Documenting the Visual Arts

Roger Hallas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351344425
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together an international range of scholars, as well as filmmakers and curators, this book explores the rich variety in form and content of the contemporary art documentary.

Since their emergence in the late 1940s as a distinct genre, documentaries about the visual arts have made significant contributions to art education, public television, and documentary filmmaking, yet they have received little scholarly attention from either art history or film studies. Documenting the Visual Arts brings that attention to the fore. Whether considering documentaries about painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, site-specific installation, or fashion, the chapters of this book engage with the key question of intermediality: how film can reframe other visual arts through its specific audio-visual qualities, in order to generate new ways of understanding those arts. The essays illuminate furthermore how art documentaries raise some of the most critical issues of the contemporary global art world, specifically the discourse of the artist, the dynamics of documentation, and the visuality of the museum. Contributors discuss documentaries by filmmakers such as Frederick Wiseman, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jia Zhangke, and Trisha Ziff, and about artists such as Michael Heizer, Ai Weiwei, Do Ho Suh, and Marina Abramovi?.

This collection of new international and interdisciplinary scholarship on visual art documentaries is ideal for students and scholars of visual arts and filmmaking, as well as art history, arts education, and media studies.

Part I

Historical foundations

1
Henri Storck’s Le Monde De Paul Delvaux and Pygmalionist Cinema

Steven Jacobs

Delvaux and cinema

The 1940s and 1950s can be considered the “Golden Age” of the art documentary. In those decades, literally hundreds of art documentary shorts were produced, many of them being made by leading filmmakers such as Henri Alékan, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Flaherty, Jean Grémillon, Alain Resnais, and Willard S. Van Dyke, among others. In addition, prominent critics and film theorists such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Rudolf Arnheim paid attention to the art documentary in their writings while the phenomenon was also extensively discussed in leading film and art journals. Furthermore, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, the production and distribution of art documentaries were backed by international cultural organizations such as UNESCO, FIAF (Fédération internationale des archives du film), IAFF (International Art Film Federation), CIDALC (Comité internationale pour la diffusion des arts et des Lettres par le cinéma), and IIFA (International institute of Films on Art). Last but not least, in 1948 leading filmmakers, producers, and museum officials founded FIFA (Fédération internationale du film sur l’art), which would play an important role in the dissemination and critical contextualization of these films. In the 1940s and 1950s, conventions were established that are still in use in art documentaries today, but many seminal works from that period remain striking because of their audacious experiments. This was particularly the case in Italy, France, and Belgium, where filmmakers such as Luciano Emmer, Alain Resnais, and Paul Haesaerts presented their “documentaries” not as mere registrations or reproductions but as experimental shorts that were new filmic artworks in their own right. These films became visual laboratories to investigate the tensions between movement and stasis, the two- and three-dimensional, and the real and the artificial; a film on art was thus self-consciously presented as an art film. Many of the art documentaries of the era are highly personal, poetic, reflexive, and experimental films that still offer a thrilling cinematic experience, in contrast with many of the didactic and instructive art documentaries produced during the following decades.¹

One of the key figures in the development of the postwar lyrical art documentary is Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck (1907–1999), who had close personal contacts with painters such as James Ensor, Léon Spilliaert, Constant Permeke, and Félix Labisse, who were all living in the seaside town of Ostend, where Storck grew up.² Storck started making films on art in the mid-1930s, but his most important contributions to the genre date from the late 1940s, when he was also personally involved in FIFA. In particular, Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (The World of Paul Delvaux, 1946) and Rubens (1948) would become landmark art documentaries that were abundantly screened and discussed in the immediate postwar era. Rubens was made in collaboration with the art historian Paul Haesaerts, who later also made art documentaries such as the widely acclaimed Visite à Picasso (Visit to Picasso, 1950). Rather than dealing with the life or the historical context of the famous baroque artist, Rubens first and foremost presents an analysis of the style and compositions of the painter with the help of camera movements, split screens, dissolves, and animation techniques. In so doing, Storck and Haesaerts employed the revealing power of cinema as an instrument of formalist art criticism, showing that it could liberate itself from dependence on a dominating voice-over narration.

Equally significant and influential as Rubens is the 11-minute black-and-white short Le Monde de Paul Delvaux, which Storck made two years earlier in collaboration with poet, essayist, and art critic René Micha, who wrote the screenplay. As its title suggests, the film deals with Belgian Surrealist artist Paul Delvaux, who had become famous for his paintings of uncanny nudes in nocturnal cityscapes. Throughout the 1930s, Delvaux had developed his set of personal themes and syntax, centering on the classical female nude, which is for him less an ideal to be pursued than an object of reverie.³ In Delvaux’s world, these nudes are juxtaposed to men dressed in the fashion of the day, wandering in desolate streets and squares, which are rendered in emphatic Quattrocento perspective. In the 1940s, Delvaux’s paintings increasingly combined elements of classical architecture with tokens of urban modernity, such as tram lines or gas lights, as well as marble statues and skeletons. When Storck made his film in the mid-1940s, Delvaux was at the height of his international popularity with a retrospective exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in December 1944, only a few months after the liberation.⁴ Stimulated by the popularization of Surrealism in the United States, Delvaux’s fame had crossed the Atlantic in the very same months – Lee Miller photographed the artist with some of his paintings at the Palais des Beaux-Arts for Vogue magazine.

