Dissertation

Painting at a Cinematic Glance The New Museum in Films of the 80's and 90's

Written by Ruth Barhum Shamir

The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1999.

PAINTING AT A CINEMATIC GLANCE THE NEW MUSEUM IN FILMS OF THE 1980's AND 1990's

Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by Ruth Barhum Shamir

Submitted to the Senate of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1999.

This work was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Dimitri Segal and Prof. Abraham Kampf

The Hebrew University Jerusalem. 1999

Contents : Overview: I - VII Chapter One: Introduction 1 - 36 Film on Art: History and Theory A Theory of Picto-film Notes Chapter Two : Painting at a Cinematic Glance 37 – 64 Introduction Painting at a Cinematic Glance "A Zed and Two Noughts" - Vermeer the Painter - The painting - "The Music Lesson" - The cinematic Pictorialization of "The Artist and His Model" - The Story of The Girl with a Red Hat - Vermeer's Apogee in Greenaway's Concert - Some General Pictorial Categories Prominent in "ZOO" - The Search for "The Real" - The Collage of Quotation and Culture and Art References - The Dominance of Visual, Pictorial and Cinematic Style - "ZOO" as Realization of the Concept of the New Museum - "All the Vermeers in New-York" - Camera Work and the Museum Sequence - The "Look Askance" and the world of Money Notes Chapter Three: The Enhancement of the Picto-Message 65 - 92 Introduction Peter Greenaway's "The Draughtman's Contract" - The Portrait - The Interior - The Outside Peter Greenaway's "The Belly of an Architect": Introduction Synopsis - The Semiotic Enhancement - "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover": Synopsis - Delight and Disgust in the Dutch Still-Life Notes

Chapter Four: The Search for the Real 93 - 107 Introduction - Meet the Real Van Gogh -"Vincent and Theo" - Dreaming of Vincent - "Dreams" ("Crows") - Reality in the Film and Reality on the Canvas "La Belle Noiseuse" "The Moderns" Notes Chapter Five: Picto-film and the High Art of Our Time 108 - 165 Theoretical Aspects of Art and High Art in our Times - The High Art and the Low Life: Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" - "Mazeppa" or The Idea of the Horse: Gericault - Byron and Pirosmani "Prospero's Books": The Art of Science - Utopia in our Time Notes

Attached: an Illustrated Album and a Video Tape with Visual examples from all films.

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I

Summary Painting and Film. Two separate media. One, belonging to an old and venerable tradition and the other comparatively new and ever-changing. Painting in Film, or Picto-film, a special genre of film, is first promulgated in this work. Through an analysis of twelve films by eight directors, this work aims to show the contribution of Picto-film to contemporary culture and the influence of the cinematic medium on our perception of painting. An Introduction is followed by four chapters which examine this premise in-depth. Chapter One - Introduction - Film on Art and A Theory of Picto-Film What is Picto-film and what does it hope to achieve? In the course of our research for this work, many media influenced our view of this question. Most important among our sources were books by Ann Hollander, Jacques Aumont, Pascal Bonizer, Donald Albrecht and essays by Umberto Eco. Conferences in Boston and San Francisco exposed us to many new ways of thinking of the plastic arts and the challenges of making art more accessible to a larger audience; an exhibition in The Pompidu Center in Paris on the evolution of the image during the 20th century was very important for this work. The synthesis of all these stimuli have shaped the contents of this work. Picto-film will be defined here as a film which employs paintings or semiotic aspects of a painting within an overall cinematic aesthetic structure in such a way as to project "enriched", semiotically meaningful light back onto the painting. Like other aspects of modern art, the pictorial image in Picto-film borrows from raw life experience. Picto-film changes our mode of seeing. Picto-film enhances the patterns of thought and imagination and offers the viewer an extra large or multi-painting. It transposes the painterly image to a larger scale and sets it in motion. Among other things the purpose of Picto-film is to make the painting move. How to accomplish that objective is a semiotic problem that faces each director. Dynamization of contemplation, film as a "new museum", picture as a code, expansion and concentration of meaning and using the picture as an ideal work of art rather than as an image of an image are some of the semiotic concerns of picto-film. To address those concerns, We have characterized four Picto-film qualities: the 'cinematic glance', enhancement of the picto-message, the search for the real and Picto-film and the high art of our time. A brief discussion of each quality is included in the Introduction; each chapter that follows is devoted to analyzing specific films, in the context of that quality and directors' desires to resolve the semiotic problems they are confronted with. Chapter Two: Painting at a Cinematic Glance. The twelve films included here were chosen because the qualities of the new Picto-film genre are most prominent in them, because of their high artistic merit and because those films created a new artistic medium. The first film examined in detail in this chapter is Peter Greenaway's "A Zed And Two Noughts" (ZOO"). Except for the fourth chapter, "The Search for the Real", Greenaway's

II films feature prominently throughout this work. All of his films are dominated by visual style and all display the qualities of Picto-film as the primary new artistic medium. Greenaway, perhaps more than any other film-maker today, is obsessed with solving the semiotic problems facing a director working in cinema. Well-known works of pictorial art or elements of those works are presented for our visual examination; however, in Picto-film instead of the traditional museum mode of viewing, the image is placed within the moving cinematographic framework of a film which almost never stops completely to freeze our view of painting. The film progresses relentlessly, as a series of discrete "glances". Works of art are presented as fragments, angles, aspects of color, shade, composition. From a semiotic point of view a curious mixture of fragmentation, of the breaking up of formerly whole entities creates an entirely new image , a new picture which emerges in the film. While the 'cinematic glance' is evident in all of the twelve films discussed in this work, this cinematic glance becomes a dominent feature of the artistic structure of both Greenaway's "ZOO" and Jon Jost's "All the Vermeer's in New York". Even though both films use Jan Vermeer's paintings as a source of visual construction in them, each film operates the cinematic glance within a radically different and aesthetically unique structure. Both film-makers are trying to recreate an entire visual and emotional world to create a strange "Vermeerishness" quality as a semiotic code or language. In all the Vermeers one discerns common features of composition and common motifs which justify the application of the cinematic glance. Even a fleeting glance at any of the four Vermeer paintings relied on by Greenaway reveals sub-paintings, or fragments, which Greenaway extracts and uses as units of his cinematic language. A complex motif becomes part of the film-maker's semiotic code and carries a different meaning each time we encounter it. Much of the chapter's focus is centered on the cinematic glance as found in The Girl with the Red Hat, The Artist in his Studio, The Concert And The Music Lesson, as it manifests itself in "ZOO". However, since the entire film "ZOO" is a semiotic code for Greenaway, other aspects of Picto-film such as symmetry, stasis versus movement, the frame, the light, categories of real and fake and the collage are examined as well in the chapter. Greenaway presents the viewer with whole new insights into the works of Vermeer, his compositions, light, colors, Dutch and Renaissance influences. After extensive analysis of the Greenaway work, our attention turns to Jost's film "All the Vermeer's in New York" for the balance of Chapter Two discussion of the cinematic glance. Here we see that pictorial language gets another new dimension. The Vermeer paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York serve Jost as background for his cinematic reflections on his own times and the nature of human relations. Pictofilm exhibits new and old elements which provide us with a new enlarged cultural reference. Film-viewers are invited to contemplate Vermeer from different and sometimes unexpected points of view. Chapter Three - The Enhancement of the Picto-Meassage. In the previous chapter the central Picto-film quality examined was the fleeting glance. A further characteristic of all picto-films is the enhancement of the picto-message, that is, a close and attentive stare, dwelling with almost painful deliberation on a feature of style, motif, composition, which originally appeared in a great work of art. What does

III enhancement of the picto-message do to the original paintings presented in the movies? This chapter will attempt to provide some concrete answers. All three films which are discussed in this chapter, "The Draughtsman's Contract". "The Belly of an Architect" and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", are by Peter Greenaway. Enhancement of a certain feature from the pictorial tradition of the past gives rise to visual image in a more abstract system, images which, in themselves, become the pictomessage of the film, almost the grammar of a new language. Film-makers achieve enhancement in a number of ways: through the use of a picture within a picture, the double frame, mise-en-abime and other devices whereby they can achieve additional visual and semiotic depth. Greenaway treats the whole film as a canvas, to be filled with motifs, figures, constructions and techniques from the world of contemporary and classical painting. Not only is this presentation of film as canvas valid, but we believe that the conceit of director as painter is equally valid. "The Draughtsman's Contract" is structured as a painting. Greenaway relies heavily on both 17th century Dutch and Flemish classical painting. He borrows repeatedly from the portrait canvases of both William Hogarth, and Georges de La Tour; he freely adapts the role of sculpture found in Nicolas Poussin's work to the frame and molds it to his visual goals. This anachronistic borrowing serves to enhance and dynamites the pictorial images. Any analysis of the Picto-film qualities of "The Draughtsman's Contract" must incorporate the film-maker's three paradigms, in the film. Greenaway used pictorial paradigms as some computer artist would, borrowing freely from 'incompatible' models and mixing them into a new very modern unity. He moves from 'group portrait' and 'still life' on which the lengthy prologue is structured, to the 'interiors' so reminiscent of the Dutch school interiors and from there to the 'outside' which, in the end, triumphs over the closed interior world. This contrast between the visible, the pictorial, the literary and the cinematic will always be central to Greenaway's art. In "The Belly of an Architect" Greenaway uses semiotic devices and constructions around the main motifs of the film, that of the belly and that of an architect, to produce a new point of view. The interpretation of the visual plane is the means of enhancing the visual and semantic meaning of the film. It is this interpretation that is the heart of this complex work of cinematic art. Greenaway's passion for manipulating works of pictorial art, analyzing paintings into their constituent elements and then reassembling them into new entities and combinations, allows the viewer to return to these textures and see them in highly movable dynamic scenes. By uniting disparate aspects of the semiotic idea of Rome we can find the key to the idea of semiotic enhancement in the film. Painting is an enhancement of reality, architecture is an enhancement of painting and visionary, utopian architecture is an enhancement of real archtecture. Truth is juxtaposed against pride and folly and the protagonist falls victim to his own belly. Greenaway seems to aspire to juxtapose personal frailty, pettiness and nastiness with eternal value and beauty of architecture in this film.

IV If "The Belly of an Architect" is concerned with the semiotic enhancement of eternal beauty, then the third Greenaway film, "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" which concludes this chapter, is equally driven by its concern for the attentive cinematic stare in a world that is both crude and barbaric, where beauty is trampled by the nouveau rich of Thatcherite England. The semiotic enhancement in this film takes another involuted and highly imaginative turn. Unlike earlier Greenaway films, this entire film is like one uninterrupted scream of disgust and delight punctured by groans of fear, pain and suspense. Like the separate paradigms in "The Draughtsman's Contract", the semiotic enhancement occurs in this film within four distinct domains: the world of the kitchen, the lush interior of the restaurant itself, the toilet and the book depository. The personages of the 17th century Frans Hals group portrait of the gentlemen of St. George's company look down on the tragic-comedy being played out in front of them while the ever-shifting present looks back to a golden past. Both personages on and off the canvas bear silent judgment of the other: the past is being constantly interpreted and re-interpreted by the present and the changing present is judged by the immutable past. The act of cinematic enhancement which Greenaway performs cannot and does not remain one directional. In all three films under scrutiny in this chapter, and indeed in the first film, "ZOO" discussed in Chapter Two, the narrative framework is similar: a man connected to Art entertains close intimate relations with a woman who later either betrays him or causes his demise, and Art appears differently than it did in the beginning. All of these films are devoted to art as obsession, the point at which reality impinges on art and culture and art changes reality. Chapter Four: The Search For the Real. Film is the complete opposite of the physical reality in which we exist. The level of sheer spectatorship manipulates the audio visual world of film in a direction away from reality. What semiotic processes occur during this juxtaposition and do they extrude into our own existential reality outside of painting and film? Is what the viewer sees, in cinematic image, the really real, the real fake or just cinematographic play. Four film-makers have examined this art-life question in semiotic terms. Each of these film-makers tackles the question of "reality" as a separate self-contained problem. Two of the film-makers, Robert Altman in "Vincent and Theo" and Akira Kurosawa in one sequence of his epic "Dreams", "Crows" are both absorbed with different aspects of Vincent Van Gogh. Altman explores the inner psychological forces driving Van Gogh and to view those forces in conjunction with the more painful and cruel socio-economic reality of his time as it affects the process of creating art. He builds his film with many reality-enhancing motifs, hoping to erect a complex edifice of different layers of reality which will help viewers discover their own perceptions about Van Gogh. Kurosawa's approach is the very opposite. Not interested in exploring the layers of reality which are behind the painter himself, he departs from some improbable dream-like premise in order to arrive at a deeper understanding and formulation of inner truth.

