within the production team, and an inspiration for an ambition to be realized from the film’s main character. Indeed, Jonathan Gray has justifiably called for greater recognition of paratexts because of their, “constitutive role in creating textuality.”13 In the case of the pitch for China’s Van Goghs, the pitch had an instrumental role in creating the text – not only in terms of r 5,ealizing the text, but in also shaping it. The text-shaping role of the pitch-paratext leads us to titles, which are more commonly understood to be paratexts than pitches, in that they frame the text for the audience.14 As we have seen, the pitches focused on Zhao’s story, as did the early cuts of the film, and the original title – the singular China’s Van Gogh. Vincent van Gogh’s singularity is both used and undermined by the title, China’s Van Goghs, which both references the West’s most famous maverick artist, and pluralizes so as to emphasize the community nature of Dafen. This is the director’s dilemma – needing to provide focus for an audience without overshadowing the work of other copy-painters in Dafen by particularizing one. Early cuts of the film followed Zhao and his story more closely that the final edit. This is not to say that the film-makers were overly indulgent of Western sensibilities or that they stuck too closely to their original pitch at the expense of their own vision. As with other endeavors, film-making is an ongoing procedure toward an ill-defined goal that becomes ever more precise through trial, error, rethinking, re-evaluation, and reshaping. The initial 12 Author interview with Tianqi Yu, November 2020. 13 Gray, 7. 14 Genette, 55–102.

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twenty-hour rough cut was created from more than 500 hours of footage. Initial rough cuts were assembled by Haibo, before further, finer editing work was undertaken by two editors from Europe: Søren B. Ebbe worked on the first version of the final film, then Axel Skovdal Roelofs reworked this version into the cut that was premiered at IDFA. Subsequently, Tom Hsin-Ming Lin, a Taiwanese editor re-edited the film into its final version. The different cuts of the film provide fascinating insights into how the artists and art world of Dafen was constructed for a 90-minute narrative documentary. Ebbe’s first cut places one of the film-makers in the story, in the form of a narration from Haibo, who appears on screen, detailing how he became involved in Dafen’s art milieu. This was considered to be a distraction, and test audiences wanted to know more about Zhao’s story. He thus increasingly became this film’s primary focus as the editing process progressed. A later cut from Roelofs placed a heavy emphasis on Zhao’s artistic rebirth following his trip to Amsterdam, with Zhao devoting himself to creating original works in a feel-good, wish-fulfilment ending, which Haibo and Tianqi eventually decided was misrepresentative. To make further changes, the film-makers engaged Hsin-Ming Lin; it was a key production decision. According to Tianqi, the previous cuts by European editors were “a little too dramatic. A Chinese speaker was able to bring out the subtlety and nuance of the emotions of the characters. It also gave the film a more East Asian sensibility.” Subsequently, Hsin-Ming Lin’s reworking saw Zhao setting up a fake Van Gogh museum in Shenzhen as the ending, undercutting the upbeat previous cut. Hsin-Ming Lin then reworked the film once more to make the final cut, which disposed of the Zhao-focused fake Van Gogh museum and depicted the endeavors and ambitions of a number of painter-workers as they created their own original works of art. The completed film, along with the pluralization in the title change, resulted in a more subtle and detailed portrayal of Dafen as a creative community, and the painters’ move to creating original works appears more organic than climactic, with the painters using the skills they have acquired, and the taking inspiration from the hero and mentor, Vincent van Gogh.

Conclusion What this chapter seeks to demonstrate is that documentary portrayals of art worlds are formed by a complexity of interrelated forces that help to shape the text. Hundreds of hours of footage were shot in order to create a film that lasts around an hour and a half. It is a long journey of decisions,

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choices, changing focus, shifting emphasis, course correction and eventual fine-tuning. These creative processes cannot be separated from the wider production contexts, and the values of potential funders and international audiences. In Clarence Tsui’s review of China’s Van Gogh in the Hollywood Reporter, he observes: “Veering sharply away from the stereotype of Chinese laborers as a faceless mass seeking a better quality of life, China’s Van Goghs explores their desire for spiritual fulfilment, too.”15 Indeed, the film’s logline emphasizes its portrayal of the Chinese journey from “Made in China to Created in China.” In order to do this, the film-makers continually revised and reshaped the film in order to make a film of subtlety and nuance, eschewing well-worn tropes of wish-fulfillment endings, or a singular tale of one man’s triumph against the odds. While they were doing this, the film was a live project: it was still being shot as funding was being sought and negotiated, deadlines had to be met and international film festival attendance arranged. Personnel had to be engaged to work on the project; in terms of editing alone, this included three editors from three different countries who needed to travel to China to perform their work within limited time frames. Throughout the production process, negotiations were taking place across different time zones with representatives of film festivals, production companies, sales agents, distributors, broadcasters, and more. The final film, and its portrayal of an art world, is shaped, to varying degrees, by all these forces – and by the sense of momentum generated by their interaction. The analysis of production histories and paratexts has been largely absent from documentary studies, but they can be vital tools to uncover how texts are shaped. In seeking to understand how art worlds are depicted on screen, it is instructive to look beyond the texts to examine the mechanics that forged the depiction, thereby gaining a greater understanding of why we are seeing what we are seeing.

Bibliography Elsbach, Kimberly D. and Roderick M. Kramer. “Assessing Creativity in Hollywood Pitch Meetings: Evidence for a Dual-Process Model of Creativity Judgements.” The Academy of Management Journal 46, no. 3: 283–301. Genette, Gerard. Thresholds of Interpretation. Transl. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 15 Clarence Tsui, “China’s Van Goghs: Film Review.” n.p.

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Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press, 2010. McKenna, A. T. Showman of the Screen: Joseph E. Levine and His Revolutions in Film Promotion. Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 181–192. Tognini, Giacomo. “Richest Cities: The Top Ten Cities Billionaires Call Home.” Forbes (April 7, 2020). [Online] https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2020/04/07/ worlds-richest-cities-the-top-10-cities-where-most-billionaires-call-home-2020/. Tsui, Clarence. “China’s Van Goghs: Film Review.” Hollywood Reporter (July 26, 2017). [Online] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/chinas-van-goghs-zhongguo-fan-gao-film-review-1023772. Wong, Winnie Win Yon, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Yu Haibo, Blurring Boundaries. Beijing: Wenlian, 2020.

About the Author A. T. McKenna is a lecturer in Media Industries at King’s College London. He is the author of King Creole: The Death of Rock and Roll in America (forthcoming, 2021), Showman of the Screen: Joseph E. Levine and his Revolutions in Film Promotion (2016), co-author of The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Film Production and the British Film Industry (2013), and co-editor of Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies (2014).

8. A World Made of Art Gillian McIver Abstract This chapter looks at two popular historical dramas set in the seventeenthcentury Netherlands: Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber, 2004) and the lesser-known Dutch epic Admiral, directed by Roel Reiné (2015). Both films have a complex relationship with Dutch Golden Age painting. Both films explicitly address painters and painting in the mise en scène, presenting a world whose historical realism is created by and through art. Paintings guide each film’s visual narrative from an imaginary realism into an immersive, emotive sublime. The chapter examines the way that paintings guide each film’s visual narrative from an imaginary realism into an immersive, emotive sublime. Keywords: Painting, Dutch Golden Age, mise en scène, history, epic

We imagine the seventeenth century almost entirely through its art: the chiaroscuro dramas of the Caravaggists; the contained domestic world of De Hooch; the sly glances of Lely’s duchesses; and the quiet repose of Van Ruysdael’s landscapes. Unsurprisingly, the world of historical films is composed almost exclusively through reference to these and other artworks. How, then, are these historical art worlds constructed? Do the artworks only provide a matrix for the film’s production design, or are they implicated in the narrative and theme? How does painting address the problem of “realism” in the historical film? Is the presentation of the past a matter of realism? What about the overwhelming experience of immersion into a distant, remote film “world”? This chapter looks at two popular historical dramas set in the seventeenthcentury Netherlands: Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber, 2004) and the lesser-known Dutch epic Admiral (Dutch title Michiel de Ruyter), directed by Roel Reiné (2015). Both have a complex relationship with Dutch Golden Age painting. Both films cover a similar time frame and are somewhat

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch08

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based on actual events. This chapter examines how these films explicitly address painters and painting in the mise en scène, presenting a world whose historical realism is created by and through art. As one of the principal visual conventions of the history film, painting is frequently employed in the production of spectacle. Painting can connect the film’s subject with well-known works from recognized artists and can cast and style the characters. Film-makers recreate paintings as shots or reveal them within the mise en scène. Susan Felleman’s astute observation that films often “tend to subsume and diminish art”1 is somewhat less true of historical films. The use of fine art within the mise en scène is one of the chief codes of these films. Visual references to paintings, either explicit or implicit, and the inclusion of (or virtual reconstruction of) known historical landmarks in the mise en scène, function as visual codes of historical accuracy and as a “fine art” imprimatur of quality. The work of Angela Dalle Vacche (1996), Susan Felleman (2006), and Anne Hollander (1989) led the way in looking at how painting is used in f ilms. Charles Tashiro’s (2004) and Geraint d’Arcy’s studies of f ilm design (D’Arcy 2019) have contributed new perspectives on the role of mise en scène in historical films. However, the centrality of painting to the recreation of the past on film remains underexplored. Following on from James Kirwan’s writings on the sublime in cinema and art (Kirwan 2018, 2005), this chapter will demonstrate the way paintings guide each f ilm’s visual narrative from an imaginary realism into an immersive, emotive sublime.

Schisms in Time Hans Kellner’s concept of “chronoschism”2 often operates in relation to historical films. He describes chronoschism as a perceived gap in time, producing a rendition of the past that is both familiar and unfamiliar. “How like us they were!” we cry, with a shock of recognition as the historical character comfortably inhabits a world we recognize from well-known paintings or photographs. The historical painting (that seems to emblematize the past) used in a history film also embodies what Kellner3 calls a “chronochasm”: a huge gap in time, over which we can look, “in a position 1 2 3

Felleman, “Decay of the Aura.” Kellner, “Is History Ever Timely?” 237. Ibid., 240.

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to oversee the outcomes of events and thus understand their meaning.”4 An iconic painting can serve as a bridge across time, helping the viewer interpret and understand the film’s meaning. A good example appears in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette: Marie has a fantasy where she imagines her dashing lover, Count Fersen, in a pastiche of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). The viewer recognizes the drama and composition as romantic (and Romantic) but, for those with a little historical knowledge, it also acts as a foreshadowing of Marie’s doom. Both Girl with a Pearl Earring and Admiral employ, in different ways, various paintings made during the Dutch “Golden Age” (the second half of the seventeenth century) by painters such as Jan Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, Meindert Hobbema, and others. These painters absorbed the achievements of Caravaggio and his Flemish followers, but here the naturalistic style of the Caravaggists becomes something akin to realism due to the way these paintings seem to describe everyday life. Commonly referred to as “genre” paintings (which also include seascapes, still life, landscapes, and portraits), the works offer an illusion of reality due to a combination of forms rendered as lifelike as possible. Through naturalistic painting techniques, and compositions that use lighting and spatial arrangement to create the illusion of depth, they recreate scenes from daily life or real-life places or events. The familiarity of genre paintings, their iconic status in art history, and the “everyday” nature of their subject matter mean that, when integrated into the mise en scène (whether presented as paintings or as recreations), they engender in the viewer a sense of chronoschism – the familiar and the unfamiliar combined. At critical moments in the film, the appearance of a particular painting triggers in the viewer an awareness of a vast gap in time – a chronochasm – through which she perceives anew the meaning of the historical events represented on screen.

The Past as Sublime If one of the historical film’s principal considerations is to depict the past realistically, the effect is often to create an immersive experience, where the 4 To clarify, chronoschism is a perceived gap in time, which the audience becomes aware of, if momentarily. Chronochasm, on the other hand, is a more profound experience of time, a recognition of a vast gap between past and present, where the shock of the perception leads to new understanding.

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viewer feels as though they are “looking back upon history.” Sometimes the chronoclasmic shock of returning to the present is one of the pleasurable aspects of a film. Is this immersive state of suspension between a re-created imagined past on screen and the viewer’s present, a kind of sublime? To Paul Roncken, the sublime “can be interpreted as an extreme type of aesthetics, a supernova of sensations.”5 It is valuable to consider these “extreme aesthetics” in terms of film aesthetics. If we look at the sublime described by Edmund Burke, it offers an evocative description of the spectacular film, which seeks to create an immersive experience that provides vicarious shocks and terrors. Though spectacle and the sublime are not the same, many historical films engage with the sublime as spectacle, by creating immersive, visually stunning set pieces where dramatic landscapes,6 natural disasters, violence or other kinds of visceral shocks appear in the service of the historical narrative. Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725) considers the sublime in art. For Richardson, the sublime is “the state which fills and satisfies the mind, nothing appears to be wanting, nothing to be amiss, or if it does, is easily forgiven. All faults die, vanish in the presence of the sublime which, when it appears, is as the sun traversing the vast desert of the sky.”7 The sublime “ravishes,” Richardson continues. “It transports, and creates in us a certain admiration, mixed with astonishment.”8 Painting is not about merely striving for realism, but moving beyond it: “he that would rise to the sublime must form an idea of something beyond all we have yet seen; or which art, or nature had yet produced.”9 Richardson’s argument can be applied to the notion of an artwork being immersive, and so well-realized that we cannot perceive or imagine any flaw or fault in the illusion it creates. Richardson’s early concept of the sublime may be a useful way to understand the sublime in film: a sense of totality, an immersion that operates across the senses and emotions. John Baillie, in An Essay on the Sublime (1747), thought that size, or vastness, was a vital element of the sublime. This, Baillie wrote, is where art is useful, since “the sublime of painting consists mostly and finally in representing the sublime of the passions.”10 Baillie specifies that the sublime can be experienced through constructed spectacle, and draws attention to vicarious 5 Roncken, Shades of Sublime, 9. 6 Lukinbeal, Cinematic Landscapes, 11. 7 Richardson, Essay, 46 (emphasis in the original). 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 99.

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experience that is the true sublime: an avalanche seen on the canvas or screen, or through binoculars, is sublime; being actually in it is less so. Both Richardson and Baillie’s sublimes seem to be related to vastness, not of the object itself but the depiction of vastness through composition. As per Baillie and Richardson, this rhetorical sublime is the sublime of artifice, created to invoke a thrilling experience. This includes historical film worlds where an imagined past can be an escape from, or trigger an illumination of, the present. The historical film creates a vast “world without edges.” I propose that this immersive experience is punctuated by disruptive moments – chronoschism and chronochasm – that pull the viewer “out of time” by recognizing the distance between the present and the fictive past in the film. This destabilization is pleasurable and we can consider it to be part of the cinematic sublime.

The Girl With a Pearl Earring When considering the adaptation of works of art and literature into film, rarely is the adaptation of painting into cinema considered as thoroughly as literary adaptation. Girl with a Pearl Earring, adapting the novel by Tracey Chevalier, depicts Griet, a servant girl to painter Jan Vermeer and his wife Catharina, becoming the model for the eponymous painting (1665). This is fiction; nobody knows who the model was. By viewing the film and following the production team’s own accounts, it seems clear that a detailed and scrupulous realism was the overarching and overwhelming aim. The film-makers are obsessed with re-creating a multisensory “real” on the studio backlot through a fascinating blend of authenticity and artifice. In the case of Girl with a Pearl Earring, a slight story set in the imagined world of a servant girl in seventeenth-century Delft, the sense of realism adapted from paintings delivers an immersive experience, a participatory fantasy of the past. The combination of literal description with the arrangement of elements into a recognizable world leads to what I term a “rhetoric of realism” because the paintings make us feel as if we are looking at “something real.” Peter Webber calls it “an illusion that feels real.”11 “Realness” as delivered by the paintings offers up proof of period authenticity, creating a visual rhetoric of realism that totalizes and defines the period and place. Today, we are more likely to find the rhetorical “real” of the Dutch genre paintings persuasive because they show us the material conditions of the 11 Webber, “Anatomy of a Scene.”

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Dutch home, how domestic life was organized at the time, the role of class and gender in domestic work, and so forth. We may no longer need to be reminded of the spiritual benefits of a clean home, though the cleaning – done by women – may also show us that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The fact that the paintings are not realistic in the sense of being “documents of life” does not detract from their rhetorical ability to convince us that what we see “feels real.” If visual images are invested with “the ability to offer audiences propositions,”12 then the realism in these paintings proposes that painting can be a window on the world (of your back yard). A painting can offer a way of looking at the world that reveals what has previously gone unnoticed, such as the way light streams through a window or how the pattern of the floor tiles reflects upon a satin dress. Even centuries later, viewing these paintings can sensitize the audience (at least temporarily) to the minutiae of everyday life. Fortunately, we can understand a little more about the intentions and the processes by which the film-makers sought to achieve realism in Girl with a Pearl Earring. The film-making team recognized early on that it would be impossible to transpose the novel’s first-person narrative, which is seen entirely through the eyes of Griet, the servant, onto the screen. Additionally, art history graduate Peter Webber understood that it was important when making a film about a painter to communicate as much as possible through rich visual images.13 The film’s dedication to realism is manifested through its attention to surface verisimilitude and its artistic reference points: “Webber assumes the responsibility of setting his story in a place that looks at every moment like seventeenth century Delft.”14 Dutch Golden Age paintings perform an iconographic role in the film’s visual narrative, which assumes a recognition factor in authenticating the historical setting and Vermeer’s art-historical importance. The film communicates primarily through its visuals. Understanding how these are selected and deployed invites a much richer reading of the film’s achievements than simply following its plot and characterizations. The film creates an entire world with an all-enveloping sense of “the real.” The word “real” is used repeatedly by the cast and crew, indicating that their true aim is the fine line between “realistic-seeming” and “authentic.”15 This goes beyond the usual requirements of surface verisimilitude. Period 12 Helmers, “Framing,” 64. 13 Webber & Paterson, Audio. 14 Leitch, Film Adaptation, 204. 15 Webber & Paterson, Audio.

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authenticity consumed the film’s budget, with elaborate sets and a large cast of extras playing the folk of bustling, prosperous Delft. Vermeer’s house boasted connecting rooms, allowing perspectives reminiscent of Pieter de Hooch, looking through doorways into other rooms, or through windows and passages into the yard. This allowed the production team to underline the importance of “looking at” and “looking through” in Dutch art by doing the same with the camera. The house was as functional as possible: the floorboards squeaked, doors and windows could be opened. The kitchen was functional too, to show the physical labor of the maidservants Tanneke and Griet. The desire for authenticity and realism meant that lighting the house was also a challenge. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra points out that, “in period films it is important to keep the dark, because people then lived in darkness; it’s important not to forget.”16 However, films and paintings offer a “reality effect” – realism instead of reality. Arguably, too much period authenticity could alienate the viewers. Were Delft’s streets that clean? Were the Vermeer family’s teeth and complexions that good? Accurate period wigs could seem ridiculous, rendering Colin Firth’s Vermeer laughable. As in every period film, the line between “authentic” and “realistic” must first serve the drama. Girl with a Pearl Earring is set during the period when Vermeer made the eponymous painting, so no works after 1665 appear. Painting references appear throughout the mise en scène, at particular plot points. As Linda Cahir notes, “scenes that we already are familiar with from Vermeer’s paintings appear in a moment, on which the camera lingers, as just as quickly the film moves forward in the story” creating “momentary tableaux vivants showing how life becomes reconstituted into art.”17 Early on, this is achieved when Catharina, wearing the blue silk jacket of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, leads Griet into Vermeer’s studio. Griet enters and, seeing the setup for Woman with a Pearl Necklace, stares in wonder at the unfinished painting, which we see briefly in full frame. The viewer understands the type of film it is, the attention to detail and, most importantly, the full embodiment of the world of art in the characters’ lives. We are engaged. Production designer Ben van Os and Serra create a whole visual world recognizable from art. This world conveys an idea about the past and persuades us that this vision of the historical past is “true.” The film does not stray far beyond what little art historians already know about Vermeer: his living conditions; his paintings; and his family. This lack of information is 16 Webber, Anatomy. 17 Cahir, Literature, 252.

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made up for with surface verisimilitude and the creation of a “world made of art” in which the characters and the audience are embedded. There is an appeal to the “quality” film; more than this, there is the sense of escape, of “living in a painting.” Vermeer’s patron, Van Ruijven, sits with his collection, which includes The Milkmaid, View of Delft, The Little Street, and especially The Girl with a Wineglass (all c. 1657–1661). He shows this last to Griet, saying “perhaps that will be my epitaph.” In the context of the film, Girl with a Wineglass illustrates Van Ruijven’s seduction of a previous Vermeer housemaid, serving as a warning to Griet not only of the dangers the patron represents to her but the danger of any consummation with a man out of her social class, including Vermeer. Seeing Van Ruijven’s ownership of these paintings clearly illustrates his power over Vermeer. The placement of the View of Delft, which we see as it frames Griet in this scene, implies the rich man’s ownership and control over the town and all their lives. However, in the scene where we expect to see the Girl with a Pearl Earring – the dénouement where Catharina confronts Vermeer and Griet – we see the painting only fleetingly as Catharina, enraged, tries to destroy it. In this scene, it is the faces that dominate: Vermeer (irritation, then shame), Catharina (jealousy and rage), and Griet (disappointment and pride). The scene ends with Catharina’s tear-stained swollen face in the foreground, made ugly by rage, with the painting’s beautiful glowing face out of focus behind her. Paintings that are both seen and more obliquely referenced (such as Griet and Pieter’s wintry walk on a treelined avenue out of Meindert Hobbema), “prove” the film’s period authenticity through a visual rhetoric of realism that, reinforced by the period detail of setting, costume and props, creates a complete visual impression of period and place. This allows the viewer to enter the period fantasy without a sense of indulging in a “lowbrow” romance. The film does portray the class-and-gender limitations of the era, though to a lesser degree than Chevalier’s book. At the same time, the intense realism, to some extent, offers an escape from the romance and invites the viewer to contemplate and imagine life in a distant past that they already know and recognize from art. It is a small, intense chronoschism, where we become so close to the characters’ daily lives that we feel we are there. This is the film’s sublime: a small, tightly-observed world with no edges. It feels limitless. Tracy Chevalier’s narrative is focused on Griet’s inner life. But Webber steps back, and subsumes Griet, Vermeer, himself and us in seventeenth-century Delft. The film’s concluding shots deliver an intense, jolting chronoclasm: the actual painting, in the Mauritshaus. It is small,

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bright, impossibly fragile-looking. We know we are not looking at Scarlett Johansen: we are, at last, looking at history. However, despite the visual reference points, the world of the film and the world of the paintings are not identical. There is a tension between the film world and the painting world. The painting world is one of domestic calm, full of domestic space and warm light; it feels open. Vermeer’s and De Hooch’s works offer domestic tranquillity amidst everyday tasks. This world feels timeless, but it is one that is always desired and never really achieved. The world represented in the film is urban, cluttered, often dark, quite cold (the main action takes place over a winter), agitated, emotionally fraught and bound by complex social roles. It is recognizably “modern” in its concerns (relationships, status, financial precarity) but relentlessly “other” in its period setting. Vermeer’s jewel-bright paintings in the film offer not only visual cues of “realism” but a promise of something better.

Admiral In Roel Reiné’s film Admiral (Dutch title Michiel de Ruyter), Dutch painting aesthetics and style merge with grand narrative subject matter. Admiral elevates visual communication derived from painting into a kind of mythmaking through spectacle. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, Admiral’s paintings perform an iconographic role in the film’s visual narrative, assuming a recognition factor in authenticating the historical setting and the art-historical importance of Dutch art. Traditional national history films like Admiral deal in “grand narratives,” with plots based on causality and – sometimes – superficial psychological analysis. They tend to follow the established historical record. Overall, the enterprise is not so much about critically reflecting on history as about re-presenting it as filmed entertainment with a purpose. It is a kind of “schoolbook” history, not based on a novel but a lesson brought to life. Its purpose, often (but not always) framed around war, is to speak to a sense of “nation and nationhood,” to bring the audience together as a “nation” of shared values and recognized identity.18 In history films of this kind, the so-called Grand Style is often conjured up on screen through the overwhelming and impressive visual spectacle of heroism and idealism. These films usually pay great attention to period details, through mise en scène and especially costume, and will often invoke the sublime through the use of 18 Anderson, Imagined Communities.

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exciting, visually stunning set pieces. The representation of history through spectacle presents the past as a place of emotional engagement, intrigue, escapism, and excitement. Visual spectacle creates a kind of “emotional sublime” whereby the viewer is transported into “the past” and often deprived of critical powers. Geoff King defines “spectacle” as “the production of images at which we might wish to stop and stare.”19 He points out how spectacle has “long played an important part in the creation of popular entertainment, from contemporary and early cinema to pre-cinematic forms such as the diorama and the magic lantern show, theatre, and whole traditions of religious and secular ritual.”20 Spectacle is what gives the history lesson its entertainment value. Spectacle is achieved through costume, set design, lighting, camera angle and action – including gesture, camera movement, and editing pace. The images and emotions of that experience stay with viewers and become embedded in their conception of history. Admiral typifies this particular direction in historical cinema, with its vast visual spectacle and many painterly moments. Director Reiné imagines the Dutch nation and its history in a certain way, and seeks to persuade the present-day Dutch audience of his perspective. Admiral restates and restages the well-established Grand Narrative of bourgeois progressivism in Dutch history as the story of Dutch liberalism – exemplified by Johan de Witt and defended by Michiel de Ruyter – and its enemies. Reiné uses paintings to associate “true” Dutch identity – represented by the artistic glories of the Golden Age art – with liberalism. He peppers the film with painterly moments that reinforce this argument, by embedding paintings within the mise en scène and through direct references, which appear less as sustained rhetorical argument and rather as rhetorical punctuation for an already stabilized historical narrative that adheres closely to the popular textbook version. Put more bluntly, Reiné has nothing new to say about De Ruyter and his world but seeks simply to retell it in a new medium, using visual spectacle to emphasize the value of the exercise. Reiné is less concerned with persuading viewers of something new or complex than persuading them to be interested and – in the process – reaffirm liberal values. Painting cements the story’s time and place and affirms its significance. While the film tries to ensure a sense of visual realism, this is designed mainly to serve the drama. The painterly references give the film credibility as a true work of “heritage” cinema. Unlike Girl with a Pearl Earring, the 19 King, Spectacular Narratives, 4. 20 Ibid.

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viewer is not meant to escape the modern world into illusion. Instead, we are invited to contemplate the chronoclasm: despite the distance of 300-plus years, Dutch liberal values, embodied by the dual protagonists De Witt and De Ruyter, still matter. Reiné is clear about his objective, writing that Michiel de Ruyter “deserved a work of passion and grand filmmaking.”21 Indeed, Admiral is all about “great men and great deeds.” The f ilm opens in 1673, at De Ruyter’s family home, as his pregnant wife Anna (Sanne Langelaar) runs out across the dunes to see the Battle of Scheveningen. Michiel de Ruyter’s life with Anna is an essential thread of the story. Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1657) is dropped into a sequence of De Ruyter’s homecoming. As his children rush past in excitement at their father’s arrival, we glimpse a kitchen maid pouring milk; then the camera moves on. The choice of The Milkmaid is significant. To Thomas P. Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in The Milkmaid “we discover Dutch self-reliance and well-being in an individual who appears to have her own thoughts and feelings but also evokes the hard-won peace and prosperity of the Golden Age.”22 The milkmaid herself has even been considered to convey a “physical and moral presence unequaled by any other figure in Dutch art.”23 The painting is remarkable and memorable because of its intrinsic simplicity: the use of the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) and a complementary scheme of light and shadow.24 In short, it is iconic – it functions as a metonym for the Dutch value of domesticity as “the good life.” But the counter to the good life is a life of service, and De Ruyter and his wife are torn between these. They choose service and, in doing so, save the nation. Though the visual reference seems like a non sequitur, rhetorically it does several things at this point in the narrative. The nod to the painting reinforces and reminds the viewer of the period context; the use of Vermeer validates the “high art” credentials of the film. The Vermeer painting itself acts as an emblem, a high art “sanctification” of domestic life. This sanctification of the domestic is presented as “common sense” visual rhetoric through the painting. The protagonist De Ruyter’s principal personal struggle is whether to fulfil his duty to his country or his family. He sacrifices his family life for his nation, allying with the politician Johan de Witt. This brief shot is also a strong call to identification: it is an assertion of “Dutchness” aimed at the film’s domestic audience. It also operates as a validator of period 21 Reiné, Admiral. 22 Liedtke, The Milkmaid, 3. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 Ibid., 8.

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authenticity and high culture for an international audience, connecting the film – a piece of popular art – to Vermeer’s high art and the museums where his paintings hang. One of the calls to identification that history films offer is to high culture – and this operates even if the viewer has no actual interest in visiting the Mauritshaus or Rijksmuseum. As well as the re-creation of specific paintings (Vermeer’s Milk Maid), the film transposes paintings into scenes: the murder of the De Witts (Jan de Baen, 1672); the Estates-General in the Ridderzaal (Bartholomeus van Bassen, 1651); and, less precisely, various sea battles by Van de Velde and Beerstratten. Actual paintings appear at critical points in the narrative; these operate rhetorically, again not in a structured way but as emphatic punctuation. They remind the Dutch viewer of what they already recognize: the Dutch as the masters of painting and their art-historical legacy, which can be seen today in museums (or online). They connect the film to intellectual history and high culture. Dutch history may be obscure to the international viewer, but the validation offered by painting lifts the film above the charge of being “mere” entertainment. The Threatened Swan by Jan Asselijn (c. 1650) hangs in De Witt’s chambers. It depicts a swan fiercely defending its nest from a dog. The painting came to be interpreted as a political allegory: the white swan symbolizing Johan de Witt protecting the country from its enemies.25 The swan reappears as a motif in the film, decorating a pie served at the De Witt’s party. In this scene, De Witt’s brother Cornelis and De Ruyter argue with Johan de Witt about his failure to address the civilian population’s fears and concerns about the war situation. De Witt responds that he is handling it, that diplomacy is the best way forward: “Cornelis: The people don’t understand diplomacy.” “Johan: I can’t adapt my policy to people who understand less than we do.”

There’s nothing more to say; Cornelis gets up and moves to the table, where he takes a knife and plunges it into the swan pie. The swan – De Witt – has been wounded by his own hubris, and he will take his brother down with him. In this scene, Reiné demonstrates the threats to the liberal project. Strangely, characters do not age over the 25 years depicted in the film, creating an unusual relationship between the film and portraiture. The actor Frank Lammers, closely resembling De Ruyter, appears frozen in time, the very embodiment of well-known portraits familiar to Dutch audiences. On 25 Rijksmuseum, Asselijn.

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the other hand, Reiné cast Barry Atsma as Johan de Witt against his portraits (e.g. Jan de Baen, 1669). In a strange and chronochasmic moment near the end of the film, Prince William, while talking about De Witt, gestures at a portrait of a mustachioed, long-faced man with long curly dark hair. Dutch audiences will know that this is the actual Johan de Witt, not the handsome, cleanshaven, and blonde Atsma. In Admiral, the sublime is in the sea battles. The scenes move quickly between long shots and close-ups. Reiné admits the battles were based on paintings in the Rjiksmuseum.26 As Director of Photography, Reiné moves between overhead shots, giving a bird’s-eye view of the ships operating in formation and maneuvering in battle, and handheld shots on deck in the thick of the conflict. The wooden ships splinter when hit by cannon, water pours in, things catch fire. These scenes combine a concern for realism with moments of sublimity, conveyed primarily through the cinematography. Reiné uses dynamic camera movement rather than cuts, or at least the camera movement disguises the cuts. The overhead shots convey a sense of vastness characteristic of the sublime. The medium shots place the viewer in the tumultuous action. Slow motion creates tension, prolonging the shock of the explosions, while close-ups confront us with the visceral, brutal reality of war. The viewer, seated in the present, has the sublime, exhilarating experience of the vicarious thrill of both being in “the past” and fighting on board a warship. The sublime is not, however, manifested only in cannon explosions and soaring perspectives. At one point, a seaman below deck is caught in a beam of light from above, like a Ribera painting. In another shot, the Union Jack unfurls as it sinks underwater, a powerful image of defeat. The brutality of seventeenth-century warfare is evident; bodies fly into the air and sea, although there is an absence of gore. Reiné’s camera is dynamic and active, building tension and excitement but revealing the horrible violence of seventeenth-century warfare. This is something that maritime painters could not show, even when they tried. Beerstraten and Vroom’s depictions of battles do not hide the sinking ships and drowning men, but they are trapped in the eternal wide shot, whereas Reiné’s camera goes right into the action. Reiné claims the film is “70% accurate”27; this is a good ratio for a drama. It is bolstered by the visual authenticity of settings, action sequences and props, and these are based on the paintings that he and his crew studied. Using visual cues, the film reveals sympathies with republicanism and ambivalence 26 De Vries, “Interview.” 27 Leyland, “Roel Reiné.”

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bordering on hostility to the Orangeists and royalism in general. Reiné frames this position as a kind of sturdy, inclusive anti-elitist nationalism. If the paintings validate the Dutch-ness of the film and give it a “high culture” imprimatur, they are also an attempt to harness Dutch painting’s material realism to the film-maker’s own subjective, ideological interpretation of Dutch history. The paintings reinvigorate the film’s bourgeois, progressive grand narrative. Like Grand Manner painting, national history films all practice “cherry-picking,” creating an image of who we would like to be, not who we were. Admiral seeks to reify the idea of the Dutch nation, pointing to the past as an exemplar, but ultimately reducing it to a heroic epic of good versus evil.

Conclusion On the whole, it may be better to dispense with any high expectations that a historical film will be a valid history lesson. But this expectation is a seductive one. The past is made to “feel” real. In mapping the substantive argument made by the placement of the paintings and painting references throughout both films’ narratives, we can see that the use of these specific paintings appeals to the film’s values. These values include fidelity to the Dutch painting aesthetic and adherence to the “quality film.” The art is a badge of quality and a sign of erudition. It is an emotional appeal designed to win over the audience and draw them into the narrative. Each film does it differently, and with a different purpose: in Girl with the Pearl Earring’s art world is its specific setting and theme: paintings help create the past as a place to dream about and escape into. In Admiral, the art is used as a visual reference to stage the action. a vehicle for endorsing specific social and political values. In both films, using paintings as references in the mise en scène, and including them as objects to drive the film’s story, expands the films’ narrative and connects it to real, tangible history and to a timeless “world of art.”

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso, 2016. Online British Library Legal Reader Deposit. Cahir, Linda. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

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Dalle Vacche, Angela. Cinema And Painting: How Art is Used in Film. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996. D’Arcy, Geraint. Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design. New York: Routledge, 2019. De Vries, Hidde. “Interview: Roel Reine.” 2016 Holland Hollywood Connection. [Online] http://hollandhollywood.com/2016/03/20/interview-roel-reine/. Felleman, Susan. Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006. Felleman, Susan. “Decay of the Aura: Modern Art in Classical Cinema.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 53 (2011). [Online] https://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc53.2011/FellemanDecayAura/index.html. Helmers, Marguerite. “Framing The Fine Arts Through Rhetoric.” Defining Visual Rhetorics, eds. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 63–86. Hollander, Anne. Moving Pictures. New York: Knopf, 1989. Kellner, Hans. “Is History Ever Timely?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 234–243. King, Geoff. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. London: IB Tauris, 2000. Kirwan, James. Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Rational in the History of Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2005. Kirwan, James. “The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime.” Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime, ed. Temenuga Trifonova. London: Routledge, 2018. 65–73. Leyland, Nick. “Roel Reiné Talks ‘Admiral’ and Dutch Naval Hero Michiel de Ruyter.” The Movie Network, 2016. [Online] https://www.themovienetwork.com/interview/ roel-rein-talks-admiral-and-dutch-naval-hero-michiel-de-ruyter. Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Liedtke, Walter. The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. Lukinbeal, Chris. ‘Cinematic Landscapes.’ Journal of Cultural Geography 23, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 3–22. [Online] https://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/frames/ phx/creativegeography/lukinbeal_05.pdf. Reiné, Roel. Admiral: Roel Reiné. [Online] http://www.roelreine.com/michiel-deruyter.html. Rijksmuseum. The Threatened Swan, Jan Asselijn, c. 1650. Roncken, Paul A. Shades of Sublime: A Design for Landscape Experiences as an Instrument in the Making of Meaning. Ph.D, Wageningen University, 2018. [Online] http://edepot.wur.nl/427612.

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Tashiro, Charles. “Passing for the Past: Production Design and the Historical Film.” Cineaste 29, 2004. Webber, Peter. Anatomy of a Scene. The Sundance Channel. DVD Bonus Feature. Pathe, 2004. Webber, Peter, and Andy Paterson. “Audio Commentary.” Girl with a Pearl Earring. DVD Bonus Feature. Pathe, 2004. Webber, Peter, and Andy Paterson. The Making of Girl with a Pearl Earring: The Art of Filmmaking. DVD Bonus Feature. Pathe, 2004.

About the Author Gillian McIver is a writer, filmmaker, and curator based in London. She is the author of Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling (Bloomsbury 2016), a survey of the historical and aesthetic relationship between cinema and visual art. She teaches at the University for the Creative Arts and Central St Martins.

9. Art and History in Woman in Gold (2015), The Monuments Men (2014), and Francofonia (2015) Christine Sprengler

Abstract This chapter analyzes films that share a narrative concern with Nazi art theft and an aesthetic approach defined by deliberate archaism – the practice of visually replicating past media forms. Specifically, I examine how Woman in Gold (2015), The Monuments Men (2014), and Francofonia (2015) appeal to heavily mediated visual palettes to contextualize canonical artworks embroiled in “real” historical situations. With reference to Alison Landsberg’s concept of “affective historiography,” I analyze the limitations and critical potential of this approach to engage broader questions about history and representation. In doing so, this paper accounts for some of the general tendencies that characterize the representation of art in historical film during the twenty-first century. Keywords: Nazi art theft, World War II, deliberate archaism, historiography, historical representation

In Real Objects in Unreal Situations, Susan Felleman considers the material, economic, and political histories that surround art objects in fiction films. Through her examination of these contextualizing forces, she raises important questions about the relationship between the narrative world of the film and the works of art mobilized within. In doing so, she investigates how historical resonances accrue around these works and inflect the interplay of different image registers and representational forms. What I propose here is a recalibration of Felleman’s focus to address real artworks in ostensibly real (historical) situations. Specifically, I analyze films that feature art in the context of historical events, both narratively and aesthetically: Woman

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch09

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in Gold (dir. Simon Curtis, 2015); The Monuments Men (dir. George Clooney, 2014); and Francofonia (dir. Alexander Sokurov, 2015). These films share a narrative concern with Nazi atrocities and the plight of canonical paintings and statues. They also share an aesthetic concern with generating a visual palette that draws heavily on the dominant production design schemes of films set in World Ware II, the restaging and colorization practices of archival footage, photography, and the paintings in (narrative) question. Some also adhere to the visual tropes of the multiple genres they cite: war films and heist movies, for example. As such, they abide by the logic of Marc LeSueur’s “deliberate archaism” – the practice of visually replicating the look of past media, one typically aligned with a postmodern sensibility that, at best, challenges our capacity to access history except through its textualized remains as Linda Hutcheon argues and, at worst, evacuates “real” history in favor of depthless pastiche as Fredric Jameson contends.1 But the deliberate archaism of my twenty-first-century case studies is not actually postmodern, nor is classification in such broad strokes my goal. Instead, by foregrounding the visual framework manufactured to place real artworks in “real” situations, I explore the various ways in which these films engage history and representation. Specifically, I consider films that, despite their heavily mediated aesthetics of pastness, eschew a postmodern sensibility in favor of a metamodern one that prioritizes – however problematically – sincerity and historical “truth” in order to situate art within the broader history of World War II and, more specifically, Nazi art theft. For Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, who gave us one of the preliminary accounts of the emergence of a metamodern structure of feeling, one aligned with “new sincerity” cinema for instance, cultural impulses defined as metamodern share an interest in hope, earnestness, and even truth.2 However, these impulses oscillate with the remains of a postmodern will-to-irony, a sense of detachment that reminds us of the pitfalls of striving for authenticity and meaning in the first place. In other words, a healthy dose of skepticism ought to remain part of the equation to alert us to the limitations of such endeavors. A related and more precise way to account for these broad shifts in visual culture is through Alison Landsberg’s concept of “affective historiography.” This term provides an aptly nuanced opportunity to mobilize some of Vermeulen and Van den Akker’s features of metamodernism in the specific context of period films. For Landsberg, affective historiography speaks to 1 2

LeSueur, “Theory Number Five,” 193–94. Vermeulen and Van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” 7.

