Screening Statues

Sculpture and Cinema

Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, Vito Adriaensens, Lisa Colpaert

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474410908
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema is the first book to focus on the relationship between sculpture and the silver screen. It covers a broad range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media, from early film's eroticized tableaux vivants to enigmatic sculptures in modernist cinema. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. The book examines key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through a series of case studies and through an extensive reference gallery of 150 different films. Considering the work of directors like Georges Méliès, Jean Cocteau and Alain Resnais, as well as films like House of Wax, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, this is an innovative exploration of two different media, their artistic traditions and their respective theoretical paradigms.

Table of contents

• Screening Statues
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Marble Camera
• Part I
• 1 The Sculptor’s Dream: Living Statues in Early Cinema
• 2 The Mystery . . . The Blood . . . The Age of Gold: Sculpture in Surrealist and Surreal Cinema
• 3 Carving Cameras on Thorvaldsen and Rodin: Mid-Twentieth-Century Documentaries on Sculpture
• 4 Anatomy of an Ovidian Cinema: Mysteries of the Wax Museum
• 5 The Night of the Human Body: Statues and Fantasy in Postwar American Cinema
• 6 From Pompeii to Marienbad: Classical Sculptures in Postwar European Modernist Cinema
• 7 Of Swords, Sandals, and Statues: The Myth of the Living Statue
• 8 Coda: Returning the Favor (A Short History of Film Becoming Sculpture)
• Part II
• Sculpture Gallery: 150 Statues from European and American Cinema
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Index