V A Japanese visitor to an art gallery steps inside the Van Gogh painting in front of him. Kurosawa takes the pictorial world of Van Gogh, dismembers, dissects and disassembles it and puts it back together again in a different mode, a device that can only be done in picto-film. In this film, cinema crosses into painting, painting crosses over into cinema and art crosses into life. Kurosawa's treatment of Van Gogh at the level of art analysis and exegesis is the best example thus far of the extraordinary power of Picto-film in that it allows its creators complete freedom to deal with questions of pictorial art, visually. Two other film-makers have a different perspective on the "reality" they are dealing within their films. In direct contrast to the Altman and Kurosawa stories around a real, and well-known artist, Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse" and Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns" present fictional painters, that create imaginary masterpieces that are dealt with in the films. The starting point for both Altman and Kurosawa is a familiarity with the works of Vincent Van Gogh, but for Rivette, the paintings in his film are devoid of any reality outside the frame-work of picto-film. We know that art which emerges in the bosom of this cinematographic reconstruction of life is an invention. We have to be convinced that what we are shown are real works by a real artist. Rivette emphasizes the process of the painter's work rather than a finished product and the dynamic result of the cameramen's work. The girl model is actually quite plain when not being enhanced by the process of painting as shown in the film. Film, according to Rivette, is a better medium in which to capture reality, both the elusive reality of beauty and the reality of everyday life. The camera creates the reality which appears more real on screen than in real life. Rudolph takes a diametrically opposite view of reality. The motif of reality of the fake paintings and the unreality of the originals is central to this film. For Rudolph, the real living girl commands the scene and produces the reality. Everyone must conform to the new reality. Art critics and the owner and the viewer each bring their own point of view to the work. We can conclude from the cursory examination of the four films analyzed in this chapter that the integration of painting and film into one cinematic work of art is a new and exciting way to examine the "real" in art and life. Painting is best suited to giving us the intellectual and spiritual framework for interpreting the world as it presents itself in the line of aesthetic tradition. Film strives to catch the immediate present-day reality in its visual aspects. But it also allows us to experience vicariously through seeing other aspects of sensual, emotional and effective reality. The camera performs the work of the brush or pen. By couching this contact in visual images taken from the world of painting we can merge reality of experience with the eternal reality of art. Chapter Five: Picto-film and the High Art of our Time. The visual or plastic arts, as we know them today, are a combination of three aspects which, when taken together, are called aesthetics: a high degree of technical accomplishment, a high degree of identification with the mythological and ritual model of the world, and a high degree of evaluation in the community. High art arises where special privileged social groups claim exclusivity and appropriate these aesthetic accomplishments for themselves. After World War I with the appearance

VI of new directions in the visual arts, aesthetics fused with social and group psychology; art was introduced into the sphere of mass media. The nature of art and the nature of the viewer's relationship to art changed dramatically. Painting became synonymous with the notion of high art at a certain stage in its development. The very notion of high art developed from the experience of painting as an art form. With the evolution of public museum, and the expanded audience for viewing art, what was formerly restricted to the elitist few, now became widely available to society at large. With the introduction of reproductions, the notion of the ideal viewer changed yet again, through the availability of multiple and familiar images taking their place in everyday life. Film, as the newest medium, originated as newsreel or reportage, at the beginning of this century, and then evolved into a visual entertainment, available to a broad cross-section of a society, in greater numbers than any visual art form before it. Only gradually did film establish its own place in the world of art. It had to transcend the framework of virtual reportage, of 'life-like' narrative and to introduce direct visual language involving artistic literary or dramatic devices. The genre of artistic film came into being and managed to establish itself firmly in the annals of 20th century high culture. With the shifts in overall conception of art, came new perspectives in aesthetics. Mikhail Bakhtin developed a 'theory of carnival" which unites in one coherent whole two formerly opposed practices of art: high art based on Kant's notion of the sublime and popular art which Bakhtin preferred to call "unofficial", based on diametrically contrasting principles of the aesthetics of the grotesque. Both trends united, borrowing from each other, engaging in dialogue, extolling the unofficial, the subversive, the individualistic, the grotesque and the low. Art became part of everyday life. Viewers and creators became interchangeable. High art, today, fuses the images of traditional high art with the forms and genres of mass popular and commercial art. The modern framework of the images of classical painting serves as the new interpretative model for these images elevating the low, mundane and democratic framework to the level of new high art, resulting in a mixed genre in which the rules of carnival and carnivalization prevail. The three last picto-films to be analyzed in this work all exhibit the quality of high art, combining intrinsic artistic values with some special anti-values of the painter, his life, his circumstances. Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" and Bartabas' "Mazeppa" and Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" are each examples of high art in our times. Both "Caravaggio" and "Prospero's Books" are accompanied by special albums which, more than the films themselves, present the high art viewpoint of the film-makers. "Caravaggio" is, for Jarman, one large painting, a kind of large-scale fresco, and the narrative line, is treated by him as a blow up of every detail within the frame. If anything, the cinematic glance we saw in chapter two, is even more triumphant here than in other picto-films. We see facsimiles and fragments of Caravaggio's work, and not the really real. In this film, the painting provides the interpretation of the story line, the album accompanying it interprets the cinematic motifs, the motifs of the painting are interpreted in light of other visual and mythological motifs elsewhere in the film. "Caravaggio" is the most deeply personally felt achievement in combining film and painting. "Mazeppa" is also a model Picto-film in that it concentrates on the work of a specific painter, Theodore Gericault, which the film presents and interprets with the help of a rich

VII palette of cinematic means which goes far beyond other authors' achievement in this genre. This film is a perfect example of carnavalistic high art. In "Prospero's Books" modern science and technology combine in this post modernist vision by Greenaway where a breath-taking array of visual structures enhances the semiotic message of this film one image overlapping another, embedded within another, with text, separate words and sentences flashed across the screen forming stylistic counterpoints with the images. One never simply watches "Prospero's Books". It is the transition from the point of view of the object to the point of view of the artist and then to the point of view of the viewer, a process discussed at the beginning of this last chapter of this work. If Derek Jarman and Bartabas regard the world which they create either as an extension of their own personal world or its projection onto some archetypal psychic model, Greenaway places a linguistic or semiotic problem into the very center of his film. Greenaway's keen curiosity and delight in the possibilities of technology combine with a desire to ask and solve intricate semiotic questions. The main emphasis in this film is on the visual code. Its main aesthetic approach is in the search for and the arrangement of beauty. Greenaway frames and reframes the film and so creates a cinematographic language and technique which serves as an aesthetic and emotional expression parallel to the world of real issues in Shakespeare. The newly invented paint box technique creates a work of art of unparalleled beauty and suggestiveness. The paint box overwhelms the viewer at the beginning of the film, it is a tantalizing glimpse into a new and fascinating possibility in film-painting in the direct sense of creating film as classical painters created their paintings. Picto-film's contribution is towards establishing new criteria for art in film. Classical painting has been reinvented and represented on film and in film. Film as world and language appears more meaningful and richer as a result of this meeting of two art media. Future high art will necessarily be carnivalistic, married to popular or folk traditions, linked to mass culture.

1

Chapter one: Introduction and Picto-film Theory. Cinema is by definition a mixed media art form. The complex and fascinating interplay of the visual and the audio, movement and the static, the spoken word and gesture and pantomime, architecture and music, dance and the pictorial element have been amply discussed, by among others, Sergei Eisenstein, Yuri Lotman, Christian Metz. Extremely insightful observations about a "cinematic" nature of certain trends in European painting were made by Ann Hollander.(1) To date, most of the discussion of cinematic multisemioticity has focused on the specific contributions of all these varied semiotic systems to the over-all aesthetics of film. The aim of this work is somewhat different: to define eventual relevant contribution of the contemporary cinematic medium to our perception of painting, namely the painting which appears in one form or the other in the recent films of such directors as Peter Greenaway, Robert Altman, Akira Kurosawa, and others. The oeuvre of Peter Greenaway appears to be the most representative and authoritative, although other authors have introduced their own specific refinements into this genre (or, maybe, sub-genre) which will be called here picto-film - a term introduced by Francois Jost. (2) Several semiotic problems arise in these films which bear on the aesthetic and the ontological status of painting at the end of the 20th century: dynamization of contemplation, film as a new museum, picture as a code, expansion / concentration of meaning, a picture as an ideal "Kunstwerk" ("work of art") versus a picture as an "image of an image". Different patterns of pictorial dynamization appear in the films to be discussed: existentialization (that is a desire, on the part of the film-maker, to convey to his film a status of "real existence"); picture as an object of "luxe, calme et volupté "; picture viewed under the prism of the "prize" or "price "categories; dynamization of

2 contemplation; dynamization in real-life treatment of pictures; new perspectives in pictorializing: the video and the multi-frame images. Cinema as a whole, has the ability to include, to combine, and to integrate separate forms of plastic arts such as: sculpture, photography, video art, television, architecture and painting. Cinema presents visual material in the most comprehensive way that derives from the cinematic medium itself, and is accessible to the largest audience. Apart from that, the cinema is able to give to those forms of art more validity and signification. It has the potential to enlarge the visual language in an effective and unique way. Picto-film enhances the patterns of thought and imagination and offers, in effect, what is an extra large or multi-painting. It transposes the painterly image to a larger scale and sets it in motion. In a unique sort of way, picto-films can and do contribute to a change in paradigm in history of art, theory of art and art appreciation. Some of these contributions have been detailed, or hinted at, in the following theoretical and descriptive works which will be discussed below. All of them left their impact on my theoretical framework. To date, little interdisciplinary research has been done in the field spanning art history and film studies. Picto-film, as a special genre is first promulgated in the present work, therefore there has been so far no specific reference to it as a genre. But there are books about films and the arts in general which develop an interdisciplinary approach, as well as articles about film and painting and more on the cinema and the arts in general. Some of them will be discussed below. 1. The relationship between the history of art and the modern cinematic point of view has been the subject of "Moving Pictures" a book by Ann Hollander published in 1986. It is one of the first attempts to study seriously the links between cinema and painting. In the field of Art History she looks for a "particular sort of picture, which seems to be in motion even while it does not move, seems to be showing a much larger section of time than the frame can contain, and seems to invite our participation in the movement of its potential narrative" (3). As Hollander stated in the introduction to her book, she undertook a "search through the history of art for the kinds of picture that attempted and

3 prefigured what cinema later actually did, and that form a background and foundation for movies". (4) Ann Hollander understands "movement" in paintings as involving both the pictorial and the psychological aspects of the represented world (color, shading, expression, position, gesture) and the corresponding expressions of the viewers' attitude (the absence of a unified dominant focus, the shift of forms or presence of multiple foci). According to her, Jan Van Eyck was one of the first to discover the secret of making a static frame appear dynamic:. . . light in figurative art, as Van Eyck discovered, has an edge over any other formal element. If the dramatic action of ordinary light can be accurately represented in a religious picture, for example, the image can manifest spiritual transfiguration simply by showing the real light of day on the right group of common objects. They will seem to fill with meaning, just as the world seems to fill with it when dawn breaks. And so an ordinary stable can effectively be shown as the sacred birthplace of the Redeemer, not by applying stagy spotlights or supernatural gold rays, but just by showing exactly how thin daylight filters through the uneven timbers of a broken door. Two centuries later, a similar rush of human meaning seems to fill the room where a woman is standing at her kitchen window and nothing at all is happening, except for milk pouring out and light coming in. (5) In the latter case Ann Hollander refers to the famous painting by Jan Vermeer "Woman Pouring Milk". In other parts of her very reasoned presentation Ann Hollander examined the role of composition, angle, light, size and gesture in the building up of a narrative - "moving" structure in the paintings by Caravaggio, Vélasquez, Piranese, Canaletto and others. Special attention is paid in her analysis to the 17th century Dutch genre, including the works by Rembrandt, Terborch, Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch and many others. In the 18th century she examines the genre works of Antoin Watteau and Claude Chardin, while the bulk of her study is devoted to painstaking descriptions of Goya, Turner, Whistler, Degas, C.D. Friedrich, Winslow Homer and other 19th century painters. Throughout her work she insists on combining the more formal history of arts approach with the study of broad cultural movements and influences, arriving, finally at far-reaching and even provocative conclusions about the interrelationships of "high" and "low" ("bad") art, high and popular culture. She insists that the one is not only influenced