Hollywood also recognized the aptness of Delvaux’s art for the film camera. Together with Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, among others, Delvaux participated in the notorious art competition for a painting representing The Temptation of Saint Anthony to appear in Albert Lewin’s production of The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947). Eventually a jury decided to include Ernst’s painting although the film itself clearly shares, as Susan Felleman notes, some pictorial characteristics with Delvaux’s paintings.⁵ Fifteen years later, the interconnections between Delvaux, Ernst, and film would also mark the production of Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). Although Resnais initially thought of Ernst for the production of the statue featured prominently in the film, the classical sculpture reminiscent of a Poussin painting was eventually made by prop artists.⁶ Yet, with its eerie tableau-like imagery, Marienbad reminds us in its entirety of Delvaux, while the statuesque actress of the theater play in the opening sequence seems to have directly stepped out of a Delvaux painting. Several scholars have noticed these affinities with Delvaux’s paintings, and British film critic Raymond Durgnat even linked Marienbad to Henri Storck’s visualization of the Surrealist painter. In his review of the film, Durgnat states that Marienbad recalls Storck’s Le Monde de Paul Delvaux “with its Surrealist canvasses of sad-eyes nudes and aimless men straying against ruins and crumbling statues.”⁷ Resnais undoubtedly knew about Storck’s Delvaux film as he recognized the importance of “the Belgian School” when making art documentaries himself in the late 1940s and early 1950s.⁸

Staging perspectives on the nude

It was Marienbad’s oneirism, as well as its morbid fascination for lifeless bodies, that reminded Durgnat of Storck’s Le Monde de Paul Delvaux. Produced by the so-called “Séminaire des Arts,” under the direction of Luc Haesaerts at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, the film was shot on 35mm during the retrospective at the Palais and released in 1946 with a soundtrack that combined music by André Souris and a Paul Éluard poem recited by the Surrealist poet himself.⁹ Written in 1938, when Delvaux contributed to the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Éluard’s Exil (à Paul Delvaux) was based on two 1937 paintings by Delvaux, L’Appel de la nuit (The Call of the Night) and L’Aurore (Aurora), and refers to “grandes femmes immobiles” or “grand immobile women” who are “tranquilles et plus belles d’être semblables” or “tranquil and too beautiful to be alike.”¹⁰

Stork divides Éluard’s poem into small fragments and integrates them into the Stravinsky-inspired score by Souris, a musician close to the Surrealist movement, who wrote that “the determining function of the film was the tempo, a function which is essentially musical. Delvaux’ painting is implicitly slow, and Storck has established the unity of the film on the slowness of his travelling shots.”¹¹ Bringing together film, painting, music, and poetry, Le Monde de Paul Delvaux presented itself as a modern Gesamtkunstwerk in the age of mechanical reproduction. Art critic and film historian Paul Davay described it as

an almost perfect meeting and fusion of different artistic disciplines subject to a new means of expression – the cinema. Under Storck’s direction, the painter Delvaux, the script-writer René Micha, the musician André Souris, and the poet Paul Éluard found a common ground.¹²

For Storck, Delvaux’s paintings were a perfect subject for a film as they are characterized by structures that resemble forms of staging. In a 1970 conversation with the painter, Storck compared Delvaux’s paintings with

the preoccupations of a theater scenographer. One can say that his paintings are constructed like a theater. […] and this is why these paintings work perfectly in cinema, why they go well on the screen. In addition to a composition and its plastic elements, there is a mise-en-scène.¹³

In Delvaux’s paintings, public squares, temple forecourts, and paved loggias create the scene for a mute drama.¹⁴ It is precisely in these stage-like settings that Delvaux’s nude bodies eroticize their environment. Enhanced by colonnades and other architectural features, the exaggerated or receding perspectives guide our gaze into the depth of the painting. This magnetic effect of Delvaux’s perspectives is closely connected to the theme of expectation since his paintings evoke a moment that endures for eternity, “pregnant with ill-defined but nonetheless profound desire.”¹⁵ In addition, with his nudes captured within receding perspective, Delvaux does not only present the woman as an object of male phantasies and desires, he also implicates the viewer in acts of voyeurism – a theme also evoked by the abundant presence of mirrors, frames, spectacles, and lamps in Delvaux’s oeuvre. This voyeuristic effect is emphasized by Delvaux’s practice of showing the same woman (or similar-looking women) multiple times, as if they surrender themselves to the gaze of the spectator. Storck’s moving camera accentuates this submission. Storck, for instance, often shows only a part of a painting, particularly when he opens a new sequence. As a result, the compositional organization within the frame differs from that of the original painting. The off-center position of the camera creates a certain tension, heightening the uncanny character of Delvaux’s perspectives. For André Bazin, this confrontation between the fixed and centripetal frame of the painting with the mobile and centrifugal frame of the film camera was precisely one of the most fascinating aspects of the art documentarie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Historical foundations
• Part II Representing the artist
• Part III Questions of documentation
• Part IV Museum gazing
• Part V Art worlds and film worlds
• Index