Four Figures at a Table

Roger Crittenden, September 2007

Until recently, Roger Crittenden was the Director of the full-time programme at the National Film and Television School. A former film editor, Roger is the author of several books on the Cinema the latest being 'Fine Cuts - the Art of European Film Editing'. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Le Nain Brothers, 'Four Figures at a Table', about 1643. The National Gallery, London.

This image haunts me. More than that, it disturbs me. I discovered it recently in Room 18 at the National Gallery, along with three other paintings by the Le Nain Brothers. Of the four pictures, this is the most realised and contained, and the most immaculately conceived. And yet in a sense the image is provisional; it is an image that is on the way towards something. That is why it feels like a kind of cinema - the kind that is open and reflexive.

One way of responding to this painting is to think of it as between takes of a shot in a film or after a camera rehearsal. While the boy is preoccupied with his food, the female characters are all paying attention to the artist or 'director'. And what I find disturbing is that these three faces express an apprehension borne of what they can see. Which means that the world behind the artist is implied in what we see.

Roman Polanski once said that what fascinated him about cinema was the problem of the 'fourth wall'. His favourite painting at the time was Van Eyck's 'Arnolfini Portrait' from 1434, in which the convex mirror on the back wall reveals what is behind the artist, and confirms the fact of the artist's presence.

If you look closely at 'Chinatown' (1974) Polanski uses many images that rely on reflection to give the audience an all-round view, including car mirrors, hubcaps, camera lenses and spectacles. His mise-en-scène cleverly registers out-of-vision reactions through the placement of minor characters around and behind the protagonists.

Jan van Eyck, 'The Arnolfini Portrait', 1434. The National Gallery, London.

The couple in 'The Arnolfini Portrait' represent the confidence of merchants and bankers whose manipulation of capital allowed them to achieve and sustain a certain position in society.

Conversely, the Le Nain Brothers here portray a family from a lower class, at a time when the lives of ordinary people was still a relatively unusual subject for painters, especially for members of the French Royal Academy as the Le Nain Brothers were.

Much of cinema has preferred to avoid portraying the lower classes, unless justified by comic treatment or if portraying a hero (seldom a heroine) who manages to achieve success or a higher status in society. Yet a number of film-makers have created masterpieces from such modest subject matter. And like cinema, painting is often most effective and affecting when it doesn't shout.

Personally, I would trade all of William Hogarth's portraits of the great and good for his 'Shrimp Girl' (about 1740-5). In a similar way, central to the appeal of Yasujiro Ozu's and Robert Bresson's films is their quiet.

Hogarth, 'The Shrimp Girl', about 1740-45. The National Gallery, London.

I am struck by the lack of a protagonist in the Le Nain Brothers' picture and by the sense of fatalism, an acceptance of a life that is a constant struggle. The mood reminds me of various films. Claude Goretta's 'The Lacemaker' (1977), for example, provided Isabelle Huppert with the role that made her known beyond France.

The character Huppert plays is Pomme, who like many sweet apples is gradually consumed to her core. She is only heroic in terms of her stoicism, and this proves her downfall and leads to her eventual decline into madness.

An even closer analogy might be the doomed character of Mouchette in Bresson's 1967 film of that name. This bleak film is shot in black and white which, as with the subdued colours in the Le Nain Brothers' picture, is both apposite to the content and emotionally correct. I am not certain that the figures in the painting were real peasants, but they do not appear to be professional models. This is close to Bresson's method of employing non-actors, whom he preferred to call 'models'.

As much as I am fascinated by this painting, it is the Le Nain Brothers themselves that really intrigue me. It turns out that very little is known about them, except that they worked together in the same workshop all their lives. There is, of course, a long history of such artistic collaborations. Even the great masters worked with many apprentices, and some artists have been known to employ friends to complete sections of a picture that they felt were beyond their competence.

Jean Renoir, when shooting 'La Régle du jeu' (1939), left the location and asked Henri Cartier-Bresson to direct the shooting of birds in the hunting scene, because he was squeamish. I want to believe that there is evidence in some of their work that more than one Le Nain Brother put brush to the same canvas. Even here, could the painting of the older woman be by a different hand?

Cinema offers various examples of brothers co-directing. There is a symbiotic working relationship between both the Taviani brothers in Italy and the Dardenne brothers in Belgium. Indeed, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani direct every shot alternately - not, it should be emphasised, every scene, but every shot in each scene. From personal knowledge of them I can say that the mutual stimulus produces a creative dialectic; their response is not to imitate but to take the other's idea a step further, progressing the narrative shot by shot.

They have worked this way for 40 years and only death will stop them, or the inability of one of them to function effectively, for they are so mutually interdependent that nothing, not even editing, happens unless both are present.

The harsh reality represented in their masterpiece 'Padre Padrone' (1977) is perhaps the nearest they have come to the context of the Le Nain Brothers' painting, although their style is more Italian baroque than the Dutch or Flemish simplicity that is referenced by the artist-brothers.

It is the Flemish Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, who accurately reflect this style, particularly in 'Rosetta' (1999), one of their best films. The eponymous character is a resourceful girl struggling to find her way in a tough world. Emilie Dequenne, who plays Rosetta and who was a newcomer to film, could be the young woman in the painting. Their resemblance is uncanny.

Even as I write this piece I remain disturbed by the painting. Its simplicity continues to speak to me. In many historical contexts, servants and children did not eat at the same table as the adults in a household. The young woman is grasping a jug as if someone has just asked for more wine, but there are no glasses or other drinking vessels visible on the table at which she is sitting.

I can imagine that the 'camera' has turned away from the main action in the room, which we might hear but can't see. Perhaps the apprehension I see in these faces is because these people have witnessed over-indulgence before and they know there will be ugly scenes before the night is through.

The painting hides a previous image, which is revealed in x-rays. This is the portrait of a courtly gentleman, perhaps a commission that was rejected by the sitter on completion. In frustration, might the Le Nain Brothers simply have looked away from their dinner and seen a new subject for the canvas on the other side of the room? Could this be a painting of their old nurse, a serving maid and two of the brothers' children? It is part of the purpose of visual art to find a view of reality that allows a different perspective, not only to focus on the main action.

One further thought: the little girl is no more than five or six, the age at which Brigitte Fossey played the unforgettable child in René Clément's 'Jeux interdits' (Forbidden Games, 1952) set in a rural community outside Paris during the Second World War. The images, especially of interiors, have a wonderful luminous quality. Fifty years later, with the benefit of hindsight and maturity, Fossey said: 'To me lighting creates an emotional space. I think Robert Juillard [the cinematographer] created light tinged with emotion... he used chiaroscuro to express the soul'.

The single source of light in the Le Nain Brothers' painting etches the faces in a way that conveys the characters' subdued emotions. If we can read pictures in this way, painting and cinema can indeed help us to see into the human soul, and we are enriched by the experience.

Having written this piece, I showed the picture to my eight-year-old grandson Jack. He contemplated it for a few moments and then said: 'You know grandad, I think the little girl is a ghost and everyone is sad that she is dead.' I am happy for him to have the last word.

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Cinema at the National Gallery