Pre-war Art Documentaries

Documentary explorations of art and artists can be found early in film history. Already in the late 1910s, German film studios such as Deutsche Lichtbild and Welt-Kinematograph produced documentary shorts on the sights and monuments of historical cities such as Munich and Seville. Strikingly, when visual art started to become the subject of films, it appeared only in the form of architecture and monumental sculpture. Having the advantage that they could be filmed in natural light, churches, palaces and monuments were the pre-eminent subject of early films on art. In spite of the vast majority of films on painting among later art documentaries, it seemed easier to justify filming three-dimensional works, such as sculpture and architecture, as movement of the viewer in space is necessary to see and experience them. Films on art, after all, confront the paradox that art objects are still while films trace movement in space and time. Through editing and camera movements, film added movement to the static artwork. This was the advantage that film was supposed to have over photography. ‘We feel the necessity of movement in order to grasp the statue's immobility,’ famous French art historian Henri Focillon asserted. ‘When we do not have the work itself, but an image of it, cannot it be imagined that the latter, through a clever artifice, will move at our pleasure before us who remain motionless?’