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how “experiential or affective modes [. . .] play a role in the acquisition of historical knowledge.”3 She argues, however, that “in order for real historical knowledge to be produced the affective engagements that draw the viewer in must be coupled with other modes that assert the alien nature of the past and the viewer’s fundamental distance from it.”4 Like Vermeulen and Van den Akker, she stresses the analytical capacities of “oscillation” and, specif ically, a movement between absorption and distraction enabled by the generation of affect. Such oscillation, according to Landsberg, can generate a “historical consciousness in the mass-mediated public sphere.”5 The following case studies enact this oscillation to different degrees, generating if not historical then at least historiographical insights, ones attuned to the complexities of representation itself. Furthermore, they illustrate the myriad implications of activating self-consciously historic mediations to contextualize artworks and documented events. But the results of this strategy are mixed, betraying the critical possibilities and limitations of this approach to representing art and history.

Woman in Gold Woman in Gold shifts between various decades of the twentieth century to tell the story of Maria Altmann’s (Helen Mirren) efforts to recover a Gustav Klimt portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch Bauer (Antje Traue), stolen from their Vienna home by the Nazis. Although Maria unites the various periods on offer, it is Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) who experiences growth in the film from a young lawyer ignorant of art and history, to an advocate for restitution and conserver of generational memory. The film traverses an entire century from the painting’s completion in 1907 to its return to Maria in 2006. During this time, it bears witness to historical events: the Anschluss, Nazi looting, and turn of the twenty-first century Austrian cultural politics. As the painting weaves in and out of political (and personal) histories, it does so as a material object that registers and accrues these experiences, rather than one that reveals its own history. For the sake of concision, Woman in Gold also ignores Maria’s husband’s imprisonment at Dachau, most legal complexities, and journalist Hubertus Czernin’s role 3 Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 10. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 16. Jacques Ranciere’s argument that formal innovations have the capacity to generate new thoughts underpins Landsberg’s belief in this potential (Ibid., 13).

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in the discovery of Austrian complicity in Nazi art theft. Certainly, we have come to expect alterations of the historical record, hopefully instigating a healthy skepticism toward the historical record itself in some instances. It is not my intention to itemize how this film or my other case studies “got it wrong.” Instead, I explore what insights might be generated by representing art against heavily mediated cinematic palettes. In Woman in Gold, Curtis takes an earnest approach that aims to generate a strong emotional response. For this metamodern sensibility he was summarily faulted. Reviewers observed that the film “smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons,” and that its various historical scenes “make the viewer acutely aware of being emotionally manipulated.”6 Some describe the film as “earnest” and “unsurprising,” one that follows “pre-ordained tracks.”7 Likewise, others fault its predictability and lack of nuance, observing the ways in which it indulges in “manufactured sentiment [and is] less interested in provoking thought than in manipulating emotion.”8 Such indictments speak to the film’s metamodern tendencies, but they often fail to address how its affective charge is inflected by its deliberate archaism. That is, they do not account for the fluctuations in its aesthetic pastness, or for the narrative significance of a painting that looks different almost every time it appears. The film shifts often between the various time periods that constitute the critical historical junctures of the story. Each period has its own aesthetic signature or color palette that helps the audience not only identify the decade in question but also, through subtle variations in light and saturation, guide how spectators ought to feel about the events represented. The emotional power of color is harnessed here, reminding viewers of the appeal to feeling that informs the etymology of “aesthetic” itself. This strategy also returns us to Landsberg’s concept of affective historiography and, more precisely, reveals how the film’s deliberate archaism is mobilized to generate feeling and thinking. These temporal and aesthetic oscillations have the capacity to alert us to the distanced, reconstructed, and mediated nature of the past on offer, prompting, as Landsberg suggests, more considered questions about the nature of historical representation.9 Woman in Gold’s deliberate archaisms – borrowed from film, photography, and painting – also promote awareness of the ways in which these mediated representational contexts 6 Holden, “Woman in Gold.” 7 Burr, “Woman in Gold.” 8 Debruge, “Woman in Gold.” 9 Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 38.

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generate questions about the cinematic depiction of art. Specifically, the film proposes that even a canonical painting is not a (visually) fixed object, but a fluid, changeable entity whose very materiality can be inflected by where it is seen, how spectators might feel at the time of encounter, and the broader social world in which it finds itself imbricated. If indeed something as ostensibly concrete as a work of art can be variable in this regard, what else from the past might be as well? Perhaps in spite of itself, the film raises this incisive historiographical question. Woman in Gold opens with an extreme close-up on gold leaf, shimmering center frame and encircled by deep dark browns. Next, the camera captures its application to canvas, followed by a slow sweep across the upper half of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1903–1907).10 A whispered instruction to “look a little to the left” is issued by the artist who is framed by an intense, almost artificially golden light emanating from the window behind him. The recipient of this directive is featured next – Adele herself, the unmistakable subject of Klimt’s painting. Whereas in Klimt’s painting her pallid gray skin is surrounded by an overabundance of gold leaf, here, her skin glows gold in contrast to the darkness that surrounds her. This short opening scene introduces a palette dominated by warm deep yellows, shimmering golds, and rich browns that will become the aesthetic shorthand for scenes set during the first decades of the twentieth century when Maria, as a young child, enjoyed the company and wisdom of her Aunt Adele. Such aesthetic shorthands become a vital part of how the film identifies shifts in time and place, specifically between 1900s, 1920s, and 1930s Austria and late 1990s and early 2000s Los Angeles and Vienna, the film’s present. Indeed, just after Adele’s admission to Klimt that she is beset with worry, the golden warmth of her carefully lit face is replaced by an altogether different palette: the hazy, desaturated palette of urban Los Angeles. An aerial view of the city features rows of grayish beige buildings with intermittent specks of dull muted greens indicating patches of grass. Color has been all but drained from this image. Even as the scene cuts to Maria’s sister’s funeral where the sun shines brightly, the sky remains gray. Costume reinforces this palette; Randy Schoenberg’s wardrobe of beige suits and even beiger ties does little to brighten the scene. Likewise, the interior of Maria’s small but elegant bungalow offers an array of pale greens, muted browns, and shades of cream. 10 Production designer Jim Clay enlisted the skills of artist Steve Mitchell to produce two replicas of the Klimt painting – one in progress and a completed one with the capacity to “come alive and off the screen” (Curtis, “Commentary,” 2015.)

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Maria’s home is the site of two encounters involving photographs that prefigure the investments in representation that will structure the remainder of the film. First, Randy notices a framed photo of the Bloch Bauers, including Maria as a young girl. As the camera zooms in, the group portrait’s initial black-and-white status switches to sepia and its stillness to movement. Viewers are shown the moment of the photograph’s registration and introduced by Maria’s voice-over to each member of her extended family. Sepia’s warmth, reinforced by the joviality of the moment is, however, fleeting and the film abruptly returns to 1990s Los Angeles. Then, Maria shows Randy another type of photograph, a worn postcard reproduction of Klimt’s portrait of her Aunt Adele. This is the first time the painting is shown completed and, significantly, as a reproduction that confirms the extent of its fame. But the trademark luminosity of the artwork is absent in this cheap copy. Its aura – or the promise of one – established during the opening sequence has, in a rather Benjaminian sense, been lost through reproduction. The painting is now free to be about something else and, in this instance, it becomes about the political history in which it was embroiled and the cultural politics its subsequent travels sparked. This is not to suggest that the painting does not reappear throughout the film in ways designed to inspire awe or esteem its uniqueness and value. It certainly does, but with the added complication that how the painting fundamentally looks is also subject to change. The next time Klimt’s painting appears it does so in its entirety, prominently displayed in the Bloch Bauer apartment. It is shot from below and remains fully visible, even when the camera pans right to capture a conversation between Maria and her uncle. But while the gold leaf catches and reflects the light, it is not the same hue first encountered. Instead, it is inflected by a cooler palette drained of warmth and variation. This is a deliberately archaic aesthetic informed, in part, by early photography, but with certain changes that cast a sense of disquiet across the scene. Missing are any hints of orange, yellow, or green (as betrayed by a turquoise houseplant). At this moment there is a clear disconnect between the feeling of unease evoked by the color scheme and the cheerful event portrayed – Maria’s wedding. However, as the revelers continue to dance, the upbeat music of the Mezinka is replaced by a single obtrusive note that dramatically changes the emotional tenor of the scene. Then, the clatter of dancing heels is replaced by the aggressive stomping of marching soldiers. The next time the painting appears (in the past), it looks almost monochromatic, as does the entire scene. Indeed, its desaturation is made evident by an intervening 1990s-set sequence that represents Maria’s re-encounter

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with Adele’s image in the Belvedere Gallery. Following this reminder of the portrait’s luminosity the film returns to the 1930s and the moment of its theft from the Bloch Bauer home. By this point, virtually all color has drained from the cinematic image, including the painting. As the atrocities against Vienna’s Jewish families escalate, a high contrast dusty rose- and turquoise-tinted black-and-white aesthetic describes the world Maria and Fritz attempt to escape. It is harsh and unsettling, made more so by injections of saturated blood red circles housing swastikas on arm bands and flags. This look is not informed by a singular past aesthetic, but an amalgam of various historical media practices: the red and turquoise of two strip Technicolor, the high contrast black and white of early twentieth century archival footage, and the haze of sepia-tinted photography. This “new” look both enables the conditions for an affective response to the historical events portrayed and alerts viewers to this act of mediation. But mediation itself is signalled here not to question the history represented. Instead, it enables a temporally split consciousness that prompts consumption of the scene as reconstructed footage, one based on documentary evidence of the Anschluss. It enables spectators to see the Nazis on film as representations of historical individuals and as present-day Austrian extras inhabiting these roles; that is, to bear witness to how 1930s Vienna welcomed Hitler and to reflect on a twenty-first-century Vienna adorned with swastikas and populated with people whose own family histories of complicity vary a great deal. To see Jewish and non-Jewish actors in a way that acknowledges their status as such, and thus how the self-reflexive presentness of this cinematic image – i.e., an awareness of its moment of registration – confronts the perpetuation of anti-Semitism in twenty-first-century Europe. This is precisely the kind of oscillation between analysis and affect that Landsberg invests with critical, historiographic potential. Another moment that blends or, more accurately, merges disparate aesthetic palettes concludes Woman in Gold. As the film enters the 2000s, it abandons the hazy desaturated look that defined 1990s Los Angeles for a more saturated one, replacing beige suits and pastels with dark suits and jewel tones. This both marks the passage of the film’s (present) time, but also enables a more seamless merger with its early twentieth-century past in a final meditation on memory. At the very end, Maria enters the building that once housed her family, instigating a sequence in which she physically enters her own recollections. The space transforms from a suite of offices to the grand ballroom and parlor that housed her aunt’s portrait. Here, in the final scene of the film, octogenarian Maria meets Adele’s gaze, and they exchange a knowing smile before the screen fades to black. Her gaze

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thus stretches back across time and through a space in which the color palettes of past and present seamlessly unite. However, while this final chromatic reconciliation works to override the complexity introduced elsewhere through deliberately archaic strategies, this exchange of looks enacted here renders it an affective historiographic gesture that encourages reflection on the relationship between past and present, the “real” and its representation, and how histories accrue around (art) objects, often supplanting the history of the creation of the object itself.

The Monuments Men Toward the end of The Monuments Men (2014), Frank Stokes (George Clooney), spots a burlap-wrapped object tucked into a mining car deep underground at the Altaussee mine. It is Spring 1945. Germany has surrendered and Stokes’s crew of “Monuments Men,” American art experts turned soldiers, have just evacuated Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432) among other canonical works of Western Art, hidden in mines and castles by Nazi looters. Stokes’s team members are calling for him to leave before the Russians arrive, but he cautiously advances to inspect this object, more out of instinct than any telltale sign it might be of value. As he pushes away the cloth, Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges (1501–1504) comes into view, bathed in the warm but dim light of his lantern. This is the work that Stokes had most wanted to recover, the one fellow team member Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville) lost his life trying to save. Stokes removes his helmet in an act of respect and whispers to the statue: “Let’s get out of here.” Michelangelo’s Madonna is first introduced earlier in the film, in situ in a church, lit by flickering candelabras that cast soft shadows across its folds. Jeffries has just arrived and is awestruck. After he, too, removes his hat in reverence, the camera slowly approaches, filming the statue from below. These cinematographic tactics are reserved for what the film deems important works: the Ghent Altarpiece is also shown in roving close-ups under soft light and Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1495–1998) is dramatically revealed following the camera’s slow pan of wartime carnage. Other strategies include banal sound bites (Stokes: “who will ensure that the Mona Lisa is still smiling?”), poor reproductions (i.e. slide shows designed to convince generals of art’s import), and scenes that reveal the sheer volume of stolen art by surveying expansive interior spaces stocked to the rafters with paintings, sculptures, and other valuables. In these instances, we might catch a glimpse of a famous artwork, some of which are even afforded a

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degree of attribution with mention of a name (e.g. Vermeer, Raphael, Renoir, etc.), but often little else. Although the protection of art is the driving force of the narrative of the film, propelling the action and prompting a series of fairly simplistic ethical reflections on its preservation, art objects do not occupy much screen time, nor is the individual history of any work ever at issue. Art is culturally important and valuable and worth dying for, the film argues, but art’s own history is overshadowed by its role as a catalyst for other historical events. As in Woman in Gold, art is a motivating historical agent that helps reveal World War II history. However, the deliberate archaism mobilized by Clooney seems far less adept at instigating reflections on history or even the nature of representation itself. As Matt Zoller Seitz aptly puts it: “The Monuments Men is a throwback to a very specific type of World War II adventure picture: a star-studded adventure made between 10 and 20 years after the war’s end” that targeted “a morally exhausted US audience that wanted to be congratulated for its role in ending tyranny […] but that also wished to be entertained.”11 More specifically, as Elizabeth Campbell Karlsgodt argues, The Monuments Men borrows certain tropes from the war film, according to Steve Neale’s definition, or the infantry film, a subgenre defined by Janine Basinger as one in which “men are on a mission.”12 Clooney’s film activates many image and narrative tropes common to such films: the banter, snappy dialogue, pacing, jingoism, and oversimplification of historic events and processes. In doing so, the film relies on caricatured (male) heroes and villains. The Nazis are cartoonish, with high-ranking officers represented as little more than bumbling fools. Herman Goering (Udo Kroschwald) lacks the menace of Hitler’s Reichmarschall while the fictional Dr. Viktor Stahl (Justus von Dohnanyi), who bears more than a passing resemblance to Hitler, appears in turn threatening and comical. This is not satire with an edge, but jokes played to sustain the film’s nod to certain war genres. The historical reality of Goehring or Nazi officials tasked with overseeing the redistribution of art is entirely absent as is any indication of their actions concerning art in relation to the Nazi Final Solution, as Karlsgodt explains.13 This is not to suggest that the film is a comedy, or that it abandons the traumatic realities of World War II altogether. While the team’s antics take center stage, the film is peppered with a few moments designed to remind audiences of the horrors of war. Two European team members are killed and 11 Zoller Seitz, “The Monuments Men.” 12 Campbell Karlsgodt, “What’s Wrong,” 401. 13 Ibid., 404.

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mourned. A barrel with thousands of gold teeth is discovered followed by a shot of the men, speechless and forlorn, riding a mining elevator as they contemplate the implications of their discovery. Likewise, there is a brief mention of the “Jewish collections” that were stolen, but the scale of this theft is never attended to, even though the Jeu de Paume, where the Rose Valland-inspired character Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett) works, was the repository for these collections. But in each instance, and especially in the case involving Nazi atrocities, the image is but a fragment, synechdocal, and little more than a fleeting instant that gestures without explanation or follow-through. They are reminders to take history seriously and acknowledge its truths, an ostensible mandate of the film given the (highly problematic) campaign to align it with “Common Core” curriculum standards for American high school students. Although Clooney clearly felt his subject deserved a sincere approach – the Monuments Men are celebrated, not satirized; the war film genre is respected, not critiqued – reviewers, too, picked up on the lack of balance between acknowledging the significance of the history represented and playing fast and loose with a range of generic tropes. For Kate Muir, it is a “simplistic wartime art heist movie [that] [. . .] staggers between parody and sincerity, failing at both.”14 For Landsberg, Vermeulen, and Van den Akker, this “staggering” – or oscillation – ought to generate the conditions for affect and analysis and to craft a vision of history capable of framing canonical artworks in ways that attest to the ethical complexities inflecting questions about value, aura, and historical representation. However, The Monuments Men seems less capable of establishing the conditions for such reflections than Woman in Gold, a consequence of its approach to deliberate archaism. For one, it plunges itself too deeply into the post-war infantry/men on a mission genre, adopting its color palette, full range of generic tropes, and tendency to eschew any hint of criticism of militarism or America’s actions. This wholesale adoption denies other aesthetic registers from generating opportunities for reflexivity or acknowledging other representational regimes, including cinematic ones, devised in the intervening years (from Night and Fog [1956] to Inglorious Basterds [2009]). That is, it stunts any potential productive oscillations. Likewise, the cinematographic strategies used to represent artworks abide only by the most conventional practices that privilege roving close-ups with reverential music or frame the conditions of individual encounters with dramatic lighting and camera angles. Cameras rarely pause long enough for the content of any artwork to activate thoughtful engagement with the 14 Muir, “The Monuments Men.”

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subject matter or consider the significance of its representational nature. According to the film, art’s power rests solely in its beauty or, more specifically, a reductive conception of beauty grounded in specifically Catholic Renaissance works. To this end, The Monuments Men ignores the Jewish-owned artworks that were at the center of Nazi art theft campaigns, an omission first perpetrated immediately after the war by art institutions that staged exhibitions featuring the retrieval of public rather than private collections.15 This exclusion also mars earlier cinematic engagements with the wartime significance of the Jeu de Paume as well as the question of art’s value in relation to human life: John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964) uses Rose Valland’s efforts to thwart Nazi looting in an equally reductive and catalytic way to initiate a narrative about “men on a mission.”16 It is also starkly absent in a – generically speaking – very different attempt to grapple with Paris under Nazi occupation: Sokurov’s Francofonia.

Francofonia Perhaps surprisingly, there are several points of intersection between The Monuments Men and Francofonia. They venture similarly vague answers to ethical questions about sacrifice in relation to art and cultural heritage preservation. They also share a reductive conception of beauty, reinforced by cinematographic strategies and by eliding the role that Entarte Kunst (“degenerate” art) played in Nazi looting practices. Both celebrate traditional and realist art styles without acknowledging art’s own history. Sokurov’s approach, however, is far more experimental and in ways that admit aesthetic, (media) ontological, and historiographical complexities into the fray. These complexities generate paradoxes, a feature that Jeremi Szaniawski observes running through Sokurov’s oeuvre.17 Specif ically, building on Jacques Ranciere’s own struggles with a “fundamental contradiction” in Sokurov’s f ilms, Szaniawski grapples with the tension “between the undeniable technological and artistic experimentation in the director’s works, and the often reactionary, conservative views he holds in interviews.”18 15 Campbell, “Claiming National Heritage,” 794–795. 16 It is also an early instance of deliberate archaism through its use of black and white and the deep focus aesthetics of some 1940s cinema. 17 Szaniawski, The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov. 18 Idem, “Before Empire Come,” n.p.

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Francofonia is an essay film narrated by Sokurov that centres on the history of the Louvre, particularly its circumstances under Nazi occupation and the relationship between Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), head of French Museums and engineer of the Louvre’s evacuation and Count Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath), German officer and art historian tasked with the protection of art during the war. Sokurov engages this history in more aesthetically complex ways than the other films considered here, appealing to deliberately archaic strategies that include sepia, high and low-contrast black and white, retro animations, and Super 8, complete with a visible soundtrack.19 These deployments of past aesthetic palettes are activated along with a myriad of visual cultural forms whose very materiality and objectivity is often preserved and foregrounded: photographs (archival and family snapshots), illustrations in books, newsreels, documentary footage, dramatic re-enactments, cinema history, drone footage, Skype, paintings, and sculptures. This footage is spliced, superimposed, collaged, digitally manipulated, and modified by special effects. Sound, too, is mobilized in this regard, with multiple sonic layers including ambient noise, scores, dialogue, and even sound effects like a barking dog or ringing telephone (noises from Sokurov’s apartment) infiltrating images from the past. Temporalities thus fray and merge. On one occasion, the Luftwaffe flies over modern-day Paris. On another, a plane crawls by at an impossibly slow pace outside the windows of the Louvre. Ostensibly still images are made to move or suggest the passage of time: the sunlight streaming in through a window in an 1880 painting of the Apollo Gallery intensifies and then darkens; and relationships between the planes within paintings change as the camera moves from an extreme close-up to the very side of the canvass. Historical temporalities collide when a teenage Jaujard appears with present-day tourists, or when a cut out sepia image of Vichy Chief of State Philippe Pétain hovers above black-and-white footage of war-torn Europe. Likewise, Sokurov speaks across time to ghosts – the weirdly comical Napoleon (Vincent Nemeth) and Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes) and to Jaujard and Metternich as he shows them archival footage of their own (real) funerals. All this seems to set the stage for a thoughtfully analytic engagement with images, mediation, representation, memory, and history. It ought to foreground the complexities surrounding the roles art plays in articulating a national identity, in recording and instigating historical processes, and in shaping cultural memory. Certainly, to an extent, it does. The film’s focus 19 For Alex Munt, Sokurov’s films “are hybrid forms, at the interstice of narrative and documentary, which arrive loaded with ‘ideology’.” Munt, “Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia.”

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on institutions, power, and conquest should also prompt reflection on the Louvre’s history (and present) as one deeply implicated in colonialism and practices of marginalization. Sokurov even raises the issue by observing that “[m]useums can also conceal the improper behavior of power and of people,” but diminishes the efficacy of this statement by then questioning, with all sincerity: “[m]ight it be that this museum is worth more than all of France?” An even more troubling sequence follows that celebrates European portraiture through its opposition to Islamic traditions that, as Schmidt argues, “blatantly others non-European cultures” at a time of increasing Islamophobia in France.20 He describes the French as the “human stock of Europe” and then proceeds, without a hint of irony, to show a (mostly) white, male brigade of portraits in a way that celebrates rather than complicates their representational nature through the film’s otherwise routine deliberate archaisms. In other words, what Francofonia accomplishes visually is often at odds with Sokurov’s narration that, at almost every turn, seems to neutralize the critical potential of his many deliberate archaisms that foreground the problematics of historical representation. For instance, as Schmidt observes, Francofonia’s message is that “protection of the Louvre merited Vichy complicity.”21 And the Louvre especially so because of the type of art it housed – traditional forms lauded for their beauty, age, and aura. However, preservation at any cost does not extend to examples of Entarte Kunst, canvases by modern artists stolen from Jewish collections and routinely sold by Nazis to fund other acquisitions, warfare, or else destroyed. This art and the specific histories it might activate in the context of Nazi-occupied Paris is missing. Some moments appear to set the stage for such an exploration, but end up pointing elsewhere: vertically striped pajamas reminiscent of those worn by Jewish prisoners in concentrations camps feature in a found footage clip that has nothing to do with such spaces. At another point, Sokurov’s narration “France, France, how lucky you were that your sister Germany recognized your right to exist. What will become of those whose human nature she does not acknowledge?” is followed by Nazi atrocities in Bolshevik Russia but not elsewhere, or in ways that admit to the Jewish experience in Europe. Whereas in the Monuments Men the wholesale adoption of a visual palette undercuts the film’s criticality, in Francofonia a complex visual engagement with art, history, and mediation – in which the art itself is in turns evidentiary, affectively charged, auratic, animated, 20 Schmidt, “Screening the Museum Aesthetic,” 18. 21 Ibid., 44.

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reflexively activated as history – is undercut by Sokurov’s dominant voiceover narration that tempers the possibility of critical oscillations between feeling and thinking.

Conclusion In Gérard Caillat’s Visitors to the Louvre, a documentary on the making of Francofonia, Sokurov laments that “art is intimately linked to history” and wishes he could “take art out of history.”22 This is an odd desire for a film about history and one seemingly invested in a range of historiographical issues, though it does accord with Sokurov’s celebration of the aesthetic beauty of only a certain kind of art. Indeed, as in Woman in Gold and The Monuments Men, the history of individual artworks is not acknowledged, nor are the social contexts that generated their creation. In each instance, art objects are historical catalysts, activating a series of events in which they play a central role. And, in all three films, the “realness” of each artwork helps confirm the historical reality of the situations cinematically represented. But while these films privilege paintings and sculptures as extant material objects with the capacity to activate real events, the broader historical world in which they exist is a heavily mediated one. In other words, while the artworks help ground the films in the “real” histories of World War II, that world is shaped by the various visual media that have represented it. These deliberate archaisms do not necessarily compromise f ilm’s ability to engage with history in a meaningful way. When mobilized to generate productive oscillations that enable a viewer’s consciousness to shift between thinking and feeling, to consider the past in relation to the present, and to reflect on the dynamics of representation – as Landsberg suggests is central to “affective historiography” – such instances of overt mediation are capable of generating insights into the nature of art and history itself. However, a comparison of Woman in Gold, The Monuments Men, and Francofonia reveals the myriad ways in which such oscillations might be enacted through appeals to a range of past aesthetic forms and practices, and the different degrees to which they engender the conditions for critical reflection. However reductive or complex each film’s conception of “art” and “history” may be, both “art” and “history” matter deeply to these films, as does the power for art to determine history and to lay bare the vicissitudes of its representations. 22 Sokurov qtd in Caillat, “Visitors to the Louvre”, 2015.

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Bibliography Burr, Ty. “Woman in Gold Feels Too Much Like a Reproduction.” Boston Globe (March 31, 2015). [Online] https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2015/03/31/ movie-review-woman-gold-feels-too-much-like-reproduction/fggxvrv8uQnIKSuJoQlnpK/story.html. Caillat, Gérard. “Visitors to the Louvre: The Making of Francofonia.” Francofonia, DVD. Directed by Alexander Sokurov, 2015. Idéale Audience et al. Campbell, Elizabeth. “Claiming National Heritage: State Appropriation of Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe.” Journal of Contemporary History 55, no. 4 (2020): 793–822. Campbell Karlsgodt, Elizabeth. “What’s Wrong with this Picture: Casual Disregard for History in Clooney’s The Monuments Men (2014).” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 36, no. 3 (2016): 392–414. Clooney, George, dir. The Monuments Men. 2014; Columbia Pictures. DVD. Curtis, Simon. “Commentary.” Woman in Gold, DVD. Directed by Simon Curtis. Origin Pictures/BBC Films, 2015. Curtis, Simon, dir. Woman in Gold. 2015; Origin Pictures/BBC Films. DVD. Debruge, Peter. “Woman in Gold.” Variety (February 9, 2015). [Online] https:// variety.com/2015/film/festivals/berlin-film-review-helen-mirren-in-womanin-gold-1201428444/. Felleman, Susan. Real Objects in Unreal Situations. Chicago: Intellect, 2014. Holden, Stephen. “Woman in Gold Stars Helen Mirren in Tug of War over Artwork.” New York Times (March 31, 2015). [Online] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/movies/ review-woman-in-gold-stars-helen-mirren-in-tug-of-war-over-artwork.html. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Landsberg, Alison. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. LeSueur, Marc. “Theory Number 5: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films.” Journal of Popular Film 6, no.2 (1977): 187–197. Muir, Kate. “The Monuments Men.” The Times (February 10, 2014). [Online] https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-monuments-men-d9zvqls85hr. Munt, Alex. “Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia: Museum Studies.” Senses of Cinema 86 (March 2018): n.p. [Online] https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2018/ cinema-and-the-museum/alexander-sokurov-francofonia/. Schmidt, Andrea. “Screening the Museum Aesthetic: Auteurs in Transnational Heritage Film.” PhD Diss., University of Washington, 2016. Sokurov, Alexander, dir. Francofonia, 2015. Idéale Audience et al. DVD.

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Szaniawski, Jeremi. “Before Empire Come: Mother and Son.” Senses of Cinema 85 (December 2017): n.p. [Online] https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/ soviet-cinema/mother-and-son/. Szaniawski, Jeremi. The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox. London: Wallflower, 2014. Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2, no. 1 (2010): 1–14. Zoller Seitz, Matt. “The Monuments Men.” RogerEbert.com (February 7, 2014). [Online] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-monuments-men-2014.

About the Author Christine Sprengler is Professor of Art History at Western University. She is the author of Screening Nostalgia (2009), Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014), and Fractured Fifties (forthcoming). She has published essays on cultural memory and nostalgia, contemporary cinematic art, and the relationship between cinema and the visual arts.

10. Examining Public Art in Parks and Recreation’s Pawnee, Indiana Annie Dell’Aria

Abstract This chapter analyzes the role of public art within the television series Parks and Recreation (NBC 2009–2015). I look to key moments where public art affects the narrative of the show as well as the styles quoted within the series to examine how public art develops the fictional town of Pawnee as a place. I argue that these fictional public artworks – both as narrative vehicles and as components of set design – are key architects of the show’s diegetic universe, sarcastic/sweet comic tone, and politics. Keywords: Parks and Recreation, television, public art, production design, murals, sitcoms

In the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009–2015), the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana, is both a satirical pastiche of the American Midwest and the object of the blind and faithful love of the show’s protagonist and feminist hero, Parks Department Deputy Director Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). What, by all accounts, seems to be a rather unsavory place to live (between the raccoon infestations, bullying local candy industry, fickle electorate, and rampant obesity epidemic) gradually earns the same love and devotion from the audience as from the eternally optimistic Knope. One continuing plot thread that develops Pawnee as a distinct place is public art: murals done in the Regionalist style pepper City Hall; local monuments are erected or vandalized; and controversy arises around censorship and committee-designed projects. Public art both reveals the legacy of colonial violence and historical oppression in Pawnee (and American public art more broadly) and functions as a key vehicle for affective production of place for both viewers and characters. This chapter analyzes how Parks and Recreation deploys public art to both develop Pawnee as a place and examines the fraught relationship between

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public art, national identity, and diverse publics. Public artworks – both as narrative vehicles and major components of set design – are key architects of the show’s diegetic universe, sarcastic/sweet comic and affective tone, and liberal pluralist politics. Who is represented, what is repressed, what is allowed, and who decides are all questions that recur frequently in public art controversy, and controversy fuels much of Parks and Recreation’s engagement with public art. Despite the headaches and blunt reminders of a disturbing past that Pawnee’s public art frequently elicits, Knope’s favorite place on earth is the mural of wildflowers in City Hall.

Public Art, Place, and Television Production Public art – defined primarily by accessibility outside of a dedicated artviewing context – has a long relationship with television. Early video artists used broadcast waves and community access cable as new public platforms and later artists even worked within the televisual spaces of serial programming, such as Mel Chin’s In the Name of Place (1995–1997), which inserted subversive artworks into the set design of the nighttime soap Melrose Place (Fox, 1992–1999).1 Whereas In the Name of Place viewed the diegetic world of Melrose Place as a kind of public space for artistic intervention, public artworks within the narrative universe of a television program serve to anchor place. While niche programming of the post-broadcast era and the “anytime, anywhere” access of streaming would seem to disperse the specif icity of place and realize what Franceso Casetti refers to as hypertopia – “an ‘elsewhere’ that arrives ‘here’ and dissolves itself into it”2 – televisual elsewheres become a particular places imbued with specificity and meaning. Geographer John Agnew argued that place has three fundamental aspects: location (the physical coordinates on a map); locale (the material setting and environs); and sense of place (the “subjective and emotional attachments people have to place”).3 Place in a television series, though sometimes with a blurry of fictional location, becomes not only a setting for the narrative (a recognizable locale), but also a world that audiences inhabit over time and become attached to. 1 This project was a collaboration between conceptual artist Mel Chin and a group of artists from the University of Georgia and Cal Arts known as The GALA Committee. 2 Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 144. 3 Cresswell, Place, 13–14.

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Workplace sitcoms tend to foreground their cities as developed places in order to provide common ground for a diverse set of characters and a background for the show’s tone and pace. Slough and Scranton stood in for bland, sleepy mid-sized cities with little upward mobility in The Office (BBC, 2001–2003; NBC, 2005–2013). Manhattan provided the frantic pace and idiosyncratic characters in 30 Rock (NBC, 2006–2013), as well as in-jokes for New York viewers. Boston in Cheers (NBC, 1982–1993), Minneapolis in Mary Tyler Moore (CBS, 1970–1977), Cincinnati in WKRP in Cincinnati (CBS, 1978–1982), Washington, D.C. in Veep (HBO, 2012–2019), and many other towns similarly become filters through which we understand characters’ aspirations, shortcomings, and obstacles. The construction of place in these shows is central to the narrative, even though each particular locale usually appears on screen only during the opening credits or in B-roll exterior footage (30 Rock and other New York and LA-based shows being the primary exceptions). At times, we even glimpse each city’s public artworks, such as the Alexander Calder sculpture that appears in the opening credits to Mary Tyler Moore or the many Art Deco sculptures of Rockefeller Center that appear in the introduction to 30 Rock. In Parks and Recreation, the fictional city of Pawnee provides much the same context, only its location is intentionally vague, located somewhere in the southern part of the state of Indiana, and its locale is produced entirely through production design and viewers’ mental image of a Midwestern anytown. Shooting locations, which are often deliberately non-descript, are almost entirely in Los Angeles. 4 The main visual vehicles for the production of place in the series are public artworks, most notably the murals that line City Hall with humorous and shockingly offensive figurative narrations of “historical” events in Pawnee. These murals appear in nearly every episode and were part of the diegetic world of Parks and Recreation since its inception. Production designer Ian Phillips worked with writers to produce visual sketches, which were developed further by professional illustrators. These images then received notes and development from Phillips before final execution in acrylic by artists Bridget Duffy and Stan Olexiewicz, a process that usually took no longer than two weeks from inception to execution.5 Pawnee’s murals feature prominently in certain scenes and form a constant visual backdrop to the exploits of the Parks Department throughout the series. They also, as Erika 4 Blake, “The Complete Parks.” The few exceptions include special episodes where the cast goes to Washington, D.C., Chicago, or London. 5 Berkowitz, “Meet The Man Behind ‘Parks & Rec’ Paintings.”

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Engstrom discusses, point to the United States’s history of colonial violence in a humorous way that “allow[s] the viewer to critique and rethink notions of patriotism” as expressed through official public artworks.6 The murals also featured prominently in the series’ transmedia storytelling, what Henry Jenkins describes as a kind of narrative world-making that takes audiences across different media to create deeper narrative immersion and multiple points of entry.7 For Parks and Recreation, transmedia elements are particularly invested in the development of Pawnee as a place: a functioning website for the fictitious town,8 a separate website on the murals with explanatory captions and a preface by Knope,9 and the book Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America (2011), which is fictionally attributed to Knope (in reality written by Nate DiMeo in collaboration with the show’s creative team), folded into the episode “Born and Raised” (S4E3, October 6, 2011), and appears afterwards as a prop in Leslie’s office.10 As we shall see, the mise en scène through which these murals enter into the show’s narrative world allow them to play an expository role in rendering Pawnee’s sense of place and history, which is deeply rooted in a legacy of settler colonialism, racism, and misogyny.

Leslie as Docent of Pawnee’s Murals and Violent Past As the primary interpretive lens through which viewers encounter the murals of City Hall, Leslie Knope effectively serves as a docent – a highly knowledgeable interpreter who engages viewers at the site of an artwork. The show’s mockumentary style makes Leslie’s role as docent within the diegesis parallel her role as interpreter for the audience. She may look alternately at the camera and at other characters, and their gazes direct the hand-held camera’s attention to details of murals, almost always first encountered with Leslie’s verbal explanation. In the pilot episode, Leslie brings her new friend Ann (Rashida Jones) to City Hall after meeting her at a public forum and promising to help turn a dangerous and unsightly pit abandoned by developers into a park – the show’s central premise. As Leslie tells Ann trivia about the building, Ann 6 Engstrom, Feminism, Gender, and Politics, 21–22. 7 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 21, 96–97. 8 “City of Pawnee.” 9 Parks and Recreation. 10 Knope, Pawnee.

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Figure 1. Screen grabs from Parks and Recreation “Pilot” (S1E1, April 9, 2019).

interjects “wow” as she looks off screen. This prompts the handheld camera to quickly pan left to reveal a detail of a mural, zooming in on a blonde pioneer woman swinging an axe. “This is our crown jewel,” Leslie says. “It’s one of our best murals. It depicts the very famous battle at Conega Creek.” As she speaks, the camera pans down to uncover more of the mural’s composition, particularly a kneeling, defenseless Indigenous woman that the axe-wielding blonde is about to murder. As the two continue down the hall, their gaze (and the camera’s) turns towards yet another part of the composition: a bloodied Indigenous corpse covered with an informational poster on Indiana labor laws. “We have a lot of children visit, so often we have to cover up the more gruesome parts with a poster,” Leslie explains, to which Ann replies, “That is horrifying.” “Yes, it is,” Leslie says soberly before moving on. This scene both introduces the murals as visual gags that satirize American mythologies often glorified in official public artworks and establishes the show’s deadpan relationship to them. Leslie again plays the role of docent to a disturbing mural in “The Reporter” (S1E3, April 23, 2009). Giving a tour to a local newspaper reporter, Shauna Malwae-Tweep (Alison Becker), Leslie explains there are ten murals in City Hall in a long shot looking down the mural-lined hall before turning her attention to The Trial of Chief Wamapo. Again, the handheld camera delays the gag, focusing first on a close-up shot of Wamapo’s face before zooming out to reveal that the mural’s titular character is strapped to a tree and about to be shot by a cannon. Perhaps trying to inject agency into the oppressed, Leslie comments, “I am always amazed at his quiet dignity

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right before he’s killed by a cannonball.”11 Shauna articulates surprise that no one has complained, to which Leslie tells her that the public, in fact, does complain, nearly every day. These brief scenes in the show’s first episodes position painted, figurative imagery as central to Parks and Recreation’s joke-telling and visual world, and establish Leslie as the primary interpreter of Pawnee’s murals.12 Leslie’s gloss on the murals suggests they are three things at once to Pawnee: 1) prized assets of City Hall (and by extension Pawnee); 2) part of a violent and racist past that the town is both forced to confront and feels the need to repress; and 3) subject to various audience responses, most often anger. Leslie, who bears a slight physical resemblance to the axe-swinging colonizer in the first mural, is positioned as both inheritor of this violent legacy (and its privilege) and progressive advocate for a more inclusive future. Later murals Leslie introduces include deliberately misogynistic content, additionally placing Leslie (the feminist hero) as the inheritor of sexist discrimination. Sunday Boxing, a mural of a raucous brawl during the town’s lawless 1880s, features Anna Beth Stevenson on the brunt end of a violent blow to the stomach by a male reverend as onlookers cheer. Leslie focuses on Stevenson’s accomplishments in her transmedia narratives of the mural, even trying to refer to this as a “proto-feminist” time when women were allowed to participate, but the image is clearly disturbing, and she does not discount its violence.13 Though custodian and interpretive guide to the murals, Leslie is never truly an apologist for their politics or the history they represent. Her relationship to problematic public artworks is one that rejects their nationalistic or aggrandizing tones but without going as far as to call for their destruction, in keeping with her character’s commitment to historical preservation. In “94 Meetings” (S2E21, April 29, 2010) Leslie attempts to prevent a historic gazebo from being demolished by a rich couple for a party. “In 1867 the progressive Reverend Turnbill officiated a wedding between a white woman and a Wamapoke Indian chief; the secret ceremony was beautiful 11 In the book tie-in, the hapless soldiers fail to properly operate the cannon and end up blowing themselves up, a scene pictured in another mural in Turnbill mansion (not pictured). Knope, 168. 12 This extends to a number of paintings not classified as public art that appear in people’s homes or as a gifts that I have omitted from my discussion. 13 There is some discrepancy between the online guide to the murals and the book: in the online guide, Knope suggests Stevenson “won the rematch a week later on a 60-round TKO” whereas the book states “I’d like to think Ms. Stevenson won this fight, but alas, history, and her headstone, show that she did not.” Parks and Recreation”; Knope, Pawnee, 169–172.

