Art in the Cinematic Imagination

Contents

Download PDF (46.9 KB)
pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

Download PDF (148.5 KB)
pp. ix-xi

At Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where I have taught in the Department of Cinema and Photography since 1998, I have been the happy recipient of grants that supported my research from several sources, including the Office of Research and Development Administration, University Women’s Professional Advancement, and the College of Mass Communication and Media...

Introduction: Baring the Device

Download PDF (326.1 KB)
pp. 1-13

Art (and by this I mean the ‘‘other’’ visual and plastic arts: painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, etc.) has been reflected and represented in, thematized by and structured into narrative films in myriad ways throughout the history of cinema. This book considers a range of such incorporations, drawn from the postwar classical and contemporary narrative cinema—European and...

CHAPTER 1: The Moving Picture Gallery

Download PDF (464.9 KB)
pp. 14-24

This death-defying magic wrought by moving pictures is not strictly a function of technology. It is representation itself that can raise the dead, as was observed long before photography by Leon Battista Alberti: ‘‘Painting has a divine power,’’ he wrote in ‘‘Della Pittura,’’ ‘‘being not only able to make the absent seem present, as friendship is said to do, but even to make the dead seem almost...

CHAPTER 2: A Form of Necrophilia (The Moving Picture Gallery Revisited)

Download PDF (696.1 KB)
pp. 25-55

In this remark, made in an interview with François Truffaut and discussing the plot of his 1958 film Vertigo,¹ Alfred Hitchcock casually mentions what is not only Vertigo's rather unsettling central proposition, but also, I shall argue, an important psychosexual characteristic of the cinematic experience generally. Using Hitchcock’s observation as a starting (and perhaps ending) point, I shall examine...

CHAPTER 3: The Birth, Death, and Apotheosis of a Hollywood Love Goddess

Download PDF (561.3 KB)
pp. 56-73

Ava Gardner’s stardom is fascinating. Although, as Richard Lippe points out, she appeared in more than twenty-five films during the 1940s, ‘‘her screen identity did not really emerge until the 1950s.’’ Under long-term contract at MGM in the early 1940s, she played minor roles before winning acclaim in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, and, Lippe notes, ‘‘she is a radiant presence in...

CHAPTER 4: Survivors of the Shipwreck of Modernity

Download PDF (478.9 KB)
pp. 74-99

At the end of The Barefoot Contessa we are left standing at the graveside of Maria d’Amata and, according to some of the film’s and its star’s ardent admirers of the period, the apotheosis of Ava Gardner and the death of the classical Hollywood cinema of which it arises are imminent. Let us imagine, then, that among the mourners—offscreen—at that cinematic graveyard are not only Claude Gauteur...

CHAPTER 5: Out of Her Element

Download PDF (525.2 KB)
pp. 100-122

The image of woman that emerged symptomatically on the incomplete and unseen canvases of Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse was that of what Barbara Creed has called the monstrous-feminine, of ‘‘what about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.’’¹ Rivette’s classic art film, with its nineteenth century literary source, its contemplative durée, its impressionist scenes of plein...

CHAPTER 6: Playing with Fire

Download PDF (547.2 KB)
pp. 123-139

Martin Scorsese’s contribution to the 1989 anthology film New York Stories cleverly acknowledged its director’s digression from the kind of wise guy theme for which he was, fairly or not, becoming known. The credit sequence of Life Lessons, his story of the relationship between two painters set in the somewhat rarefied New York City art world of the 1980s, runs over the image of ‘‘splattered...

CHAPTER 7: Dirty Pictures, Mud Lust, and Abject Desire: Myths of Origin and the Cinematic Object

Download PDF (638.6 KB)
pp. 140-157

If it is interesting to contemplate the ways in which the representation of art in films tends to allegorize the medium as art, and the way in which the artist figure tends to constitute either a self-portrait or a kind of negative version thereof, then it might be doubly interesting to consider the representation of artist couples in film. The sexual relationship between two artists offers another...

Notes

Download PDF (225.6 KB)
pp. 159-177

Bibliography

Download PDF (174.1 KB)
pp. 179-187

Index

Download PDF (230.0 KB)
pp. 189-199