Moving Pictures: Shared Aesthetics of Painting and Cinema

Sue Harper, March 2007

Sue Harper is Professor of Film History at the University of Portsmouth. She has specialised in British cinema, and is particularly interested in the issues of visual style and popular taste.

Her publications include 'Picturing the Past: the Decline and Fall of the British Costume Film', 'Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know', 'British Cinema of the 1950s: the Decline of Deference' (with Professor Vincent Porter), and 'The New Film History' with Dr Mark Glancy and Professor James Chapman.

Professor Harper is heading a major research project on British cinema in the 1970s, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Painting and cinema are both visual arts. They are similar in that they rely on those shared ways of seeing - visual codes - which hold society together; artists in both media manipulate and transform existing conventions. Painting and cinema are different in the autonomy which they afford to the individual artist.

In painting, the artwork is the result of the labour of the individual, although some favoured artists (such as Rembrandt and Canaletto) had their studios and apprentices. In cinema, the artwork is the consequence of many people's labour (the director, the art director, the cinematographer, the costume designer) and the finished film can be seen as a testament to the struggles for dominance that took place during its production.

Caravaggio, 'The Supper at Emmaus', 1601. London, The National Gallery.

In spite of the above differences, I want to argue that there are suggestive relationships between the two media, and not merely those which sketch out direct influence. It might be possible, I suppose, to discuss which film makers have been influenced by Caravaggio or Hopper, or which painters display an engagement with the cinema. But what I want to do here is to talk about shared visual discourses, fashions in ways of seeing, and techniques for evoking a coherent response to the material world. My analysis is not intended to be definitive, but to suggest some of the ways in which studies of film and painting can mutually illuminate each other.

Botticelli, 'Mystic Nativity', 1500. London, The National Gallery.

Botticelli, 'Venus and Mars', about 1485. London, The National Gallery.

Visual artists can be judged by the confidence with which they handle their material. Both films and pictures know things. Artworks will be popular if they evoke, at a subliminal level, a mythological world in which their audiences feel comfortable. So works of art can be categorised according to the solidity of their iconography, and the sense of confidence in the mythology they invoke.

Consider Powell and Pressburger's 1947 film 'Black Narcissus', for example. It depends utterly on an understanding of Christianity, with its emphasis on the power and discomforts of chastity, and on a dynamic contrast between that and the delights of the sensual, 'uninhibited' East. The film's artistic success resides in its confident handling of cultural and religious topoi. But this confidence can be seen at work in paintings too.

Consider Botticelli's 'Mystic Nativity' (1500). The angels corporeally embracing on the ground, or ethereally dancing in the sky, are executed with a passionate solidity. We know what they mean; and the dynamic centre of the painting, with its sinuous Virgin, Child and animals, radiates outwards to the edge of the frame. By contrast, Botticelli's 'Venus and Mars' (1485) evokes a pagan mythology in flagrant contradiction to the official religion.

The painting's power resides in its lack of tension and its somnolence. Neither the viewer nor the painter is in a position to hazard a guess about the meaning of Venus' gaze. Her ambiguity arises from the fact that there is no system to explain her by. Her look is exactly the same, and presented for the same reasons, as the heroine's gaze to camera at the end of David Lean's 'Madeleine' (1949).

Rembrandt, 'Self Portrait at the Age of 63', 1669. London, The National Gallery.

So paintings and films can be categorised according to the confidence they display with social systems of belief. They can also be categorised according to the way they present individual experience. Visual arts can usher in interpretations of subjectivity, but they do it in different ways. Films habitually present the subjective self via flashback.

Consider the flashback sequences in 'Rebecca' (1940) or 'Casablanca' (1942), which operate in a utopian manner: they suggest that we can access the past straightforwardly, and be again those younger people that we were.

Or consider Bergman's 'Wild Strawberries' (1957), in which the old man's past life rolls past him poignantly: what was thought lost no longer is so, since cinema has been able to bring it to life.

On the whole, subjective flashbacks like these have hard, clear edges and a sprightly movement, or they would not work. Painters' treatment of subjectivity is different. Consider Rembrandt's 'Self Portrait at the Age of 63' (1669). The meaning of this lies in the blurred lines of the image - the sfumato effect. Ageing has caused certainties to wither as well as the flesh, and the painting confronts us with silence and stillness. The past is there in the mind of the subject, but it cannot be recaptured, since painting exists in a kind of perpetual, illuminated present. The subjective experience of the painted old man, therefore, is left open, blurred and suggestive, whereas a film would present his mind as hard and firm.

Velázquez, 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary', probably 1618. London, The National Gallery.

What about social and/or intimate relationships between individuals? It is tempting to remark that visual media evoke the great truism that other people can be both heaven and hell. Cinema deals superlatively well with relationships in two ways. Firstly (in classical Hollywood cinema, at least) editing will, by varying shot length, indicate something about the intensity or otherwise of relationships. Almost any of Hitchcock's films contains examples of this.