4 by the other, but that the appearance of new art forms, like cinema, was a necessary fusion of all the technical mastery and resources inherent in the new European painting since the pre-Renaissance and Renaissance with the desire for participation and directness embodied in popular art (street shows, circuses, happenings, popular illustrations and the like). It is this emphasis on the unity of pictorial and cultural tradition which we find important for our work. 2. Jacques Aumont's book "L'Oeil Interminable" was published in 1989. (6) In this book, as well as in his contribution "Image, Face, Passage" to the exhibition catalogue "Peinture Cinema Peinture".(7) Jacques Aumont discusses the linkage between painting and cinema in a somewhat opposite manner to what was suggested in Hollander's book. Jacques Aumont insists on the basic pictoriality (static nature) of both painting and cinema. He argues that if there is a connection between painting and cinema it is because there are some painterly problems which come back again and again in the cinematic frame, such as: time as a central problem, the static frame, space, the center etc. All these are cardinal problems in painting and they become cardinal problems in cinema as well. He sizes up Bazin's arguments about cinema and painting and extends them further. Although the book's subtitle is 'Cinema and Painting', it is really about the cinema and other media, with painting getting special attention. In a later interview he said that he did not choose the subject but the subject chose him, as the cinema in those last ten years brought the importance of painting to the fore. More and more paintings appear in collective cultural memory thanks to cinema.(8) A large part of his book is concerned with the theoretical discussion of the texts by Pierre Francastel, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry and Stephen Heath which first appeared in 1970's. They were all centered around the perceived dependence of the cinematic mode on the painterly mode of representation during the Quattrocento. The problems they discussed appear quite real to Aumont

5 because he came across the same problems such as space and perspective viewed from geometric and subjective centers. These are important common problems for painting and cinema. Jacques Aumont's special contribution to the theoretical framework of this work was his insistence on a thoroughly dynamic nature of absolutely organic semiotic constructs. He observed that, for instance, human face seems to be both an elementary sign (in static painting and in moving pictures) and a complex system of dynamic meanings depending on the genre, individual perspective, cultural background etc. Thus the notion of dynamization which will be much in use in this work is related to Aumont's analyses: 1) The eye of the cinema, of painting, of photography, are really the same thing; an entire period in cinema and an entire period in painting coincide in a single period in the art of representations (and it is at the level of concepts that require the idea of cinema as an art and the idea of painting as an art that the relationship is conceivable). 2) This interminable relationship nevertheless bears the date of a period that is not yet over, a time that is, or has been, the period of the eye. There is no room here to give a detailed exposition of this thesis, which was only mentioned in order to make the following point: the thing that counts today, that makes sense, from the cinema to painting and photography, is no longer their infinitely particularized definition, their difference (where ontology has so often been a mask concealing empiricism), but the fact that they all belong to a moment in the history of culture: the modern moment. Modern? Modern. (with full awareness of how tired, how exhausted the word is.) (9) 3.) In his concise and very insightful book "Peinture et Cinema, Decadrages"(10) , the French film-critic Pascal Bonizer summarizes his observations concerning mutual relations between painting and cinema, observations which belong to the period of the 1960's-1980's when Pascal Bonizer observed the cinema work of such directors as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Pascal Bonizer proceeds from a premise that static painting and dynamic cinema not only share common origins but constantly solve the same creative and structural problems. Painting constantly seeks to capture the essence of movement, while cinema is

6 concerned, in its way, with the still image. Pascal Bonizer draws attention to the process of our visual reception of painting and cinema. He proceeds from a double hypothesis: a) that the cinema basically inherited the Quattrocento project of scientific objective perspective, realizing in the process what the great art-historian Alois Riegel calls the Kunstwollen of the Renaissance; and b) that cinema and painting are caught up in many of the same representational processes; the examples he brings up are the famous "miseen-abyme" and the tracking shot, which are found both in cinema and in painting. What was especially fruitful for this work was Pascal Bonizer's attention to what he calls "le plan-tableau" (a pictorial frame). He brings up several examples of such pictorial frames in modern films: "Passion" by Jean-Luc Godard where paintings by Goya, Delacroix and Rembrandt are presented in the cinematic form; the critic presents revealing parallels between actual paintings and frames from modern pictures (for example, a shot of a fainted woman in Eric Rohmer's "La Marquise d'O" and J. H. Fussli's 19th century "La Cauchemar"). The notion of "Décadrage" ("deframing") introduced in this book by Pascal Bonizer is important for the present work, because it is premised on the key concept of "tromp d'oeil" and the "grain de réel" which are developed here as elements of the so-called "search for the real". 4. Apart from the above-mentioned seminal works on the relationship between cinema and painting, our approach owes much to the book called "Designing Dreams, Modern Architecture in Movies", by Donald Albrecht. (11) This innovative book added its unique insights to the basic interdisiplinary ideas introduced here in the notion of picto-film similar to the change in the essence of painting which is caught in picto-films and is revealed to be of a cinematic nature. In architecture as it appears in motion pictures, the same cinematic effect is observed. "Designing Dreams" presents in a vivid form the process ofinterrelationship between the ideas and forms of modern 20th century architecture and the world of cinema in which some of these ideas and forms made their very persuasive appearance. On the one hand, it can be argued that certain direction in modernist architecture emerged from the screens of movies where modern industrial forms could be viewed in a

7 completely different visual context from the "real", "factory" or urban milieu. On the other hand, as the author argues: The adoption of architectural modernism by the popular arts had two notable effects. First, it successfully promoted the modern style to the general public, making it both more accessible and more palatable. Even more significantly, it helped create a potent new iconography for architecture: Through frequent explosure in the media in a similar range contexts, the "modern look" became associated with affluence and with progressivism in taste. . . (12) As Donald Albrecht argues, ultimately there emerged in the Hollywood movies of the 20's - 40's a certain architectural and design ambience which, as often as not, gave to architecture certain semiotic features which were present in this film-world but were most probably unavailable in the so-called "real world". One of the best examples that we could add to the analysis of Albrecht could be the black and white interior of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies where the interior and exterior design combine in creating a kind of a total design, total atmosphere, not unlike to what would be called in painting "style" or even "texture". This new use of design and architecture in film, so persuasively argued by Donald Albrecht should definitely be related to a quality which we discerned in picto-films of creating stylistic continuity between the imagined and the "real" (often commercial) world which, in its turn, has its origins in theconcept of the "new museum" which will be developed below. This stylistic continuity is inherited in picto-films (as well as in the Hollywood movies of the 20's-40's) from some very unlikely sources of the early avant-garde utopism, as argued in his book by Donald Albrecht: The modernist utopia was an egalitarian one where good design would be available to all, not just to the upper classes, who had traditionally been its main beneficiaries. The average man would live in hygienic housing, work in sunlit factories, and exercise in spotless health clubs. Moviemakers, by contrast, created a utopia of wealthy nonconformists. Instead of workers' housing, many popular films depicted deluxe villas and rooftop apartments; instead of factories, they featured executive offices for capitalist captains of industry; instead of sports clubs, sparkling nightclubs. It is one of the ironies

8 of the modernist movement that the cinema, the twentieth century's greatest egalitarian visual art form, took modern architecture's collectivist agenda and transformed it into a fantasy of privilege to be enjoyed only by the celluloid wealthy - meanwhile broadcasting that message to an audience composed of the widest segments of society that the architects sought to reach. More than any other visual medium, film, by virtue of the size of its audience and its growing influence over culture as a whole, helped shape popular perceptions of architectural modernism. The cinema of the 1920's and 30's thus offers a challenging new perspective on modern architecture, as well as an unusual case study of how mass culture assimilates radical visions in the arts. Unlike contemporary histories of modern architecture written by partisans of the movement, this book aims to present a picture of modernism drawn by art directors who were not professionals directly associated with the movement and whose sources were therefore secondhand, via the magazines, books, and exhibitions through which modern architects promoted their style. Finally, this view also gauges the influence modernism had on the public, who had been exposed to the movement through movies that had wholeheartedly adopted its most vanguard imagery, while usually ascribing connotations to that imagery that modern architects never intended, nor perhaps even perceived. (13) Some interesting insights about the uses (and abuses) of painting in our present-day cultural milieu can be found in the popular companion "Ways of Seeing", a BBC-TV series (1974), four half-hour programs directed by Michael Dibb. Author/critic John Berger focuses on the effects of social context and economic production on the perception of art. The series was unique in its time for its challenge to authoritative interpretation. In the twenty five years since the appearance of the series and the book , the involvement of the popular culture with classical painting

became even more

dynamic, omni-present and cinematic. The notion of the cinematic glance which will be developed below has its roots in this cultural development. Another important and influencial series was Robert Hughes's eight-part series on modern art, "The Shock of the New" (1979), placed twentieth-century art in historical context in a personal powerful and convincing manner.

9 Not only published books and articles contributed to the development of the conceptual framework of this book but a number of public and academic conferences and exhibitions were also instrumental in shaping our outlook. Symposiums 1. On November 14-16, 1991, I participated in a Symposium: "Art history and Film, Starting from the Art", which was held at Tufts University in Boston. Presented by the 'Art on Film' Program.(14) The Symposium focused on "Film on Art". It was a meeting of producers, directors and art historians who exchanged ideas about new ways to produce films on art. Directors presented their films, producers spoke about the difficulties of producing films on art, and the scholars spoke about the new challenges of putting art history on film and video, especially when one was looking for films that should be responsible and informative from a scholarly perspective. Judith Wechsler's (an art historian and producer/director of "Film on Art") presentation focused on the challenges of putting art history on film and video. She maintained that the way one does art history in film is fundamentally affected by the medium. The presentation of "evidence" and the process of argumentation must be handled differently in film from what would be presented in written scholarship: the word predominates in art history, the image predominates in film.(15) She stated that "film presents art history with some serious challenges". But she added "because films address larger audiences than most art history monographs and journals, an audience without specialized knowledge, they cannot effectively make use of the specialized language of art history"(16) In her view "film and the traditional forms of art history - the monograph, book, article, catalogue, lecture - can be viewed as complementary though they have quite different purposes".(17) In general the whole symposium dealt with the question of how to make the 'old ways' of art history more interesting so that they would reach a larger audience . Most of the films

10 presented were documentaries on painting and sculpture, most of them short films: Biographies of Artists, Women Artists, films analyzing specific paintings, some of the films actually presented artists in front of the camera. Such films outline documentary profiles of living artists; they function as portraits of artists. 2. The symposium "Re-framing the Artist's Vision". This Symposium was held in SanFrancisco State University on February 24-25, 1992. During the symposium a variety of new pathways, influences, transformations, relationships, ideas and visions were presented and examined. These were made possible through dynamic interrelationships emerging between art, cinema, video, computer and telecommunications. Leading artists, curators and critical theorists presented and discussed their work in the areas of production design for cinema, translating texts to visual images, the impact of mass

communications

on

creative

documentary

productions,

translation

of

sculptural/environmental space to virtual/electronic space, alterations of images through electronic manipulation and the impact of visual arts on cinematic and video works. Several exhibitions were instrumental in promoting some of the ideas of this work. 1. "Passage de L'image" One of the most influential events in the progression of my research, was organised by the Musée national d'art modern at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It later was moved to San-Francisco in 1992. This exhibition presented the evolution of the image during the 20th century. The display offered a panoramic view of the most up-to-date achievements in video, photography, cinema and installations showing interaction among these media. In the catalogue of the exhibition we read: "The present exhibition responds to the desire to understand what started happening in and among images when it became clear that we could no longer speak of the cinema, photography and painting, since we had reached a point of no return in a crisis of the image, when the very nature of images was brought into question".(18) The exhibition represented in a very concise and clear manner, the evolution of the Image in the 20th century and made clear that there appears new ways of seeing, and that at the

11 end of the 20th century we have to deal with them. It brought together overwhelming and colorful examples of works, based entirely and exclusively on technological images. Further on we read: "Such technological pictures are present everywhere in the contemporary environment - television, publicity, surveillance cameras-

and

are

gradually overrunning public and private places: shops, houses, museums, etc." (19) This exhibition made me realize the enormous influence exerted by the "power of the Image" on our culture. Even more graphically it presented the "power of the glance of the Image", the quick image in film, television, advertisements, computer images all represented for the first time in the enormous 20th century image-factory. With regards to pictures the catalogue states the position of the organizers very vividly: Pictures. There is no question here of going back in history to caves. While admitting that such a history exists, we will deal with a specific phase in their evolution: the age of the "modern picture", a complex category that emerged with the photograph and embraces a network of interconnections between modes (or models) of representation and figuration, and preand post-photographic systems of imaginative production. (20) The 20th century image emerges within a communicative interdisciplinary network of various forms of representations which create this interdisciplinary Image : the pictorial image, the photographic image and the cinematic image merged, molded into one. Every image of the media is characterized by a curious transition from one form to another form, from one meaning to another meaning, in a very quick transition, as we traverse some invisible line. This exhibition gave me the opportunity to experience in one concise space the new image and the new spectator emerging from the new image. As I see the picto-film as part of this New Image created by the 20th century, the experience of this exhibition was very important for me. The conventional, framed, traditional painting got a new semiotic dimension, multi structured and multi-leveled. By inserting painting into the cinematic frame the picto-film creates a new cinematic image. 2. The exhibition "Japan Today". This exhibition was presented in the most beautiful Jorgen Bo, Vilhelm Wohlert, Louisiana Museum, in Humlebaek (Sweden). The museum is specialized and designed for modern art only, and it is especially instructive to walk around and acquire new perspectives about modern art in its context.

