There are films about painters, films that feature paintings in the plot, and there are films about particular paintings. In the first category, the centenary has given us several van Gogh movies (directed by Paul Cox, Robert Altman,Maurice Pialat), and in Derek Jarman's CARAVAGGIO we had the anti-myth to the myth of the creative genius tormented by his Art. In all of them, what remains, one way or another, is the “agony and the ecstasy,” whether embodied by Kirk Douglas, Tim Roth, or Nigel Terry.

Paintings, and especially painted portraits abound in what has been called the women's paranoia cycle of Hollywood melodramas from the 1940s, but they also star prominently in some celebrated “films noirs” of the 1950s: one thinks of REBECCA and SUSPICION, LAURA and WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, The TWO MRS CARROLLS and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. Hitchcock, as one can see, is particularly fond of them, but so are Germanic directors like Lang and Preminger. Such portraits activate a host of associations, partly historical (they often connote a period setting and a genre: the Gothic), partly social (in a world of objects and people, a painting is always extravagant, excessive in that it is both object and person), partly economic (whoever owns a painting has surplus value to display, which means it also often functions as a signifier of class), and finally, the connotations are inescapably sexual (Beauty and Fatality, Perfection, Woman, the Unattainable Object of Desire). Sometimes they are the very epitome of patriarchy, as Joan Fontaine's father disapprovingly looks down on her choice of Cary Grant as husband in SUSPICION.

Films featuring series of paintings are mostly “European,” and they seem to belong to the 1980s: Godard's PASSION, Raul Ruiz’ HYPOTHÈSE du tableau volé, and – stretching the term painting a little – Peter Greenaway's The DRAUGHTSMAN's CONTRACT. In each case, what is explored are tableaux vivants, though to different ends.