Secondly, the camera set-ups will locate a relationship in context, and prepare the ground so that there is very little room for audience manoeuvre. The use of the master shot, the close-up, the reaction shot and the shot/reverse shot are techniques for fixing our perception of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the protagonists: consider Douglas Sirk's 1956 'Written on the Wind', for example. A painting, on the other hand, will deploy the spatial conventions of the period in which it was made, but it will have a more overt sense of play with them.

Consider Velázquez' 'Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary' (probably 1618). The picture is set in motion by an impossibly dynamic series of intersecting lines. The disconsolate Martha and the old woman who stands behind her (and who is her reproachful interlocutor) both gaze ahead. What Martha wants - to listen at the feet of the Master, to learn things - is represented behind her, outside her gaze, and is tucked away in miniature form at the top right of the painting. We can see it - that life of the spirit - but she cannot. More importantly, the perspective is slightly askew. Velázquez, who was master of perspective, is deliberately making the spiritual life tiny and out of kilter.

The real meaning of the painting lies in what is on the table. The pestle and mortar (impossible to miss the sexual resonance in its presentation), the glistening fish, the two eggs, the aromatic garlic and chilli - all these evoke the life of flesh and appetite. Martha's expression - her regret and sense of exclusion - is offset by the full, sensual cast of her features. They suggest that she may not want the world of the senses, but she is certainly made for it.

In its use of composition, perspective, contrasting lines and planes, the painting uses a number of techniques simultaneously, whereas a film would deploy images in sequence, and would be more explicit in the way the relationship between the protagonists functioned.

Cranach the Elder, 'Cupid complaining to Venus', about 1525. London, The National Gallery.

Cézanne, 'Hillside in Provence', about 1890-2. London, The National Gallery.

Let us now turn to the ways in which the two media deal with place and space. In the cinema, location shooting can be arranged in such a way that landscape can have enormous cultural resonance. In the hands of a master, the material landscape can be presented as the consummation of history; it can also be the condensation of all that is not human. It works that way in Antonioni's 'L'Avventura' (1960) and 'Zabriskie Point' (1970), and in the Death Valley sequences in Ford's westerns. In all these films, the camera movement pays scrupulous attention to the scale of the location, and to the varying relations between the human figure and the landscape.

In Michael Powell's 'The Edge of the World' (1937) and 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946), too, the stately sweep of the camera insists on the difficulty of finding a home in the inimical world into which we are born.

Painting has other resources for landscape depiction. In early paintings, far landscapes appear as distant jewels which remind the viewer of the superiority of the imaginary - for example, in Cranach's 'Cupid complaining to Venus' (about 1525). Since they cannot move, some modern paintings take a tour round the landscape and show it as a three-dimensional object. That is what Cézanne does with 'Hillside in Provence' (about 1890-2) and all the depictions of Mont St Victoire. By his craggy, rough depiction, we are invited to meditate on what is round the other side. This is something the camera could do effortlessly, but with the painting, it is the viewer who has to do the imaginative work.

Seurat uses a different landscape technique. In the sublime 'Le Beq du Hoc, Grandcamp', his pointillisme (a technique which is, of course, not available to film makers) releases the headland from its own materiality. It seems insubstantial. It floats, though in common sense we know it cannot do so. Of course, the resources of a pointilliste effect would be used by animators or avant-garde film-makers, but not by mainstream filmmakers.

Pieter de Hooch, 'The Courtyard of a House in Delft', 1658. London, The National Gallery.

Holbein, 'The Ambassadors', 1533. London, The National Gallery.

Interior space is managed by the two media in more similar ways. In the cinema, the art director or production designer is in control of the human space, and by the use of sets and set dressing will ascribe meanings to objects which are prominent in the mise en scène.

If we think about the view of history inscribed in John Bryan's interiors for 'The Wicked Lady' (1945), or Bernard Robinson's for the Hammer 'Dracula' (1958), we can see that the scale of the rooms and the objects in them are intended to function in an affective, subliminal manner. The members of the audience are put in the position where they have confidence to interpret the objects which they see.

The same holds good for some paintings, particularly Dutch interiors such as Pieter de Hooch's 'The Courtyard of a House in Delft' (1658). It is a recognisable world whose scale does not flummox its viewers, and which empowers them to take risks with interpreting the ramshackle bucket, the forsaken broom and the battered plaque. Holbein's 'The Ambassadors' (1533) works in a similar way. The very naturalism of the scale, the solidity of objects such as the lute and the globe, the sumptuousness of the fabrics, work so as to lull the viewer into accepting the one stylised object in the frame, the stretched skull.

Much remains to be done. Interesting contrasts could be drawn between painting and the cinema in the ways in which they distinguish between the sacred and the profane, or between purity and danger. Much could be written, too, on the techniques which the two media deploy for evoking the exotic and unknown, or on the different narrative codes they use.

Another area ripe for examination would be the contrasting uses painting and film make of documented 'reality'. But for the moment, I hope I have presented some stimulating ideas about the inner workings of those images which are such a vital part of human history. To be sure, these moving pictures differ according to their respective media, and alter with the ebb and flow of time. But in their mobility and stillness, they remind us how complex the material world is, and how lucky we are to be in it for a while.

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Cinema at the National Gallery