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Figure 2. Screen grabs from “94 Meetings” (S2E21, April 29, 2010).

and romantic,” she explains to the camera (and viewer) in front of a mural depicting a wedding under the gazebo. She continues, “but then word got out and the reception was a bloodbath,” at which point she frowns and the camera widens to reveal the oncoming charge from Wamapoke and white belligerents on either side. The mockumentary conceit that enables Leslie’s direct appeal to the viewer never actually materializes as a documentary within the show’s narrative world, shifting in later seasons toward cinéma verité and away from the sarcastic cynicism of mockumentary.14 Co-creator Michael Schur has been widely praised for subverting such genre expectations as well as 14 Parton, “How ‘Parks and Rec’ Transcended Its Mockumentary Roots.”

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interjecting his sitcoms with diverse casts, healthy relationships, and genuine emotion. Despite moving past mockumentaries’ more sardonic qualities, characters’ voiceovers and direct address to the camera make the show vacillate between the ironic tone of The Office and the earnest sincerity of Knope’s character in a way that could be described as metamodernist.15 Metamodernism is a reaction to postmodernism, but not solely a rejection of its cool detachment and a wholesale embrace of earnest enthusiasm but rather a constant vacillation between the two.16 Parks and Recreation’s satirical sharpness does not dissolve or overpower its emotional sweetness, but rather brightens it. Pawnee transcends the cynical stereotype of a backwards Midwestern town without becoming a nostalgic utopia that erases its history of colonial violence. The murals are at once kitschy images that allow Pawnee to emerge as a distinct, likable place and constant reminders of the disturbing truths American mythologies obscure. Murals are intensely invested in questions of place and power. Bonded to walls, and historically tied to the state or the church, murals attach themselves to place and proport to express shared beliefs. The murals in Pawnee directly reference the New Deal-era murals commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and installed in public buildings in the 1930s. A watershed moment for federal funding for the arts, WPA murals attempted to translate muralism’s disposition towards the clear expression of shared beliefs for an ostensibly pluralistic democracy, often resulting in controversies then and now.17 Stylistically, WPA murals veered towards Regionalism, the dominant visual language during the Great Depression. To its champions, Regionalism was the antidote to European modernism’s elitism and a visual language grounded in accessibility and social subjects,18 but after World War II and the ascent of Abstract Expressionism, Regionalism was not only marginalized but derided as “kitsch.”19 Parks and Recreation deliberately evokes kitsch aesthetics, but with a postmodern sensibility rather than modernist disdain – or better, a metamodernist vacillation between the aspirations of Regionalist muralism and the critique of its generalizing tendencies. According to Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America, the mural program was spearheaded by a radical leftist painter who spat in the face of Nelson Rockefeller and was sentenced by 15 Farmer, “Cloaked In, Like, Fifteen Layers of Irony.” 16 Vermeulen and Van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism.” 17 Marling, Wall-to-Wall America, 32. 18 Craven, “Our Art Becomes American: We Draw Up Our Declaration of Independence.” 19 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”; H.W. Janson, “Benton and Wood, Champions of Regionalism.”

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WPA Federal Art Project director Holger Cahill (a real person) to be sent “somewhere so miserable, so far removed from the center of culture, it’ll take an archeological dig to find him” – Pawnee.20 The merging of stylistic reference, outlandish kitsch imagery, fictional characters, and real arthistorical details and people (Rockefeller famously quarreled with Diego Rivera over communist references in a public mural he commissioned) engages the questions New Deal murals raise about muralism in a democracy, but without directly replicating the harmful effects of viewing some of their more disturbing examples. Frank Mechau’s The Dangers of Mail (1938), a New Deal mural realized for the New Post Office in Washington, D.C., features a violent stagecoach attack on the frontier, including a mass of nude, white female figures being scalped, which Karal Ann Marling describes as “excessively noticeable and unpleasant to notice.”21 This work sparked controversy even at the design stage for its violence, but in the twenty-first century (when the building housed the Environmental Protection Agency), a group of employees claimed its derogatory depiction of Indigenous people produced a hostile work environment. The series of forums that resulted from this controversy led to erection of a screen barrier, which as Jessy J. Ohl and Jennifer E. Potter contend, “cannot help but sharpen the mural’s edge through the stigma of provisional concealment,”22 echoing Ann’s comment about the “horrifying” gruesome detail covered with a poster. Notably, the gruesome details in Pawnee’s murals are of violence inflicted by the white settlers, not upon them. Ohl and Potter further argue that the controversy around Dangers of Mail cannot be reduced to “its mobilization of problematic racial stereotypes or female nudity.”23 Rather, they maintain, it is “dangerous precisely because of its capacity to provoke traumatic sense memory, disruptive feeling that forges stubborn, erratic, and unwieldy relations with the past.”24 Unseen murals referenced in the show further this connection. In a scavenger hunt in “Operation Ann” (S4E14, February 2, 2012), characters find the following murals in other parts of City Hall: “Cornfield Slaughter, Lament of the Buffalo, Needless Slaughter, Slaughter Gone Wrong, Eating the Reverend, It’s Raining Blood, and Death Everywhere.” These off-screen paintings contribute to the depiction of Pawnee’s past as full of shame and 20 Knope, Pawnee, 164. 21 Marling, Wall-to-Wall America, 256. 22 Ohl and Potter, “Traumatic Encounters,” 33. 23 Ibid., 27. 24 Ibid.

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trauma, but their humor satirizes New Deal murals’ claims to speak for a collective and clearly paint white Pawneeans as the baddies. The allusion to horrific violence in murals placed in a government building points to the real trauma caused by painting’s like Mechau’s, but through the filter of parody. The critical distance in Pawnee’s murals allows viewers to move beyond “stubborn, erratic, and unwieldy relations with the past” and toward (perhaps) a relationship with history that seeks both a level-headed acknowledgements of past wrongs and meaningful coexistence across differences.

Public Art Controversy as Public Forum When placed in public spaces or funded with public money artworks elicit a wide array of audience responses, many of them emotional and passionate. At times, such as in our current conversation around the removal of monuments to colonizers and slave holders, these conversations are both necessary and long overdue. In other instances, controversies arise around media circuses (Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc) or reactionary politics (censorship controversies in the culture wars). Parks and Recreation examines many types of controversies, positioning public art as not only a reminder of a problematic past, but also a site for public debate. In season two, public art vandalism is the focal point of two episodes: “Greg Pikaitus” (S2E7, October 29, 2009) and “The Camel” (S2E9, November 12, 2009). In the former, Leslie battles with a teenager’s Halloween vandalism of the town’s bronze statue to a past mayor. This episode highlights city governments’ difficult role in maintaining monuments and public artworks, and the dialogue between Leslie and her love interest Dave (Louis C.K.) also starts to question role of bronze statues to historical figures by revealing the mayor’s backstory: he ran into a burning building in the Pawnee Bread Factory Fire of 1922 to save a recipe for pumpernickel. “Didn’t like thirty people die in that fire?” Dave asks, to which Leslie shrugs and answers, “He wasn’t Superman.” Though the statue itself never arises as a controversial symbol and the vandalism in “Greg Pikaitus” is seemingly not directed at the mayor’s legacy, Leslie’s deadpan response affords a critical glance at official forms of commemoration. Vandalism again fuels the central conflict in “The Camel,” but in a way that more directly interrogates issues of representation. When the highly offensive mural The Spirit of Pawnee is vandalized for the fifteenth time, the city manager initiates an interdepartmental competition for replacing it. “We really need better security,” says Knope over archival security footage of

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Figure 3. Screen grabs from “The Camel” (S2E9, November 12, 2009).

someone spraying “RACIST” onto mural. “We also need better, less offensive history.” The mural features a train with a smiling white engineer moving through a landscape and towards or past a number of distasteful stereotypes: caricatures of Chinese immigrants building the railroad, drunk Native Americans clinging to liquor and about to be hit by the train, leprechaunlooking Irish men, and “killjoy harpie suffragettes.”25 The painting’s right to left movement parallels many depictions of the frontier popular in the nineteenth century, like Francis Palmer’s widely circulated print Across the Continent, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1868). Notably, the train moves towards the foreground in The Spirit of Pawnee instead of off 25 Knope, Pawnee, 165.

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into the background, as in Palmer’s print, making the violence of expansion more visceral and directed toward the viewer. Most of the episode centers around Leslie’s crew cooking up ideas for the new mural, which range wildly and showcase the ensemble cast’s diversity. Outsourcing his contribution to a local art student, Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) submits an abstract design with which he becomes increasingly enamored as the episode progresses. Donna Meagle (Rhetta) collages heads of famous celebrities from Indiana onto Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Leslie’s friend Ann submits a crude drawing of a park with cutout photographs of dogs. Ironic April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) contributes a disturbing and inscrutable conceptual piece, complete with corpses that claim: “The spirit of Pawnee is dead like me,” piles of garbage, a video monitor of knee surgery, and a human hamster wheel – “If you have to ask, you don’t get it,” she retorts to her coworkers’ confusion. Leslie submits a historical photograph of the famous Pawnee Bread Factory fire, reviving a reference to Pawnee’s history from “Greg Pikaitus.” Office punching bag Jerry Gergich (Jim O’Heir) actually comes up with the strongest design – a Pointillist-inspired image of City Hall where each pixel is an image of someone from the town. This concept is in keeping with contemporary public art’s propensity to amplify or abstract crowdsourced anonymous citizens to stand in for “community.” However, as is a recurring theme throughout the series, Jerry is ridiculed for jumbling his words, and his concept is never taken seriously by the group. Unable to come to a consensus, they end up submitting a “camel,” or a horse designed by committee – in this case, an absurd amalgam of elements from all of the submissions. As Adam Ochonicky contends, this episode is “an excellent example of the challenges involved in attempting to construct a coherent narrative of the Midwest.”26 Leslie’s decision to submit the mishmash suggests that such an undertaking – though perhaps destined for failure – is worth attempting. Just prior to her submission, Leslie contemplates entering an innocuous painting of an old man in a park completed by city planner Mark Brendanawicz (Paul Schneider) – a work that is specifically designed not to offend. When confronted with the Sewage Department’s ludicrous, proto-MAGA painting of a worker, bald eagle, and American flag that Leslie fears will win, Mark comments: “In government, there’s always someone who will oppose a stance.” Instead of the bland image Leslie opts to present the diverse, clashing, and contradictory amalgam her team made. The committee eventually decides against any of the departments’ designs, leaving the central conflict of the episode unresolved. The episode still 26 Ochonicky, The American Midwest, 6.

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Figure 4. Screen grabs from “The Camel” (S2E9, November 12, 2009).

asserts the value of pluralism through the decision to submit the camel, though this is not without an implicit critique of half-hearted attempts to signal to diversity without doing the work – the City Manager opts to simply rename the offensive mural The Diversity Express. Though the renaming hardly undoes the violence of the offending mural, nor does it come to a consensus about what constitutes the spirit of the town, “The Camel” positions debates around public art as contributing to an idealized public sphere. As Heather Hendershot claims, Parks and Recreation revives the role of television as cultural forum from the broadcast era: “Celebrating the virtues of local government and staking a claim for the value of civic engagement and the possibility of collaboration – or at least peaceful coexistence – between different political camps, Parks and Recreation offers a liberal pluralist response to the fragmented post-cultural forum environment.”27 Unlike the broadcast era, which engaged hot-button topics with a balance between two opposing sides, or the propensity for niche programming to “preach to the choir,” Hendershot maintains that 27 Hendershot, “Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum,” 202.

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Parks and Recreation’s insistence on the goodness of public service and its treatment of political difference celebrates the virtues of the public sphere. “The Camel” maintains a sarcastic edge since none of the final submissions are actually viable, but the debates within Knope’s team parallel important questions around representation and access in public art. In “Jerry’s Painting” (S3E11, April 28, 2011) censorship forms the catalyst for art debate in the public sphere. Jerry exhibits in a community art show featuring paintings slated to be hung in government buildings. His painting features a topless Greek centaur that unintentionally resembles Leslie. Local moral watchdog Marcia Langman (Darlene Hunt) publicly calls for the work’s destruction and a public apology, claiming the work is “governmentfunded animal porn” and “an obscene depiction of bestiality.” Leslie, moved that Jerry’s painting’s accidental resemblance was due to him thinking of powerful women in his life, takes up the painting’s cause and defends it both on local talk shows and at a hearing for the public art committee, two sites of debate in the public sphere. Leslie rebuffs the support of local adult film star Brandi Maxxxx (Marina Marina), complicating the talk shows’ forced two-sided debate. Disheartened when the supposedly liberal public art panel determines that, “there are nipples in it, so it seems like we ought to be safe and destroy it,” Leslie tricks Marcia into thinking Jerry painted a male figure (co-worker Tom) over the original when he, in fact, made a second painting. Marcia also appears in “Pawnee Zoo” (S2E1, September 17, 2009), an episode Hendershot claims is “a product of the post-network era insofar as [it] raises a ‘controversial issue’ [gay marriage] without neatly resolving it.” She continues, “the program does not hate ‘the other side’ [. . .] we simply have to find a way to get along.”28 John D. Inazu refers to this as “confident plural ism” and cites Parks and Recreation’s frequent incorporation of actual public forums as a reflection of real government practice grounded in constitutional doctrine. Though Pawnee’s forums frequently “devolve into a fracas that displays the inefficiencies and inconveniences that often plague governmentsponsored discussions,” Inazu argues that the show nevertheless examines how “a willingness to tolerate dissent, discomfort, and even instability” is essential to a healthy democracy.29 While the episode’s lack of resolution again does not “hate the other side,” the near destruction of the painting and the artist’s complete lack of agency in the process remind viewers of the dangers of allowing intolerant viewpoints to overpower the debate. 28 Ibid., 208, 210. 29 Inazu, Confident Pluralism, 51.

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Meet Me at the Mural Though public art frequently makes claims to represent a collective identity, it also enters into our personal lives and is open to multiple interpretations. In Parks and Recreation the murals frequently parallel what Leslie’s character is undergoing in a given episode. Sunday Boxing, for example, is featured in “Beauty Pageant” (S2E3, October 1, 2009), where Knope battles with sexism. In “The Trial of Leslie Knope” (S4E9, December 1, 2011) another misogynistic mural forms the background for Leslie’s ethics hearing over her secret relationship with her superior Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott). Leslie introduces a painting of a determined looking woman, Sarah Nelson Quindle, who, in 1849, exposed her elbow outdoors, which was a “class A felony [. . .] although she felt the law unjust, she acknowledged that she had broken it, and she nobly accepted her punishment.” As Leslie continues the story, the camera zooms out to reveal that Quindle’s punishment was to be set adrift on Lake Michigan “like a human popsicle.” Later in the episode, when determined to more vigorously defend herself, she points to the painting and claims “when you sit back and let your reputation be destroyed, you go down in history as a frozen whore.” This shot not incidentally also includes two portraits of men, positioning men as historical leaders and women as transgressors whose images in public serve as lessons to be learned. Leslie stands in front of this backdrop as not only a woman fighting for herself, but also an ambitious government employee in the midst of a campaign for elected office. Bad Pawnee, Good Pawnee, which sits directly behind the ethics panel and references other murals seen in earlier seasons as well as other stories from Pawnee’s past, is formally analogous to the left-right composition of a Last Judgment painting, and Leslie looks to it as she ponders whether or not she is a good person. Referencing yet another painting in the room, Ben tells Leslie he will be just on the other side of the wall and points up to what he did not realize was a monstrous-looking portrait, underscoring how many public paintings are nearly invisible until we take the time to notice them. “Look at the monster,” Ben tells Leslie, and she repeatedly does so throughout the episode for courage. Part of the material spaces of our lives rather than the gallery’s detached realm of contemplation, art in public places is uniquely open to this type of personal layering of multiple and unintended meanings. Public works of art are interwoven further into the courtship between Leslie and Ben. A Valentine’s Day scavenger hunt ends at the memorial for the celebrity horse Lil’ Sebastian, a figure whose fame originally baffled

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Figure 5. “The Trial of Leslie Knope” (S4E9, December 1, 2011).

Ben but something Leslie taught him to love about the town (“Operation Ann”). The most important public artwork for their courtship is a mural, though not one of past violence but of non-descript natural imagery. In “Soulmates” (S3E10, April 12, 2011), Leslie’s best friend Ann tries to cheer her up about not being able to date Ben. Filling out the profile for an online dating service, Leslie claims her favorite place in the world is a bench in front of a mural of wildflowers on the second floor of City Hall. At the end of the episode, Ben suggests they catch up on work at the wildflower mural and Leslie smiles, realizing their bond. The couple are again seen there after their office marriage in “Leslie and Ben” (S5E14, February 21, 2013) and in “London, Part 2” (S6E2, September 26, 2013), when they regroup after a trip abroad and talk about the need to expand their horizons. Leslie’s favorite place – a public artwork – becomes interwoven with her relationship to Ben, making the mural’s meaning not only personal and layered, but shifting.

Conclusion In March 2020, over f ive years after Parks and Recreation aired its last episode, fans spotted a fragment of the wildflower mural hanging in Amy Poehler’s house as she plugged a new show from her home. The feminist pop culture blog The Mary Sue wrote, “to see Amy Poehler with [the mural] hit us all right in the feels,” and a tweet cited in the article claimed the sight

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Figure 6. Screen grabs from “Soulmates” (S3E10, April 12, 2011), “Leslie and Ben” (S5E14, February 21, 2013) and “London, Part 2” (S6E2, September 26, 2013).

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of the mural “made me an emotional mess once I saw it.”30 The wildflower mural evokes a sense of topophilia, or “the affective bond between people and place,”31 for the fictional town of Pawnee on multiple levels – for the show’s characters, its star, and its fans. Though the offensive WPA-style murals most directly address Pawnee’s history as a place, they are but one component of the series’ complex engagement with public art. There is no way to create “better, less horrifying history,” only a better, less horrifying future. Doing so requires critical acknowledgement of history’s horrors and its disturbing traces that remain in the present. Using public artworks as visual elements that satirize the various mythologies embedded within our public art landscape, as well as vehicles for debate in the public sphere and objects that provide emotional attachment to place, Parks and Recreation develops its fictional town as both a reflection of and potential model for American public life. Though they may not be able to truly revive the idea of television-as-cultural-forum of the broadcast era, by taking up the varied emotional reactions public artworks elicit through a diverse set of perspectives and varied comic tone that allows for both satire and sincerity, shows like Parks and Recreation and Schur’s later project Rutherford Falls (Peacock, 2021) provide space for the consideration of how public art can and should function in a diverse society.

Bibliography Berkowitz, Joe. “Meet The Man Behind ‘Parks & Rec’ Paintings, Forks In ‘Twilight.’” Fast Company (December 8, 2011). https://www.fastcompany.com/1679180/ meet-the-man-behind-parks-rec-paintings-forks-in-twilight. Blake, Lindsay. “The Complete Parks and Recreation Guide to Los Angeles.” Los Angeles Magazine (blog) (March 12, 2015). https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/ complete-parks-recreation-guide-los-angeles/. Casetti, Francesco. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. “City of Pawnee.” https://www.pawneeindiana.com/. Craven, Thomas. “Our Art Becomes American: We Draw Up Our Declaration of Independence.” Harper’s Monthly 171 (September 1935): 430–441.

30 “Why It Was so Exciting to See Parks and Rec’s Wildflower Mural in Amy Poehler’s House.” 31 Tuan, Topophilia, 4.

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Cresswell, Tim. Place: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Engstrom, Erika. Feminism, Gender, and Politics in NBC’s Parks and Recreation. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. Farmer, Michial. “‘Cloaked In, Like, Fifteen Layers of Irony’: The Metamodernist Sensibility of ‘Parks and Recreation.’” Studies in Popular Culture 37, no. 2 (2015): 103–120. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–49. Hendershot, Heather. “Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum.” How To Watch Television, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 204–212. Inazu, John D. Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Janson, H.W. “Benton and Wood, Champions of Regionalism.” Magazine of Art 39 (May 1946): 184–86, 198–200. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Knope, Leslie. Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America. New York: Hachette Books, 2011. Leishman, Rachel. “Why It Was so Exciting to See Parks and Rec’s Wildflower Mural in Amy Poehler’s House.” The Mary Sue (March 27, 2020). https://www. themarysue.com/why-it-was-so-exciting-to-see-parks-and-recs-wildflowermural-in-amy-poehlers-house/. Marling, Karal Ann. Wall-to-Wall America: Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Ochonicky, Adam R. The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020. Ohl, Jessy J. and Jennifer E. Potter. “Traumatic Encounters with Frank Mechau’s Dangers of the Mail.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 26–42. NBC. “Parks and Recreation: The Murals of Pioneer Hall.” https://www.nbc.com/ parks-and-recreation/photos/the-murals-of-pioneer-hall/147496. Parton, Brad Becker. “How ‘Parks and Rec’ Transcended Its Mockumentary Roots.” Vulture (February 26, 2015). https://www.vulture.com/2015/02/how-parks-andrec-transcended-its-mockumentary-roots.html. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1 (1 January 2010): 56–77.

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About the Author Annie Dell’Aria is Assistant Professor of Art History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and the author of The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Her writings have also appeared in Afterimage, Public Art Dialogue, Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ, and other venues.

11. Homicidal and Suicidal Artist Figures in Film Bruce A. Barber

Abstract This chapter explores the historical origins of the homicidal and/or suicidal artist in film and discusses recent examples, including: Still Life: The Fine Art of Murder (1990) directed by Graeme Campbell, an extended satire of performance art as a homicidal practice; A Perfect Murder (1998) directed by Andrew Davis, a remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, with Viggo Mortenson as the artist; and The Dark Side of Genius (1994), directed by Phedon Papamichael, in which an artist killer who murdered his beautiful model/muse is paroled from prison and seeks out a new victim, a female reporter for an LA Arts weekly attempting to write about him. Keywords: Artists, Genius, Madness, Homicide, Suicide, Performance Art, Film Studies

In the postscript to Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death (2009), I reflected upon two primary questions that have stimulated my work as an artist and academic for over two decades.1 The first: why are there so many representations of stereotypically mad artists, psychopathic killers, and suicidal artists in film when there are so few verifiable and clearly documented cases of such artists in the history of art? The second question, with two components: can a political meaning be assigned to the proliferation of these films and television programs in contemporary society, and what does this say about the producers of such material and the cinema viewing public’s interest in consuming art, death, and crime? These two preliminary questions drew upon my previous work on graphic satires of art (cartoons and comics) and directed my research along several axes that I negotiated employing Derrida’s 1 Barber, Trans/Actions, 302–303.

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“four times around” deconstructive process. Early on, I realized that Derrida’s project was at once philosophical, historical, sociological, and therefore presented a formidable challenge to any contemporary researcher of popular culture. I was also initially skeptical that going four times around a topic would deliver the whole story and all that was needed to know, yet releasing Derrida’s statement from its implicit juridical meaning – “the whole truth and nothing but the truth!” – permitted a less prescriptive and more fluid approach to be pursued in the negotiation of my primary research questions. I found Derrida’s injunction very useful for exploring the surrounds and approaches to my chosen subjects; that is, to pay specific attention to “the work, frame, passé partout (key), title, signature, museum, archive, discourse, marketplace – in short, wherever there is legislation by marking of the limit.”2 Thus, negotiating the limit(s) provided the essential coordinates of my research into the representation of art, artists, and art history in popular culture, enabling the containment of studies within manageable contexts that are mutually reinforcing, if not holistically comprehensive. Trans/actions explored my two original questions and their related components, across and through – trans/acting – various theoretical, historical, and critical fields into specific domains of philosophical and political enquiry; for example, alterity – the question of the other – gender, race, class, and sexual orientation in the construction of social stereotypes; and the political economy of various types of humor: parody, irony, and satire. Employing the post-Freudian phantasmatic models developed by Giorgio Agamben,3 I discussed the historical construction of various stereotypes of artists, particularly the manner in which these were ideologically inscribed into the dominant culture, and thereby became available for reproduction, both in terms of an artist’s presentation of self in everyday life, and also in terms of representations within the domains of cinema, television, and the internet. I engaged in deconstructive readings of films that represented artists as homicidal and/or suicidal figures, criminals as artists, and the perfect crime, usually murder, reconstituted as a brilliant work of art. I also explored the failed artist – l’artiste manqué – turned murderer, and the artist who commits suicide, as cultural stereotypes reproduced through time. I chose to research films that were closely related to my original questions, but also to investigate the work of canonical directors: Alfred Hitchcock; Roger Corman; Peter Greenaway; and Guy Debord, in order to test some of my assumptions about the use of art in cinema generally, but also the 2 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 9. 3 Agamben, Potentialities.

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presence of art and death themes in their films. I emphasized the importance of Thomas De Quincey’s essay “On Consideration of Murder as One of the Fine Arts” (1822), and Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), which represent murder as a fine art, and argued that these extraordinary texts, ironic “riffs” on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1832), respectively, have provided powerful models for various cultural reiterations through to the present. I argued that the shadow side of the art/crime conflation was naturally the crime of art itself, an obsession of the necrophiliacal avant-garde movements of the modernist era that have engaged in the usurping of the symbolic authority of previous vanguards, acting out (passages à l’acte), an Oedipal ritualistic killing of the “father” in order to secure the identity and omnipotence of the “son” – the new wave. As an artist, trained also as an art historian, who has participated in the art world internationally and taught in university art programs for over three decades, I frequently witnessed evidence of this “will to power” (to provide its Nietzschean gloss) in art discourse (essays, reviews catalogues, interviews), especially in pronouncements about the supersession or “death” of this or that art discipline – painting, sculpture, film, performance art – and especially the demise of an avant-garde art movement (for example, dadaism, futurism, surrealism), and a genre, style or fashion. Certain artists in the media have also reflected this will to power in self-aggrandized statements and power plays. Being, however, rather skeptical of instrumentalist rationalizations of social behavior, I was not attracted to affirming these examples as the result of a psychological reflex, Freudian sublimation, a Lacanian or Žižekian “superego injunction,”4 and especially not a product of evolutionary biology or psycho-biology, which have de facto become the stock in trade of many contemporary internet blogsites, such as reddit.com, which feature serial killers and their followers. I was subsequently more comfortable with recognizing these behaviors, products, and artifacts as results of an historically instituted process, similar to Avital Ronell’s description of a “historically implanted test drive.”5 Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and other works from this period (1918–1920), the years during which he wrote on war neuroses and completed his famous essay on “The Uncanny,” he hypothesized that the flip side of Eros – the libidinal, pleasure seeking, and life-affirming character of the human psyche, was another drive, which he named the 4 Žižek, Everything You Always. 5 Ronell, The Test Drive, 86–87.

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Death Drive. In an attempt to understand the exhibition of obsessional neuroses, compulsion, and repetition that he was observing in some of his patients, Freud was forced to reconsider his previous focus upon pleasure seeking (to satisfy the demands of the libido and desires of the ego) as prime motors of human behavior. The result of this thinking, which several commentators suggest reflected a crisis of commitment to his earlier work, Freud began to speculate about a drive that was, in effect, beyond pleasure, which he named Thanatos, after the Greek deity of death.6 At this late stage in his work, at the conclusion of World War I, he was attempting to provide explanatory models for crowd psychology, the repetition of social struggle and war. Freud considered that the death drive was an ur phenomenon, a primitive/archaic element beyond the pleasure principle, provided by the libido, and capable of ensuring that the subject could secure a return to the quiescence of a state beyond the womb, prior to life itself. He further nominated the death drive as having the power to engage in sublimation in relation to the psyche’s superego imperatives and injunctions, and therefore associated it with the most creative spheres of human activity, including religion, art, and culture generally. Freud also suggested that the death drive derives its pleasure in what is disturbing and painful to the organism, hence the evidence of the urge to repeat damaging behavior and obsessional compulsion in the practice of everyday life. Confirming the existence of the death drive and understanding its effects is arguably fundamental for understanding the psychological compulsions behind evil, war, and social struggle, sadism, masochism, abjection, and pornography in the writings of many intellectuals: von Sacher-Masoch; de Sade; Lacan; Bataille; Levinas; Laplanche; Kristeva; Žižek; Butler; Agamben; and Badiou, among many others. The results of my previous research suggest that the death drive remains parenthetical, and that, if proven to exist, it could obviate the necessity to privilege socio-historical and hence ideological explanations for the prevalence of certain stereotypical representations of mad (genius) artists, particularly psychopathic killers and suicidal artists in popular culture. If, as I suspect, the death drive is thoroughly implicated in the existence of these phantasmatic representations, then it may also be a function of ideology, a “legitimating discourse” (after Bourdieu) that tends to operate with a great deal of complexity and contrariness. It remains a fact – a truth, perhaps – that these discourses and the institutions (art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, cinema, social media) from which they 6 References to Thanatos appear in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Thanatos was the brother of Hypnos (Sleep).

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emanate, provide the “discursive regimes”7 within which our understanding of ideological effects, influences and power must be located. This confirms that the most successful ideological effects are the ones that have “no need of words but only of laissez-faire and complicitous silence.”8 The Guardian’s recent profile of the top ten criminal artists included several who are iconic figures within the history of art: Caravaggio; Benvenuto Cellini; Pablo Picasso; Egon Schiele; Banksy; Fra Filippo Lippi; Olive Wharry; Shepard Feary; Carlo Crivelli; and Richard Dadd.9 It is interesting with respect to the first question that I had posed to myself that only two out of the ten criminal artists on this list were actually charged with murder, and neither Caravaggio nor Cellini could be considered serial killers, although Cellini did possibly kill three people.10 If we believe that Walter Sickert, the iconic British painter, was the nineteenth-century serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, as depicted in Patricia Cornwell’s novel Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed (2002), then perhaps he should also have been included in the top ten list.11 On an interesting comparative note, according to Joe Duncan (Joseph E. Duncan III), a convicted serial killer, child molester, and jail-based blogger, the number of serial killers who actually become artists while spending years in confinement is much higher.12 Duncan’s ten examples include Elmer Wayne Henley, Dennis Rader, Arthur Shawcross, Richard Ramirez ‒ The Night Stalker, Derek Todd Lee, Alfred Gaynor, Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, the surgeon Jack Kevorkian, and Rose West, the only woman listed in his celebrated group whose award-winning art practice is described as “culinary cooking and baking.”13 On reddit.com it is possible to find several groups interested in serial killing, among them the #SerialKillers room 14 7 Foucault, passim. 8 Bourdieu, 133. 9 The Guardian also published three other journalistic pieces: https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/feb/27/most-criminal-artists-picasso-banksy-caravaggio; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/11/scrotum-top-10-shocking-performanceart; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/feb/12/top-ten-sexiestworks-of-art-ever; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jan/13/10-most-subversivewomen-artists. 10 Serial Killers are those who murder more than three people over a significant time period. 11 However, in my view, Cornwell’s case remains pure conjecture and not as convincing as several other suspects – non-artists – potentially identified as Jack the Ripper. 12 This may actually be the result of the widespread institution of prison art programs for both the education and therapy of inmates. See https://thejusticeartscoalition.org/programs/. 13 https://medium.com/unusual-universe/10-serial-killers-who-later-became-artists. 14 https://www.reddit.com/r/serialkillers/.

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with 386,000 members; #ZodiacKiller room,15 which has 39,675 members, and the lesser known #RedheadMurders which has 1092 members, each a growing membership. There are other rooms and trending announcements including, for example, serial killer Ted Bundy’s 24 November birthday, entering group members’s inboxes daily. Documentary film-maker John Borowski is also social media blogger whose work explores the relationship between contemporary art and crime. To emphasize his interests, Borowski’s blog has a growing list of projects on serial killers, including his TV streaming show Serial Killer Culture, which focuses on authors, film-makers, musicians, artists, and collectors inspired to create and collect art based on the work of serial killers.16 His Bloodlines (2018) is a documentary film about the art and life of Vincent Castiglia, who paints neo-surrealistic images with his own blood and, more recently, with special permission, the blood of his collectors. Castiglia’s modus operandi echoes that illustrated in the film Colour Me Red (Eddie Davis, 1969), in which a painter decides that the recoloring of his paintings is best rendered in real blood! Although Vincent Castiglia almost died and had to be hospitalized for withdrawing too much blood from himself for his paintings, no one has yet died in this artist’s potentially homicidal/suicidal art practice. These cases point to the resilience of certain models circulating in the cultural domain that have a long pedigree, reaching back to the Greek foundations of Western epistemology, for example the myth of Pygmalion, the artist whose inert sculpture of Aphrodite (Galatea), the woman he loves, becomes alive under his embrace. In an earlier discussion of this myth, I reflected upon the many examples of (predominantly) male artists in film who reverse this narrative trajectory by taking a live subject, killing it and then turning it into a fetish object worthy of (disinterested) aesthetic contemplation.17 I argued that this reversal was the perfect incarnation of the fetish character of the art object itself, and a compelling reason to sustain Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s phantasmatic revision of creativity to the Freudian “object of lack” and the figure of the failed artiste manqué who becomes dissatisfied killer and/or victim of suicide.18 The list of works discussed in this chapter explore recent examples of homicidal and/or suicidal artists in cinema beyond the iconic artists represented in The Affairs of Cellini (aka The Firebrand, Gregory La Cava, 1934), in which the 15 https://www.reddit.com/r/ZodiacKiller/. 16 http://johnborowski.blogspot.com/. 17 Barber, Trans/actions, “The Pygmalion Effect,” 138–161. 18 Agamben, 7–9.

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roguish artist is accused of murder in sixteenth-century Florence, Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944), a narrative about a turn of the century pathological painter and part-time puppeteer who engages in serial murder, and Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959), in which Walter Paisley, a shy busboy and amateur artist working in a beatnik café, becomes an artist who engages in serial murder to make a proverbial “killing in the art world.” Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), the forensic psychiatrist depicted in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), is an amateur artist and serial killer who eats his victims, and The Joker (Jack Nicholson), who charmingly proclaims himself “the world’s first fully functioning homicidal artist” in Batman (Tim Burton, 1989), are other notable films in this genre.19 There are hundreds of films and television programs, not to mention books and theater plays, which represent the artist as other.20 In the company of Julia Kristeva’s discussion of alterity/ abjection – the powers of horror21 – the valorizing of artist killers in order to seek and/or affirm De Quincey’s eloquent offering, in his satirizing of Kant’s aesthetic theory, that murder can be considered one of the fine arts. In the following pages, I will discuss three cinematic examples: Still Life: The Fine Art of Murder (Graeme Campbell, 1990), an extended satire of performance art as a homicidal practice; A Perfect Murder (Andrew Davis, 1998), a remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder with Viggo Mortensen as the artist; and The Dark Side of Genius (Phedon Papamichael, 1994), in which an artist-killer who murdered his beautiful model/muse, is paroled from an asylum, and seeks out a new victim, a female reporter for an LA arts weekly attempting to write about him, thus presenting a warning to all authors on homicidal artists that they may become targets of the killers they pursue for their writing. Still Life is an extended satire of performance art as a homicidal practice. A rather sadistic example of the “Pygmalion effect”22 is provided by this slasher film by Canadian director Campbell, working from a screenplay by Michael Tan and Dan Parisot. Still Life ratchets up the trans/actions between murder and aesthetics – art and crime – by showing a serial killer who proudly presents his victims as works of creative assemblage and signs 19 This term should be plural as films featuring homicidal and suicidal artists actually span several genres and subgenres, including horror, thriller, drama, crime film, action, art films, dark comedy, science fiction, noir/neo-noir, and documentary. 20 See Wittkower, Born Under Saturn. 21 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. 22 The “Pygmalion effect,” also known as the “Rosenthal effect,” is a psychological phenomenon, in which high expectations lead to improved performance. My usage of the term is more solicitous involving toxic masculinity, misogyny, and objectification.