12 I visited the museum in June 1995, when a new exhibition was opened to the public, called "Japan today". Japan is a superb example of a hi-tech and telecommunicative culture and as such serves the purpose of my research. This exhibition gave me the opportunity to view art objects representing the first generation of Japanese painters who have succeeded in breaking away from both Japanese and Western traditions to develop a mode of expression of their own commensurate with the hybrid modern culture of Japan. I paid special attention to Miran Fukuda's work because her artistic vision is to a great extent inspired on one hand by the Japanese information and telecommunication culture, with paintings providing a critical commentary on Japan's enormous consumption of high and mass-culture images, and on the other hand, her chosen motifs are from Western art history. Her work relates to picto-film and was therefore especially interesting for me. A good example in this respect would be Miran Fukuda's painting, "Young Woman standing at a virginal, Japan, 1991; which clearly evokes the images of the famous Vermeer's painting. Another example is "Danae Receiving the Shower of Gold", Japan 1994; which goes back to Titian's oeuvre of 1554. "In my work I attempt to carry out a thorough investigation of what we call "painting" to make the fundamental themes of painting visible to the present time"(21). This is how Miran Fukuda characterized her work as a painter. Fukuda and other Japanese artists tried to re-examine and re-define contemporary painting. Fukuda's investigation of painting involves coming to terms with the painting as it stands in relation to the mechanic-ally and electronically produced images of the present. These artists, as their work showed, are mainly concerned with visual perception in relation to the stream of images produced by the information society and thus question the way in which the contemporary individual sees things. By appropriating Western masterpieces and altering them, Fukuda hopes to enhance our awareness that visual perception can change our concept of the "masterpiece", as she reexamines the idea of painting as material color and surface. Fukuda either splits the original painting into smaller parts which she then recombines, or she changes the original composition and motif by shifting the view point 90 degrees in both cases

13 altering the original meaning of the painting. Collages, blurring and cuttings are also stock elements of Fukuda's (and others) manipulation of images. By linking old masterpieces to modern visual

technology, Fukuda bridges the gap

between different technologies of reproduction and brings painting into the age of high technology. Film on Art: History and Theory There are many approches to filming art. Film as an independant media has its own language and strategies, and the theoretization of film has already taken place in film studies. Judith Wechsler has some insights about art history and films on art in general: The intersection of art and film raises some important issues about the perception of art, the practice of art history and about film. Art historians and film-makers need to develop and interface between art and film, to find meaningful ways to transmit a still, silent image through a moving picture, usually with sound. Though there may be some compromise in translating from one medium to another, there is the possibility of enhancing the experience of looking under different circumstances. Film can offer a more immediate conduit to the art object than can most publications. Films on art are, for the most part, addressed to an audience without specialized knowledge. Through television, films reach a broader and more varied public than those attending college courses and even art exhibitions. But are films on art condemned to over simplification, mystification, and populism? Does popular appeal preclude film as a vehicle for scholarship? Can one present theory visually? What kinds of art history are relevant for film? Filmmakers convert subjects not only by the choice of images and text, but in the "look" of the film - through framing the image, choosing details, pacing camera moves and editing - all of which affect our perception of works of art. Technical issues have methodological and theoretical implications that lie outside the traditional practices of art history.

Art history and film can intersect and overlap, but they represent distinctive

conceptual modes. "Evidence" in film differs from that of the written tradition of scholarship. Some of the usual apparatus of the discipline is not feasible: digressions can

14 be confusing, arguments cannot be developed in detail, footnotes are impossible. In film, clearly the visual predominates; in art history, the word. Content does not determine the quality of the film. One can have fine films on lesser subjects and dumb films on important themes. Should an exceptionally good film be regarded as an artifact or a work of art rather than a form of art history? Some filmmakers assert that a film on art is art and that their statements are potentially as significant as the subject/object of their discourse. Does this justify a filmmaker's ignorance of art? Should the filmmaker be seen as an artist whose films need to be deconstructed, or as an art historian who identifies the problematic? Film is an introjection, and the presence of the filmmaker changes the way the art object is seen. . . (22) Judith Wechsler argues that "certain distortions of the art object occur in film and video through the format, the representation of scale, and the translation of color. The sense of space in a film is unlike that of painting." (23) As the film theorist André Bazin observed: A frame is centrifugal, the screen centrifugal . . . . If we show a section of a painting on a screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and its limits and is presented to the imagination as without any boundaries.(24) Montage, or editing, creates meaning through association of images.The creation of sense or meaning is not proper to the images themselves, but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition. Between the scenario . . . and the image pure and simple, there is a relay station, a sort of aesthetic Transformer". The meaning is not in the image, it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage onto the field of consciousness of the spectator.(25) Judith Wechsler continues her statement and overview on the films and video representing art: Films on art confront the paradox that art objects are still, while films trace movement in space and time. The justification for camera movement is that we do not see an entire object at one glance: it takes time to see. But if one tried to replicate the movements of the eye with camera moves, the experience of seeing would not be transmitted: the mind makes sense of the picture from successive glances. Camera moves reflect an image that has been thought through and in turn suggest a way of "looking" in the sense of understanding. It is easier to justify filming three-dimensional works, such as

15 sculpture or architecture, as movement of the viewer in space is necessary to see and experience them. The challenge is to present art objects, which are spatial, in a temporal mode: to achieve a specialization of time. As we do not have sense receptors for time, it must come through our other senses, the auditory and kinaesthetic. In film, time is manipulated: sped up or slowed down, interposing past and present with the use of dissolves, fade-ins and fadeouts. New computerized video techniques introduce a far greater range of capabilities, suggesting movement and time, that bear little resemblance to unmediated experience: superimposition of images, distortions, shifts of color, changes of scale, etc.(26) Broad distinctions in genres have been elaborated as far as transferring art into film. One could think of the following broad genres which represent art on film. A short history review is given in the directory of Films and Videos about the visual arts, "Art on Screen" : Biographies of Artists - The genre of films on art have generally been those of traditional art history: chronological presentation of biography, iconography, tracing of formal characteristics, review of stylish periods, schools of art. Amongst the genres, biography has predominated. After all, art history had its origins in biography with Vasari's "The lives of the Italian Painters, Sculpture, and Architects, first published in 1550. But biography is often the lowest common denominator of art history, the one with the most popular appeal. In film, biographies range from such features as "Moulin Rouge (1952), directed by John Huston; "Lust for Life" (1956), directed by Vincent Minnelli; "The Agony and the Ecstasy" (1965), directed by Carol Reed; to less commercial and highly effective films, closer to the works of art, such as Peter Watkins "Edward Munch" (1976); Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" (1985); and Paul Cox's Vincent: The life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh" (1987). Docudrama is a variant. Leslie Megahey produced a BBC-TV series, "Artists and Models" (1983), on the French painters David, Gericault, and Ingres. These films evoke a sense of history through use of silent black-and-white film footage to suggest newsreels of ninteenth-century historical events, as well as the use of excerpts from classic films about the period. The archival passages are intercut with dramatic re-creations and

16 documentary sequences to create some of the most imaginative and successful films in this genre. Artists on Camera - In documentary profiles of living artists, there is an immediacy and intimacy elicited through the artist's direct participation. The "artist at work" remains one of the most convincing genres of art films. These productions do what only moving image media can, and are of great archival value. The classics are Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg's "Jackson Pollock (1951) and Clouzot's "The Mystery of Picasso" (1956). Emile de Antonio's "Painters Painting" (1972) is a significant documentary of fourteen artists in the 1960's. The films of Michael Blackwood on painters, sculpture, and architects constitute important records of art in the second half of this century, documenting with probity and intelligence individuals at work as well as schools and styles. The creation and development of a work of art is a variant of the genre. Film is particularly valuable in documenting site specific works of art that change in time, capturing a certain period in that progress. Exemplary are Robert Smithson constructing his "Spiral Jetty" (1970); Christo's installations, such as "Running Fence" (1976) filmed by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin; and "Stones and files: Richard Long in the Sahara (1988), by Philip Haas, a compelling document on one of Long's sitespecific environmental works. David Sutherland has developed an original and effective style of documentary in which artists speak scripted lines developed from previous interviews, as seen in Paul Cadmus: "Enfant Terrible at 80" (1984) and Jack Levine: "Feast of Pure Reason" (1986). Providing Context - The context in which a particular art object is made is often a focus of films, and though interesting and sometimes useful, it is often presented at the expense of looking at how art develops in response to art. The simplest approach to context involves location scenes intercut with artists' work. The approach is an integral part of a number of films on Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Manet, Monet and others, used with varying degrees of pertinence and intelligence. Comparisons of sites and paintings have been the focus of various art historical studies, particularly popular in studies of Cezanne in the 1940's.

17 Context involves more than a comparison with location. Subject matter, composition, style are largely affected by the conventions of art, a matter insufficiently suggested in most films on art. A recent video by the Museum of Modern Art on the Ellsworth Kelly exhibition, "Fragmentation and the Single" from 1990, is a fine example of an artist presenting and discussing art historical precedents. . . Restoration is a subject that film addresses well and that invites some issues of the intersection of art and science. The processes of restoration can be demonstrated and the state of the work, before and after, shown to great effect. Two recent films are particularly successful in this regard: the Nova program "Can the Vatican Save the Sistine Chapel" (1988), written, directed, and produced by Susanne Simpson; and a film by David Sutherland, :"The Feast of the Gods" (1990), for the National Gallery of Art in Washington." Recent Development - The Metropolitan Museum/ J. P. Getty Trust Program for Art on Film set out to explore alternatives to the conventional genre of filmmaking by pairing accomplished art historians and filmmakers. Since the majority of films on art have been about twentieth-century artists and have focused on painting, the program commissioned films on art before Impressionism, with preference for media other than painting and including non-Western art: the concept of Main Japanese architecture, Mimbres pottery, a Gothic cathedral, Fayum portraits, and Chinese scroll painting are five out of an initial ten films. With high technical skill and production values rarely affordable in films on art, they raised the standard: they mobilized Leonardo's water drawings using computer animation, filmed Beauvais cathedral with a helicopter, shot one brilliant camera move on 35mm for an ingenious film on Manet's series of paintings on the execution of Maximilian. The Louvre has produced a series, 100 Seconds for a Work of Art, on objects in their collections. Directors were given free reign to make intense, innovative, entertaining films without didactic commentary. Another Louvre production is "Palettes", a series of half-hour videos directed by Alain Jaubert, which explores major individual paintings by old masters including Jan van Eyck, Veronese, Georges de La Tour, Claude Lorrain, Delacroix. These videos address aesthetic, historical, and technical issues, using various art historical methods and advanced video techniques in highly intelligent and

18 informative ways. They are among the very best examples of films on art in which the work of art, the history of art, and hugh production values are brought into a fine and rewarding balance. (27) The use of paintings in genres other than painting has its own quite venerable history, especially if one turns to the way literature tried to present , describe and contextualize paintings. The earliest examples of the use of paintings in literature can be found in the special literary genre of "Ekphrasis" collaborated in the Hellenistic period of antiquity. Dynamization of painting, began with the "Ekphrasis", which is a cultural phenomenon, which contemplates, examines and describes one art form through another art form. The cinema's representation of paintings copes with questions similar to those raised by those who described paintings by words. An early example can be found in a book by Elder Philostratus called "Eikones" ("Pictures"), (28) written in the second century C.E. : The Painting of Narcissus gazing at his reflection in a pool is the subject of a Pompeian wall-painting (29) - the pool paints Narcissus, and the painting represents both the pool and the whole story of Narcissus. A youth just returned from the hunt stands over a pool, drawing from within himself a kind of yearning and falling in love with his own beauty; and, as you see, he sheds a radiance into the water. The cave is sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs, and the scene is painted realistically. For the statues are of a crude art and made from a local stone; some of them are worn away by time, others have been mutilated by children of cowherds or shepherds while still young and unaware of the presence of the god. Nor is the pool without some connection with the Bacchic rites of Dionysus, since he has made it known to the Nymphs of the wine-press; at any rate it is roofed over with vine and ivy and beautiful creeping plants, and it abounds in clusters of grapes and the trees that furnish the thyrsi, and tuneful birds disport themselves above it, each with its own note, and white flowers grow about the pool, not yet in blossom but just springing up in honour of the youth. The painting has such regard for realism that it even shows drops of dew dripping from the flowers and a bee settling on the flowers - whether a real bee has been deceived by

