Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the Post-war Art Film
- 2 Vasari in Hollywood: Artists and Biopics
- 3 Galleries of the Gaze: The Museum in Rossellini's Viaggin in Italia and Hitchcock's Vertigo
- 4 Tableaux Vivants 1: Painting, Film, Death and Passion Plays in Pasolini and Godard
- 5 Tableaux Vivants 2: Film Stills and Contemporary Photography
- 6 The Video That Knew Too Much: Hitchcock, Contemporary Art and Post-Cinema
- Appendix to Chapter 2: Artist Biopics
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Vasari in Hollywood: Artists and Biopics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the Post-war Art Film
- 2 Vasari in Hollywood: Artists and Biopics
- 3 Galleries of the Gaze: The Museum in Rossellini's Viaggin in Italia and Hitchcock's Vertigo
- 4 Tableaux Vivants 1: Painting, Film, Death and Passion Plays in Pasolini and Godard
- 5 Tableaux Vivants 2: Film Stills and Contemporary Photography
- 6 The Video That Knew Too Much: Hitchcock, Contemporary Art and Post-Cinema
- Appendix to Chapter 2: Artist Biopics
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Celluloid Art History
The previous chapter demonstrates that seminal art documentaries made during the aftermath of the Second World War sought to animate static artworks not only by editing and camera movements but also through storytelling devices in order to create a narrative dynamic. One way of achieving this was linking pieces of art to the life of the artist who created them. Directors such as Oertel and Resnais, for instance, presented artworks as components of the biography of Michelangelo or Van Gogh. Given this perspective, their films show unmistakable similarities with cinematic biographies in the form of feature films, the so-called biopics (a contraction of biography and picture) dedicated to the lives of famous artists.
Jorge Luis Borges once recounted that Oscar Wilde attributed the following joke to Carlyle:
a biography that failed to mention any of Michelangelo's works. Reality is so complex and fragmentary, history so simplified that an omniscient observer would be able to make an indefinite and almost infinite number of biographies of any person, biographies that would throw light on unrelated facts that would require us to read many of them before we would understand that the protagonist is one and the same person. Let us simplify a life to an extreme degree: suppose it comprises a total of 3000 facts. One of these hypothetical biographies would record facts 11, 22, 33 . . another one the series 9, 13, 17, 21; and yet another the facts numbered 3, 12, 21, 30, 39 ….
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Framing PicturesFilm and the Visual Arts, pp. 38 - 64Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011