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them with his acronym AK for Art Killer. Like the previous films discussed, Still Life conflates horror with comedy, although in somewhat less comedic (ironic/satiric) manner than either Bucket of Blood (1959) or Batman (1989). The film opens with Nelly the television reporter covering one of the Art Killer’s latest works, a very dead vagrant hanging in a gilt frame. “The Art Killer has struck again with his version of Fatal Art,” scream the media headlines. Predictably, AK has developed a following and groupies have been lauding each of his exhibits as examples of “very cool” art. Today, obviously, the media would be concerned about the potential for copycat killings. Nelly meets Peter when a “terrorist bomb threat” clears the bar in which he is about to perform. A relationship quickly develops between them and she moves into his loft. Teddy, who lives next door to Peter, rapidly becomes jealous of their relationship. Meanwhile, Peter receives a suspicious-looking videotape package through the mail from a new music producer bearing the sinister name of Luther Wax, requesting a new composition to accompany his compilation of horrific images. Luther has been a suspect in an unrelated murder case, and when the next Art Killer victim is found Wax is again arrested as a murder suspect. After Peter’s successful gig at the bar, Billy and Frank simulate an Art Killer performance by ambushing Peter, attaching him to a frame, and then hanging him high from a building. But instead of killing him they simply sign the piece AK and document it with a Polaroid camera. From this production the film narrative continues to witness a scary performance by Teddy in which he threatens both Nelly, his co-performer, and a woman in the audience with his pistol. Nelly is upset by this unscripted gun performance and tells him loudly, “you can fuck with people but you don’t need to kill them!” and “if you even shoot at me again, I’ll kill you!” Peter is found and becomes Nelly’s next media assignment under the headline “Totally Screwed.” Suspicious of the fact that Peter is somehow in the vicinity of each of the killings – “Other victims he kills, but you he sets up” – two Detectives decide to place him under surveillance. Meanwhile, Peter has received another menacing video from Luther showing that Nelly has been taken hostage. “I’ve got a fish to fry for you,” relates the voice on the tape, followed by “Finish it Peter, or it’s all over but for the frying.” Peter stays up all night to finish the piece while the detective keeps his vigil. The serial Art Killer’s sixth victim becomes Stan (the Man), a popular local liquor store vendor and finally, Teddy dressed as a clown (now a familiar homicidal figure), drags Nelly into Peter’s loft revealing that he, Teddy, is the Art Killer. “Put the handcuffs on lover boy,” he says to Peter. “Why are you doing this to us?” demands Peter in return. “You’re our friend!” to which Peter replies, “I’m tired of being ignored,”

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as the camera pans up to a poster on the wall showing them all under a text that reads: “Real Performance Art.” “I planned all this, the bomb scare, the art killings, and ah…Miss Nelly, I was your only story!” Outside the loft, clown suited fans of the Art Killer chant in unison “AK! AK! AK! AK!” Dave, Nelly’s cameraman enters the loft and she appeals to Teddy’s narcissism by suggesting that they undertake an interview for NYTV news. She questions, “Is this your final piece Teddy?” and “Why are you doing this?” You’re not going to kill us, man?” asks Peter, to which Teddy manically replies, “I want the show to be over.” With a final refrain “I want to be with my people,” the AK leaps through the window into the assembled crowd several stories below and lands heavily on the roof of a parked car. Peter comforts him before he dies from his suicidal act and says, “I love you man,” to which Teddy replies, “I love you too.” His last words are prophetic and a strict Pygmalion effect reversal if ever there was one. “I’ve just got one thing to say . . . you’ve got to kill yourself to make it in the art world!” Here, suicide is presented as the symbolic act of an artist seeking fame, not necessarily fortune. A Perfect Murder further illustrates the resilience of De Quincey’s model of the fine art of murder in contemporary film and underlines the use of culinary art and sex to further this goal. Art, food, sex, and film references abound in A Perfect Murder, which could be described as a Hitchcock thriller à la lettre. Not only does this film represent a riff on Hitchcock’ s Dial M for Murder but Davis has also quoted the work of many other filmmakers, providing a panoply of references to cinematographic and directing styles of directors such as Orson Welles, Brian de Palma, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich. For example, the film opens with a Wellesian travelling aerial shot through the skylight windows into a spacious artist’s warehouse studio to focus on a fornicating naked couple in the bed, Emily and painter David Shaw. David Shaw, whom we subsequently learn at a museum opening was educated at Berkeley and Cal Arts, dresses fashionably in black. Emily Taylor works as a multi-lingual translator to a UN Ambassador and is from a wealthy background with a $100 million trust fund inheritance. Stephen Taylor, her husband, is a multi-millionaire Wall Street financier about to undergo a financial meltdown, described by one of his consultants as “the equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster.” Recognizing that his options are limited, he decides to blackmail Shaw into killing his wife, Emily. Taylor has done his homework on his wife’s lover and on a pretence of interest in seeing and perhaps collecting some of his artwork, he discloses his knowledge of the affair as well as the extensive research he has undertaken on the artist, contemptuously reciting details of David’s (aka Winton le Grange) miserable life, “made up of depressing little scams,” for which he has spent three or

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more years in Soledad prison, which is where he actually learned how to paint, instead of the iconic institutions where he declared he studied. “I feel like I’m medium deep in bohemian cache,” remarks the venture capitalist, later offering to Shaw “Your work is very trashy…. your anger… it’s very controlled… the colour of despair.” And later, “You can cash out $1/2 million tax free” for killing my wife.” Asked by Shaw what is in it for him, Taylor replies, “my agenda doesn’t concern you,” but we know that he will both punish his wife for adultery and inherit a 100 million from her fortune and relieve himself from bankruptcy. The “perfect” set-up for the murder is similar to Hitchcock’s Dial M, although both films depart somewhat from some of the details in the original Frederick Knott play. The husband is to take his wife’s latch-key and place it in a spot for the murderer to retrieve and Shaw is then cued to attack the wife at a predetermined time as she answers the telephone. The husband’s alibi is a high stakes card game and a phone call at the anticipated time of death to his stockbroker. In Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder the alibi for Tony Wendice is provided by a Stag party that both he and his wife’s lover attend. In the film version the husband is expecting David the lover to be the murderer and not, as it turns out, one of his prison acquaintances. Before he leaves the loft where he makes the arrangement, Stephen informs David that the murder should appear to be “spur of the moment [. . .] the word bludgeon comes to mind.” Janine, the Taylor’s African American housekeeper has made one of her legendary roasts for the couple and the meat thermometer that subsequently becomes the domestic murder instrument, is thrust into the neck of the roast with a resounding “thwack!” The murder scene employs typical Hitchcockian suspense editing, cross cuts, and inserts between Gwyneth relaxing seductively in her bath, invoking the vulnerability of Janet Leigh in Psycho, and the murderer stealing his way into the apartment. At his poker game, Stephen makes two calls on his cell phone, one to his broker and the next to Emily to cue the murder. Knowing she is in the bath he lets it ring until she answers it. “Hello,” she says, “hello,” (three times). “Who is this?” and at this signal the masked intruder springs in to strangle her. As in the Hitchcock original, this scene is also a highly choreographed but with much more sadistic violence. Emily is literally thrown across the kitchen counter. The assailant gropes after her and with his hand in a strangle hold around her throat, he attempts to reach up with his other to grasp an appropriate bludgeoning instrument, an overhanging fry pan. In a reverse shot to the one employed by Hitchcock, Emily reaches back into the sink to pick up a Sabatier knife, which is knocked out of her hand and then, with what seems to be her final breath, she grabs

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the needle-sharp stick thermometer that Janine had previously set down into the drying tray, picks it up and thrusts it into the jugular vein of her assailant’s neck, spurting blood – in a “gross out” imitation of a slasher movie – in all directions. As the thermometer enters the neck it makes the same repulsive “thwack” sound it had previously being thrust into the roast by Janice – enough to turn a hardened carnivore into a vegetarian. A Perfect Murder employs many postmodern ironies apart from the “imperfect murder,” which is the basis of the denial of absolute perfection and acceptance of potential failure. For example, inspector Hubbard (John Williams) in the original Dial M . . . is replaced by the inimitable David Suchet, who plays Hercule Poirot, the famous detective in the Agatha Christie stories, profiled to great acclaim on the PBS Mystery Series. In this film, Poirot’s Daliesque waxed moustache is gone, a contrast to the full-brush moustache worn by Inspector Hubbard in Dial M for Murder. Like its model in Hitchcock, this perfect murder turns out to be not so perfect, not quite reaching the perfection of high art removed from the banality of domestic life – that is, cooking in the Davis film and knitting in Dial M for Murder. At the conclusion of the film, when Emily recognizes that her husband was behind her near death, she shoots him with his own gun. The detective is supportive in his language, “May God be with you,” to which Emily responds, “and you as well,” signaling that she will not be indicted for an act in which she would become the victim. A Perfect Murder assigns the primary art references directly to the identity of the artist, opening with spiraling window and ceiling shots in the large NYC warehouse studio, his artwork, the museum opening, and the Taylors’s extravagant uptown condominium, which displays a major work of sculpture in the hallway, and several paintings adorning the walls. The film credits the artist David Shaw’s artwork as actually being created by Viggo Mortensen, while the workspace was courtesy of the actor-director Dennis Hopper. The model for Davis’s film, Hitchcock’s Dial M…, contains many references to the idea of the “perfect” murder as a work of art: for example, Grace Kelly’s icy beauty and diaphanous dress in Dial M for Murder connotes to-be-looked-at-ness and the strangling scene itself is a tightly choreographed aestheticization of violence providing, like so many of Hitchcock’s other film murders, an example of his masculine conception of high art. The director’s meticulous attention to detail is evident in his choice of two prints by Rosa Bonheur, Wedgewood, and Staffordshire figurines, oriental Buddhas, teacups, and tennis trophies for the mantelpiece of the Wendice apartment in Maida Vale, a tony district of London. After the first take of the famous scissors scene, in which Grace Kelly stabs her assailant in

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Figure 1: Viggo Mortensen painting a large canvas inside the warehouse loft set in Greenpoint Brooklyn, New York City, where he lived and painted during the filming of A Perfect Murder with several works stacked to the right in preparation for shipment to Los Angeles on December 9, 1997. (Photo by Lindsay Brice courtesy of Getty Images.)

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the back, Hitchcock reportedly said: “This is nicely done but there wasn’t enough gleam to the scissors, and murder without gleaming scissors is like asparagus without a hollandaise sauce – tasteless.”23 How like Hitchcock to link murder with food! But, of course, he also linked murder with sex and art, the latter providing a neat squaring of the circle. For Hitchcock, the art of murder, rather than being a source of cheap entertainment, should and could be compared to the transcendent perfection idealized in the work of the great artists – masters – in the art-historical canon. And if a few artists had to be murdered or commit murder or suicide in the quest to achieve immortality, so be it. As the camera pans over the body it moves back to quickly take in a pile of three large art books – monographs on Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the third an indecipherable monograph but possibly the other key figure from the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo. As Hitchcock mentioned several times – “It’s all in the details” and “Everything’s perverted in a different way” – references to art, artists, and art history may often be scattered throughout the film to influence the various readings of the narrative and the actions of the characters.24 The Dark Side of Genius (1994) plays all of the stereotypes for the homicidal and suicidal artist available in popular literature and previous films by Hitchcock and others. The credit sequence reveals a nude model posing seductively in a studio being painted by the hippie-looking artist standing at his easel, with the voice-over dictating that “between an artist and his subject lies a bond that cannot be broken. But what happened nine years ago is a mystery that cannot be forgotten.” The artist who had killed this model in a psychotic rage is a handsome, talented yet extremely troubled young artist described in one scene as a “paranoid schizophrenic.” He has just been released from an asylum, where he had been held, not criminally responsible, for the last seven years, for the murder of Anna, his girlfriend/ model/muse, another instance of the Pygmalion reversal mentioned previously. Escaping his paranoid/psychotic and suicidal thoughts – stereotypically the proverbial “dark side of genius” – Jons attempts to continue painting again, and, after a short time, he is approached by Jennifer Cole, an attractive art critic who, intrigued by this complex, neurotic, and somewhat melancholic artist, announces that she wants to interview him for a review article she is writing for a prestigious art journal. Against the backdrop of the contemporary art world, she begins to dig into his past, fully aware that it holds painful memories for Julian, and perhaps danger for herself if and when she decides 23 Spoto, 208. 24 “Alfred Hitchcock Interview,” 51. See also Jacobs, The Wrong House.

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to have a sexual liaison with him. The art critic’s obsession with a scandalous artist leads her to uncover a past that he is desperate to hide. The critic is informed by an older colleague that “artists are funny people. They feed off their own obsessions [. . .] you can’t separate them from their problems, and we shouldn’t try,” followed by a series of images of the artist working and comments delivered in a montage of images of friends and acquaintances: “What’s your interest in Mr. Jons?” “He’s a dangerous man [. . .] do you know how many unsolved murders there are in this town? “We’re dealing with a paranoid schizophrenic here.” The film progresses into a homicidal space where the repeating of the earlier murder is a distinct possibility, and the dark side of genius is reflected in the valorised archetype of the serial killer. In each of these films, and many others, irony and parody provide the vehicles for the satirical intentions of the screenwriters and the subsequent interpretation of the scripts by the film directors and their partners in crime.25 Like Roger Corman’s Bucket of Blood, which parodies the performance, behavior, and idiomatic language of fifties beat culture, Still Life is a cynical late-twentieth-century attack on the putative narrowing of the gap between art, life, and death, announcing that “It’s all a performance!” A Perfect Murder, imperfect or not as the original writer proposed, is a work of art in many ways beyond the prison cell of the studio. “Artists are always appreciated more after they are dead,” Steven Taylor says as David Shaw lies dying in a train carriage bound for his escape to Montreal, pointing to the political economy of monetary and cultural appreciation to which an artist and their artwork is (hopefully) destined after death. And the Dark Side of Genius is always a play between the artist’s object of desire and their psychotic impulses, presenting yet another model of the close relationships between madness and genius, which, in the annals of art history, psychiatry, and law have been vindicated, disputed, rescinded, and reproduced.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Transl. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. “Alfred Hitchcock Interview with Ian Cameron and V.F. Perkins.” Alfred Hitchcock Interviews, ed. Sydney Gottlieb. Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2003. 44–55. 25 See appendix list of films in Barber, Trans/actions for more examples of parodic and satirical treatment of artists, art, and art history.

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Barber, Bruce, Trans/Actions: Art, Film and Death. New York: Atropos Press, 2009. Black, Joel, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Transl. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Transl. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Cornwell, Patricia. Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002. De Quincey, Thomas. On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Edinburgh: Adam Charles Black, 1827. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Transl. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books 1973 (1966). Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961. Freud, Sigmund. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1964. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994. Jacobs, Steven. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Ronell, Avital. The Test Drive. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Sandblom, Philip. Creativity and Disease: How Illness Affects Literature, Art, and Music. London: Marion Boyars, 1992. Spoto, Donald, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies. New York: Random House, 2008. Teuteberg, Jasmin. America’s Favourite Serial Killer. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2009. Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Wittkower, Rudolf & Margot Wittkower. Born Under Saturn. The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution. New York: Random House, 1963. Žižek, Slavoj, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). London: Verso, 1992.

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About the Author Bruce Barber, Professor Emeritus at NSCAD University, is the author of Performance [Performance] and Performers: Essays and Conversations (2008), Trans/Actions: Art, Film and Death (2009) and Littoral Art and Communicative Action (2013), and editor of Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization (1983).

12. Blood Lust: Realism, Violent Inspiration, and the Artist in Horror Cinema Kate Robertson

Abstract Drawing from long-established stereotypes, cinema envisions the artist as a fascinating and exceptional figure, a conduit for inspiration. Horror films are ideally suited to exploit this archetype, with artists compelled by internal or external forces to do terrible things in the pursuit of great art. Taking mimesis to the extreme, they turn to a long history of biomatter as a medium, traversing the nexus between life and art, real and artifice, living and inanimate. Like Pygmalion in reverse, sculptors create living statues for their wax museums. In mid-century exploitation films, the use of bodies as material is satirical, alleging the absurdity of contemporary art. Possessed by inspiration, artists are fuelled by bloodlust, violence, demonic whispers, and, overwhelmingly, the pursuit of greatness. Keywords: Horror, artist, sculptor, inspiration, vampire, waxwork

In the cultural imagination the artist is a fascinating and exceptional figure, a conduit for creative inspiration, which is framed as something inaccessible, maybe even fantastical. Horror films are ideally suited to exploit this stereotype. Imagined as a genius, a madman, an outsider unbound from everyday concerns and rules, the artist is compelled by internal or external forces to commit terrible acts in their pursuit of great art. Dedicated to realism, they turn to the human body for subjects, inspiration and, sometimes, material. Like Pygmalion in reverse, Mystery of the Wax Museum (Curtiz, 1933) preceded several films about human-sculpture exhibits. In splatter films like A Bucket of Blood (Corman, 1959) and Color Me Blood Red (Lewis, 1965), the perfect materials for striking artworks are discovered by accident. Bloodlust fuels vampire-artists in Blood Bath (Hill/Rothman, 1966) and Bliss (Begos, 2019), an unusual instance of a woman in this role. Witnessing

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch12

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visceral horror inspires art in The House with Laughing Windows (Avati, La casa dalle finestre che ridono, 1976) and Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal (Rodriguez, 2012). In The Devil’s Candy (Byrne, 2017), a painter is plagued by demonic whispers. Violence and art are tightly interwoven in these films. In the ultimate demonstration of authenticity, the artists take mimesis, strived for throughout art history, to the extreme.

Artists, Bodies, Horror The archetype of the artist is envisaged variously as unique, sensitive, narcissistic, rebellious, licentious, tortured, unstable, obsessive, a misunderstood genius, and, most often, a man. Such traits are understood to be required for artistic creation, not only accepted but demanded. Artists actively negotiate these expectations in their public and also private personas, adopting the roles expected of them. In 1934, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz traced the origin of this stereotype back to the Hellenistic era, cataloging motifs that reappear in artist biographies, such as the precocious child, the artist-hero, divine inspiration, magic, realism, and virtuosity.1 However, it really took hold in the Renaissance, when the artist was elevated from a craftsman leading collaborative work in a studio to a prodigious individual. Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists (1550) was incredibly influential in encouraging this shift, connecting art to biography. The type of the artist-genius flourished in the late-eighteenth century, with Romanticism fashioning a solitary figure, tormented by deeply felt emotions, starving in a garret while focusing on art at the expense of all else. Through the nineteenth century, bohemianism evolved to encompass a broader and more fluid type that was popularized by mass culture. Bohemians embraced the modern world, expressing their rejection of norms through means such as eccentric appearance and licentious behavior, indulging in drugs, alcohol, and sex. In the post-World War II United States, this was embodied by the Beats, who appear in several films below. Readily understood as a counter-culture figure, a rebellious outsider who refuses conventions, living beyond the rules of society, the artist in cinema is poised to transgress. As a conduit for creative inspiration, their exceptionalism permits, even justifies, such behavior. Ruled by the drive to create, artists do terrible things. Creativity is inextricably tied to madness in the cultural imagination, a notion that Griselda Pollock argues underrides art 1

Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic.

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historiography.2 The unhinged artist appears regularly in films, including Bluebeard (Ulmer, 1944), Un tranquillo posto di campagna (Petri, 1968), Vargtimmen (Bergman, 1968), La rossa dalla pelle che scotta (Russo, 1972), The Driller Killer (Ferrara, 1979), and Delirio di sangue (Bergonzelli, 1988). Films about fictional artists exist in parallel to artist biopics, which, though based on real people, invariably employ fictionalization. Steven Jacobs observes a preference for two periods: the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries and nineteenth–twentieth centuries, with popular figures including Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh.3 This aligns with eras when the artist of was of particular social interest. However, this stereotype is invariably informed by contemporary contexts, entangling ideas across time and place. The films in this study engage with a complex history of bodies in and of art. They draw on a long tradition of biomatter as a medium: blood as prehistoric pigment; teeth in ancient jewellery; Victorian hair wreaths. In the late-seventeenth century, natural anatomy exhibitions astonished viewers with human specimens, augmented by media such as wax, inscribed with a sense of life.4 In tableaux vivants, popular entertainment from the late-eighteenth century, people posed silently in static recreations of famous artworks, literature, or historical events. In contemporary art, blood has been used in performance since the 1960s, including by Hermann Nitsch, Anna Mendieta, and Gina Pane. Judy Chicago, Catherine Elwes, Carolee Schneeman, Judy Clark, Tracey Emin, and Portia Munson have all used menstrual blood in their work. In 1991, Marc Quinn began a series of casts of his head made from his own blood. The ghastly practices of the fictional artists here also evoke the portrayal of violence on bodies throughout art history, especially the drama, realism, and visual excess of the Baroque, where artists like Caravaggio, Gentileschi, and Goya – popularized through artist-biopics – embraced narrative and stylistic depictions of violence, pain, and anguish. This impulse resonates in the Théâtre du Grand Guignol. Founded in late-nineteenth-century Montmartre, the stage shows shocked audiences with horrific inflictions of bodily harm performed with gruesome effects. While the spectacle seemed real, viewers understood it was not; temporarily suspending this knowledge permitted enjoyment of this slippage. This visceral experience is essential to horror cinema, evinced in physiological responses like raised pulse, flinching, screaming, and even fainting. The rendering of the body on screen forges a reciprocity between viewer and image, real and fake, alive and inanimate. 2 3 4

Pollock, “Artist Mythologies,” 57–96. Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 41. Landes, “Wax Fibers,” 46.

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Pygmalion in Reverse Wax museums feature as unsettling locations throughout cinematic history, including in Figures de Cire (Tourneur, 1914), Chamber of Horrors (Averback, 1929), Midnight at Madame Tussaud’s (Pearson, 1936), The Frozen Ghost (Young, 1945), Mill of the Stone Women (Ferroni, 1960), La Casa del Terror (Solares, 1960), and Waxwork (Hickox, 1988). Horror legends Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi play wax sculptors in While Paris Sleeps (Tourneur, 1923) and the serial The Whispering Shadow (Clark/Herman, 1933), respectively. The most influential precedent here is Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), based on Charles Belden’s unpublished story “The Wax Works.”5 Beginning on a stormy night in 1921, Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) welcomes two art critics to his wax museum in London. Impressed by his talent, one offers to submit his work to the Royal Academy, one of the oldest and most prestigious exhibiting bodies. However, Ivan’s business partner, Worth, proposes they burn the museum down to claim the insurance, setting a display alight. Grotesque close-ups linger on melting bodies. When a hand holding a guillotine rope melts, the blade falls, cutting off a head. Worth escapes, locking the doors behind him. Though Ivan survives, watching his “children” perish drives him mad. In 1933, he opens a new museum in New York. With his hands irreparably damaged, he recreates his collection by murdering people and casting them in wax. Brash reporter Florence (Glenda Farrell) notices a startling resemblance between the Joan of Arc figure and the model whose death she is investigating. She cracks the case and saves her roommate Charlotte (Fay Wray) from becoming Ivan’s new Marie Antoinette. When shot at by police, Ivan falls into his own vat of molten wax. Mystery sets up many elements that appear in later films with peopleas-statues: the mad artist obsessed with work, art as immortality, real versus simulation. In an inversion of the myth of Pygmalion, the talented sculptor turns humans into statues. In Greek mythology, Pygmalion sculpts a woman so beautiful he falls in love with his creation and, with a plea to Aphrodite, she is brought to life (with his kiss). This story exemplifies the creative process as something all-consuming, wondrous, and potentially magical, with the talented artist erasing the distinction between object and being. Mystery channels this myth. A trained sculptor, Ivan transitioned 5 This was also sold as a play to producer Charles Rogers, who abandoned it after a claim it infringed on the recent Broadway production Black Tower (retitled Murdered Alive for its West Coast run, starring Lugosi), where a scientist discovers a method of embalming that turns bodies into statues (Senn, Golden Horrors, 167).

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from working in stone to wax as he felt it better reproduced “the warmth, flesh and blood of life.” As an organic material, wax is more akin to flesh than stone. Warmed by bare hands it softens to be shaped, relying on touch as much as sight. Ivan’s skillful illusionism imbues wax with the semblance of flesh, rendering the artifice imperceptible. When stripped of his talent, Ivan invents a method that bypasses this meticulous labor. Bodies dipped in wax recall a traditional life-casting process, whereby a model is coated in a material that hardens to produce a three-dimensional mold from which a sculpture is cast. Yet, Ivan’s models are not temporary but incorporated into the sculptures, producing indisputably original works that are not simulacra but actually taken from life. Mystery and its followers have a specific origin in Madame Tussauds’s “Chamber of Horrors.” Designed in early-nineteenth-century London, its gruesome displays included French Revolution figures modeled from death masks, including Antoinette (who appears frequently in the wax films). This verisimilitude is what made the exhibits so horrifying yet so popular. It also sets a precedent for the radical treatment of bodies in later films. The wax museum exemplifies Brigitte Peucker’s suggestion that the continuity between art and reality is driven by the concealment of the abyss between life and death.6 Life-sized, painted, and clothed, wax figures are designed to deceive. They are inherently uncanny, familiar yet decisively not. Surveying early-nineteenth-century reviews of Madame Tussauds, Uta Kornmeier highlights frequent references to the lifelike nature of the statues.7 Creating an illusion of a shared physical reality, she argues, encourages an intimate engagement between viewer and object. Such reciprocity is central to Mystery, where the sculptures are played by actors, making the viewers believe – like the artists – that they are alive. The studio capitalized on this in its promotional materials, proposing a tie-in with a local department store, where a model would pose motionless among the mannequins before awakening.8 Bringing the display to life, this spectacle evokes the tableaux vivant, subverting the distinction between real and artifice. Andre DeToth’s House of Wax (1953) is a close remake of Mystery, notable for being the first color 3D feature from a major studio. Set in early-twentiethcentury New York, the sculptor Henry Jarrod is played by horror-staple Vincent Price. Plot differences include Henry creating an exhibit of his murdered business partner, Matthew, whose fiancée Cathy becomes Joan of 6 Peucker, Incorporating Images, 114. 7 Kornmeier, “Almost Alive,” 73. 8 Berenstein, ‘“It Will Thrill You,” 158.

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Arc. Florence is eliminated; instead, Sue (Phyllis Kirk) recognizes Cathy in the exhibit, is pursued for her resemblance to Antoinette, and is eventually saved. By mentioning Madame Tussauds and the Eden Musée (brought from Paris to Coney Island), the film evokes their devastating fires, in 1925 and 1928, respectively. Both Ivan and Henry are driven mad by watching their creations perish, especially Antoinette. Their love for her clearly references Pygmalion: Henry even pronounces “Once in his lifetime, every artist feels the hand of God [. . .] and creates something that comes alive.” Like the mythical sculptor, the men’s affections are exclusively directed to this ideal woman they invent (necessarily disregarding that Antoinette was once a real person). No woman could rival her perfection. It follows that when they discover her living doppelgänger, they intend to transform her into wax, believing this process of artistry will resurrect their lost loves. The double animates the nexus between real and unreal. The uncanny resemblance between Charlotte and Antoinette is validated for Ivan, and the audience, by Wray’s portrayal of both women. Pronouncing “you are that figure come to life,” Ivan establishes Charlotte as a doppelgänger. Drawing on Otto Rank, Freud poses that the double is an assurance of immortality that becomes a harbinger of death.9 This is envisaged when Henry shows Sue a likeness of her head, a cast she was unaware existed. But this duplicate will not satisfy Henry, who demands “the real you-nothing less will satisfy me.” Susan Fellman’s examination of films where men encounter doppelgängers of their dead love objects is useful in considering Ivan and Henry. The doppelgängers’s body, she argues, is a site for the articulation of a necrophilial desire that is a paradigm of cinema, reflecting the apparatus, industry, and audience’s regard for its fantastic objects.10 Charlotte/Wray and Sue/Kirk are objects of desire both in the diegetic and real worlds. Ivan and Henry’s erotic fixation on their destroyed loves is sublimated through these women, who they consider simulacra. But their status as doppelgängers is complicated by the fact that their predecessors were never actually alive; they cannot be revenants. The uncanny double also manifests in the masks the men wear. Exemplifying their preternatural skill, wax is indiscernible from skin, an illusion broken when Charlotte and Sue lash out and crack the masks. This disguise permits an invisibility of sorts, hiding not just scars but monstrous actions. Like death masks, the imprint of their faces leave a trace, making these not just representations but extensions of the body.11 Recreating their 9 Freud, The Uncanny, 142. 10 Felleman, Art in the Cinematic Imagination, 25–55. 11 See Kornmeier, “Almost alive,” 76.

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undisfigured faces reflects their aspiration to remake the past, an impulse fundamental to their profession of reviving historical figures. These films draw on the mad science subgenre, popular in both the 1930s and 1950s. The studios resemble laboratories, displaying anatomical drawings, casts of limbs, dangerous-looking tools, and bubbling liquids. The artist and scientist are driven by similar compulsions to create something great, to alter nature, to “play god.” Some artists actually become scientists, transforming people into living statues. In Nightmare in Wax (Townsend, 1969), museum owner Vince Rinaud devises a serum to paralyze and control his models. Shot at Movieland Wax Museum in California (1962–2005), the film highlights the public’s shifting interest from historical displays to Hollywood celebrities. After being terribly injured by the head of Paragon Pictures, Vince assembles the studio’s stars in sensationalist displays, a demonstration of self-reflexivity. As a special effects artist, Vince has a talent for artifice. Conversely, he makes these bodies look less real to hide his crimes. However, Vince does not conceal his scars, forgoing mask or make-up. Another excessively villainous mad scientist appears in The Wax Mask (Stivaletti, Maschera di Cera, 1997), a period-set giallo conceived by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. In 1912, Sonia begins working at a wax museum owned by Boris Volkoff who, coincidentally, murdered her parents. An investigation uncovers worse transgressions: experiments Boris considers a new zenith in the search for perfection that drives art. In his secret laboratory, lightbulbs flash, electricity arcs, and tubes of brightly colored liquids bubble as blue serum is injected into his subject’s veins, petrifying them. The gruesome truth of the displays is revealed when the museum burns, echoing Mystery and House of Wax. Though Boris seems to perish, he switches faces before a wall of masks, escaping undetected. Curtiz and DeToth’s films inspired numerous others. In early-twentiethcentury Mexico, an actor-turned-sculptor turns women into famous stage heroines for his wax museum in Museo del horror (Baledón, 1964) – he falls not into a vat of wax but onto the stage, a final performance. In Terror in the Wax Museum (Fenady, 1976), Jack the Ripper comes to life – a nod to Waxworks (Leni, 1924) – which the denouement reveals as the killer’s disguise. Living statues are also made of other materials. In Bloodlust! (Brooke, 1961) and Il mostro di Venezia (Tavella, 1965), humans are embalmed and displayed in a lair-turned-private-museum. In Môjû (Masumura, 1969), a blind sculptor abducts a model and keeps her in a studio among a surreal tableau of oversized body parts. Boris Karloff plays a blind sculptor unknowingly using human skeletons as armatures in El coleccionista de cadáveres (Alcocer, 1970). The horrific origin of a bronze sculpture are revealed in the opening scene of

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Crucible of Terror (Hooker, 1971). Artist Victor Clare (Mike Raven) layers paste and plaster to his model’s skin, leaving a single hole that reveals her eye opening as he pours molten bronze into the cast. Possessing Victor’s next model, the vengeful spirit plunges him into his own fireplace. Though diverging in narrative and tone, these films about people-as-statues foreground negative traits associated with artists, with fanatical and dangerous protagonists who defy societal and natural laws in their pursuit of greatness.

Satirizing the Mid-Twentieth-Century Art World The contemporary artist was a conspicuous figure of fascination in the mid-twentieth century. In 1953, Parker Tyler mused “Does ‘the’ artist exist? The cult of the artist’s bohemianism, the myth of his genius allied to his abnormalcy and extremism, the statistics, often so misleadingly publicized, of his strivings, his life and his death, all have enormous currency.”12 This stereotype is satirized in exploitation films where people-as-art signal the opaque meaning, and alleged absurdity, of contemporary art. Approached from the perspective of an audience who neither understands nor appreciates non-figurative work, these artists are ludicrous, not aspirational. A Bucket of Blood (1959) is a comical splatter film that sends up beatnik culture and, more broadly, the art world. Walter (Dick Miller), a busboy at a café, reveres its pretentious clientele. After accidentally killing his landlady’s cat, he covers it in clay to hide the evidence. Displayed at the café, Dead Cat is praised for its morbid realism. Walter’s next subject presents itself after he panics and kills a policeman with a frying pan to the head. Accepted into the creative community, Walter justifies progressing to deliberate murder with Brock’s tribute: “[L]et them become clay in his hands that he may mold them.” But creation here is accidental. This feeds into the still-persistent idea that abstract or conceptual art is not “real” art. Not only are Walter’s highly regarded technical skills non-existent, but he is so inept that the corpses are quickly noticed. An angry mob discovers his body hastily smeared with clay: “I suppose he would’ve called it Hanging Man. His greatest work” intones Brock in the closing line. This self-portrait is an irreversible marker of Walter’s artistic identity through which he posthumously achieves the status he so desperately sought. His fraudulence is positioned as an extension of the speciousness of the art world, where artists are expected to perform their creativity so as to appeal to collectors, critics and the public. 12 Tyler, “The Artist,” 30.

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Another splatter film with a murderous artist is Color Me Blood Red (1965), the third title in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s “Blood Trilogy,” following Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964). Opening at Farnsworth Galleries, a man approaches a canvas reverently, touching its edges gently before slowly carrying it off-screen. Keeping the image concealed, he places it face down outside and sets it alight. The artist, Adam Sorg, is a mediocre abstract painter criticized for a lackluster palette. When his girlfriend, Gigi, accidentally smears blood onto a discarded canvas, he discovers an unexpectedly vibrant pigment. Initially a willing muse, she lets Adam nick her finger to apply directly onto the canvas, pulling away when he becomes too rapacious. He tries using his own blood but almost passes out. So, he murders Gigi. His approach immediately loosens, painting urgently with his hands and even wiping Gigi’s face across the canvas. Exaggeratedly gruesome effects draw directly from Grand Guignol. Again, viewers are transfixed by the art, unaware of its grisly origin. But Adam refuses to sell it, rejecting the expectation that art is simply merchandise. Desperate to keep working, he kills local teens to procure more blood, until one shoots him. Returning to the opening scene, Farnsworth deems the burning painting Adam’s funeral pyre. Blood seeps out, the artist destroyed like his victims. In the deliriously fragmented Blood Bath (1966), an artist-vampire murders women, paints them and – inexplicably – covers their bodies in wax. Its complicated production history includes re-writes, re-shoots, and edits released under at least five titles. Corman appointed Jack Hill to salvage footage from the un-released Operation: Titian, resulting in Portrait in Terror, about a sculptor possessed by his ancestor who covers women in wax. Unhappy, Corman hired Stephanie Rothman, who reimagined the protagonist as a painter-vampire in Blood Bath. Antonio Sordi (William Campbell) is an in-demand painter of “Dead Red Nudes,” popular works derided by the insufferably pretentious beatniks at the café-gallery who consider themselves the new avant-garde. Denigrating formal art, they produce work like an eye-topped metronome – echoing Man Ray’s Object to Be Destroyed (1923) – shoot paint from a gun and admire the lifelike ooze of ketchup Sordi pours on Bruno’s painting. Sordi’s practice, however, seems conventional. As Daisy poses, he prepares an easel and palette, explaining: “I never plan a picture, it must be able to grow according to its own natural law.” He swings a cleaver and blood pools around her, creating a ghastly tableau. Antonio is possessed by his ancestor, Erno, who, in the fifteenth-century, was charged with stealing the soul of his mistress Melitza and embedding it into his art, a story echoing Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). So great was his talent that

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Erno was deemed in league with the devil and burned at the stake, along with his art. He returned as a vampire, feasting on women’s blood before documenting their final moments. Personality slippages are encapsulated by a Surrealist-inspired scene of Erno/Sordi in the desert surrounded by objects from the studio: an easel; chair; candelabra; flail; crucifix; and draped bodies. These victims eventually come alive to kill him, a fantastical conclusion to a bizarre film.

Possessed by Art Obsessive, gifted, and deluged by inspiration, artists can become possessed by art-making, a process so immersive that art and life become interchangeable. This is central to The House with Laughing Windows (1976), where Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) travels to a small village to restore a modern church fresco by the mysterious Legnani, which the mayor hopes will become a tourist attraction. Opening in sepia, close-ups of a man in pain are accompanied by a delirious stream-of-consciousness voice-over about colors running hot in his veins like blood, of purging and purity. This equation of blood and paint is later reinforced in a flashback to Legnani using his arm like a palette. The fresco at the center of this film depicts St. Sebastian, a thirdcentury Christian tied to a tree and shot with arrows. Legnani, however, reimagines Sebastian pierced by knives. Even stranger, Stefano uncovers two women stabbing him; recalling the opening sequence, these are obviously Legnani’s sisters. Obsessed with authenticity, Legnani documented real suffering. Known as the “painter of agonies,” he visited people on their death beds to capture their final moments. This escalated to watching his sisters enact torture. “For him, painting death is life,” one tells Stefano. Legnani’s fanatical striving for realistic expressions of suffering in sacred art evokes an apocryphal legend about Giotto painting the crucifixion, where he bound a man to a cross and stabbed him. Such persuasive images – and stories – forge strong connections between art and viewer. This is important in images of saints, who believers turn to as intercessors, a link between humanity and the divine. As a martyr, Sebastian’s suffering, the ultimate demonstration of piety, brought him closer to God. His torture also has clear echoes of the crucifixion, aligning him with Christ. In Legnani’s fresco, Sebastian’s pain mirrors the artist’s emotional anguish. Driven mad by syphilis, incest and completing the fresco, Legnani eventually set himself on fire – a final symbolic act of purification. However, Stefano discovers the sisters continued their abhorrent practices, a dreadful secret the village conceals.

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Witnessing violence also inspires the internationally-acclaimed Danish artist Lars (Thure Lindhardt) in Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal (2012). After accepting a teaching position in a remote Canadian town, Lars agrees to temporarily mind Eddie (Dylan Smith), unaware the mute student’s childhood trauma manifests as sleep-eating living creatures. Eddie’s cannibalism signifies Lars’s hunger and the lengths he will go to for art. Having not produced anything for years, Lars’s dormant creativity is reignited by encountering viscera on fresh snow. After trying-and-failing to kill an injured deer humanely, Lars dreams of the carnage juxtaposed with his blank canvas. But discovering Eddie eating a rabbit prompts frenzied work, paint streaking his skin like blood. Lars mirrors Eddie’s somnambulism, a trance-like state compelled by violence. When Eddie progresses to human prey, Lars conceals and then stimulates these nocturnal activities, a willing observer like Legnani. A montage splices Lars witnessing a gory massacre of townspeople with furious painting. After killing the sheriff, Lars decides he must sacrifice someone he loves: Lesley. Eddie, however, intervenes. Dying in Lesley’s arms, Lars intuits how to complete the work; with a few strokes he is satisfied, she extols its perfection, and he dies. The painting is never shown. The final scene reveals that Ronny, his agent, and Harry, the Dean, coordinated the situation, driven by their respective desires to incite Lars’s work and promote the school. As a public figure, Lars is a construct they can exploit. Unlike Legnani, whose history is concealed by complicit townspeople, Lars’s actions are amplified and he is framed for all the murders. His oeuvre of violent images is positioned as a precursor to the carnage; simulation becomes real and art is imbued with biography. In Bliss (Joe Begos, 2019), Dezzy (Dora Madison) navigates creative block through transforming into a vampire. A rare example of a woman in this subgenre, Dezzy conveys traits of the typically male artist: egocentric, obsessive and fueled by vices and ambition. Having not finished anything for her upcoming exhibition over three months of sobriety, she turns to Diablo for inspiration. While drug use has long been associated with creative practice, Diablo’s stimulus is extreme. Over a debauched night of drugs, alcohol, and sex, she is infected with vampirism. The next morning, her tentative dabs are replaced by swift and confident actions she retains no memory of performing: “Something came over me then it all just started pouring out of me…it’s like I was possessed.” Images of pain and suffering emerge from a fiery hellscape on the canvas. Bloodlust overwhelms Dezzy’s life; even her shower appears to flow with blood. Her ravaging informs her practice, inspiring frenetic and captivating work. Blood and paint become interchangeable. Bliss documents Dezzy at work from the opening scene

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through to the hypnotic conclusion. Abandoning herself to ekstasis, she dances and paints wildly, coated in paint and blood. She envisions her victims crawling towards her in the blood-drenched studio. A monumental self-portrait emerges, a dark deity upon whom a mountain of bodies climb, worshippers or maybe sacrifices. This conveys her ambition and expectation that her work will be celebrated but also suggests that the violence she enacts is not only towards others but, ultimately, herself. Dezzy invests herself in the work to the point of self-destruction. Finishing her masterpiece as dawn breaks, she explodes. Like in Poe and Wilde’s stories, the painting remains, a record of her genius. Creativity is a decisively supernatural force in The Devil’s Candy (2017), afflicting the painter Jesse (Ethan Embry) when he moves to a rural property in Texas with his wife Astrid and daughter Zooey. Beset by the demonic voices that continue to drive its former inhabitant, Ray, to do unspeakable things, Jesse produces unexpectedly dark work. Close-ups demonstrate his process: paint is sprayed, squeezed from tubes, coats brushes, and applied to canvas with confidence and vigor. A series of reverse-shots of Jesse and a blank canvas implies a reciprocal relationship, but what emerges is a hellscape of screaming children among flames he has no memory of making, much like Dezzy. When woken by a dream of Zooey screaming, bathed in red, he hastens to destroy the painting. Scalpel poised, the voices intensify and he backs away and drops it, hands raised in submission. Even when Zooey appears on the canvas, he cannot stop: “It’s like these children are inside of me. Begging, screaming to be let out.” The way Jesse loses himself in his work, painting in a trance, aligns with the idea of creativity as something instinctive, even arcane. Jesse is “taken over” by inspiration: “It flowed through me.” Here, possession is literal; Jesse is a conduit for darkness, his work a product of human sacrifice, echoing Poe and Wilde’s stories. Like Legnani and Lars, Jesse documents real torture, though not witnessed in person. Instead, Ray’s actions feed directly into Jesse’s work, captured in a violent montage of swiftly edited images of paint and blood, palette knife and handsaw. Yet, if Jesse is a vessel, it is not solely for evil. Artists have long been associated with divinity, likened to God through the power of creation, their talent a God-given gift or a conduit for divine inspiration.13 Jesse’s prescient visions of Zooey allude to the idea of an artist as seer. He channels the pain of the children he paints until he realizes where they are buried, ensuring their souls can be saved. Religious symbolism abounds in Devil’s Candy. A crucifix flips upside down, its imprint on the wall; a door with a 13 Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, 48–60.