19 the painted flowers or whether we are to be deceived into thinking that a painted bee is real, I do not know. But let that pass. As for you, however, Narcissus, it is no painting that has deceived you, nor are you engrossed in thing of pigments or wax; but you do not realize that the water represents you exactly as you are when you gaze upon it, nor do you see through the artifice of the pool, though to do so you have only to nod your head or change your expression or slightly move your hand, instead of standing in the same attitude; but acting as though you had met a companion, you wait for some move on his part. Do you then expect the pool to enter into conversation with you? Nay, this youth does not hear anything we say, but he is immersed, eyes and ears alike, in the water and we must interpret the painting for ourselves. The youth, standing erect, is at rest; he has his legs crossed and supports one hand on the spear which is planted on his left, while his right hand is pressed against his hip so as to support his body and to produce the type of figure in which the buttocks are pushed out because of inward bend of the left side. The arm shows an open space at the point where the elbow bends, a wrinkle where the wrist is twisted, and it casts a shadow as it ends in the palm of the hand, and the lines of the shadow are slanting because the fingers are bent in. Whether the panting of his breast remains from his hunting or is already the panting of love I do not know. The eye, surely, is that of a man deeply in love, for its natural brightness and intensity are softened by a longing that settles upon it, and perhaps thinks that he is loved in return, since the reflection gazes at him in just the way that he looks at it. There would be much to say about the hair if we found him while hunting. For there are innumerable tossing of the hair in running, especially when it is blown by a wind; but even as it is the subject should not be passed over in silence. For it is very abundant and of a golden hue; and some of it clings to the neck, some is parted by the ears, some tumbles over the forehead, and some falls in ripples to the beard. Both the Narcicci are exactly alike in form and each repeats the traits of the other, except that one stands out in the open air while the other is immersed in the pool. For the youth stands over the youth who stands in the water, or rather who gazes intently at him and seems to be athirst for his beauty. (30) This English tradition of the Greek original of Philostratus renders faithfully the rhythms of the text and illustrates the typical problems which arise when transposing one artistic

20 medium into the context of another. The basic problem here is, of course, the different time-space frameworks of the painting and the literary text. In the painting the time-space is perceived both simultaneously, in a static way, and dynamically, as the observer scans the painting. Philostratus gave several examples in his book, of models of the possible scanning technique, thus achieving the dynamization of the painting, making it move, which is the purpose of the picto-film. These techniques are varied and not altogether obvious to the modern observer and often they occur together in one piece of description. He may execute his description of the painting either according to the logic of the story (or stories) which it presents, or he may follow the outlines of the common-sense ideas of how humans (and mythological heros) should ordinarily behave, comparing those with the images of the painting; he may present his (or others') ideas as to the nature of the background, its historic and geographic provenance etc. In general he is completely convinced that the aim of the painting is to imitate life. Thus, his description of the painting strives, ultimately, to achieve the sameeffect upon the reader, as if the story behind the painting had a painter. An example is the "ekphrastic poetry" in which the poet contemplates on paintings through poetry. Already in the 5th century B.C. Simonides said: "The painting is a mute poem and the poem is a speaking painting". Several examples of poems on paintings can be given . Let us quote a poem by Charles Tomlinson, "Paring The Apple", (31) which describes the painting by Pieter de Hooch "Woman Peeling Apples", in Wallace Collection, London: There are portraits and still-lifes. And there is paring the apple. And then? Paring it slowly, From under cool-yellow Cold-white emerging. And . . . ? The spring of concentric peel Unwinding off white, The blade hidden, diving. There are portraits and still-lifes

21 And the first, become 'human' Does not excel the second, and Neither is less weighted With a human gesture, than paring the apple With a human stillness. The cold blade Severs between coolness, apple-rind Compelling a recognition. Ekphrastic poetry such as this , presents the cinematographic and modern nature of the use of painting in films in that it does not strive to render the story but turns to emblematic elements of style, composition, color, presenting them "at a glance", infusing them with ambient emotion, contemplation and interpretation. A Theory of Picto-film Picto-film will be defined here as a film which employs paintings or semiotic aspects thereof within an over-all cinematic aesthetic structure in such a way as to project "enriched", semiotically meaningful light back onto the painting which was injected into the film in the first place. However the aim of the film-maker is definitely not a study in art-criticism or art-history. On the contrary, in all of the films of the genre of picto-film, works of art ( or their concentrated motif- transformations) are extremely existentialized, that is made part and parcel of life, presented as "pieces" of raw life. They are, in fact, more and less than paintings, as they are usually conceived, and the film imparts onto works of art qualities of actual experienced life, while subtracting from them that special suspended aura which is so characteristic of an individually contemplated painting. In this respect the "pictorial" aspect of picto-films is not unlike other aspects of modern art which tend to borrow from raw life experience. However, the crucial difference lies in the fact that the place of "objects trouvés"("ready made") is taken by examples of actual or simulated great plastic art of the past. However, unlike Dali's use of 'Mona Lisa' in his own painting. the use of art in picto-film is within a much broader "quasi- existential" framework of the film.

22 Thus, a picture may be presented through a whole series of fragmentary, partial, fleeting frames or via a succession of visual motifs, details or even color and shade arrangements given in short cuts or "quotations". At the same time a different or an opposite process occurs, after viewing paintings within the picto-film cinematic frame: when one returns to the original, the painting itself turns to be more static. Thus the picto-film changes our mode of seeing. And through it, the painting enters the new image circle of the 20th century. Thus, "dynamization of contemplation" at both poles is created, through the picto-film images: on one hand picto-film adds a dynamic dimension to the painting, and on the other hand it converts the original painting to a more static mode. In this respect the picto-film is truly 'multi frame'. It becomes more and more apparent that the world we are living in is a kind of a 'spectre world', a world in which spectres of images and earlier perceptions inhabit, a world created by communication techniques. This world is overloaded with the products of vision and sight. The images are overloaded with multiple significance and their potential increases enormously. The dynamization created by picto-film as regards the painting within the cinematic frame, is analogous to the state of the arts, the communication dynamization and the interdisciplinary flow of information offered to the 20th century spectator in other spheres of culture. The information is presented in a fast, quick, and fractured way. This is a totally different spectator from the one in the 19th century and even from the spectator just 50 years ago. This spectator gets most of his information about the world from screens and moving pictures. This is the post-cinematic spectator who is a "visual scholar", looking for constant excitements. A simultaneous experience of two forms of art in a junction creates a new kind of comprehension. Picto-film offers 'painting at a cinematic glance'. The main idea lies in the complex image "cinema/painting" and in understanding the power of the glance which causes new patterns of viewing the art.

23 The existentialization of "picto-elements" in the examined films is effected in keeping with the over-all semiotic atmosphere of our times which will be characterized here by the following paradigm : 1). Painting at a cinematic glance Our semio-sphere is characterized by the abundance of stimuli, multiplicity of codes, channels, screens, constant switching from one mode to another - ours is the age of the fragment embraced as a whole and the whole shattered into a myriad of fragments. This is rooted in the "cinematic glance" the unique 20th century view point. Paintings and art objects in general became a part of the image world of all people. Advertisements, for example, include countless images from Van Gogh, Magritte, Botticelli, Klimt and others thrown into the mundane surroundings of our age. Obviously in the consumption of the art object there is somewhere that ideal model of the man who stands in front of a painting and nothing stands in between, and he has all the time in the world to watch for as long as he wants. All this is in fact imaginary and ideal, because in reality at least as far as the classical paintings are concerned there will be many people around during any real contemplation of any classical painting in the original and one would see the painting with crowded heads in between. The facts of life changed the way we see art objects because painting, without changing its essence, turned out to be a democratic art, with hundreds and thousands of tourists enjoying it. The influence of the 'cinematic glance' can be seen everywhere and works of art are constantly pushed into our visual and perceptual field. Three processes can be traced in this respect: 1.Various objects are put together. 2. Debasement of art objects. 3. Expansion & Enhancement of the art objects and their meaning. Mass culture and commerce show art everywhere: in buses, in cheap reproductions on kitchen utensils and on cheap china etc. Ordinary people encounter high art through the mass media, on the other hand, the respect for the art of the past remains quite high as Berger remarks in his book "Ways of Seeing" : Publicity images often use sculptures or paintings to lend allure or authority to their own message. Framed oil paintings often hang in shop windows as part of their display. Any

24 work of art 'quoted' by publicity serves two purposes. Art is a sign of affluence; it belongs to the good life; it is part of the furnishing which the world gives to the rich and beautiful. But a work of art also suggests a cultural authority, a form of dignity, even of wisdom, which is superior to any vulgar material interest; an oil painting belongs to the cultural heritage; it is a reminder of what it means to be a cultivated European. (36) This phenomenon has also a sort of debasement accruing to the work of art. With the simple fact of the reproduction of art objects in the sphere of commercialized mass production which turns out cheap objects of everyday life, high art, unique and original, descends, to mass culture, becomes vulgar and debased. The high art of the past now turns out to be democratic, equal for all. In other words, high art is multiplied onto saucers, placemats and serviettes with Pieter Breughl's, Van Gogh's and Manet's images on them. Another aspect which is connected to the 'cinematic glance' is the freedom and virtuosity of using works of art in advertisements. Good examples are the putting of strange objects into a painting, or "a Parker pen" in a diagonal position on Michelangelo's preparatory drawing paper, of 3 nude men.(32) Another example of the freedom of use of the works of art of the past, can be seen in a series of short films about painters and paintings called "Pallette" .The presentation of a painting includes fragmentations presenting parts from other paintings for comparison and variety. The film may include also the place itself as it appeared in the past, or appears now in reality. For example: with the representation of a painting by Claude Monet "The beach at Sainte-Adresse" 1867, we would see the real beach as it looks like today, with real boats and real people walking. Another possibilty would be showing other boats and beaches painted by other painters alongside the original painting. This freedom of use of various images together, adding and detracting, showing parts etc, became possible because of the 'idea' of the cinema internalized in the 20th century culture. These are the new possibilities opened by the cinematic view points which expand and enhance the art of the past. It is, probably, far from accident that most of the paintings involved in picto-film are from the 17th century Dutch and French genre and still-life schools, and from these it is the work of Vermeer of Delft which attracted the most attention. In our material we see

25 Vermeer appear extensively in Peter Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" and Jon Jost's "All the Vermeers in New York". Vermeer's paintings demand very close contemplative attention by their very special plastic quality of suspended and very dramatic time-space. Vermeer's paintings demand utter concentration of point of view and crystalization of attention. One of the most dramatic expressions of this concentration is the glance thrown askance at the viewer by the strangely distracted personages of Vermeer's canvases. These wistful glances seem to invite film-makers and film-viewers to contemplate Vermeer's paintings from most different and sometimes unexpected points of view, to grasp fragments of the whole painting, to "free" elements from the context of the painting and transplant them into the semiotically different world (compare the crimson toque transplanted from Vermeer's painting into the modern restaurant in Greenaway's "Zed and Two Noughts"). The motivation behind this "parcellization" of the total experience of a Vermeer painting seems to be the desire to arrive at a definition of some elusive "Vermeer quality", "Vermeerishness", as it were, to be distributed among the more ordinary objects and situations of our contemporary reality. In a similar vein, one encounters countless images from Monet, Magritte, Raphael, Leonardo and others thrown into the mundane surroundings of our age. The difference between this use (or abuse) of picto-images and the viewing at a glance as suggested by Greenaway and Jost being that the multiplication of painting in the work of these directors takes place within the confines of a closed aesthetic structure, thus creating a serious feedback from the film to the painting enhancing, as it were, the picto-message. 2) The Enhancement of the picto-message The picto-film, definitely, "interferes" with the immediate, unhindered communication between the painting and the beholder. However, at the close of the twentieth century one has come to realize the such a "pure" contemplation is merely an abstraction while in reality there is always an additional semiotic system which interposes itself between ourselves and the work of art, be it a framework of a museum, an exhibit, an art film, a slide at a learned lecture, a reproduction or an album thereof etc. The very process of

