Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Since its invention, film has been in competition with the other arts, and
especially painting. 220 Even though film had from the beginning a mimetic
advantage over painting due to its ability to directly represent images of the world
on screen, film could not compete with painting on the purely visual level until
the late 1960s, when film color became sophisticated enough to become
competitive (Monaco 39). Moreover, many filmmakers were painters before they
became filmmakers (for example, to name but a few, Derek Jarman, Agnes
Merlet, Maurice Pialat, and Peter Greenaway). Other filmmakers, such as Carlos
Saura and Alexander Korda, have brothers who are painters. In all these cases, the
paragonic aspect of their films is intensified through that connection. Those
filmmakers who could not or did not become painters are now able to dominate
art in their new medium, film, or film may become the site of the contest between
the brothers.
Moreover, films about painters and paintings are becoming increasingly
frequent. In the outline of my methodology I have already referred to filmmakers
such as Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Greenaway. Both use art in most of their
movies, resulting in painterly films that are highly ekphrastic, and their use of
lightning and camera framing often demands that one read individual film frames
as paintings. Godard’s film Passion, moreover, is a film about the filming of an
entirely ekphrastic film, in which a filmmaker films a series of tableaux vivants of
famous paintings. Likewise, Peter Greenaway is currently in the process of
220 See André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” What is Cinema? Trans. by Hugh Gray (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1967) 164-72, and Martin Norden, “Film and Painting,” Film
and the Arts in Symbiosis: A Resource Guide, ed. Gary R. Edgerton (New York, Westport, and
London: Greenwood Press, 1988) 17-46, esp. 18-23.
235