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red stained-glass cross; Ray’s motel-room television blasts choral music and a sermon warning of the devil: “We are his demons on earth, we satiate his hunger [. . .] he will slither into your soul.” As an artist with a family – the only one in this study – Jesse has responsibilities ensuring he cannot dedicate himself fully to his practice. But ambition opens him up to temptation. Jesse is offered a life-changing opportunity to sign with Belial, a Hebrew word for wickedness and also a demonic name. The gallery owner’s toast “to sacrifice” gestures to a Faustian pact. Jesse, however, rejects the dark path to greatness, choosing his family. He destroys the painting, excising the voices, but experiences its inferno first-hand when entering his burning house to save Zooey. His willingness to sacrifice not only his career but his life leads to his salvation.

Inspiration, Commerce, Immortality Traversing these films is the representation of art-making driven by realism, an intimate engagement with death, and bodies becoming art. Human and non-human material is intentionally confused – wax for skin, paint for blood. Emphasizing corporeality demonstrates how artists are bound to their art; it is a part of them. This is typified by its destruction, most often by fire. The dangerously close relationship between creator and creation emerges when these artists are driven mad by art-making. Dezzy, Vince, Walter, and Sordi imagine their victims pursing them, haunted by guilt. It is not creativity that drives Ivan and Henry mad, but rather the inability to create. Overcoming creative block, Dezzy and Lars paint in a “mixture of fury and madness” akin to intoxication.14 Their feverish need to create is an addiction. Lars identifies with Lesley’s speculation that chasing this rush is what motivates her; he later confesses: “it’s an addiction and I have to up my dose.” For Dezzy, the thirst for drugs and blood become interchangeable. Legnani, Lars, Dezzy, and Jesse are conduits for inspiration: the art pours out of them, unbidden but accepted. They give themselves over to art. Working as if in a trance reflects not dislocation but rather deep engagement. The inextricable connection between art and commerce emerges throughout these films, signaling the financial pressures placed on artists and their work. Audiences demand horrific art. Ivan and Henry are initially driven by their craft, refusing to compromise their vision to lure crowds. By the eighteenth century, waxworks were considered popular entertainment rather 14 Ibid., 49.

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than high art. Though exceptionally skilled, by treating their sculptures as high art these men fail to capture interest from the art world or the general public. Worth disparages the “artistic nonsense” and Matthew the “historic peep-show.” Seeing the museums in purely financial terms, they ruthlessly destroy them to recover their investments. The myth of the artist as a lone genius solely concerned with art – exemplified in Ivan’s indifference to unpaid rent – is clearly an impossible aspiration. Yet, “commercial” is wielded as an insult; in Color, a critic calls Adam “a commercial success but an artistic imposter” and in Blood Bath, the beatniks deride Sordi’s soughtafter “Dead Red Nudes.” This idea persists, in part, as it is what audiences demand. Though the artists produce work to be consumed by viewers and also buyers, the erasure of this mutual-reliance helps perpetuate this myth. Agents and galleries aid this separation, acting as intermediaries. Shifting the focus from making to selling, they pressure artists to appeal to the capricious market. When Adam refuses to sell his work, it only heightens demand. A collector aggressively bidding on Walter’s Dead Cat raises his offer from $100 to $500 in one conversation, then $1500 at its exhibition; a critic remarks it will be worth $5000 after his review. Seeing no return on investment, Dezzy’s agent drops her, though reconsiders after learning of her progress. Ronny exemplifies the predatory nature of agents, setting-up Lars then fashioning a ghastly narrative to cement his notoriety, ensuring his now-finite oeuvre will increase in demand and consequently value. Lars is a sacrifice, fed to the ravenous market. Like the original wax collections, he is assessed and deemed expendable. Alternately, Belial sees Jesse as an investment – his skills will serve evil. Striving for greatness, these artists not only seek fame or fortune but to establish their place in history, immortalized through their art. In this exigent pursuit, they sacrifice not only others but, ultimately, themselves. Only Boris – saved by science and Jesse –– by divine intervention – survive. The wax artists insist that their victims will be immortalized, captured forever in a moment of time, an apt comparison to cinema. Plunged into wax, Ivan and Henry ultimately become their own final works, as does Walter. The artist-scientists who create living statues disrupt the junction between life and death, truly “playing god.” Legnani is kept “alive” by his sisters, who continue their abuse even after his death. Dezzy discovers, and squanders, actual immortality. Referring to their work as “children,” Ivan, Henry, Vince, and Sordi position art as their legacies, ensuring their names persist. For Antonio/Erno Sordi, ancestral and artistic heritage are inseparable. When Jesse’s work endangers Zooey, he prioritizes her; his child is his most important creation.

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The subject of artists who take realism to the extreme, inspired by real bodies, violence and death, expands into a diverse catalog. Corman remade A Bucket of Blood (1995) with a recognizable cast led by Anthony Michael Hall. Warner Bros’s second remake, House of Wax (Collet-Serra, 2005), is a slasher more closely aligned with Tourist Trap (Schmoeller, 1979) than its namesake. Artists are inspired by murder in Horrors of the Black Museum (Crabtree, 1959), House of 1000 Corpses (Zombie, 2003), and M.F.A (Leite, 2017). Bodies are repurposed as objects in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) and Maniac (Lustig,1980). A surgeon transfers his obsession with a woman onto her wax figure in Mad Love (Freund, 1935) and transforms her into a living Venus in Boxing Helena (Lynch, 1993). The frequency with which this subject is treated in cinema reflects the continued fascination with artists and art-making. Negotiating the evolution of long-held stereotypes, these films promise insights into the nature of inspiration, talent, and the creative process. Like Pygmalion in reverse, artists loosen the dualities that order their worlds, turning beings into objects, real into unreal. Macabre sacrifices fuse life and art: paint and blood are indistinguishable; skin becomes wax becomes skin. Pursuing greatness, artists live – and die – for their work, creating a legacy to cement their place in history.

Bibliography Berenstein, Rhona. “‘It Will Thrill You, It Will Terrify You, It Might Even Horrify You’: Gender, Reception, and Classic Horror Cinema.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015. 145–170. Felleman, Susan. Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Jacobs, Steven. Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Kornmeier, Uta. “Almost Alive: The Spectacle of Verisimilitude in Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks.” Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2008. 67–81. Kris, Ernst and Kurz, Otto. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist. London: Yale University Press, 1979. Landes, Joan. “Wax Fibers, Wax Bodies, and Moving Figures: Artifice and Nature in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy.” Ephemeral Bodies, 41–65.

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Peucker, Brigitte. Incorporating Images. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pollock, Griselda. “Artist Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History.” Screen 21, no.3 (1980): 57–96. Senn, Bryan. Golden Horrors: An Illustrated Critical Filmography of Terror Cinema, 1931–1939. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996. Tyler, Parker. “The Artist Portrayed and Betrayed.” ARTnews 52, no.10 (1954): 30–33; 55–56. Walker, John. Art and Artists on Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

About the Author Dr Kate Robertson is an Australian-born, New York-based writer and academic affiliate of the University of Sydney. She has written about art, culture, and film for a range of publications and authored two books: Identity, Community, and Australian Artists, 1890–1914 (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Trouble Every Day (Liverpool University Press, 2021).

13. Picturing Picasso: Revisiting Paul Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso (1950) Steven Jacobs and Joséphine Vandekerckhove

Abstract A documentary by art critic Paul Haesaerts, Visite à Picasso (1950), shows Pablo Picasso painting on a glass pane placed in between the artist and the camera. Apart from reconstructing the film’s production context, this chapter investigates in what way this lyrical documentary responds to Haesaerts’s notion of cinéma critique, a form of lens-based art criticism. In addition, it analyzes how Haesaerts combines his attention for the temporal development of Picasso’s linear drawings with an interest in post-cubist spatiality. Lastly, this chapter demonstrates how Haesaerts presents Picasso as the ultimate embodiment of the image of the artist as a genius, alluding to both ancient myths of artistic creation and the modern celebrity cult of mass media. Keywords: Art Documentary, Pablo Picasso, Paul Haesaerts, Film and the Visual Arts, Artistic Creation

Picasso and Film Shortly after the World War II, Pablo Picasso became a veritable celebrity, his artworks elaborately reproduced and his personality widely discussed in both art journals and the popular press. Leading photographers such as Brassai, Dora Maar, Paul Strand, Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, Arnold Newman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gjon Mili, and Jacques Henri Lartigue portrayed Picasso, who appeared on the covers of Time, Life, Look, L’Express, and other magazines and photo journals.1 This abundant photographic imagery of Picasso and his work went hand in hand with cinematic explorations 1 Richardson, Picasso & The Camera.

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch13

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of the life and works of the artist.2 In the Cold War era, Picasso was surrounded by film-makers, actors, and film producers. In 1949, he appeared in La Vie commence demain (Nicole Védrès, 1949) and in 1950 he created his f irst f ilm in collaboration with Frédéric Rossif and Robert Picault.3 The late 1940s and early 1950s also marked the heyday of the experimental and lyrical art documentary. 4 Film-makers like Alain Resnais, Luciano Emmer, Glauco Pellegrini, and Robert Flaherty presented the art documentary as a highly poetic genre that enabled them to combine cinematic experiments with artistic profundity. Strikingly, each of these directors created a landmark f ilm on Picasso. Glauco Pellegrini’s L’Esperienza del cubismo (1949) explores Picasso’s pioneering role in the evolution of cubism, created with the assistance of painter Renato Guttuso. Other mid-century films by Robert J. Flaherty, Helge Ernst, and Alain Resnais focus on Picasso’s dramatic portrayal of the atrocities in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.5 Additionally, films such as Robert Mariaud and André Verdet’s Terres et flammes (1951) and Luciano Emmer’s Picasso (1953) present unique footage of the artist at work, creating ceramic molds or large charcoal drawings. This chapter focuses on the extraordinary 1950 documentary Visite à Picasso (Visit to Picasso) by Belgian art historian and film-maker Paul Haesaerts (1901–1974). Largely shot in Picasso’s studio in Vallauris in the South of France, Haesaerts creates a poetic portrait of the artist, repeatedly showing him painting on a glass pane placed in front of the camera – a technique that was famously adopted in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 Le Mystère Picasso. Although Visite à Picasso was screened and praised internationally, Haesaerts’s film remains largely understudied. This chapter reconstructs the 2 Marie-Laure Bernadac and Gisèle Breteau-Skira collected about 200 films, made between 1930 and 1990, which deal with the famous modern artist. This extensive list includes cinematic explorations of his paintings, didactic documentaries comparing Picasso with Francisco Goya and other major Spanish painters, and feature-length biopics focusing on the artist’s personality. See Bernadac, Picasso à l’écran, 77–108. See also Cuenca, Picasso en el cine Tambien, and Hagebölling, Pablo Picasso in Documentary Films. 3 Bernadac, Picasso à l’écran, 15–17. 4 See Robert, Le Film sur l’art; Saurisse, “Creative Process and Magic”; and Jacobs, Latsis and Cleppe, Art in the Cinema. 5 The main examples are Guernica (Robert J. Flaherty, 1949), Guernica. En Billedfantasi inspiret af Picassos Billede (Helge Ernst, 1949), and Guernica (Robert Hessens en Alain Resnais, 1950). Later, also Fernando Arrabal (1975), Emir Kusturica (1978), Iñaki Elizalde (1994), Emilio R. Barrachina (2011), Guillermo García Peydró (2012), and Carlos Saura (2015) dedicated films to the 1937 painting. See Breteau-Skira, Bonet, and Gutiérrez García, Guernica. Un tableau au cinéma.

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Figure 1. Hervé Callemien, Photograph of Paul Haesaerts and Pablo Picasso in Antibes, 1949 © RMFAB, ACAB, Brussels, ACAB 516.

film’s production context, and investigates in what way this documentary speaks to Haesaerts’s notion of cinéma critique, a form of lens-based art criticism. Moreover, it discusses how Haesaerts attempted to reconcile the spatial art of painting with the temporal medium of film. Lastly, it demonstrates how Haesaerts combines the myth of artistic creation with a fascination for Picasso’s bodily presence.

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Haesaerts and Picasso After his studies in painting, architecture, law, and philosophy, Paul Haesaerts became a jack-of-all-trades, working as a painter, illustrator, architect, and, first and foremost, as an art critic. Together with his brother Luc Haesaerts, he founded the journal Les Beaux-Arts in 1930, publishing widely on modern art. Shortly after World War II, Haesaerts also became a film-maker, particularly acquiring fame and success with some landmark art documentaries.6 Made in collaboration with film-maker Henri Storck, Rubens (1948) evokes the works of the Baroque painter by means of a highly mobile camera, rapidly rotating images, and animated lines and circles that accentuate his dynamic compositions.7 An advocate of modern and contemporary art, Haesaerts also dealt with Picasso in several books, lectures, and exhibitions. He met the famous Franco-Spanish painter in 1930s Paris, after which he published Picasso et le goût du paroxysme (1938).8 In addition, he regularly contributed to large exhibitions dedicated to Picasso’s oeuvre at various Belgian venues such as the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts (in 1938, 1956, and 1958) and the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts (in 1964). Haesaerts also gave lectures on Picasso at museums and universities and in 1946, he organized the conference Picasso et notre temps at the Sorbonne in Paris.9 Following the premiere of Rubens at the 1948 Venice Biennial (where it won the Golden Medal in the category of films on visual arts), the Belgian government commissioned Haesaerts to create an educational film on French art. Haesaerts’s preparatory notes focus on three key motifs of modern art – the so-called sensual or carnal (Renoir), the cerebral (Seurat), and the instinctual or passionate (Picasso). This film, entitled De Renoir à Picasso. Trois aspects de la peinture contemporaine (From Renoir to Picasso: Three Aspects of Contemporary Painting), was produced by Haesaerts’s own production company Art et Cinéma, which he had founded in 1949 together with his brother-in-law Jean Van Raemdonck, and was financially supported by a 6 See Thirifays, “De gebroeders Haesaerts en de cinema”; and Maes, “Paul Haesaerts et le film sur l’art.” 7 On Storck and Haesaerts’s Rubens, see Jacobs and Vandekerckhove, “Art History with a Camera.” 8 Haesaerts, Picasso et le goût du paroxysme. 9 The reconstruction of Visite à Picasso’s production and reception is based on the 1949–1951 correspondence between Paul Haesaerts, Jean Van Raemdonck, and Pablo Picasso as well as on production notes in the Haesaerts Archives in the Archives of Contemporary Art of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (folders 515–524).

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group of prominent Belgian art collectors. Similar to Rubens, Haesaerts used animation techniques, split screen compositions, diagrams, and multiple exposures to analyze and compare the formal structure of the paintings by Renoir, Seurat, and Picasso. Inspired by Sasha Guitry’s landmark film Ceux de chez nous (Those of Our Land, 1915), Haesaerts also planned to include shots of artists at work. In addition to appropriating Guitry’s footage of Renoir, Haesaerts visited Picasso in his Vallauris studio in May 1949, resulting in unique footage of Picasso at work. These images then motivated Haesaerts to create a new short film entirely dedicated to Picasso. Eventually, Haesaerts’s backers agreed to finance Visite à Picasso, its production coinciding with De Renoir à Picasso. Both films premiered at the Brussels Théâtre Marivaux in May 1950. In the following months, the two Haesaerts films were screened internationally and widely discussed in French, Belgian, Italian, and British newspapers and art journals.10 In addition, at the Venice Film Festival Visite à Picasso won the prize for best international documentary while De Renoir à Picasso got the prize for best documentary feature on paintings. De Renoir à Picasso was also awarded as the best medium-length film at the Rio de Janeiro film festival whereas, in 1951, Visite à Picasso was nominated for best documentary feature at the BAFTA awards. A few years later, however, Visite à Picasso was eclipsed by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s far more spectacular feature-length Le Mystère Picasso (1956), which also shows Picasso at work using a comparable technique. As a result, Haesaerts’ 1950 film fell into oblivion.

A Visit to Picasso and Haesaerts’s Concept of Cinéma Critique The twenty-minute film Visite à Picasso opens with a montage sequence of posters of exhibitions and conferences on Picasso followed by a tracking shot showing a desk covered with books on Picasso. With these shots, made by French cinematographer Jean Lehérissey, Haesaerts positions himself explicitly in the context of the wealth of art critical interpretations of the leading modern artist. Furthermore, linking his filmic exploration of Picasso’s oeuvre to print media and the illustrated art book, Haesaerts demonstrates that art has entered Walter Benjamin’s “age of mechanical reproduction” or André Malraux’s contemporaneous Musée imaginaire, consisting of an almost endless collection of photographic reproductions 10 The Haesaerts Archives contain reviews published in Film Forum, Le Soir, Die Neue Zeitung, and La Stampa, amongst many others.

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Figure 2. Paul Haesaerts, Visite à Picasso, 1950, digital film frames.

of artworks.11 While we see hands piling up additional books and leafing through various publications, the voice-over commentary (spoken by French actor Gérard Philippe) mentions that, in the last three decades, more books were published on Picasso than on Michelangelo and Rafael in three centuries. Providing an overview of Picasso’s oeuvre from 1895 up until the 1940s. The next sequence presents itself as a brief conventional art historical slide lecture with the help of a succession of close-ups of various works. Establishing shots of the surroundings of Picasso’s studio in the Mediterranean village of Vallauris are followed by a sequence that introduces the artist. We see Picasso walking in front of his studio where he handles various canvasses, lining them up. In so doing, Haesaerts emphasizes the paintings as material objects in contrast to the close-ups of the paintings in the previous sequence, which are fragmented and completely disconnected from reality. Furthermore, Haesaerts literally sets the static paintings in motion, bringing them to life as it were. This is also the case with various sculptures, which are placed on rotating pedestals set in motion by the artist himself, making 11 Malraux, Psychologie de l’art and Les Voix du silence. Benjamin, “The Work of Art.”

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possible a more “haptic” perception of the statues. Other works are presented to the spectator in shots showing Picasso holding sculptures in his hands or in front of him, their shadow clearly visible on the wall in the background. This sequence also makes clear that the film’s subject is not only Picasso’s works but the artist himself, who is often shown absorbed in his art and labor. This is also the case in the next sequence, which is undoubtedly the most spectacular one, its peculiarity emphasized by the change of rhythm in André Souris’s organ score.12 It shows Picasso painting on a transparent plate of plexiglass placed between the artist and the camera – a device Haesaerts would later use in Quatre peintres belges au travail (1952), showing Edgar Tytgat, Albert Dasnoy, Jean Brusselmans, and Paul Delvaux at work. Right in front of our eyes, we see the creation and development of images, displaying familiar motifs of Picasso’s oeuvre: birds; a bull; a vase with flowers; and female nudes. The following sequence brings us to the Grimaldi castle in Antibes, which is transformed into a museum containing many works by Picasso. It also shows us a Picasso statue installed in a former chapel as well as Picasso painting on plexiglass a life-size bucolic scene with nudes and a goat. Throughout the various sequences, Haesaerts intercuts his footage with shots of earlier Picasso paintings, drawings, or prints, situating the works made in/for the film both thematically and formally in Picasso’s entire oeuvre. In doing so, Haesaerts, as the voice-over commentary states, shows Picasso’s “metamorphosis of forms, their evolution to a kind of simplification, to the essentials.” In general, Haesaerts uses lap dissolves between the various artworks, with the exception of the Guernica at the end of the film, which is represented with the help of jerky camera movements and fast editing. These sequences are a perfect example of Haesaerts’s specific take on the format of the art documentary. It is striking that only the opening sequence with books and posters and the succeeding one with the brief overview of Picasso’s oeuvre are accompanied by voice-over commentary (written by Haesaerts himself). In the other sequences, combining footage of the artist at work with static images of paintings, Haesaerts eschews any didacticism, letting the images speak for themselves. In so doing, Visite à Picasso is a perfect example of Haesaerts’s concept of cinéma critique, which he developed in the 1940s.13 Considering both 12 Belgian composer André Souris (1899–1970) was closely connected to the Belgian Surrealist movement. He also wrote the score for other seminal art documentaries, such as Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (Henri Storck, 1946) and Haesaerts’s De Renoir à Picasso. Archival materials (such as a May 1950 letter to Haesaerts) indicate that he was also involved in the editing of Visite à Picasso. See Van Deuren, “Les œuvres d’André Souris,” 15–20. 13 See Paul Haesaerts, “La Critique par le cinema,” (Lecture at the third congress of the Association International des Critiques d’Art (AICA), 1951), and Paul Haesaerts, “Art Criticism and

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the camera and its mechanically reproduced images as indispensable instruments for the modern art historian, Haesaerts argued for a new kind of photographic and cinematic of art criticism capable of constructing a discourse based on juxtapositions, sequences, and close-ups: a “critique par la photographie” or a form of criticism through or in photography.14 Likewise, Haesaerts presented the medium of film as a “new instrument of investigation and thinking,” that enables us to comprehend artworks in an original way. In a 1951 lecture, he stated that “the beauty of a phrase [. . .] may easily distract us from the quality of the artwork, whereas a harmonious movement of the camera or successful lighting can never distance our judgment from the real value of the filmed object.”15 In addition, he advocated for the replacement of words with images to let discourse become “an eloquent succession of images.”16 Haesaerts distinguished three types of cinéma critique corresponding to the possibilities of textual criticism: the anecdote; technical analysis; and lyrical representation, all of which are combined in Visite à Picasso. The film shows anecdotal information of Picasso in his everyday surroundings, going to his studio in Vallauris or visiting Grimaldi castle in Antibes. It also provides a technical analysis of his paintings by demonstrating the act of their creation. In addition, it is a lyrical expression of a highly personal message through a work of art or a style, which was, according to Haesaerts, the most important component of a film on art.17 Modern techniques of film-making could not only capture Picasso’s “gesture, tempo, hesitation and even [his] thought process,” they also could “expand the possibilities of critical expression.”18

The Myth of Picasso In the 1930s and the early 1940s, Picasso was at the height of his artistic career. Following the success of Guernica (1937) and his large exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art (1939) his artworks were internationally Art History by the Kinema: The Work of Rubens on the Screen” (Press Release, 1948), Haesaerts Archives, Brussels. See also Haesaerts, “Arts plastiques,” 25–31; and Haesaerts, “Art plastique et cinéma.” All translations into English are by the authors. 14 Haesaerts, “Une Critique par la photographie,” 11–27. 15 Idem, “La Critique par le cinéma.” 16 Idem, “Art Criticism and Art History.” 17 Ibid. 18 Idem, “Picasso devant la caméra,” 45.

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praised. Although he would never again attain the artistic peak of these triumph years, his popularity and fame continued to rise after World War II. When Visite à Picasso was released, Picasso had become the ultimate embodiment of the modern artist. During the Cold War era, his private life and his relationship with Françoise Gilot, his membership to the Communist Party, his anti-bourgeois attitude, and his permanent establishment on the French Riviera were also widely covered by the mass media. According to John Berger, “the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade.”19 In addition, both the popular press and art criticism repeatedly portrayed Picasso as an artist genius, relating him to ancient mythical and legendary artists. According to Rachel Esner and Sandra Kisters, the stereotypical presentation of Picasso as a child prodigy, a rebellious genius, a madman, a multi-millionaire, a misunderstood individual, or an inveterate womanizer are motifs with an ancient pedigree.20 The mystical aura surrounding Picasso was encouraged by the artist’s own fascination for a mythological past and for the theme of the painter and his model. Visite à Picasso also portrays Picasso as a genius artist; as Haesaerts’s camera shows the many publications on Picasso’s oeuvre, the voice-over commentary describes how “Picasso is one of those who rejuvenate with age,” and how “already at fourteen he practiced a naturalism close to that of a Courbet.” Haesaerts also praises Picasso’s ability to constantly reinvent himself, describing him as an “inexhaustible inventor,” doing “magical work.”21 The sequences showing the artist at work contribute to this process of mystification and the cult of the modern artist as genius. Like Le Mystère Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956), Picasso (Luciano Emmer, 1953), and other post-war films on Picasso, Haesaerts repeatedly shows the artist in the “holy site of artistic creation” in his Vallauris studio.22 According to Haesaerts, “nothing is more secret and needs more special attention than the act of creation.”23 Filming the artist in his studio, the art historian-cum-filmmaker attempts to capture “the authentic movements” of the artist’s thought processes in order to reveal “the hidden intention of the image.”24 In so doing,

19 Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso, 6. 20 Esner and Kisters, The Mediatization of the Artist, 10. 21 Haesaerts, “Picasso devant la caméra,” 45. 22 Sfakianaki, “Artists’ Confessions,” 68. For more on the artist studio in documentary film, see, for example Nead, “The Artist’s Studio”; Hayward, Picture This; and Walker, Art and Artists on Screen. 23 Haesaerts, “Picasso devant la caméra,” 44. 24 Ibid.

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Haesaerts attributes lifelike features to Picasso’s artworks, describing them as “obedient to the painter’s will” and “doubles of his complex personality.”25 As Visite à Picasso stages the physical act of painting, Picasso seems to be immersed in his creative process. According to Karen L. Kleinfelder, filmmakers often attempt to render the artists less visible in order to heighten the virtuosity of their artworks as if “creative genius seems to be measured by what degree the creator is effaced by his own creation.”26 Haesaerts described Picasso’s awareness of the “giant eye of the camera” as one of the main obstacles on set: “Picasso’s refusal to act as an actor, the impossibility of making him, at the desired moment, restart a gesture or rediscover an expression hardly facilitate the work of anyone who wants to present him on screen.”27 At certain moments, however, Picasso is also aware of the camera’s presence, looking straight into the lens. Visite à Picasso ends with a close-up of Picasso’s face followed by the artist putting his signature on a wall surface. Haesaerts repeatedly described how he and Picasso collaborated on the film’s narrative, referring to Picasso as “a painter-film-maker.”28 In addition, Picasso consciously helped to cultivate the myth of his persona as an artist-genius through film. Picasso’s commercial success was a token of his many collaborations with interviewers, photographers, and film-makers. In Visite à Picasso, as well as in the many other films that portray the art of the famous painter, Picasso plays on his media persona ironically, but purposely. Extremely conscious of all that was said or written about his work, he carefully preserved his portraits as one of the many facets of his work and personality. “Picasso was perfectly aware of the topography of his face and he knew exactly how to animate his character with a few simple touches,” Gjon Mili stated after photographing the artist at work.29 Throughout the twentieth century, photography and film have become the main modes of mediatization of visual artists. According to Heige Hagebölling, the universality of Picasso is unthinkable without the technical mediation of the cinematic medium.30 Also, in more recent f ilms and documentaries, Picasso served as the example par excellence of Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s concept of “the myth of the modern artist.”31 Biopics such 25 Ibid., 45. 26 Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, 40. 27 Haesaerts, “Picasso devant la caméra,” 44. 28 Ibid. 29 Mili, Picasso et la troisième dimension, 183. 30 Hagebölling, Pablo Picasso, 15. 31 Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic, 4.

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as The Adventures of Picasso (Tage Danielsson, 1978) and Surviving Picasso (James Ivory, 1996), and series like Genius: Picasso (Ken Biller, Kevin Hooks et al., 2018) remain rooted in the romantic notion that Frederick Antal in 1951 described as “the incalculable nature of genius in art.”32

Painting in Action Evoking ancient legends about artists in general, the “myth of Picasso” went hand in hand with a fascination for the mystery of the process of his artistic creation. A temporal medium, film adds to this mystery. Haesaerts decided not only to show Picasso’s works, evoking their creation by filming preparatory sketches and unfinished works, but also to represent the act of creation itself. Haesaerts clearly realized that the film medium could play perfectly on some of the essential characteristics of the art of Picasso, who stated that a “painting is not conceived and fixed in advance, it rather follows the mobility of thinking while it is made. Finished, it changes for the better.”33 In Picasso’s own words, his paintings develop in succeeding stages, the intermediate steps determining a series of decisions that could not be conceptualized initially in front of the empty canvas. In light of this, his works are perfect subjects for the medium of film that is capable of showing the entire process of creation. The notion of Picasso’s paintings as a constant process of metamorphosis was crucial for Haesaerts, who stated that through his film “the process and not the result of this process is preserved,” since “unfinished, a painting remains alive.”34 Commenting on Haesaerts’s film, John Berger stated that when Picasso “has finished a drawing, it is barely left on the screen for a couple of seconds. The whole film is about the process of creating works of art, but never about the final result.”35 According to André Bazin, who famously labeled Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso a “Bergsonian film,” time and duration became the instruments and even the subject of the film, which consisted for the most part of uninterrupted long takes that reproduced the duration of the painting process.36 As Clouzot’s film would do some years later, Haesaerts, too, shifts the emphasis 32 33 34 35 36

Antal, “Remarks on the Method of Art History,” 189. Pablo Picasso, qtd in Mili, Picasso et la troisième dimension, 9. Haesaerts, “Picasso devant la caméra,” 45. Berger, “The Myth of the Artist”, 21. Bazin, “Un Film bergsonien,” 193–202.

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from the simultaneous presence of all the elements of a finished work to the progressive timespan of the creative act. Focusing on the act of creation, Haesaerts and Clouzot’s films turn the static images of paintings into a narrative telling the “story” of their creation. Their “temporality” was even literal as the drawings were specially made for the film and they were immediately erased. Haesaerts admitted that the drawings made in the film are effective from a didactic point of view, but maybe less convincing aesthetically, due to the fact that Picasso was not working in normal conditions.37 Showing the stages of the development of the creation of the artwork instead of merely exploring f inished artworks, Haesaerts and Clouzot did not invent a new format. On the contrary, as showing a static artwork in the dynamic medium of film was sometimes considered a somewhat uninteresting or unchallenging task, many film-makers favored the motif of the creation of an artwork. Already in the 1910s, Sacha Guitry had portrayed several leading French artists at work in his aforementioned Ceux de chez nous. In the 1920s, Hans Cürlis made the landmark series Schaffende Hände (Creating Hands), which showed Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Pechstein, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, and others at work.38 Particularly after World War II, many art documentaries, in addition to the Picasso films by Haesaerts, Clouzot, and Emmer, continued this tradition: Aristide Maillol, sculpteur (Jean Lods, 1943); Henri Matisse (François Campaux, 1946); Pollock (Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg, 1951); Calligraphie japonaise (Pierre Alechinsky, 1956); Magritte, ou la leçon de choses (Luc de Heusch, 1960); The Reality of Karel Appel (Jan Vrijman, 1962), etc. In addition, in 1946–1947, Alain Resnais made a series of 16mm films on artists such as Henri Goetz, Hans Hartung, César Doméla, Lucien Coutaud, Christine Boumeester, Félix Labisse, and Max Ernst, while Haesaerts contributed to the subgenre as well with Quatre peintres belges au travail (1952) and Masques et visages de James Ensor (1952). These titles indicate that filming the artist at work became a highly popular practice in the 1940s and 1950s. This is not a coincidence, as this focus on the act of creation tallied perfectly with the practice of contemporaneous artistic currents such as Action Painting or lyrical abstraction, which celebrated an expressionist style of painting implying vigorous manual activity and powerful bodily movements. Referring to Action Painting, Harold Rosenberg famously noted in 1952 that “the canvas began to appear [. . .] 37 Bernadac, Picasso à l’écran, 13. 38 See Cürlis, “Das Problem,” 172–815; Thiele, Das Kunstwerk, 15–18; and Ziegler, Kunst und Architektur, 302–309.

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as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”39 Rosenberg concluded that “a painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life. [. . .] The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”40 Like many of the other aforementioned films, Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso does not only show the “event” of the artwork’s creation – it also makes clear that some form of “heightened temporality” is inscribed in Picasso’s works.41 The temporal development of Picasso’s works is even emphasized by the linearity of his drawings. Confirming conventional opinions that present Picasso as a master of the line (as opposed to Henri Matisse who is often hailed as a colorist), Haesaerts shows Picasso making drawings in white paint, which almost look like diagrams that make visible the movements of the hand of the artist. In so doing, Haesaerts’s take on Picasso evokes the pictorial practices of action painting (for which both the cubist and the 1930s Picasso were an important source of inspiration), emphatically presenting the brushstrokes as registrations of the artist’s movements. With its focus on the connection between the hand and the line, Haesaerts’s Picasso film is particularly powerful because it hints at an essential feature of Picasso’s art, and of many art currents of the twentieth century. Instead of presenting the hand as a mere servant of the artist-genius, giving form to a preconceived idea or disgeno, modern art saw the struggle against the materials or against earlier stages of the artwork as an essential element of its aesthetic power.

Body, Plexiglass, Post-Cubist Space With medium and long shots showing the artist from the waist up or his entire body, Haesaerts relates Picasso’s drawings not only to the artist’s hands but to his bodily presence in general. In so doing, Haesaerts evokes an intense physical subjectivity – a phenomenon that has often been associated with Picasso’s works. 42 Furthermore, in line with the aesthetics of 39 Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 581. 40 Ibid., 582. 41 Boehm, “The Form of the Formless,” 39. 42 Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso, 178–179.

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gestural abstraction, which combines physical and biographical aspects of the artist’s personality, Haesaerts literally shows the artworks in an organic relationship with the artist who made them. In contrast with the Clouzot film, which alternates over-the-shoulder shots of a bare-chested Picasso at work with shots from behind the “canvas” (in fact, a translucent screen) that fills the entire frame, Haesaerts visualized Picasso always frontally, immersing the artist in his paintings and thus emphasizing the physical dimension of the pictorial act. Evidently, this simultaneous presentation of the emerging drawings and the artist himself was made possible by the use of the sheet of plexiglass placed between the artist and the camera. Strikingly, the sequence showing Picasso at work situates the artist in three different spatial contexts, each accompanied by specific light conditions. First, a series of medium shots show the artist in his studio space, revealing the monochrome surface of the wall behind him. Subsequently, a long shot shows Picasso full-length, right under a remarkable ogive arc of a door opening. Finally, Picasso is shown in a darkened space while he draws a life-size bucolic scene with nudes and a goat. Throughout the sequence of Picasso at work, the space of the representation and the space of the artist seem to conflate in different degrees. In so doing, Haesaerts blended Picasso’s painted universe and the real world. Quoting Jean Cocteau, Haesaerts stated that “more than anywhere else, we have the impression here of seeing [. . .] of what is happening ‘behind the mirror’ emerging on its surface.”43 Haesaerts also refers to Picasso’s cubism, which attempted to reconcile three-dimensional space with the two-dimensional picture plane. With linear drawings on the invisible planar surface of the plexiglass, Picasso seems to create animals, human figures, and objects that seem to float in the three-dimensional of the studio. 44 Picasso’s linear drawings, quickly executed for Haesaerts’s camera, evoke the romantic notion of the artist-genius and age-old myths of inspiration and creation. Thanks to the f ilm medium, Picasso acquires an almost shamanistic power. Visite à Picasso contributes to what Philip Hayward 43 Haesaerts, “Picasso devant la caméra,” 45. 44 Some parts of the sequence evoke the so-called light drawings that photographer Gjon Mili created in 1949 for Life Magazine, which depict Picasso with an electric light torch in long exposures, resulting in linear drawings that only lasted a brief moment of time. These thirty drawings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1950. In Haesaerts’s archives, there is no indication that he was aware of the Mili photographs, but the resemblance with the sequence in his film, which was made in the same year, is striking. See Mili, Picasso et la troisième dimension.

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described as an “extreme fetishization of the actual moment of creation.”45 Although Haesaerts, to a certain extent, unveils the mysterious act of creation, showing Picasso in his everyday environment, Visite à Picasso unmistakably contributed to the processes of mystification and the cult of Picasso as a modern genius.

Bibliography Antal, Frederick. “Remarks on the Method of Art History” (1951). Essays in Classicism and Romanticism. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1966. 175–189. Bazin, André. “Un Film Bergsonien. Le Mystère Picasso.” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Cerf, 1997. 193–202. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Berger, John. “The Myth of the Artist.” Artist, Critic and Teacher, eds. Paddy Whannel and Alex Jacobs. London: Joint Council for Education through Art, 1958. 17–22. Berger, John. The Success and Failure of Picasso. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965. Bernadec, Marie-Laure and Gisèle Breteau-Skira. Picasso à l’écran. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992. Breteau-Skira, Gisèle, Juan Manuel Bonet, and Héctor Gutiérrez García. Guernica. Un Tableau au cinéma. Tolède: Antonio Pareja, 2017. Boehm, Gottfried. “The Form of the Formless: Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel.” Action Painting: Jackson Pollock, ed. Pepe Carmel. Ostfeldern: Hatje Cantz, 2008. Cuenca, Carlos Fernandez. Picasso en el cine tambien. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1971. Cürlis, Hans. “Das Problem der Wiedergabe von Kunstwerken durch den Film,” eds. Georg Rhode et al. Erwin Redslob zum 70. Geburtstag. Eine Festgabe. Berlin: Wasmuth, 1955. 172–185. Esner, Rachel and Sandra Kisters. The Mediatization of the Artist. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. Haesaerts, Luc and Paul Haesaerts. “Une Critique par la photographie.” Flandre: Essai sur l’art flamand depuis 1880. Paris: Lazzaro, 1931. 11–27. Haesaerts, Paul. “Arts plastiques et caméra,” Arts de France 23–24 (1948): 25–31. Haesaerts, Paul. “Art plastique et cinéma.” L’Amour de l’art 29, 37–39 (1949): 33–40. Haesaerts, Paul. “Picasso devant la caméra,” Les Beaux-Arts 297 (1951): 44–45. 45 Hayward, Picture This, 7.

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Haesaerts, Paul. Picasso et le goût du paroxysme. Antwerp: Het Kompas, 1938. Hagebölling, Heide. Pablo Picasso in Documentary Films: A Monographic Investigation of the Portrayal of Pablo Picasso and His Creative Work in Documentary Films 1945–1975. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988. Hayward, Philip, ed. Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists. London: John Libby, 1988. Jacobs, Steven, Birgit Cleppe, and Dimitrios Latsis, eds. Art in the Cinema: The Mid-Century Art Documentary. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Jacobs, Steven and Joséphine Vandekerckhove. “Art History with a Camera: Rubens (1948) and Paul Haesaerts’ Concept of cinéma critique.” Art in the Cinema: The Mid-Century Art Documentary, 89–104. Kleinfelder, Karen L. The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. 195–201. Kris, Ernst and Otto Kurz. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Lemaître, Henri. Beaux-arts et cinéma. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1956. Maes, Céline. “Paul Haesaerts et le film sur l’art. Pour un cinémacritique.” Le Film sur l’art. Entre histoire de l’art et documentaire de creation, eds. Valentine Robert, Laurent Le Forestier and François Albera. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015. 153–164. Malraux, André. Psychologie de l’art. Genève: Skira, 1947. Malraux, André. Les Voix du silence. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. Mili, Gjon. Picasso et la troisième dimension. Paris: Triton, 1970. Nead, Lynda. “The Artist’s Studio: The Affair of Art and Film.” Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? ed. Angela Dalle Vacche. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 23–38. Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico. “Film d’arte, film sull’arte, critofilm d’arte” (1950), reprinted in Arti della visione. Cinema I. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1975. Richardson, John. Picasso & The Camera. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2015. Robert, Valentine, Laurent Le Forestier, and François Albera, ed. Le Film sur l’art. Entre histoire de l’art et documentaire de création. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015. Rosenberg, Harold. “The American Action Painters” (1952). Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. 581–584. Saurisse, Pierre. “Creative Process and Magic: Artists on Screen in the 1940s.” The Mediatization of the Artist, ed. Rachel Esner and Sandra Kisters. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. 99–114.