26 arranging paintings for hanging on a wall or for a sequence in a book or film invariably activates certain mechanisms of metonymic association. The picto-film makes a very conscious and deliberate use of this mechanism to enhance the picto-message, both in its purely plastic and its semantic aspects. Examples of such plastic enhancement are plentiful in the work of Peter Greenaway: compare his very deliberate isolation of the 17th century Dutch and French still-life motifs in his "Draughtman's Contract" and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" in order not only to impress the viewer with their utter beauty and reality but to add to this purely sensual enjoyment the semiotic element of

signification when such still-life

elements (fruit in bowls, game and fish, cutlery, china and silver) become a kind of a code, language. The role of this language (not only in the oeuvre of Greenaway, but elsewhere as well) is highly ambiguous: it combines the effects of estrangement (the traditionally static forms have begun to move, and we see them from completely unfamiliar angles) with the effect of "familiarization", for the viewer is reminded of the many actual pictorial works in which these motifs usually appear. This plastic enhancement is often achieved quite deliberately and on purpose, as in the following statement by Peter Greenaway himself: “Stylistic liberties have been taken which could not satisfy a history- perfectionist. The wigs are larger than any seventeenth century European ever wore. The English landscape is perpetually greener than anyone could really expect an English landscape to be for more than three days at a stretch.’’ (33) Naturally, the plastic enhancement is only a means for a larger purpose: the semantic enhancement which often becomes semantic "enrichment" and then "transformation". Derek Jarman's tableaux vivants in "Caravaggio" are supposed to discover the "real", "hidden" meaning of the great master's paintings, and make these meanings obvious (or more obvious) to the viewer. Greenaway's critique of the Thacherite English society in "The Cook, the Thief His Wife and Her Lover", his disgust with their crassness and caddishness, is not only interpreted as a protest against the expropriation of the great art of the past by the abominable new rich (the despicable Mr. Spica played so delightfully by Michael Gambon), it also somehow reflects back on the meaning of great art itself (in this case, most probably, the great Dutch masters Frans Hals and Rembrandt.). This meaning is expanded and concentrated, probably, in the direction of emphasizing the

27 plight and tragedy of the artist in the bourgeois milieu. However, there is also a feeling of a retrieval of the lost primeval passion and of the roots of great pictorial art which seem, according to the film- makers, to strike deep into the heart of darkness and evil. Greenaway, Jarman, Kurosawa and Altman seem to drag us away from the surface of the painting deep into its imaginary world (and Kurosawa even shows this immersion into the picture - in his case that of Van Gogh - as part of the actual physical plot). 3) The Search for the Real The search for the real is a typical feature of picto-films on different planes and in different directions : A) As we have just pointed out the picto-film seeks to establish "the real", "the authentic" meaning of the picture; B) Apart from this aspect we see a desire to delve for a deeper definition of "reality" itself, to arrive with the help of the paintings, of the pictorial elements, at a richer and more palpable description of reality. The reality as it is defined by a painter's style, his brush-strokes, his colors and composition is presented in picto-films as authentic live matter. This approach reminds one of Umberto Eco's perception of the so-called "transreality" or "hyper-reality" in the North American tradition of live reconstruction of the events and situations from the past. (34) Just as a reconstructed gold-diggers' camp is "more real", "more alive", more beautiful" than a real empirical one a reality viewed through the picto-elements of, say, Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" or "The Draughtman's Contract" is more palpable and richer than a mundane everyday world. One is forced therefore to face the problem of the kitsch in picto-films, just as Eco has analyzed them pointing out that the aspects of kitsch permeate the artistic atmosphere of American "trans-reality". (35) And, indeed, in almost all of picto-films under investigation one finds certain "kitsch-like" elements and configurations, and the question is whether these aspects detract from or contribute to the semantics of the picto-sphere. In our opinion, the fact that, for example, the Flemish abundance inGreenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" is, in fact, traded and sold in a sleek-sleazy restaurant expands the original field of reference of the Dutch school. To put it bluntly, this conversion of painting into kitsch-like reality is as legitimate an interpretation of the art

28 as any "historical" or "biographic" commentary. One may add that in itself the marriage of art and kitsch should not necessarily be to the art's detriment as was shown, for instance, by the films of the great Russian film-director Sergei Parajanov. Let us reflect, for a moment , on the art of the Renaissance as a holistic phenomenon. It strove to reconstruct and revive the art of the past. If we compare Phidias' sculpture with its Renaissance copy, we will feel the exaggeration, prominence and certain maladjustment which can be found in any "kitsch". When we see the paintings of Fra Angelico, Frans Hals, Rembrandt or Poussin they are experienced as "pure" and in "exellent taste", while in case of Ingres, the Pre-Raphaelites, Neo-Classics questions of "kitsch" lurk in the background. C) The search for "reality" in picto-films is sometimes carried out by a paradoxic juxtaposition of the "inner-painting" and "outer-film" domains in such a way that the viewer is deceived by the seemingly seemless transition from one to the other, like in Altman's "Vincent and Theo" where the sand of the pictorial panorama is transformed into the "real" sand of the seashore dunes. D) And finally, perhaps the most provocative and appealing aspect of the search for "reality" in picto-films is the discussion of the "reality" of the paintings themselves: do picto-films show us actual, real historical pictures or do we see only images of pictures or even images of their simulations? Much of the footage of picto-films is devoted to creating/dispelling illusions about pictures. The only instance of an actual painting appearing in picto-films is the opening shots of Altman's "Vincent and Theo" where one watches an auction at Christie's at which a painting by Van Gogh was sold for 22.500.000 pounds*. One is not certain at all whether the Vermeer of Jost and Greenaway, the Gericaults' of Bartabas are authentic or they are just cleverly shot images of slides or reproductions. ___________________________________________________ *Probably even this was not a real painting, but a fake, as was stated in the press recently.

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The dispute about "authencity"is brought to its logical climax in a film "La Belle Noiseuse" by Jacques Rivette where the "beautiful" and "authentic", "more real than life" portrait painted by the painter-hero (modelled after Balzac's Frenhofer from "Un chef d'oeuvre unconnu") is never shown to the viewer. Logically enough, in some of these films the motif of artistic counterfeit fake occupies an important place: compare: the portrayal of the famous forger Van Meegeren in Greenaway's "Zed and Two Noughts". More generally, some of the picto-images seem to suggest that, indeed, the film is powerful enough to conjure the appearance from the recesses of time of some "long-lost brothers" of Frans Hals', Rembrandt's or Georges de La Tour's paintings. 4) Picto-film and the High art in our time The evocation of Peter Greenaway's oeuvre indicates the direction in the evolution of the concept of "high art": from his first experimental pictures to highly sophisticated, sumptuous and semantically and visually enriched images of "TV Dante" and "Prospero's Book's". Peter Greenaway creates his cinematic masterpieces as legitimate extensions of pictorial masterpieces which he presents in his work. In other words, Greenaway's film is, in some respects an equivalent of a painting by Frans Hals. The tradition of Renaissance art and humanistic philosophy are clearly discernable in Greenaway's work. He tries to represent cinematographic space similarly to its representation in Renaissance painting where symmetry and perspective are the most prominent elements. Moreover, Greenaway is clearly fascinated by the contents of Renaissance thinking: the idea of the timepiece as the prototype of motion in the universe, the interest in the mechanical and biological principles of behavior, the fascination with the magical and the Renaissance villa as the model of the world. At the same time Greenaway clearly feels that the fact that he inhabits the modern world enables him to create modern master-pieces which can combine elements from different artistic epochs and traditions. Thus, the Renaissance is complemented in his films by features of Mannerism and Baroque. Ultimately he succeeds in creating original visual masterpieces ("TV Dante", "Prospero's Books") which develop a new cinematic multi-

30 frame and multi-layered language in which classical painting is not only "enriched" and interpreted but transformed into semio-elements, concentrated and compressed. The evocation of the painting as a semio-sphere helps create a sort of a "picto-milieu", an artificial cinematographic world (similar, let us say, to the wonderful musical and plastic world of Rogers-Astaire musicals) in which cinema is a total environment. This environment reminds one of the conditions of viewing art which prevailed in the "premuseum era". These viewing circumstances may be compared to the Renaissance's holistic concept of beholding art. During the Renaissance painting was perceived as part of the holistic environment. The viewer who enters the Sistine Chapel, Raphael's rooms in the Vatican or Piccolomini's Library in Siena, enters the closed pictorial world governed by plastic principles and inhabited by continuous personages, landscapes and perspectives. Instead of contemplating one isolated painting on a museum wall "entering" in the process the world of that painting, the viewer is surrounded by images from all sides enabling a cinematographic scanning of this holistic environment. In the Vatican the viewer enters from this expanded picto-sphere into specially designed gardens which reproduce the idea of nature in miniature. The picto-film cannot be a substitute for this environment of high art and exquisite design. What it creates is an image of an image - unlike the Villa Medici in Rome, the film is devoid of any permanence. When one walks inside the rooms of the villa and then steps out to the gardens, one has the continuous experience of the picto-milieu which can be traced through the paintings into the gardens which are designed with the same concept of compositions and design. Picto-film, on the other hand, is a purely semiotic phenomenon, it is pure meaning. When one walks out of the picto-film into the outside "reality" one experiences a discontinuity, a dissonance of semiotic ambience. From the world of high art one steps into the reality of mass-produced industrial forms. If one talks of the place of the picto-film among the masterpieces of great art, it should be pointed out that picto-film belongs to pure art to the same extent that it belongs to the interpretations of great art, to its meaning.

31 5) The picto-film and the new museum. The concept of the new museum was first formulated by André Malraux, and one of the great manifestations of this new concept is Museé d'Orsay with its very successful large scale representation of the entire semiotic concept of the 19th century: the muse-um is built inside the prestigious and very pompous 19th century railway building; it exhibits not only rare objects of high art, but furniture, jewelry, maps, theater objects etc. This concept demonstrates the semiotic need to combine in one holistic environment authentic high art and popular art and culture - the great divide between the elite culture and the mass culture so typical of the 19th century Western culture is, in fact, eliminated in the new museum and in picto-film. All Picto-films express the concept of the new museum. They provide cultural frames to art objects, artifacts, art collections. They present collections of elements, images linked semantically, and paintings are part of this semantic world. If one expands the concept of the new museum and includes into it , not only paintings, art objects, etc, but everyday life itself in its various forms, it will then serve as a semiotic, cultural framework for various cultural phenomena. Peter Greenaway's film "Prospero's Books" may thus be regarded as a museum of the Renaissance of sorts, with Shakespeare's "The Tempest" as the central exhibit and the structural framework. Bartabas in his film "Mazeppa" arrives at a cinematic synthesis of the "history of art", the "new museum" and "Post-modernism" as he examines the work of Theodore Gericault against the background of "the phenomenology" and the mythology of the horse. In the end one is left with an impression of the "Idea" of the Horse which is so powerful that "Mazeppa" may be considered as legitimate a station in the study of the archetype of a Horse as any actual archaic ritual involving the horse. The basic difference between this kind of cinematic myth-making and the work of the 1930's (Eisenstein, Bunuel, Dali) is that Bartabas' film does not strive to remove the border-signals of quotations, meta-texts, interpretations, thus creating a structure which is much more reminiscent of a museum, or an exhibit than of a traditional film. Two additional phenomena are connected with the cinematic concept of the "new museum". They belong to the extra-cinematic cultural sphere which envelops both cinema and paintings. We call these two phenomena "expansion" and "cinematization" of

32 the painting matter: the "expansion" is expressed in the fact that in addition to the colorful and sweeping movie , a book or an impressive brochure may be published containing plans, sketches, scripts, versions, film-shots etc., pertaining to the movie ("Caravaggio", Dreams", "Drowning by Numbers", Prospero's Books" etc). In the case of "The Draughtsman's Contract" an exhibition of the drawings and costumes from the movie was arranged, and a brochure called "Plans and conceits....'of double authenticity'.... by Peter Greenaway has been published. (36) Thus in addition to the "new museum" in the film, another new museum is created alongside it. Moreover, we are aware of the widespread commercial phenomenon in the American movie world of marketing T- shirts, hats, booklets, garment accessories, furniture and toys, restaurants and cafes which derive from the world of the movies and add to their appeal and profitability. Another element of the "new museum" is the "cinematization" of the pictorial matter: paintings become "heroes" in the film of their own existence. What comes to mind here is the continuing process of restoration, study, attribution and re-attribution, as well as reallife adventures of actual paintings. They leave the silent world of contemplation and history of art appreciation and enter into the physical reality of "a plot" where they are handled, changed, improved etc. The paintings undergo the same process of "existentialisation" which their images suffer in picto-films. An example of such a "plot" is the story of the restoration event of Michelangelo's "Sistine Chapel": 1. Photographing the place before the restoration. 2. A film representing the cleaning process in all stages. 3. Articles about the restoration project are written during the cleaning process. 4. All the process is photographed from all angles in the "National Geographic" magazine. 5. An academic event-show is arranged during which a discussion for and against the restoration takes place. 6. Even at the end of the restoration a small part will stay untouched, to show the viewers the "before and after" of the plot.