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Sfakianaki, Poppy. “Artists’ Confessions to Tériade in L’Intransigeant, 1928–1929: The Construction of a Public Image.” The Mediatization of the Artist, 61–79. Thiele, Jens. Das Kunstwerk im Film. Zur Problematik filmisher Präsentationsformen von Malerei und Grafik. Bern: Herbert Lang and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1976. Thirifays, André. “De gebroeders Haesaerts en de cinema.” Kunst in België 1880–1950. Hulde aan Luc en Paul Haesaerts. Brussels: Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, 1978. 52–58. Van Deuren, Lambert. “Les œuvres d’André Souris,” Revue belge de musicologie 20 (1966): 15–20. Walker, John A. Art and Artists on Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Ziegler, Reiner. Kunst und Architektur im Kulturfilm 1919–1945. Konstanz: UVK Verlag, 2003.

About the Authors Steven Jacobs is an art historian specializing in the interaction between film and the visual arts. He teaches at Ghent University and at the University of Antwerp. Joséphine Vandekerckhove is currently enrolled as a PhD student (Fellow of the Research Foundation ‒ Flanders) at the Department of Art History, Musicology and Theater Studies of Ghent University and Università di Verona, where she is working on a comparative study of Belgian and Italian mid-twentieth-century art documentaries.

14. This Is the End of High Entertainment: Tiny Furniture and This Is the End Kelly Lloyd

Abstract This chapter details the plot and production of Tiny Furniture and This is the End as two films that represent both artists and entertainers, and whose creators wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the films. A discussion of the similarities between the two f ilms, including being produced in the early days of YouTube, taking place within modern homes, and featuring a plot of ego death, illuminate humor and self-awareness as mechanisms artists and entertainers use to demonstrate knowledge of their environment. The chapter also comments on how these two films do not meet David Robbins’s criteria for High Entertainment, a middle ground between the Art World and Mainstream Entertainment Culture. Keywords: Artist Figures, High Entertainment, Art World, Lena Dunham, James Franco

Lena Dunham wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the 2010 independent film Tiny Furniture, which features her own short video The Fountain, and the artwork of her photographer mother, Laurie Simmons. Seth Rogen co-wrote, co-directed, co-produced, and starred in the 2013 studio film This Is the End, featuring the artwork of actor and artist James Franco. Although each of these films features an ensemble cast and a host of collaborators, I have chosen to focus on Dunham, Simmons, Franco, and Rogen as characters whose work structures the films, facilitates a discussion about artists and entertainers in film, and the art world versus mainstream entertainment culture. Tiny Furniture and This Is the End have a number of things in common including a similar time period (the early YouTube era), a similar set (the interior of modern open-plan homes collapsed with the identities of the artists who own them), a similar plot of ego-death, and a similar use of

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self-aware humor. Piecing apart the films’ similarities will facilitate a better understanding of how artists and entertainers play themselves in film, and what these two films suggest about the potential for a middle ground between the art world and mainstream entertainment culture.

Tiny Furniture In Tiny Furniture, Lena Dunham plays Aura, a “video maker”1 who moves home to New York City after graduating from a liberal arts college in Ohio. Struggling to find her next steps in her career and personal life, Aura reconnects with her mother Siri, sibling Nadine, and childhood friend Charlotte. Siri is a single mother and successful artist whose photographs feature miniature furniture, and whose studio occupies the bottom half of their Manhattan apartment. Nadine is an overachieving high school student who wins prizes in poetry, and who takes up familial space appearing in Siri’s photographs and occasionally sleeping in her bed. Charlotte is a selfproclaimed “asshole”2 who has not progressed beyond the point where she and Aura were childhood best friends. Charlotte is Aura’s default companion and helps her to find a job as a host at a restaurant. We are also introduced to Keith, a chef at the restaurant where Aura works, and Jed, a YouTuber who is in New York City to develop some television show ideas for HBO and Comedy Central. Although initially a romantic interest, Jed becomes a temporary tenant, and mirror to Aura’s professional indeterminacy. In the film, we see Aura navigate her relationships with her mother, sibling, childhood friend, and potential romantic interests, work a low-wage job, and contemplate her work’s place in the art world. Aura’s struggle is financially supported by her mother, and the film itself is narrated by Aura, reading out sections of Siri’s journal. The film culminates in a moment when Aura recognizes that she is lost, having slept with Keith in a pipe in a construction yard, after pre-maturely leaving the opening of a group art exhibition in Brooklyn where Charlotte included Aura’s video The Fountain. In the last scene, Aura crawls into her mother’s bed to massage her back, and to talk to her mother about her personal and professional failures at Aura’s age, finding comfort in the fact that Siri also finds Nadine’s overachievement irritating. In addition to Lena playing the protagonist Aura, Lena’s mother, Laurie Simmons, plays Aura’s mother Siri, who, like Laurie, is a successful fine 1 Tiny Furniture, DVD. 2 Ibid.

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artist known for photographing miniatures. Lena’s sibling Cyrus plays Aura’s sibling Nadine, who, like Cyrus, won the Poetry Society of America’s Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award while in high school; and Lena’s childhood friend Jemima Kirke plays Aura’s childhood friend Charlotte, who like Jemima, has parents who are both artists. Lena Dunham wrote Tiny Furniture in four days, and filmed it over the course of November 2009 primarily in her parent’s Manhattan apartment with a Sony camcorder that she got for her twenty-f irst birthday. The film’s budget of $25,000 was, “supplied by three art-world investors who had seen her earlier work.”3 Her father stayed at their Connecticut home during the nineteen-day shoot and after the shoot, Dunham’s parents paid for the replacement of the unit’s white floors. 4 Tiny Furniture premiered at South by Southwest Festival where it won Best Narrative Feature, and halfway through watching Tiny Furniture at home, Judd Apatow called Dunham to give her an opportunity to write a television show for HBO, script unseen. This script became Girls. Yet, Dunham insists that her success is not due to the privileges she received as the daughter of two well-established and well-respected artists. In 33 Artists in 3 Acts Sarah Thornton writes, When Girls first launched, bloggers attacked Lena for benefitting from nepotism, as if Carroll Dunham ran HBO or Laurie Simmons had sway in Hollywood. “People were complaining before they had figured out who my parents were,” [Lena Dunham] explains. Shortly afterward, the Internet was flooded with articles about Lena’s ‘not-so-famous’ artist parents. “No one is going to give you a TV show because of your parents,” [Dunham] declares as she slips off her shoes and swings her legs up on the velvet couch. “It is just not going to happen.”5

This Is the End This Is the End, written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and released in 2013, features Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, and Seth Rogen, all playing themselves, holed up in Franco’s Hollywood mansion trying to survive the Apocalypse. The film 3 Mead, “DOWNTOWN’S DAUGHTER.” 4 “Lena Dunham’s Parents.” 5 Thornton, 33 Artists, 206.

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opens with Rogen picking Baruchel up from the airport, and pressuring him into going to a party at James Franco’s house, which Baruchel is hesitant to attend because he feels disconnected from Rogen’s new life and new friends in Hollywood. Franco’s party is stocked with cameos from Rogen’s Superbad and Freaks and Geeks co-stars and a smattering of celebrities including Rihanna and Emma Watson. Later that night, a sinkhole appears in Franco’s front yard, which consumes everyone except for the core crew: Baruchel; Franco; Hill; Robinson; and Rogen. After barricading themselves in Franco’s house, and completing an inventory of supplies, they retreat to different areas of the home, only to be disrupted in the morning by McBride, who, unbeknownst to them, had been sleeping in the bathtub, and who used up the majority of the supplies cooking a lavish brunch. Tensions mount as the crew attempt to procure more water and contemplate their morality as actors, after Baruchel correctly identifies the Apocalypse as a moral reckoning. This tension is expressed in the widening rift in Rogen’s old friendship with Baruchel, and his new friendships with the others, in particular Franco. Jonah Hill is the first to die having been possessed by a demon after praying for Baruchel’s death, and Craig Robinson is the first to ascend to Heaven after putting himself in front of the hell-beast to allow Rogen, Franco, and Baruchel to escape. Danny McBride becomes the leader of a group of cannibals who consume Franco after his mockery of them cancels his ascension to Heaven. After Baruchel openly communicates his envy of Rogen’s professional success, and Rogen communicates his self-hatred around his professional success, both ascend to Heaven to join Robinson and the Backstreet Boys in a choreographed dance to “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” This Is the End was filmed from February to July 2012, and released in theaters in June 2013. This Is the End was the first film that Rogen co-wrote, co-directed, co-produced, and acted in, and in the short documentaries included in the DVD extras of This Is the End, Rogen said the film is, “really a movie about a group dynamic between friends,”6 adding that, “I don’t think we could have written this movie if we didn’t know these guys.”7 Seth Rogen has known Jay Baruchel since he was eighteen, he met James Franco on the set of Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, and he worked with Jonah Hill on Superbad, Craig Robinson on Knocked Up, and Danny McBride in Pineapple Express. In an interview with Erik Hedegaard of Rolling Stone, Rogen recounted: “A month or so before shooting started, the studio called 6 “Redband Sizzle Trailer,” This Is the End, DVD. 7 “Directing Your Friends,” This Is the End, DVD.

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and said, ‘We’re uncomfortable with you guys playing yourselves. Evan and I said to them, ‘We’ll shoot a version where we’re not ourselves.’ And then we just didn’t do it.”8

The Early Days of YouTube Although artist, comedian, and writer David Robbins wrote “High Entertainment: Curtain Up” in 2005, it was only published in 2011 in his book Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History to Twentieth-Century Comedy. In the essay, Robbins writes about how creative people divide themselves between two poles, the art world and mainstream entertainment culture, and about how this divide is being threatened by the emergence of “High Entertainment”: “one sector of the emergent middle-ground. Drawing upon the better aspects of both worlds, High Entertainment will combine entertainment’s accessibility with art’s experimentalism and bent toward form discovery.”9 The birth of High Entertainment was spurred, Robbins writes, by [i]ndependent imaginations [who] have been able to work directly, efficiently, and economically in the forms and formats of the mainstream media culture. The kids are pointing cameras and microphones at things and creating their own entertainment-movies, pop music, and TV-cultureinfluenced videos. They’re burning these onto DVDs, and CDs, uploading them, downloading them. Which means they’re able not only to create in mass-media formats but, crucially, distribute them as well.10

One major platform for these independent imaginations was YouTube. Debuting in May 2005, YouTube became the “fastest growing website”11 by mid-2006. Julia Alexander details the history of YouTube in “The Golden Age of YouTube is Over” explaining how [. . .] [t]he focus on creator culture def ined YouTube culture from its earliest days. The platform was a stage for creators who didn’t quite fit into Hollywood’s restrictions [. . . ]Between 2011 and 2015, YouTube was 8 Hedegaard, “The Doobie Brothers.” 9 Robbins, Concrete Comedy, 290. 10 Ibid., 289. 11 O’Malley, “YOUTUBE.”

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a haven for comedians, filmmakers, writers, and performers who were able to make the work they wanted and earn money in the process.12

In “Everyone’s a Critic,” a post for the Guggenheim’s blog The Take, Lena Dunham wrote, “I didn’t go to film school. Instead I went to liberal arts school and self-imposed a curriculum of creating tiny, flawed video sketches, brief meditations on comic conundrums, and slapping them on the Internet.”13 One such film that Dunham “slapped on the internet” was The Fountain, featured as Aura’s only work in Tiny Furniture, and one of five of Dunham’s short films included in the DVD extras. Evan Goldberg and Jason Stone wrote the story Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse, which Goldberg and Rogen turned into a screenplay for a short film in 2006. Filming took place in late 2006 and early 2007, and when a trailer for the short film was uploaded on YouTube in June 2007, it “caused a stir in the blogosphere.”14 Goldberg and Stone were able to use the buzz generated by the trailer of the short film to shop the project around to production companies, eventually landing a deal with Mandate Pictures in 2008. Tiny Furniture and This Is the End are not only descendants of early YouTube uploads, but also contemplate this distribution platform in the films, thereby combining the accessibility of entertainment with the form discovery of art. In Tiny Furniture, Aura uploads her short video The Fountain on YouTube, and meets Jed, someone famous from his YouTube uploads Nietzschean Cowboy and Skeptical Gynecologist. In This is the End, after the guys have done all of the drugs in the house, they shoot a sequel to Pineapple Express. The last scene of the Pineapple Express 2: Blood Red trailer pans out to show the guys watching the film on the television that rises out of James Franco’s floor, with Rogen saying, “We should make sequels to more of our movies”, and Jay Baruchel commenting, “This is the beginning of the rest of your comedy.”15

Artists and their Modern Open-Plan Homes The majority of the plots of Tiny Furniture and This Is the End take place within the interior of an open-plan modern home owned by the artist in 12 13 14 15

Alexander, “The Golden Age.” Dunham, “Everyone’s a Critic.” Seigel and McNary, “Rogen, Baruchel.” This Is the End, DVD.

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the narrative. Tiny Furniture takes place inside of Aura’s childhood home, a two-story, open-plan modern apartment in Manhattan that Siri owns. While Siri’s studio is on the bottom floor, the walls of the top-floor living space are dotted with Siri’s unframed photographs of miniature furniture. In the middle of the film, Aura ends an argument she had been having with Siri by throwing mail on the ground, and shouting at Siri and Nadine, “This is my house too! And nobody acts that way! You act like it’s all your house, it’s all your stupid shit! It’s all over the house!”16 While Siri and Nadine were away visiting Colleges, Aura invited Jed to stay, saying, “I have the whole place to myself. Frankly, I feel greedy keeping it that way.”17 And when Siri no longer allows Jed to stay in the apartment, Jed says to Aura about her mother, “I figured an artist, an open lady.”18 The apartment is representative of Siri’s profession to Jed, and as Siri is an artist, she must be open, and her house must also be open. However, the apartment is also representative of Siri’s success to Aura, and therefore, is the stage where Aura’s personal and professional struggles play out through comparison. Siri, her photography, her professional success, her wealth, and her open-plan modern apartment collapse into one location. This Is the End takes place inside James Franco’s open-plan modern mansion in Los Angeles. Welcoming Rogen and Baruchel into his house, Franco says, “Come on in, check it out, my new place. Designed it myself. This place is like a piece of me. You two just stepped inside of me.” To which Rogen responded, “You let us both come inside you!”19 Then Franco gestures towards a text painting diptych which hangs above them in his foyer. The paintings are imitations of Josh Smith’s paintings of his own name and hang side by side, the painting on the left reading “SETH ROGEN” in white letters tinted with red, green, and blue and set against a forest green background, and the painting on the right reading, “JAMES FRANCO” in white letters tinted with red and yellow set against a blood red background. To extend the collapse of Franco, his paintings, his professional success, his wealth, and his open-plan modern mansion into one location, when Jay Baruchel attempts to dislodge the SETH ROGEN painting to use it to barricade the house with the rest of Franco’s art collection, Franco stops him and says, “Not the Rogen, alright? Don’t take him, take me.”20 16 Tiny Furniture, DVD. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 This Is the End, DVD. 20 Ibid.

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In an interview for SCREENRANT Ben Kendrick asked Franco if Rogen and Evan Goldberg gave him, “any insight as to why they set the movie at [his] house, specifically.” Franco responded, I’m not quite sure why it’s at my house [. . .] I don’t have a house. I live in an apartment in New York, a pretty small one, on the Lower East Side. I guess of all of our group, our friends, maybe I’ve branched out into other kinds of movies, so maybe I am the easiest to classify as the Hollywood guy with a big mansion.21

Translating visual art into a staged scene is an often used technique in biopic films about artists.22 While Siri and Franco’s open-plan modern homes are decorated with their visual art, Tiny Furniture and This is the End are not located in staged scenes reflective of Siri and Franco’s visual art, but rather are located in staged scenes reflective of Siri and Franco professional success and corresponding financial and cultural wealth.

Ego Death and Self-Aware Humor It is interesting that Franco assumes that the film took place inside his home because he was simultaneously the actor with the most diverse portfolio of films, and also the “easiest to classify as the Hollywood guy.” In an interview with VICE magazine, Franco clarified that while, “art was always in the script [. . .] what [Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen] had written was kind of a flat character [to parody his modelling campaign with Gucci] who was very materialistic, who cared more about his clothes and things than people, and I didn’t think that was going to be the funniest thing to play and they agreed, so we changed it.”23 While Franco’s home was chosen because he was the most “Hollywood,” Franco decided to play into his role as “the cool, arty one”24 because it would be funnier. While Franco has earned degrees at well-regarded institutions like Yale University, and collaborated with well-regarded artists like Kalup Linzy and Marina Abramović, Franco’s fame has less to do with his art and more to do with his roles in mainstream entertainment films. Franco speaks 21 Kendrick, “This Is The End.” 22 Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 88. 23 Gurmen, “Day Five.” 24 Henderson, “This Is the End.”

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to this in an interview with Jerry Saltz, an art critic and Lena Dunham’s godfather. Franco says, I think you even said in that article about celebrity artists that they all seem to be doing painting. That that’s the go-to thing. It felt to me like, well, I don’t want to be that, whatever that cliché actor-moonlighting-as-anartist kind of thing is. I thought one thing that I know is filmmaking and video. But movies, especially commercial movies, are a particular thing. They’re narrative-based. There are tacit expectations from an audience of a movie. A certain length. There’s a certain amount of entertainment that’s expected. I thought here is a way to use this medium that I’m very familiar with, and here’s a realm where the expectations are different. I don’t need to entertain in the same way. But I was scared to mix my film life and my new burgeoning art life.25

Franco has chosen to use film as his artistic medium, although, when Franco plays himself in This Is the End, he plays himself as a painter, like all of the other celebrity artists; not only a painter, but a derivative painter with bad taste, Franco’s nod to how he is not taken seriously as an artist. But while Franco’s house in This Is the End is littered with hyper-sexualized Pop Art, the two paintings in the style of Josh Smith are notable for two reasons: first, in their intelligent nod to contemporary portraiture in cinema in line with This Is the End constructing subjects using name recognition; and second, because these paintings are not imitations of Josh Smith paintings, they are Josh Smith paintings. James Franco and his friend Josh Smith painted these paintings together. Franco explains, [Josh Smith] and I made a series of paintings specifically for the film. It was great because the paintings could comment on the characters in the action and become a real part of the narrative… Josh and I were going to give some of the paintings to Seth and Evan and the people in the movie, and then we were going to make a book out of them, but right now they’re just sitting in storage at Josh’s gallery, Luhring Augustine, in New York.26

A Josh Smith painting, quite similar to the ones that he and James Franco painted for This Is the End, sold for $77,500 in 2018.27 25 Saltz, “Can the Art World.” 26 Gurmen, “Day Five.” 27 “Lot 287”.

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In Legend, Myth, and Magic of the Image of an Artist, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz write, The notion of the artist’s superiority to his contemporaries was expressed in a variety of ways. In general, this superiority was not directly connected with his activity as an artist. Instead, witty remarks and jokes were attributed to leading artists [. . .] Generally speaking, the quick retort and the joke are indicative of an ability that operates on the basis of specific mechanisms to place ordinary things in an unexpected light. Thereby it demonstrates that mastery of the environment and that superiority over the public which not only characterize the artist to a very high degree, but which are also attributes of many other outstanding personalities.28

In the adept use of the Josh Smith paintings in This Is the End, James Franco demonstrates a mastery of his environment and therefore superiority to his contemporaries. However, Franco undermined this demonstration of mastery one year after the release of This Is the End, in his solo exhibition New Film Stills at PACE Gallery in New York. New Film Stills featured a series of photographs where Franco replaces Cindy Sherman in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. Roberta Smith, art critic and godmother of Lena Dunham, wrote, Mainly, we sense Mr. Franco once more playing himself, dipping a toe simultaneously in the waters of art and demi-drag [. . .] Franco’s photos fail (or worse) because he is a male “artist” reinterpreting a piece of feminist art with no apparent understanding of that aspect of the work.29

Jerry Saltz also penned a damning review of New Film Stills, and then followed that up a four-hour interview with Franco quoted earlier in this chapter. When given an opportunity to respond to the criticism of New Film Stills, Franco said, “I would argue- and maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I’m misguided- but the one thing about all those students’ re-creations of Cindy’s film stills, the one thing that they don’t have is an actual actor in them.”30 Franco uses this opportunity of redemption only afforded a celebrity to affirm his identity not as an artist, but as an actor. 28 Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, 99–100. 29 Smith, “Everybody Is Playing.” 30 Saltz, “Can the Art World.”

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In This Is the End, when Jay Baruchel is able to correctly identify the Apocalypse as a moral reckoning, James Franco does not question his morality as an artist (perhaps because he is playing himself as not an artist but rather a celebrity artist), but rather denies that the guys are bad people because, “We’re actors! We bring joy to people’s lives.” Baruchel responds by saying, “We get paid handsomely, much higher than the average profession.” To which Franco responds, “It’s not like it’s just handed to us! We work really hard to be here.” Eventually Franco admits, “I fucked Lindsay Lohan. She was fucked up, she was high, it was at the Chateau Marmont. She kept banging on my door. She kept calling me Jake Gyllenhaal. I said … call me the Prince of Persia.”31 To be clear, James Franco uses a movie reference as the punchline in a story about him having sex with Lohan who is so high at the time that she cannot correctly identify him, and therefore could not have legally consented to sleeping with him. To play a negative version of oneself is a common strategy when people play themselves because it promotes an advantageous fiction while showing that you are self-aware. Judith Roof in “Fame’s Ambivalents” uses Neil Patrick Harris’s role in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay to explain this strategy, “Using this image to produce the fiction of its opposite makes us believe all the more in Neil’s originary media fiction as a nice guy. We know that Harold and Kumar is a joke about the gay, nice Neil who portrays himself as the druggy, rude, bad Neil.”32 Evan Goldberg, cowriter and co-director of This Is the End, explains the benefits (and therefore perhaps the motivations) of an actor when choosing to play this kind of a role, “It sets actors free, I think. They’re working but it’s also like therapy, purging demons and saying things they never could before.”33 While Franco successfully demonstrates mastery of mainstream entertainment culture by playing the negative version of himself in This Is the End, and successfully demonstrates mastery of the art world by playing himself as a celebrity artist who makes derivative work in This Is the End, this strategy fails when Franco attempts to play himself as Cindy Sherman in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. This failure calls into question Franco’s proficiency with this repeated strategy, and makes me wonder what exactly is Franco playing at when he plays himself? I have a similar question for Lena Dunham. Dunham was not a celebrity at the time she released Tiny Furniture, and therefore the strategy of 31 This Is the End, DVD. 32 Roof, “Fame’s Ambivalents,” 127. 33 Gilbey, “This Is the End.”

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playing a negative version of oneself was not as available to her as it was to Harris or Franco, who have enough information floating around in popular culture that the audience can recognize in their performance when they lean into or away from this information. However, Dunham, whose work is semi-autobiographical, still chooses to perform a negative version of herself specif ically around Aura’s lack of recognition of her privilege. In her n+1 review of Tiny Furniture, Elizabeth Gumport argues that this performance can be seen as a successful critique of the art world Lena Dunham grew up in and occupies as the daughter of two successful artists. Gumport writes, What actually makes Tiny Furniture a daring film is that it talks about class and privilege. What makes this boldness radical is that it treats privilege positively: instead of implying privilege’s existence via its absence, Dunham makes it present, as a material experience that offers specific pleasures and advantages. She doesn’t speak truth to power, but from it, which these days is as rare, and as necessary.34

Perhaps Dunham is playing a negative version of herself more in line with Goldberg’s explanation that, “it’s also like therapy, purging demons,” and by doing so, she is presenting a version of herself that is self-aware, which she then contradicts when failing to publicly acknowledge her privilege in the aforementioned interview with Sarah Thornton. Perhaps Dunham and Franco’s negative self-aware performances are more in line with Jean Baudrillard’s explanation of how “institutions speak of themselves through denial” in Simulacra and Simulation: To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity, and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious cycle of its irresponsibility and of its fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and of its already dead.35

James Franco and Lena Dunham have more in common than their filmic professional counterparts, Laurie Simmons and Seth Rogen. It seems as though Dunham and Franco are standing on the same bridge connecting art and television, but started their journey from opposite ends; Dunham’s 34 Gumport, “Made in Manhattan.” 35 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 19.

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trajectory from The Fountain to Tiny Furniture to Girls, and Franco’s trajectory from Freaks & Geeks to This Is the End to New Film Stills. YouTube creators also seem to be travelling along this bridge, as suggested by Carrie Crista, who explains in a 2018 article in PR Week “Goodbye, YouTube. Regulations could prompt microinfluencer migration to other platforms,” how with the emergence of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, YouTube has turned away from its creators in an attempt to compete with television streaming platforms.36

This Is the End of High Entertainment While Dunham’s The Fountain and Rogen, Goldberg, and Stone’s Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse were examples of High Entertainment, when these YouTube uploads graduated into feature-length films, the films themselves and the people inside of them reverted to old self-perpetuating habits. Robbins has this to say about the theater of the divide between the art world and mainstream entertainment culture: In truth, the rules of this theatre are held in place more by the players’ vanity- in the case of art, the need to feel oneself superior and special, and the need for an association with exclusivity; in the case of the massculture, the illusion that one is speaking for The People, and “giving people what they want” – than by any contradiction intrinsic to either the media or the venues through which the refined and the mass cultures communicate with their respective audiences.37

The aforementioned need for a method to distinguish which artists were superior was developed by biographers whose work assisted artists in distinguishing their labor as a specific profession, dating back to the writing of Xenocrates and Duris of Samos in the fourth century BC.38 However, Kris and Kurz in Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist, also note that: “In this world, however, the artist does not stand alone: he is a member of the great ‘community of geniuses.’”39 While Tiny Furniture and This Is the End might not have carved out a middle ground between the art world 36 Bradley, “Goodbye, YouTube.” 37 Robbins, Concrete Comedy, 288. 38 Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, 40. 39 Ibid., 7.

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and mainstream entertainment culture, both films represent artists and entertainers as members of larger communities which are fundamental to their individual success.

Bibliography Alexander, Julia. “The Golden Age of YouTube Is Over.” The Verge (April 5, 2019). https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18287318/youtube-logan-paul-pewdiepiedemonetization-adpocalypse-premium-influencers-creators. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan, 1994. Bradley, Diana. “Goodbye, YouTube: Regulations Could Prompt Microinfluencer Migration to Other Platforms.” PR Week (January 22, 2018). https://www.prweek. com/article/1455055/goodbye-youtube-regulations-prompt-microinfluencermigration-platforms. Dunham, Lena. “Everyone’s a Critic.” The Take (July 27, 2010). https://web.archive. org/web/20100802142537/http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact/ participate/youtube-play/the-take/moving-images/3589-everyones-a-critic. Gilbey, Ryan. “This Is the End: Why Actors Love to Play Themselves.” The Guardian (June 6, 2013). http://www.theguardian.com/f ilm/2013/jun/06/ this-is-the-end- actors-play-themselves. Gumport, Elizabeth. “Made in Manhattan.” n+1 (March 5, 2012). https://nplusonemag. com/online-only/film-review/made-in-manhattan/. Gurmen, Esra. “Day Five: James Franco Plays a Parody of Himself in His Latest Film.” VICE (June 28, 2013). https://www.vice.com/da/article/qb54p3/day-fivejames-franco-plays-a-parody-of-himself-in-his-latest-film.Hedegaard, Erik. “The Doobie Brothers: Lighting Up With the Stars of ‘This Is the End’.” Rolling Stone (June 4, 2013). https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/ the-doobie-brothers-lighting-up-with-the-stars-of-this-is-the-end-127663/. Henderson, Odie. “This Is the End.” Roger Ebert (June 12, 2013). Kendrick, Ben. “‘This Is The End’ Cast Interview: Apocalypse, Grisly Deaths, & Playing Themselves – James Franco.” Screenrant (April 24, 2013). http://screenrant. com/this-is-the-end-movie-cast-interviews-james-franco/6/. Kris, Ernst and Otto Kurz. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A HistoricalExperiment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. “Lot 287.” CHRISTIE’S (September 27, 2018). https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/ paintings/josh-smith-untitled-6161294-details.aspx?from=salesummery&int ObjectID=6161294.

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Macaulay, Scott. “Creative Nonfiction’s Lena Dunham By Alicia Van Couvering.” FilmmakerMagazine (March 18, 2009), https://filmmakermagazine.com/804creative-nonfictions-lena-dunham-by-alicia-van-couvering/#.X9LWAC2cZE5. Mead, Rebecca. “DOWNTOWN’S DAUGHTER Lena Dunham Cheerfully Exposes Her Privileged Life.” The New Yorker (November 15, 2010). http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2010/11/15/downtowns-daughter. “Lena Dunham’s Parents Sell New York Loft Featured In ‘Tiny Furniture.’” Huffington Post (26 November 2013). http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/lena-dunham-parents-loft_n_4344749. html. O’Malley, Gavin. “YouTube Is the Fastest Growing Website.” Adage (July 21, 2006). https://adage.com/article/digital/youtube-fastest-growing-website/110632. Robbins, David. Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History to Twentieth-Century Comedy. Copenhagen: Pork Salad Press, 2011. Roof, Judith. “Fame’s Ambivalents.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 42, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 121–136. Saltz, Jerry. “Can the Art World Take James Franco Seriously?” New York Magazine (April 18, 2016). https://www.vulture.com/2016/04/james-franco-jerry-saltzconverstaion-c-v-r.html. Scott, A.O. “Whoa, the Apocalypse. We’re Still Buds, Right?” The New York Times (June 11, 2013). https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/movies/this-is-the-endwith-seth-rogen-and-james-franco.html Seigel, Tatiana and Dave McNary. “Rogen, Baruchel set for ‘Apocalypse’.” Variety (June 10, 2008). https://variety.com/2008/f ilm/markets-festivals/ rogen-baruchel-set-for-apocalypse-1117987205/. Smith, Roberta. “Everybody Is Playing Somebody Else Here.” New York Times (April 22, 2014). https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/arts/design/james-franconew-film-stills-arrives-at-pace-gallery.html. Thornton, Sarah. 33 Artists in 3 Acts. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Filmography Dunham, Lena, dir. Tiny Furniture. 2012; New York, NY: IFC Films, 2012. DVD. Rogen, Seth and Evan Goldberg, dirs. This Is the End. 2013; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2013. DVD. Rogen, Seth and Evan Goldberg, dirs. “Directing Your Friends.” This Is the End. 2013; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2013. DVD. Rogen, Seth and Evan Goldberg, dirs. “Redband Sizzle Trailer.” This Is the End. 2013; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2013. DVD.

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About the Author Kelly Lloyd is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production and prioritizes public-facing collaborative research. Lloyd is currently studying for a Practice-Led DPhil in Fine Art at The University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art and Wadham College. Website: www.k-lloyd.com.

15. Screening Performance: Curating the Artist Persona Susan Flynn

Abstract While much has been written about the redemptive power of neoexpressionist work, which is said to draw upon the mythological, the cultural, the historical, and the erotic, the artist’s curation of the self as a business entity, a consumable product, especially in tangent with screen culture, has been left largely unexplored. This chapter draws on theories of performativity and the work of Zygmunt Bauman on “practices of selfhood” to examine Julian Schnabel as an artist engaged in an act of self-curation onscreen. Using The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) as a case study, the chapter argues that Schnabel’s directorial work conserves the notion of the artist as a constructor of history. Keywords: Schnabel, Performance, Screen, Art, Business, Commodification

Introduction In the modern West, visual art has traditionally been understood as a form of high culture, participated in through norms of connoisseurship, patronage, and individual expression. Images and objects have been primarily seen as things to view, set apart in museums, galleries, and other public places.1 Art is viewed, experienced, or consumed – the enactment of modern choice in a world replete with options. Currents within contemporary art include a globalized and relentless re-modernizing, the embrace of the rewards and downsides of neoliberal economics, capital, and neo-conservative politics, pursued during the 1980s and since, by artists such as Julian Schnabel.2 1 2

DeMarrais and Robb, “Art Makes Society,” 3–22. Smith, “Currents,” 179.

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch15

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Sensationalism and spectacle abound in this contemporary visual art, where exhilaration, the lavish excess of emotions, and the construction of the artist as auteur selling his world vision is key. This chapter unpacks the notion of the artist as curator and composer of his public self, the careful self-coding and self-definition that contribute to the making of the artist as a consumable product, especially within screen culture. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theories of consumerism in the contemporary world and of the “performativity” of the self, proposed by Bauman and Rein Raud in their work Practices of Selfhood (2015), I examine Julian Schnabel as an artist engaged in an act of self-curation onscreen. Schnabel’s films are considered “painterly” in that they are persuasive, poetic, and experimental. They also bear the indelible imprint of Schnabel’s painting practice, not least in the scale, vigor, and challenge to norms that they present. Through an analysis of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), I suggest that Schnabel’s directorial work is first and foremost a performance of his “selfhood.”

Schnabel: The Artist-Director When I was young, all I wanted to do was be a great artist. I didn’t even know what the art was supposed to look like.3

Julian Schnabel is the American-born son of Czechoslovakian immigrants, who emerged into the New York art world of the late 70s as a neo-expressionist and “one of the most divisive art-world figures of the modern era [. . .] known to revel in the image of an art-world provocateur [. . .] synonymous with the decade’s excess, yuppie culture and penchant for vapid self-aggrandising.”4 The documentary Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait (Pappi Corsicato, 2017) provides some telling insights into Schnabel’s motivations, inspirations, and ambitions. Through his comments here, Schnabel can be seen to be the director of his own narrative; making a conscious decision as a young boy to be a painter. He has established his clear vision of himself as an artist, which notably came before the art. From this, we can construe that his performance of being an artist pre-empted the art itself. His friend Carol McFadden discusses the overt way in which Schnabel deliberately cultivated his own aura since his youth: “There was no confusion at all about what Julian was meant to do with his life. It was his purposefulness that made 3 4

Schnabel qtd in Corsicato. Bakare, Interview, n.p.

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us all give up any ideas that there could be anything else for him but where he was going with his art, with making art, and being an artist.”5 Further interviews in this documentary with artists, acquaintances, and friends indicate Schnabel’s awareness of the a priori codes and conventions of being an artist. Working to cultivate the image of himself and his life on a grand scale, his self-promotion has apparently been career-long. His confidence since the beginning of his career is indisputable, as art promoter Mary Boone speaks of their first meeting: “[Julian] says ‘well you’re going to be lucky because I’m going to be on the cover of Artforum within five years’. I mean Julian always made these very expressive comments, but most of them actually came true. And in fact, he was on the cover of Artforum. That was maybe ’79 he said that, and by ’81 he was on the cover, before 5 years.”6 From his arrival on the art scene, Schnabel’s persona quickly became notorious, as Alba Clemente recalls: “I remember Julian, his grandness. Through him I understood the meaning of ‘bigger than life’ or ‘over the top’.”7 In moving to the film form, Schnabel was able to engage more deeply with contemporary culture and the large-scale enactments of scripts gave him freedom to explore his vision and to further the connections between the visual and the felt dimension of art: “Julian had always been a filmmaker in his own mind, and he’d always had a sort of cinematic view on the world. Even his paintings are very cinematic.”8 Yet, from his first film, Basquiat (1996), Schnabel’s directorial work has been about his persona, more so than about any protagonist, even though the films are ostensibly biopics: “The first film that I made had to do with the art world, had to do with my experiences in the art world it had to do with my witnessing what happened to Jean-Michel.”9 The themes of his first three films circle around the visceral fear of being forgotten, or of being erased from history. But the thematic schema is secondary to the persona of Schnabel as director and the privileging of his unique vision. Willem Dafoe, who worked with Schnabel on At Eternity’s Gate (2018), acknowledges that the director’s life and art bear similar marks: The one thing that I feel when I watch Julian work that I recognise from making performances is that bending of words, taking things around 5 6 7 8 9

Carol McFadden qtd in Corsicato. Mary Boone qtd in Corsicato. Alba Clemente qtd in Corsicato. Nemo Librizzi qtd in Corsicato. Schnabel qtd in Corsicato.

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him that have a significance, have an emotion, have something resonant in them, and then working through pleasure and reaction he starts to play with them [. . .] [I]t’s something that’s consistent in his filmmaking, and in his painting, his sculpture, even, sometimes how he lives his life.10

While Schnabel’s first two films, Basquiat and Before Night Falls (2000), were artist biopics, and as such a form of popular art history with their attendant litanies of commercial highs and emotional lows, in his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel moves away from the mass mediation of art history to that of a literary memoir. By so doing, he continues to engage in what Pierre Bourdieu termed “cultural capital,” the privileged access to knowledge, connections, and items of value. Bourdieu considered aesthetic preferences as transmitted by generations, buttressing and reproducing social class. Within this paradigm, each class has its own consumer interests and affiliations that meet these needs through literature, newspapers, art, and entertainment, giving the members a sense of authority and authenticity. For example, cultural elites (the owners of capital) show their learned characteristics as natural and innate. As Klimczuk notes, These processes are manifested, for example, in luxury or the freedom of practicing and admiring art for art’s sake. For all those outside this class, they are at best incomprehensible and at the worst exclusive, for example, as reflected in abstract painting [. . .] with no traditional form and structure.11

Consumer elites who eschew popular taste in favor of “high culture” therefore enact a distinct form of cultural currency: “In this sense, art can be a vocabulary for the shared habitus of members of the same social class, a tangible yet dynamic means for relating or dividing groups. This may often be simply through shared styles or ways of doing things.”12 The rich texture of the film and the production values, as well as the emotional subtext around the tragedy of the loss of a life of glamor, speaks to the values of certain audiences, rather than those of a global audience. As Keti Chukhrov points out, “[c]omplex art is considered bourgeois. It needs skills, connoisseurship, and culture that can only belong to the socially privileged.”13 In this sense, 10 11 12 13

Willem Dafoe qtd in Corsicato. Klimczuk, “Cultural Capital,” 2. DeMarrais and Robb, 16. Chukhrov, “On the False Democracy,” n.p.

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contemporary art and the enactment of the artist as a distinct persona are at odds with the democratic ideals of social transformation and democracy, which the contemporary art movement purported to offer. As Chukhrov writes: “paradoxically, art’s ambition for direct social engagement and its self-abandonment loops back to the very territory of contemporary art, its archive machine, and its self-referential rhetoric of historicizing.”14 Schnabel’s own cultural capital, as a successful artist, is evident in his approach to and reverence for the superiority of his own interpretations: “I had definite opinions about what characters should be doing or what they could be doing, or how stories shouldn’t be told or things I didn’t like.”15

Audience Reception Schnabel’s persona is inextricable from his films: his notoriety instills a distinct set of expectations in his audience, expectations that are further enhanced by the self-promotion provided by the director’s multiple interviews and publicity surrounding the films. The grandiose and spectacularized performance of Schnabel as artist/director works to further establish his films in the art biopic genre, as Schnabel’s own life and art becomes part of the narrative. As film theorists have pointed out, genres are constituted not merely by the films themselves but also by the “specific systems of expectation and hypothesis that spectators bring with them to the cinema and that interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process. These systems provide spectators with a means of recognition and understanding.”16 Audiences draw certain associations based on their particular cultural background and knowledge, associations that are then further embedded by their repetition in film. The awareness that the film director is an artist positions the audience to buy into a specific artistic vision; the artist-director’s persona presages the aesthetic and the cultural value of the film, adding value in the form of cultural currency. The celebrity artist-director, then, operates in an intertextual zone where his or her presentation of their self converges with their art and their directorial work. As a product of culture film has resonances that go beyond what semioticians call its “diegesis” (the sum of its denotations): “In addition to these influences from the general culture, film has its own unique connotative 14 Ibid. 15 Schnabel qtd in Corsicato. 16 Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 27.