33 Another variant of cinematization (without cinema) is the situation around the question who is the real or the fake Rembrandt, when around the "solid Rembrandt" a large circle of "Rembrandtization" was created, and now instead of former real Rembrandts, we have: 1. Rembrandt and his studio 2. Rembrandt's circle 3. The imitation of Rembrandt. etc. The structure of self-reference, self-commentary and self-interpretation is very significant for picto-film. In fact, one can say that the semiotic importance and impact of films depends very much on their very skilful use of double and multiple frames, which creates the powerful effect of infinite meanings and references. What used to be pure semantics becomes abstract code, and elements of code function as highly meaningful referential structures. The conscious return to the paradigm of "great painting" in these recent films provides a new insight into the search for cultural perfection.

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Chapter One : Introduction and Picto-film Theory. Notes: 1) Anne L. Hollander, "Moving Pictures". (1986), Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2) Francois Jost, a film and art critic writes in Cahier du Cinema and L'Avant Scene Cinema. 3) Hollander, op cit., p. 4 4) Ibid. 5) Ibid., pp. 18-19 6) Jacques Aumont, "L'Oeil Interminable", (1989), Librairie Seguier, Paris. 7) "Peinture Cinema Peinture" (1989). Editions Hazan, Paris et la Direction des Musées de Marseille. pp. 82-95. 8) Entretien avec Jacques Aumont, Paini Dominique, "Le Cinema est La Peinture, Le Cinema Hait La Peinture", Cahiers, n 421: 60-62, (June 1989). 9) "Peinture Cinema Peinture", op cit., pp. 82-84. 10) Pascal Bonizer ,"Décadrages: Peinture et Cinema" , (1987). Cahiers du Cinema / Editios de L'Etoil, Paris. 11) Albrecht, Donald. "Designing Dreams, Modern Architecture in the Movies". (1986), Harper & Row in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New-York. p.XIII. 12) Ibid., p. XII 13) Ibid., p. XIII 14) In 1984 the Program for Art on Film was established as a joint venture between the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was established to foster new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and moving image media (film, video, multimedia). Its purpose is to define, develop, and disseminate information and programs that will support the effective production and use of moving image media, in

35 order to enhance and boaden public understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts. The center has a Database service, a newsletter of film and video on the visual Arts and has published a Directory of Films and Videos about the Visual Arts "Art on Screen", in Collaboration with the Tufts University department of Art and Art History and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 15) Symposium Report, November 14-16, (1991). "Art History and Film, Starting from the Art", Presented by the Program for Art on Film, in Collaboration with the Tufts University Department of Art and Art History and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. P.11. 16) "Art on Screen", a directory of films and videos about the visual arts, compiled and edited by The Program for Art on Film, (1991). ed, Nadine Covert. A joint venture of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust. New-York. 17) Ibid., p.13. 18) "Passage de L'Image" exhibition catalogue,(1990). Editions du Centre Pompidou, Paris. p.21 19) Ibid., p. 26. 20) Ibid., p. 26 21) A quotation of the artist describing her own work and influences, from a paper on the wall in the entrance to the exhibition. 22) "Art on Screen", op cit., p. 7 23) Ibid. 24) André Bazin, Painting and Cinema, in "What is Cinema?",(1967). Translated by H. Grey, Berkeley, p.166. 25) Ibid., Bazin, pp.24-25. 26) "Art on Screen", op cit., p.8 27) Ibid., pp. 9-12 28) Philostratus," Imagines", Callistratus, Descriptions;(1931). Translated by Arthur Fairbanks. William Heinemann LTD, London. G. P. Putnam's sons. New-York. 29) Ibid., Book I. 23. p. 89. (Ternite,Wandgeaelde, III, 4. 25. Fig 30) Ibid., Book I. 23, pp. 89-93. 31) "Voices in the Gallery", Poems & Pictures chosen by Dannie & Joan Abse, (1986). The Tate Gallery, London. pp.162-163.

36 32) John Berger, "Ways of Seeing",(1872). London, p.135. 33) From a statement by Peter Greenaway, "The Draughtsman's Contract", (1992). The British Film Institute production. p.1 34) Umberto Eco, "Travels in Hyperreality, Essays",(1973), first Harvest edition, San Diego (1990). 35) Ibid. 36) Peter Greenaway, "Plans and Conceits....' of doubtful authencity'...., "(1992). The Exhibition Catalogue in The Talbot Rice Art Center. The British Film Institute Production.

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37 Chapter Two: Painting at a Cinematic Glance Introduction: For our analysis of the picto film we have chosen the following films directed and produced during the 1980's-1990's: 1. "The Draughtsman's Contract", by Peter Greenaway, 1982. 2. "A Zed and Two Noughts", by Peter Greenaway, 1985 3. "Caravaggio", by Derek Jarman, 1986. 4. "The Belly of an Architect", by Peter Greenaway, 1987. 5. "The Moderns", Alan Rudolf, 1988. 6. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", by Peter Greenaway, 1989. 7. "All the Vermeers in New York", by Jon Jost, 1990. 8. "Vincent and Theo", by Robert Altman, 1990. 9. "Dreams - Crows", by Akira Kurasawa, 1990. 10. "Prospero's Books", by Peter Greenaway, 1991. 11. "La Belle Noisseuse", by Jacques Rivette, 1992. 12. "Mazeppa" by Bartabas, 1992

These films were chosen because the qualities of the new picto film genre are most prominent in them, because of their high artistic merit and because the most representative film-makers clearly realized that they were creating a new artistic medium. Of all the directors involved in the picto film two stand out because of their identification with pictorial art and its history: Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman. Peter Greenaway is a director, a painter and a novelist. He produced an opera production "M for Mozart", continuous exhibitions "The Physical Self" at Rotterdam and "100 Objects to Represent the World" in Vienna. He also illustrated books. All are intertextual, multi-dimensional, intellectual and colorful. As Jonathan Macket and David Price pointed out (1), Greenaway's films are a feast for any semiologist who would like to decode and reconstruct films which overflow with complex ideas, images and visual techniques, intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic. Drawing on a wide range of cultural references with deep knowledge in history of art, theater, music, opera, ballet and literature, he is a painter as well as a cinematographer. He thinks, tells remarkable stories, philosophizes and entertains in pictures and pictorial elements and creates cinematic masterpieces based on paintings and deriving from them. His concern is the arrangement of the cinematic design within a frame and the film as a whole. His films are a superb example of the cinematic possibilities of picto film. They succeed, in fact, in showing paintings in a whole new way. His approach to the cinema is that of a painter - the designs of his films are visually and perceptually extremely beautiful, all of them are dominated by visual style. This is how Greenaway describes his career in his own words: “I began my filmmaking when I was an art-student studying to be a mural painter, and had ambitions to make every film-image as self-sufficient as a painting . . . I wanted to

38 make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to try to use the same aesthetics as painting which has always paid great attention to formal structures, composition and framing, and most important insisted on attention to metaphor. Since film is not painting - and not simply because one moves and the other doesn't - I wanted to explore their connections and differences. I was interested in all forms of Natural History, my literary interests were strong on lists, classifying, encyclopedias, and the nouvelle roman, and my twentieth century heroes outside of cinema were John Cage, Duchamp and Borges. Inside cinema they were Hollis Frampton and Alain Resnais. The cultural baggage has proliferated in my feature films. Conspiracy theory, deromanticized sex, equal participation of the female, the trauma of death, and an unapologetically baroque view of the world in all its richness and complexity have now become more of the constant characteristics. There are no longer any certainties - if indeed there ever were - and surely no single meanings - except to very simple-minded who endearingly want things kept straight forward and clear-cut. If a numerical, alphabetical or color-coding system is employed, it is done so deliberately as a device, a construct, to counteract, dilute, augment, or complement the all-pervading obsessive cinema interest in plot, in narrative, in the 'I'm now going to tell you a story' school of filmmaking, which nine times out of ten begins life as a literature, an origin with very different concerns, ambitions, and characteristics from those of the cinema. The interest in exploring the language of cinema, indeed of manipulations of visual image of all sorts, is there, and has remained the most persistent and significant item in all the subsequent filmmaking.” (2) In a different place he is quoted as saying "I am still, primarily, a painter who's working in cinema. I think my cinema is best understood in the critical terms normally applied to painting traditions and art history."(3) Peter Greenaway has been the subject of a very rich bibliography: A book entitled "Peter Greenaway" was published by Disvoir, in 1987, which includes several very interesting articles about his films and a very extensive interview with him. (4) A whole issue of "l'Avant Scene Cinema", was dedicated to Peter Greenaway and his films. (5) Numerous long and serious interviews with Greenaway have been published over the years. We met Peter Greenaway during his visit to the Haifa Film Festival, in Israel, in September 1996. He loves to talk about his work, explain it and expand in words on the achievements of his images. Several editions of his enlarged scripts were published by Greenaway on the occasion of the release of the films; some of them can be seen as exhibition catalogue. The most beautiful publication with visual examples is "Prospero's Books".(6) "The Draughtsman's Contract" was accompanied by a real exhibition in the 'Talbot Rice Art Center in London in 1982. The exhibition featured costumes and designs from "The Draughtsman's Contract", and graphic work from his earlier films, "The Falls", "A Walk Through H", and "Vertical Features Remake". The Exhibition catalogue was called "Plans and Conceits ". . . 'of doubtful authenticity'. . ." and was published by the British Film Institute. "Drowning by Numbers" was accompanied by two small books: "Fear of numbers", A Commentary in one hundred parts of "Drowning by Numbers"(7) and a

39 conventional published script (8). Both include visual examples. There is also the script of "The Belly of an Architect". (9) Derek Jarman (1942- 1990) was a film-director of world renown as well as a painter. The present work includes an analysis of one of his films, "Caravaggio" (1986 ). (in chapter five) Derek Jarman's style is anti-naturalistic, abandoning chronological narrative or psychological exploration, in favor of his highly individual and unusual vocabulary of image, symbolism, color, and sound. Derek Jarman's films are often dream-like. This dream-like atmosphere is compounded by a high degree of improvisation that characterizes his films. With his strong background both in painting and set design, he frequently uses imaginative mise-en scene and tableaux, many of them direct quotes from paintings. The release of the film by the British Film Institute in association with Channel Four Television in 1986 was accompanied by a paper by Derek Jarman. He wrote : The narrative of the film is constructed from the paintings. If it is fiction, it is the fiction of the paintings. Most of the paintings were easy to reconstruct with actors - only "Profane Love" was impossible to reproduce in the present moral climate: the homoerotic pin-up painted for the Marchese Giustiniani of a naked twelve-year-old boy as Cupid trampling over Culture and Architecture and Martial Arts with wicked grin. (10) Derek Jarman began his career as a set designer in Ken Russell's films during the years 1970- 1976. He also made several music videos during the years 1982-1987 and he was also involved in theatrical designs during the years 1967-1984. He had several painting exhibitions during the years 1967- 1988, and directed Silvano Bussotti's opera, "L'Ispirazione" in Florence.

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Painting at a Cinematic Glance All the films chosen for our analysis exhibit a very important property of the picto film. They present to our view, for our visual examination well-known works of pictorial art or elements thereof; this presentation takes place within the moving, cinematographic framework of a film which almost never stops completely to freeze our view on the painting, but progresses relentlessly, sometimes smoothly, sometimes in fits and starts. Thus a picture is never viewed in its conventional, "museum" or "reproduction" mode. In this mode our contemplation of the work of art is, firstly, completely homogeneous, that is, our attention always remains the same and never wavers, covering all the picture always in the same way, and, secondly, is time-independent, that is, it can continue in this way, uninterrupted into eternity. The picto film not only parts with this conception of art contemplation, it shows that our real-life contact with works of art always proceeds as a discrete (that is non-continuous, interrupted) sequence of glances. By presenting works of art as integrals of fragments, angles, aspects of shades, coloring, composition etc., the picto film legitimizes our reallife practice of viewing pictures. It does this, as was pointed out before, against the background of tremendous cultural and communication developments of the recent years. We are being showered by myriads of images, usually man-made, communication oriented. Our TV- screens, Internet surfing, video and audio environments present us with endless fragments of images, paintings, clips, films etc. What happens here from a semiotic point of view is a curious mixture of fragmentation, breaking up of formerly whole entities into multitudes of splinters and fragments, and autonomy, when these former fragments and splinters become new independent images, new whole pictures. Let us dwell for a moment on what happens within the reality of the film with these pictorial images. They combine and recombine in the framework of a work of art, of a film which imparts to these fragments new meanings, new possibilities of combination. Thus, we might, by a fluke of the director's and cameraman's art see suddenly a new, "not yet painted" picture by a long dead genius, or we might recognize the film as a realization of a desire to impart motion, movement, life to the visual world of the painter. This new totality is obtained from the framework of the film and it imparts to the paintings new life, new context and new meaning. The effect of the 'cinematic glance' is evident in all our films. For this chapter we chose two films to illustrate the way this cinematic glance becomes a dominant feature of the artistic structure of these films. Each film operates the cinematic glance within a radically different and aesthetically unique structure. They are: Peter Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" and Jon Jost's "All the Vermeers in New York". In these two films, the method of the "cinematic glance" is used to achieve a powerful visual cinematic commentary on the pictorial style of Jan Vermeer ("A Zed and Two Noughts"). In both cases the film-makers try to recreate the entire visual and emotional world of the pictorial oeuvre of the two painters, the ensuing effect being one of a strange "Vermeerishness".