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ability. We know (even if we don’t remind ourselves of it consciously) that a filmmaker has made specific choices.”17 The figure of the artist and the culture of excess and of consumerism that loom in Schnabel’s f ilms is indicated by the cutting comment from critic Charlie Finch that Schnabel likes to “casually decorate his protagonists with the bourgeois trappings of his own life.”18 Film is an especially powerful medium for disseminating the images, ideas and ideologies of the director; this is attributable in part to its particular forms of narrative and its visual format: “As the viewer watches the film, she or he picks up cues, recalls information, anticipates what will follow, and generally participates in the creation of the film’s form. The film shapes particular expectations.”19 As I suggest below, using The Diving Bell as a case study, Schnabel’s directorial work demonstrates the ways in which the artist uses film to cultivate or “practice” his selfhood.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly In 2007, Schnabel adapted Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (1997). The author of the memoir had suffered a stroke, leaving him paralyzed but conscious in a condition known as “locked-in syndrome,” a rare neurological disorder that results in total paralysis despite often total cognitive awareness. Realising that he had control over his left eye-lid, his therapist taught Bauby the ESARIN system of spelling, which allowed him to communicate by blinking. Using this painstaking system Bauby dictated his short but powerful memoir. In Schnabel’s film, the first-person narrative of the memoir fuses with the narrative “eye” of the camera, creating a ground-breaking first of letting the audience access the lived experience of the disabled narrator: “The f ilm’s essential intervention, then, lies in closing this ironic distance between the felt experiences of artist and audience. The book describes Bauby’s frustration, while the film dares to induce it.”20 The subtext of the film is at all times the vision and persona of Schnabel, as artist-director. His art and/or his artistic vision effectively offer escape from imprisonment. It should be noted that Schnabel’s earlier films – Basquiat, a biography of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Before Night Falls, an 17 Monaco, How to Read a Film,180. 18 Finch, “Schnabel and his Doubles,” n.p. 19 Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 75. 20 Brophy, 2.

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adaptation of the autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas – both concern an artist who is imprisoned, either physically or psychologically. Thus, the audience’s generic expectations are established by the director and his previous work: from the tortured artists in Schnabel’s first two films to the tortured, trapped writer in Diving Bell, Schnabel uses his own reputation and visual style to reinforce the already existing generic conventions. In Diving Bell, the images and experiences of the narrator and the mise en scène – the act of Schnabel’s direction -are inextricably connected, because the eye is fused with the camera itself. The role of the viewer in the construction of meaning is vital, and in tandem with contemporary art movements the spectacularizing of the experience is both exhilarating and terrifying. The narrative circulates around the narrator’s need to claim back agency and to direct his own “story.” The film opens with the song Beyond the Sea (La Mer) popularized in the US by Bobby Darrin, voiced here by its originator Charles Trenet. La Mer plays alongside images of X-rays, presumably those of Bauby. The lyrics themselves are suggestive of life on a grand scale: “Somewhere beyond the sea/She’s there watching for me/If I could fly like birds on high/Then straight to her arms/I’d go sailing.” The butterfly, Bauby’s other persona, is a panacea to his locked-in state. Numerous scenes of the changing sea and the beach at Berck-sur-Mer, a former Naval hospital at a resort town where he vacationed as a youth, offer the opportunity for him to imagine taking flight, escaping from his wheelchair. During these scenes, no longer “a castaway on the shores of loneliness,” Bauby at once embraces and sensationalizes life: “I have realized I can imagine anything, anyone, anywhere. I can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, visit the women I love, let the sea wash over me on the isle of Martinique.” The theme of the sea, which stands for the quintessential “tides of time” and the fear of being erased, are essential elements in the grandness and opulence of the production. As Schnabel says: “There is a lot about fluid, about the way paint is fluid. And I use water a lot, in a subject manner and also as a material.”21 The viewer follows the flight arc of the butterfly, through the dandelion field, then swooping over mountain tops, skyward through the clouds and then to vintage black-and-white travelog footage of ancient ruins and pyramids, as if traveling through time, before swooping back to the present and the jagged lines of the Alps, the blue sea, and eventually to an attractive woman, naked in bed. The scene continues with the protagonist, Bauby, as his imagined self, rolling on the beach with a young woman. 21 Schnabel qtd in Corsicato.

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The aesthetic of the f ilm is influenced by the depth and heaviness described at the beginning of the memoir. Schnabel uses an experimental technique to place the audience “inside” Bauby’s trauma. He puts the camera inside his eye, thereby creating a disorienting view that mirrors that of the newly injured patient. The idiosyncratic use of the camera renders Bauby, Schnabel and the viewer inseparable from each other: becoming the camera, we become immersed both in the narrative and in the director’s artistic vision, and through this new strange perspective we experience new sensations. We experience the protagonist’s “locked-in syndrome,” constructing wholeness out of partial images, like piecing together meaning from contemporary art’s deliberate disjunctures. Mismatched fragments of the protagonist’s life, much like the broken plates of Schnabel’s artworks such as “Self Portrait by a Red Window” (1982) work together to create a vision, a narrative. The abstract images of curtain edges, body parts and disassociated memories are invariably reminiscent of contemporary art. So ethereal is the experience of meeting two attractive therapists, who lean in evocatively to the camera eye, that Bauby mutters in his head, “Je suis au paradis ou quoi?” (Have I died and gone to heaven?”). “Locked into Bauby’s immobilized gaze, viewers find they cannot withdraw from the image or retreat from the Other.”22 The audience is sutured into the passive patient’s position and we are inside the eye of the patient, experimenting with the experience and “locked-in.” Limited to the parameters of Bauby’s field of vision, the familiar becomes extraordinary and mediocre items are effectively repurposed, reminiscent of the repurposed items in Schnabel’s art, from boat sails to plates. In the f ilm, those caring for Bauby must adjust themselves to his f ield of vision, bending down to a limited area in front of his one “good” eye. The eschewing of conventional framing and the requirement for reorienting one’s vision operates throughout the f ilm, giving it a distinct and spectacular avant-garde feel, which has been compared to Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). The f ilm works to challenge the camera’s immunity and the physical detachment the audience might usually enjoy.23 The disparity between the self as it is internalized, and its outward appearance is acknowledged by Bauby as he sees his reflection for the first time since his accident, “like something from a vat of formaldehyde.” This self is abstracted from the previous self in the flashbacks: Bauby has 22 Brophy, 10. 23 Ibid., 17.

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been dressed, now static and voiceless, much like the models at his Elle photoshoots. Mirroring the demands of contemporary art appreciation, the audience is called upon to decipher past from present, dreams from reality, an audible voice from an imagined one. These dualities rely on the audience to decipher which is which at any moment and to decode the dilemmas of cultural production and artistic expression, just as in the mid-century modernist art cinema of Fellini, Bunuel, and Bertolucci.

Creative Vision Even before the outset of the film, Schnabel establishes himself as the creative genius, who visualizes and renders comprehensible the terrifying and unfamiliar locked-in syndrome, while also presenting and offering for sale the experience of his unique vision. Acknowledging his power in the making of this film, and the composition and artistry involved, he states in an interview: “I could put in anything I want to in this movie. This is a guy who could go wherever he wants. He could time travel. Be with the women that he likes. Whatever he imagines, he can have. As a film director, I thought, “ah, this is a pretty interesting palette to give oneself.”24 In this way, Schnabel enacts a “self” that is at once artist, performer, and creative genius. He acts to cultivate the notion of himself as artist and to sell himself as an artist. In performing this part, Schnabel confirms and buttresses the public persona which he has cultivated throughout his career. As Rein Raud remarks, self-presentations “either conform to a certain expectable pattern which facilitates the reception of what they want to say, or do not, which initially forces audiences to look for a key, a code for how to interpret them. In contemporary society, however, most such erratic behaviour has already been classif ied and coded.”25 Raud here refers to the expected codes of behavior and the keys that identify professions or types. Citing the stereotype of the extravagantly dressed artist who conforms to expected norms, Raud draws on Mead’s work on role-playing and role-taking. Here, I suggest, Schnabel confirms what is expected of him as a contemporary artist, not just by enacting his spectacularized vision of the script, but also by the symbolic meaning-making he engages in with this direction of the film. In his performance as director, Schnabel enacts the public spectacle of flamboyant creator, the film itself a mere accoutrement to the 24 Abeel, “The Diving Bell,” n. p. 25 Bauman and Raud, Practices of Selfhood, 42–43.

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performance of Schnabel. In the numerous interviews that accompany the film, he acknowledges the allure of creating his vision: “I like to write and tell stories. And [making films] is a way of using that part of my brain that I don’t use when I’m painting. Or that doesn’t get recorded – I’m not sure that I’m not speaking to myself.”26 Multiple interviews and documentary appearances onscreen act to ground Schnabel in the culture of celebrity, part of his cultivation of his “self.” As Raud puts it, the screen version of one’s self is more completely the manifestation of one’s own will: “I can be who I want to be [. . .] a constructed image of how I want to appear.”27 The work involved in creating and sustaining one’s persona is a uniquely modern phenomenon and one that contemporary artists appear to be very familiar with. The flamboyant aura of the artist is enacted through space (Schnabel’s pink Italianate villa in the heart of Manhattan), through lifestyle (Schnabel’s large creative family), and through outward appearance (his penchant for wearing pyjamas). When asked why he is always seen wearing pyjamas, Schnabel responds, “I consider we’re all in the hospital and I’m an outpatient.”28 Discussing his work and his self-hood, Schnabel appears deeply aware of the work involved in maintaining his persona; “I never compromised [. . .] I didn’t give away my authorship. Once you sell that you don’t exist any more.”29

Contemporary Art and Consumerism As we consume the notion of the artist, we do so from within a blatantly consumerist culture, a feature of what Bauman calls our “liquid” modern times. Contemporary art both invokes and is invoked by consumerist culture. The contemporary moment, enmeshed in the various conflicts of globalisation, commodification and the mediation of politics, is a moment of crisis, one of the currents reflected in the art of our time; as Smith writes, there are “manifestations within contemporary art practice of deep currents within the broader condition of contemporaneity itself.”30 One of the features of contemporaneity is the access to the various forms of art 26 27 28 29 30

Schnabel qtd in Abeel, n.p. Bauman and Raud, 45. Schnabel qtd in Abeel, n.p. Bakare, n.p. Smith, 185.

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and “the sheer quantity of people attracted to active participation in the image economy,”31 with art reaching new audiences in unprecedented ways. If contemporary art is concerned with consumerism, cinema is uniquely placed to sell the vision of the artist as director. As our perceptions of art become increasingly mediated in the digital age, the notion of “art,” too, becomes subject to the breaking down or breaking into bite-size pieces. Commitment to a notion, ideal or even a narrative is replaced with a clip, a freeze frame or even a meme, purchasable or shareable in the tiniest format. The endless reproduction that the digital era offers speaks to the ravenous consumerism of our times. Conspicuous consumption, cultural capital and the self-aggrandisement of the modern artist work together to create and sustain the aura of the celebrity artist and the mediated perception of artistic practice. As Schnabel said “When someone buys my work, I have no idea how they made their money or what they did. I’m happy to be able to sell a painting so I can make another painting.” In Liquid Modernity (2000), Bauman defines the history of consumerism as the story of breaking down and discarding successive obstacles that limit our freedom. Need has been replaced by desire, which is more fluid and expandable. Desire has been replaced by the wish.32 Life organized around consumption is guided by seduction, ever rising desires and volatile wishes.33 The wish for freedom, progress, or alternative visions may be placated by art and by artists’ own selves. In our “liquid modern” world, we lack agency and freedom, but can “buy into” the vision of others and escape, if even momentarily, the constraints of our everyday lives. In Bauman’s words, “[l]iquid modernity has transformed us into a global community of consumers [. . .] mobile individuals with their logic of life deeply embedded in withdrawal-and-return.”34 Contemporary art and the artists who produce it are intimately aware that the public perception of art is that it is ultimately for sale, a product whose value is inseparable from its reception. By fostering a particular image of him or herself, the artist adds value to their product to the point that they themselves become the product. Their work inevitably proposes sets of ideals and value images that sell the artist’s world view. In this sense, the artist’s work could be seen an extension of “imagology,” “the art of making sets of ideals, anti-ideals and value-images that people 31 Ibid., 183. 32 Bauman, Liquid, 75. 33 Ibid., 76. 34 Donskis, Moral Blindness, 54.

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are supposed to follow without thinking or critically questioning, is the offspring of the media and advertising.”35 Baudrillard’s notion of “simulacra,” referring to reality’s disappearance into representations, is relevant here. Indeed, I would suggest that both Schnabel and the film’s protagonist Bauby fear that their representations might vanish, which would mean that they, too, would vanish, become irrelevant. This is, of course, one of the greatest fears of celebrity culture – the “fear of being beyond the tv and media world, which is tantamount to becoming a non-entity or the end of one’s existence.”36 Art, film, and culture are intimately entangled in this modern crisis of existence. As Bauman notes: “It has been precisely the knowledge of having to die, of the non-negotiable brevity of time, of the possibility or likelihood of visions remaining unfulfilled, projects unfinished and things not done, that has spurred humans into action and the human imagination into flight. It was that knowledge that made cultural creation a necessity and turned humans into creatures of culture.”37 One simple thing marks out our contemporary fears from those of our ancestors – the commercialization of our fears. Fear, like water, has been made a consumer commodity. In a consuming world suffering, too, is consumed, as are victims and stories.38 Here, then, is the layering of the cultural and the consumable: a narrative of suffering, a search for meaning in the modern world, and a contemporary artist selling his own vision. Both Bauby and Schnabel enact a quest for immortality, each to be preserved in his own memoir, whether it takes the form of art, film, or memoir. Bauman contends that in the modern condition gaining effective control over your soul and its immortality is what your life should be dedicated to; immortality is both something that must be earned, and a chance that may be lost.39 Immortality, in Bauman’s words, may be achieved by “the secure entrenchment in collective memory and/or in the shape of things to come.”40 Popular culture in general, and film in particular, are uniquely positioned to both offer and interrogate the modern condition and the anxious search for meaning; the mediated experiences which media technologies offer allow audiences to feel the highs and lows of modern life, all consumable and available at a price, and offering, for a brief moment, a resolution to the crises 35 Ibid., 71. 36 Ibid., 94. 37 Bauman qtd in Donskis, 101–102. 38 Donskis, 108. 39 Bauman and Raud, 9–10. 40 Ibid.

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of our times. Indeed, the technologies employed by mass media, television, film and the web, are increasingly offering solutions to all our anxieties: The on-going search for new ways of detoxifying the sting of the irritating elusiveness of immortality (as well as rendering the dream of immortality fit to be deployed in the service of economic profitability) is moving currently from the realm of entertainment (offering an ‘experience of immortality’, if not immortality itself, available ‘on the spot’, ready-made for instant consumption – and so pulling its vision down from the dreamy, unattainable heights of indef inite eternity to the category of goodswithin-reach, indeed of a daily served and digested nourishment) to that of technology. 41

Practices of Selfhood In Diving Bell, Schnabel’s very approach to and vision of the film becomes his “art.” Schnabel offers us his explicit (and literal) vision of the experience of being imprisoned, and of disability itself, thereby expanding the terms of reference for our understanding of disability, and the parameters of our experience. As the directorial vision of the film becomes the film, Schnabel practices his own selfhood through another, and the audience’s experience of the film is thoroughly his vision. He engages with the crisis of modernity inasmuch as the history of modernity is history of a certain type of self, 42 a self that is an object of scrutiny and contemplation. In the onscreen dramatization of a life in crisis, Schnabel sells his own interiority. It is in this way that we may conceive of Schnabel’s art/practice as director as a commodification of life. We can see film directing as a form of social performance that Schnabel’s own “self.” The very relationship between director/artist and audience creates the director/artist. The production of “selfhood” takes place via an “interaction with the audience rather than as unaccompanied solo performance,”43 and necessarily involves “negotiations with all the meaningful others towards whom one’s self-expression is directed, and constant correction of one’s own actions whenever some-thing seems to have gone amiss.”44 41 42 43 44

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 39.

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The creation of selfhood through constant negotiation with others is, of course, always a work-in-progress, as nothing in our liquid modern world defined by relationships “conspicuous for their fluid, transient and eminently revocable, ‘until-further-notice’ status”45 is permanently stable. This fact, Bauman insists, “should be placed in the very centre of an investigation of the dynamics of the self once it is conducted, as ours is, in a multi-centred, deregulated, fragmented and fluid world of similarly fragmented and deregulated lives.”46 Citing Margaret Mead’s earlier work on the self – Mind, Self, and Society (1972) – Bauman here touches on the labor involved in the production of the self and obtaining the recognition it needs. Mead’s work, like Bauman’s, examines the relationship between identity and modernity, acknowledging that modernity works to erode certainty and the promises of previous solutions, such as religion, while constantly striving to recover certainty in new guises. It is out of this ongoing questioning of one’s place in the world that modern identity is forged, Mead argues. In the formation of the self in the matrix of the modern world the work of forming the self is onerous and ongoing, a continuous “work-in-progress” where the self is always open to interpretation by new and changing others/audiences. In modern life, with its multiple screen and online networks and painless movement between platforms, audiences are always changing and new ones are constantly produced. In moving between the worlds of art and film, Schnabel continuously works to buttress the allure of his persona and his unique artistic vision. With allegiances easily formed and just as easily cast off, the process of self-formation, self-presentation, and self-negotiation are stripped of risk and discomfort.47 Through the distinct lavish production and artistic vision that Schnabel creates in Diving Bell he is curating his own self, much like the way in which Mead suggested we create our own codes so that we are readable and recognisable to others. The lavish scenes of his films act alongside the massive canvasses, sails, roofs, and other materials in Schnabel’s art to reconfirm his unique artistry and make him knowable. The grand scale and the lavish scenography suggest a grandiosity at one with a grand ego, and in tandem with contemporary art. “I’m as close to Picasso as you’re going to get,” Schnabel apparently once told New York. 48 We may use Bauman’s schema to acknowledge that, in tandem with the modern condition and 45 Ibid., 41. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 42. 48 McBain, “A Year,” n.p.

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with our consumerist culture, Schnabel’s work may be construed as that of a genius, although this is always open to interpretation and reinterpretation. Innovation must become routine, and so in our liquid modern times the route to becoming a genius is a long one: [O]ne can be ‘innovative’ and ‘original’ in oodles of ways, most of which prove blind alleys, false dawns of gambits leading astray. Which manifestation of originality is a mark of genius and which is no more than another of all-too-common blunders is decided retrospectively, and there is no time limit attached to that decision and its eventual revisions. The pattern set by a solitary eccentric’s innovation needs first to transmogrify into a routine for the weirdo to be ushered into the ‘genius’ class through the gate reserved for the ‘precursors’, ‘harbingers’, ‘trail blazers’ and ‘pioneers’ – or indeed ‘prophets’. 49

Schnabel as Curator In the practice of his selfhood, we may conceive of Schnabel as curating his own image. Creating a body of work that acts alongside his distinct public persona, as well as cultivating his relationship with mass media, can be seen as an act of curation inasmuch as “curating is everywhere being extended, encompassing every kind of organizing of any body of images or set of actions.”50 The contemporary artist curator can be seen as an invention of our times – an outcome of spectacularized culture. Artists have opened up new, imaginative ways of seeing,51 enacting spectacular versions of themselves as products – knowable, consumable, onscreen. Current debates about curating indicate the vitality of the discourse, its close engagement with art practice, and its willingness to grapple with changes in contemporary life. They also suggest that the ground of what it is to be a curator is shifting.52 Within the art context, the term “curator” now occupies a growing portfolio of activities and practices, operating across divergent practices rather than simply being entrusted with the overseeing of a particular collection or display, thus bringing different cultural elements into contact. 49 Bauman and Raud, 43. 50 Smith, Thinking, 31. 51 Ostling “How Might Recent Theorisation.” 52 Smith, Thinking, 55.

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The current trend in contemporary art is toward celebrity culture, with the curator becoming “the image of the glamorous entrepreneur.”53 Celebrity artists/curators prepare the way for an expansion of the art market: “through the leverage of current cultural and knowledge economies, the contemporary art curator [has become] [. . .] a means to create knowledge, disperse influence, and generate capital.”54 Increasingly, celebrity artists/ directors operate across and utilize the expanse of knowledge and cultural economies, acting as art entrepreneurs to create and sustain economies of scale to leverage their fame and create synergies through their work.

Conclusion If we believe in the lofty aspiration that “art mediates power relations, establishes ideational realms, as well as influencing the routine encounters and engagements of everyday life,”55 then Schnabel’s opus as well as his performance of selfhood contribute to dominant notions of art and its place in the world. Operating across the culture industries and straddling mediums in this way, Schnabel’s work can be seen to buttress ideational realms through its recirculation of ideologies. It operates as an effective medium of cultural rhetoric, not least because his performance of selfhood underscores the aims and ideologies of his work. As an industry, the art world in which Schnabel’s work and persona sit, necessarily operates around financial gain, so that, to channel Adorno and Horkheimer, “In the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears.”56 Contemporary art, as a culture industry ostensibly including film, imposes upon itself a financial imperative. The irony is that, while claiming extreme social openness and political commitment in the vein of the avant-garde’s impact on society, contemporary art – de facto – in its economic disposition happens to be part and parcel of post-Fordist alienated production. In other words, in narratives it claims democratic and resisting values, but in reality it happens to be a nonsocialized, nondemocratic i.e., quasi-modernist realm in its means of production and sense.57 53 Ostling, 88. 54 Ibid.. 55 DeMarrais and Robb, 6. 56 Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 356. 57 Chukhrov, n.p.

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If the socio-cultural construction of the celebrity artist is an integral aspect of contemporary art, then Schnabel is consecrated as the artist par excellence.

Bibliography Abeel, Erica. “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Interview with Julian Schnabel.” [Online] https://www.indiewire.com/2007/11/indiewire-interview-the-divingbell-and-the-butterfly-director-julian-schnabel-73424/. Adorno, Theodore and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Mass Communication and Society, eds. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woolacott. London: Open University Press, 1977. 349–383. Bakare, Lanre. “Interview: Julien Schnabel ‘Why can’t a while person tell the story of a black person?’” The Guardian. April 5, 2019. Julian Schnabel: ‘Why can’t a white person tell the story of a black person? Everyone is pink inside’ | At Eternity’s Gate | The Guardian Bauby, Jean Dominque. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Bauman, Zygmunt and Leonidas Donskis. Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Bauman, Zygmunt and Rein Raud. Practices of Selfhood. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Brophy, Gregory. “Untouchable: ‘Disabling’ Cinema’s Contract on Contact in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’. New Review of Film and Television Studies. 2021, 1–22. Chukhrov, Keti. “On the False Democracy of Contemporary Art.” e-flux [Online] https://www.e-f lux.com/journal/57/60430/on-the-false-democracy-ofcontemporary-art/ Corsicato, Pappi, dir. Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait. 2017. eOne Films Distribution. DeMarrais, Elizabeth and John Robb. “Art Makes Society: An Introductory Visual Essay.” World Art 3, no. 1 (2013): 3–22. Finch, Charlie. “Schnabel and His Doubles” artnet.com No Date. [Online] http:// www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/finch4-29-08.asp. Klimczuk, A. “Cultural Capital.” The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, eds. D. Cook and J.M. Ryan. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 209–214. http://doi.org/10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs083 McBain, Sophie. “A Year in the Life of Julian Schnabel.” GQ (May, 15 2018). [Online] https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/julian-schnabel-art-exhibition. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

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Monaco, James. How To Read A Film. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Neale, Stephen. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000. Ostling, Susan. “Curators, Their Personal Attributes, and Modes of Practice: A Historical Comparison.” International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2014. 87–99. Ostling, Susan. “How Might Recent Theorisation of ‘the Curatorial’ Be Valuable to the ‘Artist as Curator’ in the Context of the Art School Environment?” ACUADS Annual Conference, QUT Creative Industries Faculty, Brisbane, 29–30 September 2016. Schnabel, Julian, dir. At Eternity’s Gate. 2018. Riverstone Pictures. Schnabel, Julian, dir. Basquiat. 1996. Miramax. Schnabel, Julian, dir. Before Night Falls. 2000. Grandview Pictures. Schnabel, Julian, dir. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 2000. Canal+. Smith, Terry. “Currents of World-Making in Contemporary Art.” World Art 1, no. 2 (2011). 171–188. Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International, 2012.

About the Author Susan Flynn is Director of eduCORE, the centre for excellence in educational research centre at the Institute of Technology, Carlow, Ireland. She teaches digital culture and education, and her research is concerned with the performance and the curation of the self via digital technologies. She is editor of a number of edited collections, including The Body Onscreen in the Digital Age and Screening American Nostalgia (both forthcoming in 2021, New York: McFarland).

16. Peter Greenaway’s Artist-Entrepreneurs Marco de Waard Abstract This chapter considers the relationship between art, commerce, and artistic entrepreneurship in film through the case of Peter Greenaway’s “Dutch Masters” films Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012). Drawing on theoretical work on affective labor, precarity, and entrepreneurial subjectivity in the new creative industries – and more broadly in contemporary public spheres, – it analyzes the eponymous character of Goltzius and the Pelican Company as a “virtuoso” figure whose performance of himself in the cultural marketplace holds an ineradicably political potential, related to his deployment of theatricality and language. In the context of Greenaway’s cinema, this leads to reflection on how Goltzius encodes its engagement with artistic entrepreneurship in what is here called an aesthetic of “virtuosic remediation.” Keywords: Peter Greenaway, affective labor, creative entrepreneurship, remediation, virtuosity

This chapter considers the relationship between art, commerce, and creative labor in the cultural marketplace, as depicted in Peter Greenaway’s “Dutch Masters” films Nightwatching (2007) and Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), and secondarily in the spin-off mockumentary Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2008).1 I pursue this inquiry in the context of a broader interest in how Greenaway’s films engage with the (artistic and political) public sphere, for a historical imaginary of publicness is present in many of his features and inflects how themes of democracy and public freedom, artisthood and 1 The title “Dutch Masters” is adopted here from promotional texts (e.g. it is used by Greenaway’s publisher Dis Voir: http://www.disvoir.com/fr/fo/b/191.html Accessed April 26, 2021). Greenaway did not initially plan the f ilms as a series but accepted in retrospect that, together with a projected film on Hieronymus Bosch, they might be seen to add up to a trilogy (Lyman, “Peter Greenaway”).

Trifonova, T. (ed.), Screening the Art World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724852_ch16

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creative entrepreneurship are taken up and interrelated. In one perspective, the f ilms in the “Dutch Masters” series would seem to be thematically continuous with earlier features in Greenaway’s oeuvre, most notably The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), in that they foreground the contractual element that binds artist-entrepreneurs to structures of power and patronage in which they might get enmeshed and lose (artistic) control. In what follows, however, it will be argued that the “Dutch Masters” f ilms also form a new departure as they invite analysis of the pressures placed on subjectivity when the imperative to “be creative” is generalized to extend from artistic or aesthetic labor to immaterial and affective labor in a large, encompassing sense.2 The point is to show how, in so doing, the films probe the ways in which “art” and “business” slide into each other in the present cultural juncture. Greenaway’s version of Goltzius as a “virtuosic” artistentrepreneur is emblematic of the precarious labor conditions that apply in today’s neoliberal world of commercialized creativity and performative self-exploitation. Moreover, both Nightwatching and Goltzius and the Pelican Company explore, in different ways, how self-marketing artists whose “freedom” to trade the products of their creativity so easily masks new forms of subjugation might reclaim political and critical agency vis-à-vis the structures of power in which they find themselves entangled. To this extent, raising the question of political possibility, both f ilms present the plight of the entrepreneurial artist in ways that resonate with recent discussions of neoliberal subject formation, as will be seen by placing them in conversation with Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Isabell Lorey, and other critical theorists who help us think about neoliberal subjectivation in creative industry contexts. I should stress from the outset that in proposing this kind of approach to Greenaway’s work the aim is not primarily to study the “Dutch Masters” films under the rubric of artist biopics. Avoiding the narrative and psychologizing conventions of the biopic genre, the films do not so much offer interpretative accounts of their protagonists as imaginative, theatrically staged re-creations of some of the courtly or public urban settings in which both Goltzius and Rembrandt found themselves fashioning new relationships with their publics and their art (in Golzius’s case, prompted by 2 Here, I follow Michael Hardt’s (building on Maurizio Lazzarato’s) understanding of affective labor as a specific form of the more general category of immaterial labor. See Hardt, “Affective Labor”; Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor”; cf. Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory?” “Be creative” is a reference to Angela McRobbie’s analysis of what she calls the neoliberal “creativity dispositif.” McRobbie, Be Creative, 1–16.

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new technical advances in printmaking and engraving). As this makes for films that ask attention for their own relationship with other media and art forms, as well as their histories, the discussion is more productively framed in the broader terms of the politics of cultural memory and mnemonic remediation in Greenaway’s cinema – a pursuit in which the question of art, artists, and the art world on screen is tied up with that of how the films self-consciously (at times even media-archaeologically) comment on the terms of their own self-inscription in the art and media histories they revisit. All this is well-trodden ground for Greenaway scholars and afficionados, as intermedial and “archaeomodern” discussions of his work would seem to underline.3 The present focus on the engagement with publicness in the “Dutch Masters” series returns us to more directly political questions while retaining a sense of the films as partaking in what Mieke Bal has called a “preposterous” temporal structure, i.e. a structure that is firmly presentist and may yet be deeply historically engaged as its practice of quotation re-envisions the past to obtain new, productive angles on the contemporary moment. 4 The task, then, is to connect two very different concerns. First, I am interested in seeing how the dialogue staged by the “Dutch Masters” films with newly emergent public life conditions from the 1640s and 1590s, respectively – the rise of modern print techniques and of new public spaces – occasions representations that hold allegorical potential for the eviscerated, fear-ridden public spheres that characterize early-twenty-first-century neoliberalized societies. In this context, Greenaway’s protagonists are not so much biographees as figures with the potential to emblematize historical forms of public life that may illuminate the present. The director’s Rembrandt, I argue, approximates the figure of the parrhesiastic contrarian: an artist who speaks “truth to power” through the message that is provocatively encoded, in Greenaway’s proposition, in the painting now known as the Night Watch. Meanwhile, Greenaway’s Goltzius approximates the figure of the virtuoso, a figure of entanglement and ensnarement who holds aesthetic and political forms of agency together in a complex and highly public negotiation of both. In both cases, the modalities of these artists’ implication in nascent early modern public spaces resonate strangely but persistently with the contemporary experience of what Paolo Virno has called “publicness without

3 E.g. Kovács, Screening Modernism, 202; Tweedie, Moving Pictures, 193–216; Peucker, Aesthetic Spaces, 41–65. 4 Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 7; cf. De Waard, “Art and Aisthesis.”

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a public sphere”5 – a condition in which individuals who have been reduced to being “entrepreneurs of the self”6 see the traditionally political qualities of their public modes of action diminish or retreat. Second, considering work as meta-cinematic and self-referential as Greenaway’s, this line of inquiry ultimately leads back to the question of the place of digital film itself in the landscapes of publicness and art-as-business to which I take the “Dutch Masters” films to speak. I argue that the way in which a certain style of “virtuosity” is incorporated into the visual language of Goltzius works as a commentary on its own status as an intermedial feature and on the form of its self-inscription in the system of cultural production it inhabits.

Nightwatching and Rembrandt’s J’Accuse Greenaway’s interest in publics – and in the idea of cinema as an essentially public art – is very well established.7 He himself has commented often on the ornamental and sculptural qualities of the figure of the audience or public in his work, locating its emergence in the scene in The Belly of an Architect (1987) where an ensemble of “dilettanti architects [. . .] clapped the Pantheon” as if it was a performance.8 The film’s proposition that “Rome is the play” cast the eternal city as a grand theatrical stage where publics and monumental buildings face each other as if enveloped in a vision of the city, its art and heritage, as a political-symbolic space that bestows identity and form on collective memory and experience. Thomas Elsaesser has paid the most sustained attention to the political character of this engagement with publicness, suggesting that Greenaway – only apparently in tension with his much-rehearsed thesis about cinema’s “end” or “death” – “might just offer a vision of a new, eminently civic, maybe even democratic, but in any case, yet to be realized, public function for the cinema.”9 Indeed, in rejuvenating his (meta-)cinema practice by placing it in dialogue with public architecture and public urban spaces – sometimes literally so, taking his filmic vocabulary 5 Virno, Grammar, 40. 6 Foucault, The Birth, 226. 7 This section reworks material from my 2012 essay “Rembrandt on Screen,” which considered Greenaway’s Rembrandt f ilms of 2007–2008 within the double context of Rembrandt Year 2006 and its commercialization of art-as-heritage on the one hand, and the European arthouse tradition of the Rembrandt biopic on the other. 8 Steinmetz and Greenaway, The World, 122. 9 Elsaesser, European Cinema, 190. Greenaway reiterates his thesis about the “death of cinema” in numerous places, e.g. see Meyer, “Playing with New Toys.”

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into the streets or projecting it onto civic buildings10 – Greenaway’s art might well be said to attempt to “preserve the cinema for its audiences [. . .] not for art’s sake, but for politics’ sake.”11 Originally written in 1996, this assessment still feels apt, and it is worth revisiting in light of the evolving trajectory of Greenaway’s triple career as a film-maker, exhibition curator, and installation artist whose catalogue of moving-image art for museums, galleries, and heritage sites has involved him ever more closely in Europe’s cultural heritage industries since the 1990s. A unique, politically inflected mode of “expanded cinema” has shaped up that turns the European city of heritage into its theater of (peaceful!) operations; alongside the feature films, it has continued to proceed by taking his work into the city – itself understood as a repository of cultural memory – to make a spectacular display of past aesthetic and cultural codes and to reimagine its spaces as what Elsaesser called “agora-spaces” for a digitized, late-postmodern world.12 I argue that this trajectory makes increasingly manifest a full-fledged, indeed democratic imaginary of publicness which, in recent years, has centered on memories of early modern social experience as if to find in courts, cities or small towns on the cusp of transition to modernity the creative material for re-envisioning possibilities for public life today. Rembrandt’s Amsterdam around 1642 (Nightwatching) and Colmar during a fictional visit by Goltzius in the early 1590s (Goltzius and the Pelican Company): the two films take us back to small-scale, close-knit civic units of an early modern kind, just as Greenaway’s site-specific multimedia installations at the Royal Palace of Venaria (2007), Castle Amerongen (2011; with Saskia Boddeke), and in Basel and Lucca (both 2013) testify to Greenaway’s fascination with the social theatricality of its early modern citizens or subjects, dozens of whom he has animated on projection screens for indoor or outdoor display.13 The “Dutch Masters” films converge with this work as much as they do with Greenaway’s other feature films with early modern settings (The Draughtsman’s Contract, Prospero’s Books, The Baby of Mâcon). As the interest in spaces forms an important unifying thread, I will borrow the term “‘ocular’ public space” – occasionally used by Arendtian public sphere theorists14 – to refer to Greenaway’s interest in evoking internally 10 A notable early example are the large-scale installation projects realized at various locations in Geneva and Munich, respectively, in 1994 and 1995; see Greenaway, The Stairs: Geneva and The Stairs: Munich Projection. 11 Elsaesser, European Cinema, 191. 12 Ibid., 189. 13 E.g. see Greenaway, The Towers: Lucca Hubris. 14 Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 8.

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homogenous, state-centered public spheres that are notably weak in the exercise of rational-critical public sphere functions but no less political in that they are suffused with theatricality, more precisely with theatrical forms of self-staging (or, social mise en scène) on the part of the community in its quest to project a unified image of itself or to overcome a violent rupture. In the context of Greenway’s cinema, the focus on “ocular” public spaces suits an ocularcentric imagination that has long had an interest in constructing fields of visuality as fields of more or less visible power relations, both The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Baby of Mâcon being cases in point. Nightwatching came out in the immediate aftermath of Rembrandt Year 2006, which was celebrated in Amsterdam (and throughout the Netherlands) with a surfeit of Rembrandt-themed exhibitions, cultural projects, and events, including an installation by Greenaway in the Rijksmuseum. The film comes closest in Greenaway’s oeuvre to a narrative artist biopic, although comparison with other films about Rembrandt – a rich European tradition, which includes films by Alexander Korda (1936), Jos Stelling (1977), and Charles Matton (1999), as well as a curious biopic by Nazi director Hans Steinhoff (1942) – points up a significant departure from the “misunderstood genius” plot so typical of the genre. While Greenaway creates a contemplative, at times quietly lyrical mood that would seem to honor the long-standing image of Rembrandt as an artist of interiority and “northern” spiritual depth, the film shifts attention from the private spaces of production or creation to politically consequential public spaces of display. What motivates this narratively is the film’s revision of the “fall-from-favor” topos traditionally associated with the Night Watch in European cultural memory. At the center of the plot is the idea of the painting as “[Rembrandt’s] David challenge to the contemporary Goliaths”: a clique of Amsterdam burghers who, it is charged, while commissioning a collective portrait in their function as civic militia, engage in child trafficking and other misdeeds that their hypocrisy seeks to hide. The painting, incorporating clues to unravel a cover-up conspiracy and a murder, is thus “Rembrandt’s forensic enquiry in paint, his Crime Scene Investigation in the Breestraat.”15 It is typical for Greenaway that as the story of Rembrandt’s rejection by the Amsterdam establishment gets turned into one that returns political/critical agency to the artist, the film stages the theatrical social style of the burghers on the model of an animated reconstruction of his painting. As a privileged medium in the film, theatricality becomes a way to recover past political energies and valences; 15 Greenaway, Nightwatching, 3.

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it is even used for staging the artist’s more private anxieties and moods to comment on themes of violence and power, most notably in the fantasy of a sacrificial blinding which opens and closes the film, staged on a dark-lit stage.16 Rembrandt’s J’Accuse brings Nightwatching’s concern with a historical form or style of publicness still further to the fore. A faster-paced remediation of the biopic, overlayed with a barrage of visual and textual quotations in the mode of a mockumentary that has Greenaway double as art educator, it notes the circumstances of the very public display of the Night Watch for some three hundred years before the emergence of public museums in the mid-nineteenth century. In a remediated scene from Nightwatching that has Rembrandt walk through the great hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, home to the company of civic guardsman who are to become his subjects, he gets the idea to turn the commissioned work into a public “indictment” – indeed, a “j’accuse.” The scene thus associates the painting not just with the history of early modern (semi-)public spaces but with a politicized idea of them, recoding the Night Watch as a parrhesiastic act and Rembrandt himself as a parrhesiastic figure. In juxtaposition with images of Amsterdam’s Museum Square as an art-themed tourist space elsewhere in the film, art museum and exhibition spaces are thus re-envisioned as part of a public sphere where art may yet be the site of critique, of the practice of holding power to account. Taken together – and notwithstanding their abundant use of irony and pastiche – both Rembrandt films are painterly animations that speak to debates about the depoliticizing effects of cultural heritage discourse and practices in the commodified “city of culture.” It is in their deployment of theatricality and animated tableaux, seen as forms of mnemonic remediation, that both films reinvent or recode museum spaces as eminently public spaces whose political valences may still resonate today.

Goltzius and the Pelican Company: “We Traded in Words” After the relatively subdued and contemplative moods of Nightwatching, Goltzius and the Pelican Company marked a return to Greenaway’s signature neo-Baroque aesthetic, awash with richly textured visual overlays and prolific art-historical quotation. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described the film as “an explicitly, almost pedantically erotic court masque for the cinema, and an attempt to fuse the early modern aesthetic of the sixteenth century with the 16 For more analysis of theater as a “mediating term between painting and film” in Nightwatching, see Peucker, Aesthetic Spaces, 48–55, quote from 48.

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twenty-first century medium of digital film.”17 As a cinematic masque, it also continued the engagement with theatricality in a political key, specifically by understanding Goltzius and his entourage as performers who try to save their skin by catering to the Margrave of Alsace’s every whim. An equally relevant comparison is with The Draughtsman’s Contract: just like the draughtsman Neville, who naively steps into a contractual commitment – on the level of a “paid servant” – that becomes his undoing on account of how it ensnares him in the “crisis in symbolic paternity” that is registered on different levels through the film,18 Goltzius courts – and obtains – a commission whose dark demands on him exceed the transactional as they tie him to an autocrat’s tyrannical style of rule. As well, like Neville’s, the deal that Goltzius makes has both a sexual and an artistic element: it repeats the structure of a double contract with a capacity to tip the balance of power between the contracting parties. The most conspicuous difference, however, is Goltzius’ entrepreneurial savvy, a quality the film relates to his understanding of theatricality, of the political nature of his performance of “virtuosity,” and perhaps even to the (secret) affinity he has with the Margrave on account of the latter’s dependence on the spectacular staging of his power. To put it schematically: Neville’s contract inscribes him in a complex, overdetermined field of visuality on which he fails to obtain perspective (after all, he is only a draughtsman!), while Goltzius’ deal with the Margrave inscribes him in a theatrical field of entertainment and display, in which the dark (sexual and political) games that are being played set him up not only for a deepening spiral of self-exploitation, but also for a chance to extricate himself, if not every other member of his troupe, from vicious courtly dangers. Indeed, in considering the film’s dénouement, I shall argue that Goltzius finds in the condition of theatricality – which this film treats as ontological – a principle of autonomy or freedom that ultimately has primacy over autocratic or sovereign power in the film. The narrative is set in the winter of 1590–1591, well before the historical Goltzius became successful and could afford to turn to painting. There is no historical basis for assuming that he visited Colmar on his way to Italy, but we know from Karel van Mander’s Schilderboek that he travelled through Germany (possibly Alsace) on his journey south, occasionally indulging in theatrics by changing roles with his servant – apparently for his amusement.19 The character of the Margrave is entirely fictional: the 17 Bradshaw, “Goltzius and the Pelican Company.” 18 For a discussion of this point, see Michael Walsh, “Allegories,” 287–291, quote from 288. 19 Van Mander, Het Schilderboek, 330–344, see 333. Greenaway comments on the extent to which he fictionalized the historical material in Ciment, “Entretien.”

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idea of a local tyrant or potentate, lording it over an island of autocracy in a world that is on the cusp of discovering ideas of liberty of thought and expression, pushes the biographical material in a political direction and resituates it in a context of transition to the modern. The commission that Goltzius obtains from the Margrave speaks directly to this context: his company from The Hague, in order to finance a printing press that will allow him to produce an illustrated version of the Old Testament – and, in an anticipated second commission, an illustrated Ovid – commits itself to dramatizing six erotic biblical tales on six consecutive nights for the Margrave’s entertainment.20 As a special contractual condition, not only does this provide occasion for the dazzling intermedial games in which the film delights – its dialogue with theater, painting, the arts of drawing and engraving, and the staging of elaborate tableaux vivants – but it also permits Greenaway to explore the nature of contractual power in the film within a nexus of relations in which commercial pursuit, artistic and media innovation, and erotic desire all commingle. In this regard, and taking the film as part of Greenaway’s “cinema of ideas,”21 I see it as significant that in the frame narrative, which has an older and established Goltzius look back on his days at the Alsatian court, the entrepreneurial element is played up in terms of the opportunistic promise of voyeuristic satisfaction – indeed, of the immaterial products of affective and communicative labor. As Goltzius puts it at the start of the film: “We traded in words.” As an acknowledgment of the complex implication of his entrepreneurial pursuits in a web of communication and sociality – courtly and modern, corporeal and mediated by modern print – this adds to the sense that the film invites consideration not just as a historical fiction but in terms of cultural and creative labor conditions today. For a critical perspective on these conditions as they prevail in our neoliberalized creative and entertainment industries I will rely here on theoretical work in the Italian autonomist tradition (Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno) and the way that some of its insights have been reworked in a Foucauldian vein by Isabell Lorey. What makes this theoretical work attractive, for my purposes, is its concern with the increasing pressures on subjectivity that are exerted when cultural labor becomes performative – as it does when it is focused on the production of affects and more broadly of new socialities and “forms of life.” Lazzarato’s classic essay “Immaterial Labor” was very clear that with the shift to “post-Fordist” models of labor, 20 The Hague replaces Haarlem, the real Goltzius’ base in the Low Countries, in the film. 21 The term is Greenaway’s own (qtd in Woods, Being Naked, 18, 281).

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“workers are expected to become ‘active subjects’ in the coordination of the various functions of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command.”22 Hardt elaborates on the “affective face” of immaterial labor by arguing that it merges “the instrumental action of economic production [. . .] with the communicative action of human relations” – a form of breakdown of “the division between economy and culture” that, again, reaches far into the constitution of subjectivity and sociality.23 Meanwhile Lorey, whose dialog with the Italian tradition is primarily through Virno, supplements this framework with questions about the transformation of present-day public spheres and how they witness the erosion of specifically political freedoms. If for Virno “the boundaries between pure intellectual activity, political action, and labor have dissolved,”24 with qualities traditionally associated with politics subsumed under public forms of communication-asproduction, for Lorey, reworking the analysis through the prism of Foucault’s “governmentality,” what is at stake is how today’s regimes of entrepreneurial “freedom” lack any political element but are deeply disciplining and subjugating in effect, “conducting the conduct” of subjects who internalize the logic of market and capital to the point that they constitute themselves as “entrepreneurs of the self.” For Lorey, as for Virno, the “virtuosity” this exacts seems emptied of political qualities, even as it takes place in spaces that are the home of political action.25 The precarious artist or creative worker is emblematic of the convolutions and paradoxes of this condition, which sets an expectation of public, performative excellence that turns “virtuosity” into “a self-referential and competitive servility. Virtuoso labour thus shows itself as ‘universal servile work.’”26 Let me build on this framework to highlight Goltzius’ contemporary resonance and critical allegorical potential. Crucially, while artistic entrepreneurship finds its epitome in Goltzius himself within the narrative – he pioneers technical innovation and risks his skin for a business opportunity – it also works in it as a generalizable logic that exceeds the conf ines of individual character or motivation. We have already seen that the terms of the contract introduce a demand that is in excess of artistic production proper. Let us spell out the consequences in terms of an intensif ication and diversif ication of communicative and affective 22 Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 135. 23 Hardt, “Affective Labor,” 96. 24 Virno, Grammar, 50. 25 Lorey, State of Insecurity, 73–90. 26 Ibid., 86 (italics in original).

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labor: the “work” of entertaining the Margrave is driven by intellectual or literary labor (the playwright Boethius, a member of Goltzius’ troupe, who develops the concept for each performance), spills over into forms of emotional and affective labor (Goltzius himself in his contact with the Margrave, chatting him up), and finally into erotic or sexual labor as well (starting with the characters Quadfrey and his wife Portia, coaxed into having intercourse on stage to please the Margrave). It is the stringing together of these different but adjacent forms of labor, all springing from the same contractual source, that constitutes Goltzius as a cinematic interrogation of the production of sociality and affective experience under conditions of precarity. If we may relate this allegorically to present-day labor conditions, it is because in their ensemble and adjacency, and in the transitions and slippage between them, the different forms of work in the film paradoxically reveal the de-politicized nature of the space in which they transpire and a stubborn political potential: on the one hand, we see a de-politicizing environment as the Margrave pushes back hard against the libertarian energies he has released, disavowing his enjoyment of each night of entertainment by staging “show trials” at his court that censor the Pelican Company’s freedom of speech; yet we see a political energy in Goltzius and his troupe as well, not so much on account of any specific message they may be committed to expressing, as on account of the very event of their performance. To understand this latter point, we need to see how the contract sets in motion a machinery not so much of theater as of theatricality, what Samuel Weber has described as a “wandering” principle – a kind of “subversive power” or energy that has no proper place, moves by definition across borders and boundaries, physical and ideal, and is to this extent anarchic.27 At this point it is worth returning to the historical material to ask how the notion of “virtuosity” – as an ambivalent and overdetermined concept – resonates in the context of what is known about Goltzius’ life and work and his place in the art market in his day.28 In art-historical scholarship, Goltzius has served as a locus of discussion for considering the question of when 27 Weber, Theatricality, 37: “Theatricality demonstrates its subversive power when it forsakes the confines of the theatron and begins to wander: when, in short, it separates itself from theater. For in so doing it begins to escape control by the prevailing rules of representation, whether aesthetic, social, or political.” 28 The question is not without risk of anachronism: cultural-historical interest in public discourses of virtuosity, and indeed in the “virtuoso” as a recognizable cultural type, has been more focused on modern, especially nineteenth- and twentieth-century case studies and examples. E.g. see Brandstetter, “The Virtuoso’s Stage.”

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artistic or technical skills and technical invention turn into “virtuosity.”29 Although his biographer Van Mander does not (and possibly could not) use the term virtuosity in his account of Goltzius, he does provide a description that has been hugely influential: “Goltzius is a rare Proteus or Vertumnus in art, because he can transform himself to all forms of working methods.”30 Importantly, the meaning of “virtuosity” here need not be linked to skill or dexterity alone; it has also been connected to notions of changeability and shape-shifting, for which the names of Proteus and Vertumnus stand as shorthand. Walter Melion, in his reading of Van Mander, has thus spoken of a “paradigm of Protean virtuosity” that extended to the artist’s comportment of himself in public, signifying “a constellation of changes – of materials, of appearances, of social profile – that can characterize broadly the artist’s trade – his manipulation of media, his production of persuasive likenesses, his subordination of self in the interests of accurate depiction and in deference to a client’s requirements.”31 Taking my cue from this cluster of associations, which move from dexterous imitative and reproductive skills to the artist’s social adaptability, I want to stress the connection between them in the context of rivalry and competition in an art-market dynamic. The point to make is that in terms of the allegorizing procedures or strategies of Greenaway’s film, his virtuosic Goltzius maps well onto the notion of the contemporary virtuoso’s plight as governmentally shaped or produced, i.e. as standing for a modality of “freedom” in the public square that intensifies – dramatizes – the conditions of the virtuoso’s “servitude” in order to shape his conduct and make it bend to the laws of the market. In this light, it seems fully motivated that in Greenaway’s film Goltzius is primarily a character who talks, while the question of virtuosic technique gets, as it were, displaced from the character onto the film-maker’s own art of remediation, of copying and adaptation. It is through talk that Greenaway’s Goltzius secures his commission, through talk that he organizes the web of relationships in which he is entangled (from his company to the Alsatian court), and through talk that he stays socially afloat once the Margrave has sealed his downfall by wandering into the theatrical space he has set up, violently intervening in the final (sixth) performance in a way that undermines the spectacle of his own rule. This is what the logic of Goltzius’ “servile virtuosity” results in: the possibility of escape from the conundrum of entrepreneurial self-exploitation and the virtuoso’s precarity lies hidden in the performance conditions of virtuosity 29 See different contributions to Michels, Hendrick Goltzius. 30 Van Mander qtd. in Breazeale and Sancho Lobis, Passion and Virtuosity, 9. 31 Melion, “Karel van Mander’s Life of Goltzius,” 115.

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itself within this film, as if the political qualities it harbors are never fully extinguished but can always reassert themselves to transform the texture of relations. Notwithstanding the threat of sacrificial violence that constantly runs through Goltzius – it sees Boethius, the playwright, beheaded in the context of his dramatic rendering of John the Baptist on the final night of entertainment – it ends on a note of emancipation insofar as it asserts the primacy of the virtuoso’s freedom over the trappings of courtly power.

Virtuosic Remediation The starting point of this chapter was the idea that the f igure of the entrepreneurial artist in Goltzius and the Pelican Company – seen in the context of a broader genealogical interest in publicness in both “Dutch Masters” films – might be read as emblematic of contemporary neoliberal conditions of labor and production in the “new” creative industries.32 Situating the figure within a paradigm of “virtuosity” that is both historical and critical-theoretical, I have tried to show that it stands for a mode of public self-implication which – reimagined through the prism of cultural memory – maps well onto the entrepreneurial subject’s predicament in today’s fragile public spheres, marked by experiences of insecurity, fear, and the evisceration of political agency. The freely fictionalized historical setting of the films, ostensibly so remote from today’s creative industries, does not detract from the point. The “ocular” public spaces that can be seen to shape social experience in Greenaway’s early modern settings resonate curiously with contemporary public life conditions insofar as they exact a performance of the self which, paradoxically, is as servile and subject to discipline as it is individualistic and brandable as “creative.” A cultural figure or type that embodies these paradoxes, the “virtuoso” straddles the early modern and our present neoliberal era – its retrieval from the past allegorically illuminating, in a gesture of “preposterous” historical reimagining indeed, the present constellation. The final aspect to consider, then, is the place of this recovered paradigm of “Protean” virtuosity within the condition of twenty-first-century digital film. How does this paradigm, understood cross-temporally, resonate with the director’s art of mnemonic remediation in the context of digital filmmaking? How might we read the bravura performance of virtuosity in Goltzius as a statement about Greenaway’s own cinema, self-referential and 32 McRobbie, Be Creative.

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auteurist as it is? It seems to me that one can only respond to these questions by recalling how virtuosity was visually encoded in the early modern artist’s technical and artistic achievement to make imitative reproductive skill as such – the skill of “rendering” the “hands” or signature style of other artists to perfection – into an object of representation.33 Analogously, by recoding his practice of cinematic remediation in a virtuosic key, Greenaway offers a meta-commentary on his intermedial art practice that relates it to a dynamic of contest and rivalry in the capitalist cultural marketplace, seen in its current, heavily technologized and digitized form. A different way of putting this is to say that Greenaway makes Goltzius pertinent to the condition of digital film-making on account of the artist’s Protean skill as a drawer and engraver and the competitive, survivalist drive identified with it within the filmic narrative. On this reading, Goltzius is not simply cast as another proto-cinematic forebear, on a par with the great proto-cinematic quartet of Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez (claimed by Greenaway with much zest in Rembrandt’s J’Accuse and elsewhere).34 Rather, this broader proto-cinematic canon, so well established in the director’s oeuvre – where it is commonly centered on the motif of “cinematic” artificial light in painting – is here expanded in the direction of a discourse of intermedial dialogue, circulation, and exchange that understands the visual codes of remediation as such, on the model of the historical Goltzius’ dexterous “renderings,” in economic and competitive terms. On this reading, the director’s turn to Goltzius as the second of his “Dutch Masters” is all the more resonant and compelling as the artist’s work included mixed-media work that recognized the historicity of some of the artistic examples it recycled or adapted. On the one hand, then, Greenaway’s film is a tribute from one mnemonic visual artist to another, a celebration of virtuosic remediation as a modality of self-inscription in the history of the visual arts – which, it should be added, is understood here from the perspective of an idea of film as a hybrid, “impure” practice that needs to engage with other media, such as theater and painting, if it is ever to realize itself or to reflect on its own condition. On the other hand, alongside the homage to a past master, the film’s virtuosic aesthetic of remediation also inscribes it into the world of cinematic cultural production today, casting it as a critical site for reflecting upon the entanglement of art, capitalism, and technological innovation and for claiming a principle 33 Melion, “Karel van Mander’s Life of Goltzius,” 127. 34 E.g. in the lecture “New Possibilities: Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema,” delivered at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, on 13 September 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6yC41ZxqYs.

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of autonomy or freedom from within the over-saturated image culture in which Goltzius holds a self-conscious place. We may conclude that following Prospero’s Books – among other 1990s films in which he pioneered new visual overlay techniques, forging a unique cinematic vocabulary on the cusp of the digital era – Goltzius and the Pelican Company marks a new Protean moment in Greenaway’s intermedial cinema, one that celebrates virtuosic remediation even as it recognizes how the practice is deeply internal to the capitalist culture of making a business of art.

Bibliography Bal, Mieke. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Bradshaw, Peter. “Goltzius and the Pelican Company Review – Peter Greenaway’s Modern Court Masque.” The Guardian (July 10, 2014). https://www.theguardian. com/film/2014/jul/10/goltzius-and-the-pelican-company-review-greenaway. Brandstetter, Gabriele. “The Virtuoso’s Stage: A Theatrical Topos.” Theatre Research International 32, no. 2 (July 2007): 178–195. Breazeale, William, and Victoria Sancho Lobis, Passion and Virtuosity: Hendrick Goltzius and the Art of Engraving. San Diego, CA: University of San Diego, 2013. Ciment, Michel. “Entretien avec Peter Greenaway: Je suis plus attiré par ceux qui voyagent que par ceux qui sont arrivés.” Positif 636 (Feb 2014): 25–28. De Waard, Marco. “Rembrandt on Screen: Art Cinema, Cultural Heritage, and the Museumization of Urban Space.” Imagining Global Amsterdam: History, Culture, and Geography in a World City, ed. Marco de Waard. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. 143–167. De Waard, Marco. “Art and Aisthesis in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio.” The Mediatization of the Artist, eds. Rachel Esner and Sandra Kisters. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 147–163. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66230-5_10. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart. Transl. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gill, Rosalind and Andy Pratt. “In the Social Factory?: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 7–8 (2008): 1–30. Greenaway, Peter. The Stairs: Geneva. 2 vols. London: Merrell Holberton, 1994. Greenaway, Peter. The Stairs: Munich Projection. London: Merrell Holberton, 1995. Greenaway, Peter. Nightwatching. Paris: Dis Voir, 2006. Greenaway, Peter. Goltzius and the Pelican Company. Paris: Dis Voir, 2009.

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Greenaway, Peter. The Towers: Lucca Hubris. Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2014. Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 89–100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/303793. Kovács, András Bálint. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labor.” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 133–147. Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Trans. Aileen Derieg. London: Verso, 2015. Lyman, Eric J. “Peter Greenaway on Art, Cinema, Sex, and Religion.” The Hollywood Reporter (12 November 2012). https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/ movie-news/peter-greenaway-art-cinema-sex-389277/. McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Melion, Walter S. “Karel van Mander’s Life of Goltzius: Def ining the Paradigm of Protean Virtuosity in Haarlem around 1600.” Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, eds. Susan J. Barnes and Walter S. Melion. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989. 113–133. Meyer, Clive. “Playing with New Toys: An Interview With Peter Greenaway.” Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice, ed. Clive Meyer. London: Wallflower Press, 2011. 225–253. Michels, Norbert, ed. Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617). Mythos, Macht und Menschlichkeit. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2017. Peucker, Brigitte. Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Steinmetz, Leon and Peter Greenaway. The World of Peter Greenaway. Boston, MA and Tokyo: Journey Editions, 1995. Tweedie, James. Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Film, New Media, and the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. van Mander, Karel. Het Schilderboek. Het leven van de doorluchtige Nederlandse en Hoogduitse schilders. Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1995. Villa, Dana R. Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Transl. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004. Walsh, Michael. “Allegories of Thatcherism: Peter Greenaway’s Films of the 1980s.” Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester D. Friedman. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. 282–300.

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Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Woods, Alan. Being Naked, Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Filmography Greenaway, Peter, dir. The Baby of Mâcon. 1993. Allarts. Greenaway, Peter, dir. The Belly of an Architect. 1987. Callender Company. Greenaway, Peter, dir. The Draughtsman’s Contract. 1982. British Film Institute. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Goltzius and the Pelican Company. 2012. Head Gear Films. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Nightwatching. 2007. ContentFilm International. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Prospero’s Books. 1991. Cinéa. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse. 2008. Submarine.

About the Author Marco de Waard is senior lecturer in literary studies and cultural analysis at Amsterdam University College and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. He teaches and writes at the intersection of cultural analysis, literary and film studies, political and critical theory, and cultural memory studies.

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Bibliogr aphy

325

Campbell, Graeme, dir. Still Life: The Fine Art of Murder. 1990. Bucko Pictures. Capotondi, Giuseppe, dir. The Burnt Orange Heresy. 2019. Indiana Production. Clooney, George, dir. The Monuments Men. 2014. Columbia Pictures. Corsicato, Pappi, dir. Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait. 2017. eOne Films Distribution. Crowley, John, dir. The Goldfinch. 2019. Warner Bros. Curtis, Simon. “Commentary.” Woman in Gold. Directed by Simon Curtis. 2015. Origin Pictures/BBC Films. Curtis, Simon, dir. Woman in Gold. 2015. Origin Pictures/BBC Films. Davis, Andrew, dir. A Perfect Murder. 1998. Warner Bros. De Saint Phalle, Niki, dir. Un rêve plus long que la nuit/A Dream Lasts Longer Than the Night. 1975. Auditel. De Saint Phalle, Niki and Peter Whitehead, dirs. Daddy. 1973. Argos Films. Dunham, Lena, dir. Tiny Furniture. 2012. IFC Films. Ford, Tom, dir. Nocturnal Animals. 2016. Focus Pictures. Gilroy, Dan, dir. Velvet Buzzsaw. 2019. Netflix. Greenaway, Peter, dir. A Zed and Two Noughts. 1985. British Film Institute. Greenaway, Peter, dir. The Baby of Mâcon. 1993. Allarts. Greenaway, Peter, dir. The Belly of an Architect. 1987. Callender Company. Greenaway, Peter, dir. The Draughtsman’s Contract. 1982. British Film Institute. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Goltzius and the Pelican Company. 2012. Head Gear Films. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Nightwatching. 2007. ContentFilm International. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Prospero’s Books. 1991. Cinéa. Greenaway, Peter, dir. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse. 2008. Submarine. Haesaerts, Paul, dir. Visite à Picasso. 1950. Art et Cinéma. Hiller, Arthur, dir. The Wheeler Dealers. 1963. MGM. Hultén, Pontus and Hans Nordenström, dirs. En Dag I Staden/A Day in the City. 1956. SWE. 19 min. b&w. Jost, Jon, dir. All the Vermeers in New York. 1990. America Playhouse. Krakora, Joseph, dir. Vermeer: Master of Light. 2001. Interface Media Group. Marclay, Christian, dir. Made to Be Destroyed. 2016. Paula Cooper Gallery. McTiernan, John, dir. The Thomas Crown Affair. 1999. MGM. Östlund, Ruben, dir. The Square. 2017. Plattform Produktion. Papamichael, Phedon, dir. The Dark Side of Genius. 1994. Pacific Shore Pictures. Parks and Recreation. Creators: Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. 2009–2015. NBC. Pennebaker, D.A, dir. Daybreak Express. 1958 [1953]. US. 5 min. Col. Pennebaker, D.A, dir. Breaking it Up at the Museum. 1960. US. 6 min. 16mm, b&w. Reiné, Roel, dir. Michiel de Ruyter/Admiral. 2015. Rebel Entertainment. Rogen, Seth and Evan Goldberg, dirs. This Is the End. 2013. Sony Pictures. Schnabel, Julian, dir. At Eternity’s Gate. 2018. Riverstone Pictures.

326 

Screening the Art World

Schnabel, Julian, dir. Basquiat. 1996. Miramax. Schnabel, Julian, dir. Before Night Falls. 2000. Grandview Pictures. Schnabel, Julian, dir. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 2000. Canal+. Sokurov, Alexander, dir. Francofonia. 2015. Idéale Audience, et. al. Teller, dir. Tim’s Vermeer. 2013. High Delft Pictures. Teshigahara, Hiroshi, dir. Sculpture Mouvante: Jean Tinguely. 1981 [1963]. JAP. 15 min. 16 mm. b&w. Thompson, J. Lee, dir. What a Way to Go! 1964. Twentieth Century-Fox. Tornatore, Giuseppe, dir. The Best Offer. 2013. Warner Bros. Tsui, Clarence. “China’s van Goghs: Film Review.” Holly wood Reporter (July  26, 2017). [Online] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ chinas-van-goghs-zhong-guo-fan-gao-film-review-1023772. Tyldum, Morten, dir. Headhunters. 2011. Nordisk Film. Van den Berg, Rudolf, dir. A Real Vermeer. 2016. Rinkel Film. Waggner, George, dir. Batman [TV series]. “Pop goes the Joker” and “Flop goes the Joker.” ABC (March 22 and 23, 1967). Weber, Lois, dir. Fine Feathers. 1912. Kino Lorber. Weber, Lois, dir. The Dumb Girl of Portici. 1916. Universal Film. Webber, Peter, dir. Anatomy of a Scene. 2004. The Sundance Channel. DVD Bonus Feature. Pathé. Webber, Peter, dir. Girl with a Pearl Earring. 2004. DeLux Productions. Webber, Peter, and Andy Paterson. “Audio Commentary.” Girl with a Pearl Earring. 2004. DVD Bonus Feature. Pathé. Webber, Peter, and Andy Paterson. The Making of Girl with a Pearl Earring: The Art of Filmmaking. 2004. DVD Bonus Feature. Pathé. Yu Haibo and Kiki Tainqi Yu, dirs. China’s Van Goghs. 2016. Century Image Media.

Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to images in the text. action painting 56, 246, 247 Admiral 22, 149, 151, 152–62 Adorno, Theodor 66, 87, 284 affective historiography 21, 22, 165, 166, 168, 178 archaeomodern temporality 19, 289 archaism 165, 166, 168, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178 architecture 7, 10, 36, 91, 238, 290 art 7–23, 31–37, 39, 42–45, 47–49, 51–61, 65–79, 85–99, 101–11, 115–19, 122–30, 133, 138–39, 141, 143–44, 149–62, 165–69, 172, 175–78, 181–83, 188, 190, 192, 193–96, 198, 203–11, 213, 215–16, 219–22, 226–33, 235, 237–39, 242, 245, 247, 258, 260, 262, 264–65, 269–70, 272–73, 276, 278, 280, 281–85, 287–88, 290–91, 293, 295, 298–300, 301 and business 43, 133, 222, 269, 288, 290, 296, 301 and censorship 34, 78, 181, 190, 194 and commodification 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 49, 52, 53, 70, 88, 107, 118, 129, 269, 278, 280, 281, 293 and consumerism 55, 104, 118, 119, 135, 270, 272, 274, 278, 279, 280, 283 and crime 208, 209, 74, 94, 103, 110, 203, 204, 205, 208, 209, 216, 225, 292 and cultural capital 11, 272, 273, 279 and digital technologies 14, 17, 18, 20, 23, 93, 99, 176, 240, 279, 286, 290, 294, 299, 300, 301 and ethics 69, 77, 78, 173, 174, 175 and freedom 18, 271, 272, 279, 287, 288, 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301 and humor 183, 184, 190, 204, 253–69 and illusion 21, 44, 67, 68, 69, 71, 76, 79, 95, 96, 98, 151, 152, 153, 159, 223, 224, 265 and immersion 86, 96, 149, 152, 184 and madness 109, 203, 216, 220, 231 and morality 66, 66 n.6, 69, 70, 77, 79, 105, 159, 173, 194, 256, 263 and murder 103, 106, 109, 160, 185, 203–04, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 229, 233, 292 and neoliberalism 18, 20, 67, 75, 79, 269, 288, 289, 295, 299 and politics 13, 14, 17, 21, 23, 56, 76, 77 n.22, 78, 79, 87, 93, 94 n.24, 98, 101, 116, 129, 162, 165, 167, 170, 181, 182, 186, 190, 193, 194, 203, 204, 216, 269, 278, 284, 287–299 and selfhood 23, 269–87 and suicide 116, 121, 135, 203, 204, 208, 211, 215

in television 47, 48, 58, 101, 102, 109, 110, 117, 118, 119, 139, 181–203, 204, 209, 210, 231, 254, 255, 258, 264, 265, 281 and truth 19, 20, 21, 22, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 65–81, 94, 109, 130, 138, 166, 174, 188, 204, 206, 264, 265, 289 and vandalism 11, 21, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 110, 190 philosophy of 21, 65–66, 68, 71, 79 art critics 12, 49, 51, 54, 66, 69, 73, 74, 75, 93, 94, 108, 125, 137, 215, 216, 222, 235, 238, 261, 262 art criticism 12, 22, 73, 87, 235, 237, 242, 243 art dealers 53, 75, 138, 139 art entrepreneurship 23, 269–87, 287–301 artist biopics 13, 14, 221, 272, 288, 292 artists 7–15, 19–20, 22–3, 31, 33–34, 36, 38, 42–44, 49, 53, 55–56, 57, 60, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 87, 88, 90–98, 101, 105–8, 109–10, 116–19, 124–26, 128, 133, 137, 139, 142–43, 150, 169, 177, 182, 183, 194, 203–16, 219–33, 235–49, 253–66, 269–85, 288–301 art galleries 7, 24, 69, 71, 74, 75, 108, 109, 310 art market 20, 21, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 76, 87, 98, 107, 284, 297, 298 art museums 76, 89, 101, 101–15, 293 art world 11–23, 33–34, 49, 51, 56, 88, 133–34, 143, 144, 149, 162, 205, 209, 211, 215, 226, 232, 253–55, 257, 262–65, 270–71, 284, 289 aura 13–19, 21, 23, 65, 71, 85–89, 93, 98, 102, 170, 174, 177, 243, 278–79 decline of 16, 17, 19, 71 auratic 14–15, 17–19, 86–87, 89–90, 92–93, 177 authenticity 13, 14, 17, 19, 21, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 87, 134, 153, 155, 156, 160, 161, 166, 220, 228, 272 avant-garde 20, 21, 47–48, 56, 58, 60, 61, 87, 89, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126, 205, 227, 276, 284 Batman 21, 101–13, 209, 210 Benjamin, Walter 13, 17, 18, 21, 22, 68, 71, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 94, 96, 98, 111, 170, 239 Best Offer, The 72–73 Bliss 219, 229 Blood Bath 227, 232 Bucket of Blood, A 219, 226, 233 Burnt Orange Heresy, The 73–74 Burton, Tim 21, 101–13 business (of art) 43, 133, 222, 269, 288, 290, 296, 301

328  camera obscura 18, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 91, 92, 93, 98 capital, cultural 11, 272, 273, 279 censorship (of art) 34, 78, 181, 190, 194 China’s Van Goghs 133–80 chronoschism 19, 150, 151, 153, 156 cinema: and art 7–23, 33–35, 44, 48, 61, 65–79, 97, 98, 102, 110, 117, 118, 119, 120, 128, 133, 150, 153, 158, 166, 169, 171, 174–78, 187, 203, 204, 206, 208, 219, 220, 221, 224, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 244, 271, 273, 279, 287, 289–90, 291–301 and costumes 33, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 61, 156, 157, 158, 169 and horror 14, 22, 67, 74, 98, 209, 210, 219–34 Chinese 133–80 silent 9, 14, 31–47 cinéma cinétique 117–19 cinéma critique 22, 235, 237, 239, 241, 242 Color Me Blood Red 219, 227 commodification 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 49, 52, 53, 70, 88, 107, 118, 129, 269, 278, 280, 281, 293 conceptual art 76, 102, 104, 182, 226 connoisseurship 87, 95, 269, 272 consumerism 55, 104, 118, 119, 135, 270, 272, 274, 278, 279, 280, 283 crime (in art) 208, 209, 74, 94, 103, 110, 203, 204, 205, 208, 209, 216, 225, 292 cubism 236, 248 Dada 56, 106, 116, 123, 205 Danto, Arthur 12, 13, 66, 67 Dark Side of Genius, The 203, 209, 215–16 de Saint Phalle, Niki 47, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 117 Devil’s Candy, The 202, 220, 230 digital technologies 14, 17, 18, 20, 23, 93, 99, 176, 240, 279, 286, 290, 294, 299, 300, 301 Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The 23, 269, 270, 274–77 documentaries 10, 14, 21, 22, 87, 88, 92, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 133, 133, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 171, 176, 178, 187, 208, 209, 235, 236, 237, 239, 241, 243, 270, 271, 278 of art 85–101, 115–33, 235–50 Dumb Girl of Portici, The 31–46, 37 Dunham, Lena 253–69 Dutch Golden Age 20, 94, 149–65 Eddie The Sleepwalking Cannibal 220, 229 entertainment 18, 23, 56, 118, 157, 158, 160, 215, 221, 231, 253–68, 272, 281, 294, 295, 297, 299 entrepreneur, self- 13, 20, 22, 23, 134, 135, 137, 138, 284, 287–301, 269–87

Screening the Art World

ethics (in/of art) 69, 77, 78, 173, 174, 175 expressionism abstract 56, 188 German 51, 52 fake, the 17, 18, 21, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75–76, 77, 78, 79, 85, 93, 94, 95, 99, 143, 221 film festivals 133–80 Foucault, Michel 20, 109, 207, 290, 296 Francofonia 22, 165, 166, 175–78 Franco, James 253–69 freedom (artistic) 18, 271, 272, 279, 287, 288, 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301 Freud, Sigmund 15, 204, 205, 206, 208, 224 genius 14, 19, 22, 90, 92, 93, 203, 206, 209, 215, 216, 219, 220, 226, 230, 232, 235, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 265, 277, 283, 292 genre 10, 11, 11 n.30, 14, 18, 68, 75, 151, 153, 166, 173, 174, 187, 205, 209, 209 n.19, 225, 229, 236, 246, 273 Girl with a Pearl Earring 21, 149, 151, 153–58 Goltzius and the Pelican Company 23, 287, 288, 291, 293, 293–301 Greenaway, Peter 8, 10, 14, 20, 21, 23, 85, 95, 96, 97, 98, 204, 287–301 Haesaerts, Paul 22, 235–51, 237 Headhunters 71–72 heist film 15, 16, 65–81, 166, 174 historiography 21, 22, 165, 166, 168, 178, 221 history: in art 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 20, 22, 50, 65, 71, 87, 94, 96, 99, 102, 106, 126, 128, 135, 149–62, 165–80, 183–200, 232, 233, 257, 270, 271, 279, 281, 293, 300 of art 8, 10–11, 14, 15, 22, 33, 44, 72, 73, 74, 79, 87, 89, 90, 96, 98, 105–07, 108, 117, 135, 151, 154, 157, 160, 203, 204, 206, 207, 215–16, 220, 221, 240, 272, 293, 297 Hollywood 8, 14, 20, 38, 47–63, 101–13, 118, 139, 144, 225, 255, 256, 257, 260 Homage to New York 55, 115, 116, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 130 House of Wax 223, 225 House with Laughing Windows, The 220, 228 humor (in art) 183, 184, 190, 204, 253–69 iconoclasm 101, 102, 103, 106 illusion 21, 44, 67, 68, 69, 71, 76, 79, 95, 96, 98, 151, 152, 153, 159, 223, 224, 265 immersion 86, 96, 149, 152, 184 ineffability 85–101 inspiration 219, 220, 221, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 247, 248, 270 intermediality 7, 7 n.1, 8–21, 102, 130, 289, 290, 295, 300, 301

Index

kitsch 47, 61, 188, 189 labor affective 287–301 artistic 133–47 Made to Be Destroyed 101, 102, 103, 110 madness 109, 203, 216, 220, 231 Malevich, Kazimir 77, 107 Marclay, Christian 101, 102, 103, 110, 111 medium specificity 7, 11, 21, 32, 44, 45, 47, 48, 86, 87, 89, 93, 102, 118, 121, 127, 140, 158, 161, 212, 219, 221, 237, 239, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 261, 274, 284, 292, 294 metamodernism 19, 166, 168, 188 mise-en-scène 97, 124, 149, 150, 151, 155, 157, 158, 162, 184, 275, 292 Modern art 7, 9, 12, 16, 47–63, 67, 76, 108, 115–32, 236, 238–39, 242, 243, 244, 247, 248, 279, 300 Modernism 14, 19, 95, 97, 106, 115, 130, 166, 188 morality 66, 66 n.6, 69, 70, 77, 79, 105, 159, 173, 194, 256, 263 MoMA 52, 55, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 138 Monuments Men, The 22, 165, 166, 172–75, 177, 178 murals 39, 181–203 murder 103, 106, 109, 160, 185, 203–04, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 229, 233, 292 Mystery of the Wax Museum 22, 219, 222 Nazi art theft 165–81 neoliberalism 18, 20, 67, 75, 79, 269, 288, 289, 295, 299 New Realism 55, 105 Nightwatching 14, 23, 287, 288, 290, 292–94 Nocturnal Animals 74–76 painting 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 21, 22, 34, 35, 36, 38, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 70–100, 104, 105, 107, 108, 122, 124, 133–80, 186, 189–98, 205, 208, 213, 214, 215, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235–51, 259, 261, 262, 270, 271–72, 276–79, 280, 287–301 paratexts 133, 134, 138, 139, 142, 144 Parks and Recreation 22, 181–203, 185, 187, 191, 193, 196, 197 pastiche 9, 51 n.7, 52 n.8, 56, 59, 94, 151, 166, 181, 293 Pavlova, Anna 31, 32, 38, 40, 41, 42 Perfect Murder, A 203, 209, 211–15, 214 performance art 11, 107, 108, 203, 205, 209, 211 philosophy (of art) 21, 65–66, 68, 71, 79 photography 7, 34, 97, 138, 139, 166, 168, 170, 171, 242, 244

329 Picasso, Pablo 20, 22, 61, 94, 129, 207, 235–53, 237, 282 politics 13, 14, 17, 21, 23, 56, 76, 77 n.22, 78, 79, 87, 93, 94 n.24, 98, 101, 116, 129, 162, 165, 167, 170, 181, 182, 186, 190, 193, 194, 203, 204, 216, 269, 278, 284, 287–299 post-conceptual art 76, 77 post-cubism 235, 247 postmodernism 95, 97, 106, 188 production design 15, 19, 44, 149, 155, 166, 169, 181, 182, 183 public art 14, 22, 128, 132, 181–98, 290, 322 realism 20, 31, 32, 33, 38, 52, 54, 55, 56, 96, 97, 98, 105, 108, 116, 117, 118, 127, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 205, 219, 220, 221, 226, 231, 233 relational aesthetics 76, 77, 78 Rembrandt 50, 53, 221, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293, 300 remediation 9, 287, 289, 293, 298, 299, 300, 301 satire 18, 74, 75, 173, 198, 203, 204, 209 Schnabel, Julian 269–87 sculpture 7, 10, 15, 34, 44, 45, 49, 51, 51 n.7, 505, 102, 102 n.2, 105, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 172, 176, 178, 183, 205, 208, 213, 219, 223, 225, 232, 240, 241, 272 selfhood 23, 269–87 sitcoms 181–203 Smalley, Phillips 31, 32, 34, 36, 41, 42, 43 Square, The 76–79 simulation 92, 97, 222, 229, 264 Still Life The Fine Art of Murder 203, 209–11 sublime 149, 150–53, 156–58, 161 suicide 116, 121, 135, 203, 204, 208, 211, 215 surrealism 52, 56, 108 n.12, 205, 245 n.35 television 47, 48, 58, 101, 102, 109, 110, 117, 118, 119, 139, 181–203, 204, 209, 210, 231, 254, 255, 258, 264, 265, 281 This Is the End 22, 253–67 Thomas Crown Affair, The 68, 69–71 Tinguely, Jean 18, 19, 21, 47, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 115–32 Tiny Furniture 22, 253–67 Trance 73–74 truth (in/of art) 19, 20, 21, 22, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 65–81, 94, 109, 130, 138, 166, 174, 188, 204, 206, 264, 265, 289 vampires 219, 227, 228, 229 vandalism 11, 21, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 110, 190 van Gogh, Vincent 21, 70, 86, 95, 133–45, 221

330  Velvet Buzzsaw 74–76 Vermeer, Johannes 18, 21, 85–100, 104, 151, 153, 154–57, 159, 160, 173 Visite à Picasso 22, 235–49, 240 virtuosity 220, 244, 287, 290, 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300 visual art 7, 8, 9, 10, 31, 33, 34, 44, 238, 244, 260, 269, 270, 300

Screening the Art World

Warhol, Andy 47, 61, 99, 109, 110, 135 waxworks 219, 225, 231 Weber, Lois 20, 31–46 What a Way to Go! 20, 47–62, 58, 59 Wheeler Dealers, The 20, 47–62, 51, 54 Woman in Gold 22, 165, 167–74, 178 World War II 94, 165, 166, 173, 178, 188, 206, 220, 235, 238, 243, 246 Work of Art, The 17–18, 21, 71, 85, 86, 87, 98