41 This "impression" of the two great pictorial styles in the film medium was made possible due to certain special qualities of the painting in question - that of Jan Vermeer ( and the more generic Dutch realistic 17th century genre painting). "A Zed And Two Noughts" "Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the story- tellers". This statement by Peter Greenaway aptly represents his "A Zed and Two Noughts" (11). The implication in the challenge is that something richer and more capable than a mere story lies in this film and is waiting for us. Synopsis As with "The Draughtsman's Contract" which will be examined later, the story involves a sudden death. In "A Zed and Two Noughts" (in short “ZOO”) the death scene opens the film. Oliver and Oswald Deuce, two twin brothers with the family names strangely recalling the devil himself, as well as the idea of the twins, and that of luck, game, are, simultaneously mourning their wives who both died in a car accident with a swan in the Rotterdam zoo. The crash happened in a street named Swan's Way (compare Marcel Proust)*. Alba Bewick (read: Buick) who drove the fatal Ford Mercury, survived with one leg only. Her surgeon is one Van Meegeren who is identified as a nephew of the notorious Van Meegeren, who, as we are told, had successfully faked Vermeer's paintings, and the surgeon himself is also obsessed with Vermeer. The obsessional desire of this surgeon, a lover of art (especially of all artifice), is to rebuild a three dimensional universe of the artist of Delft, and to reproduce his paintings in a "Tableaux Vivants" form, drawing attention to the fact that one can never see the legs of the women depicted in Vermeer's paintings. Therefore after a while Alba's other leg "doit partir", as we have been told because of the reasons of pictorial aesthetics of symmetry. Oliver and Oswald are in fact Zoological scientists who work in the fatal zoo, researching evolution by observing the behavior of trapped animals. After their wives' tragic death they attempt to make sense of their loss and appease their grief by the research of animals, fruits and human decay. They watch documentary films on Darwin's evolution, photographing the decay shot by shot in an scientific mode, asking the question on the connection between life and death.

________________________________________________ *The dangerous swan is of course the quotation from a well-known painting in the Rijksmuseum in which the belligerent Swan threatens "the enemies of the state".

42 The life and death are also referred to, in the connection between film (motion, life) and painting (static, death), as the death of the women in the film is life for others, mycroorganisms. The mythology of twinning and kinship and duplicity, swings effortlessly from the Judeo-Christian world of Noah's Ark or the Garden of Eden to the classical world of Venus De Milo who, as the personage in the film, turns out to be a courtesan at the zoo and from here to the cinematic allusions to Greenaway's own film mythology of his character Van Hoyten from "The Draughtsman's Contract". The prologue places the characters in the ancient Pantheon of mythology figures. The twin brothers are new incarnations of Castor and Pollux who know that they are inseparable. The car, in which the two woman find their death is a Ford Mercury, and in plane 25 of the film the wings of Mercury can be seen clearly with a traveling shot on the curved engine lid, which enables the spectator to read: N.I.D. 26 B W. 26 is the number of the letters in English Alphabet and also the number of paintings attributed to Vermeer (26 paintings). Peter Greenaway himself relates to the mythlogical aspect of the film: The film “ZOO” describes a human zoo. Throughout the film I obviously wanted to draw parallels between the humans and the animals. It's true that the characters are basically emblematic. All eleven of them relate to the Roman pantheon. The clue is the zoo prostitute, Venus de Milo, (a pornographic storyteller and a frustrated novelist), who is Venus. Fallast, the head of the zoo, is Jupiter. Neptune is there in the form of Pipe, who runs the fish house. Van Meegeren is there as god of healing. Alba Bewick is Juno, Mother Earth, forever concerned with fecundity or barenness. Caterina Bolnes is Diana, the chaste goddess of the hunt. And Van Hoyten is the god of the underworld - he wears a Walt Disney Pluto badge. All of this in turn relates to Castor and Pollux, the original Gemini twins, and Leda and the swan's egg and all that. (12) As the article in "Monthly Film Bulletin" states: "The film celebrates Vermeer as the visual master of ceremonies, and acknowledges the lure of the foremost forger of Vermeers, Van Meegeren. It lists a number of the questions that the film itself playfully proposes, most of them born of a fatal collision between mythology and natural history of the kind that resulted in hybrids like the Minotaur." (13) “ZOO” amply quotes from Vermeer's work, and there are hardly any other pictorial allusions there. These give the spectator a whole new point of view on Vermeer's paintings as a holistic notion, "Vermeerishness". The film itself serves also as kind of imitation of the painting, as 'tableaux vivants' reduplicate and imitate what was done in the past on canvas. It is a sort of sublime fake representing itself as truth, a quasi perfect realization of an illusion. The world and the arts play a tricky optical interplay. Inserting a character who is simultaneously a surgeon (analyst, editor) and the forger who loves Vermeer, is very significant to Greenaway's process of working. His task is to cut Alba's only remaining leg, in order to restore symmetry to nature. "A reproduction of Vermeer's The Lacemaker accompanies Greenaway's film as he wants to restore, refit Alba's body". (14) She also is visually similar to another woman in another painting by Vermeer. She is dressed exactly as the

43 lady in a strict reconstruction of The Lady and Gentleman at the Virginals (about 1662, London Buckingham Palace), and in The Concert ( about 1662, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). Another hero from Vermeer's picture, The Girl with the Red Hat, (about 1667, Washington, National Gallery of Art) is seen going in and out of the pictorial frame into the cinematic frame and vice versa. She is also seen traveling around from one cinematographic sequence to another. From the cinematic frame in the restaurant sequence The Girl with the Red Hat, she moves into another picture The Lady and Gentleman at the Virginals . She is walking in and out of the cinematic frame moving through the paintings and the 'tableaux vivant' and vice versa. In this context Greenaway himself can be regarded as a kind of a forger, when he "improves" or repairs and reconstructs the paintings of other painters with his cinematic apparatus. The relevant sequences can be seen as a 'tableau vivant' which duplicates and/or imitates paintings in the canvas from the past. It is in some ways similar to a forgery which represents itself as the real thing, a realization of a complete illusion. However cinematographic glance at the paintings never claims to be those paintings, never claims to substitute them. In this sense Greenaway's "fakes" of Vermeer, when placed in the film context, surrounded by Greenaway' complex and convoluted artistry and imagery, are, in a very potent sense, "real", sometimes more real then the surrounding cinematographic "reality". In this context the whole film can be considered as "a real fake" of Vermeer's paintings. The mode of our film analysis is based on Vermeer's paintings as a source of the visual construction of the film. One of the most important and interesting references in this film is to the 26 authenticated Vermeer's paintings. Art historians still disagree about the number of authentic versus "fake" Vermeers. The Girl with a Red Hat which is so extensively quoted in this film, has been one of the disputed paintings. Yet it is Vermeer's visual sense, not the number of his authenticated works, that most fascinates Greenaway. As he remarks in the preface to his screenplay, "The overall visual masterof-ceremonies" of the film was to be Vermeer - adroit and prophetic manipulator of the two essentials of cinema - the split-second of action, and drama revealed by light". (15) Vermeer the Painter It is now quite evident that many of the elements of Greenaways "Vermeerishness" were implicit in the oeuvres of the Dutch master. His use of composition, figure treatment, color, light, his recurrent motives, the unforgettable facial and postural features and the entire atmosphere were the source behind Greenaway's decision to analyze Vermeer from a cinematic point of view. Much of Vermeer's unique characteristics were summarized in the work of art historians who treated Vermeer's oeuvre. This is how the art historian Paul Zucker summarizes Vermeer's unique art: All the qualities of the seventeenth-century Dutch style are sublimely realized in the work of the master Jan Vermeer van Delft. Though few in number, his canvases are at once typical of the period and yet unique in their objective perfection, sensibility, and detachment. Vermeer actualized a world without the least trace of associative and

44 subjective emotion. His characteristic lighting is serene to the point of making us "hear silence" as it flows over fabric, rug, metallic vessel, human face, or bare wall. Changing surface and textures into a subtle radiance of color values, he handles light the way a jeweler handles precious gems and crystals . . . Vermeer employed light to elucidate the hidden complexities of color. (16) Note Zucker's insistence here on special preciousness of each separate detail, thing, fragment or part in Vermeer's work. An interesting cinematic point of view on Vermeer's paintings and his way of working, can be found in Ann Hollander's book: "Moving Picture". Her idea about the cinematic quality of Vermeer's paintings is very intriguing : “In the tradition of Van Eyck or Vermeer, the "reality" of the image depends on the sense that the light of the moving eye has been directly engaged by the moving light on separate phenomena - by each illuminated thing itself, not by an idealizing version that manages the lighting so as to harmonize each thing with other things. Painted light, imitating the action of seen light, can give this sense that the world of picture is momentarily actual and uncertain motion - becoming seamlessly part of our own shifting world, even while remaining a painting in a frame. It does not fool or please the eye; it is like part of the eye's usual experience. Whether applied in paint or by the movie camera, this "photographic" method gives a peculiar atmosphere to the phenomena it records - a presence, the look of having a distilled meaning. A painting made this way does not primarily display its forms outlined and then modeled by a painter's learned and informing hand, whipped into shape by the brilliance of a tutored brush; it does not show color seized away from nature to be a formal tool manipulated into leading its own autonomous life. It does not show a cleverly created artificial space populated by ravishingly believable fictions. It seems to be something the artist has momentarily conjured, not wrought. Light behaves inside the frame just as it does outside it; and the artist seems to stand back saying, like the camera, behold what there is.” (17) Further Ann Hollander goes on to discover cinematographic qualities in Vermeer's painting: “The quality of movement in Vermeer's still painting is carried not in the rendering of arrested human action - it is in the surge of feeling that attaches to the perception of light's motion... The picture is a discovery and at the same time, the still image is a lesson in contingency. The discovery is not one instant, but a dip into a flow of light that must keep changing, that shows what both is and is not a present moment, a moving present that is always full of both hope and loss. And so the Vermeer is like a sequence of movie frames, not like a photograph that tries to freeze the light. The still image is laden with constant shift, like still moments in life itself". (18) In Vermeer's interiors, the room is always very quiet. There is almost no action or reaction, and no pose-holding. All the dramatic movement is in the flash of light and glances. Dutch genre pictures in general show the oddity of ordinary phenomena rather than their beauty. They delight in recording dull, unharmonious moments, but present them as full of their own autonomous significance.

45 "Vermeer painted women as conductors of change and flow, balancers of scales, pourers of milk, players of music, readers and writers of letters, containers of recurrent ambiguity."(19) Elsewhere Ann Hollander remarks: “The Garbo spell, for example, is a matter of light and shade creating an emotional atmosphere analogous to the spell of Vermeer's women, an uncanny evocation of female inwardness conveyed in a picture that seems to show a sequence of important moments without showing any action. A fashionably dressed woman is in a room - we see her from the knee up. Perhaps a man has just left, or is just coming, or is on the other side of the world. She is aware and full of feeling, but her face is still and her hands quiet. She holds something, a vessel or a hairbrush, a letter or the window frame; meanwhile we look at her and feel that the scene is momentous, she is heartbreaking, the image is unforgettable. Garbo could never create such effects on theatrically lighted stage; and it wasn't acting. She (and we) needed the "realistic" film-lighting, the film setting, and the creative camera "loving" her as it moved in to regard her, just as Vermeer seems to have "loved" the lady with the scale, the glass, or the guitar. “(20) Ann Hollander especially stresses the problematic function of the "traveling detail", "traveling fragment" in Vermeer's paintings: “The case of the yellow-and-black silk bodice worn by five very different women in Vermeer's oeuvre: in "The Music Lesson", The Concert"(1662), "Woman With a WaterJug" (1663), "Lady Reading a Letter at an Open Window" (1958), "Soldier and Laughing Girl" (1657). In Vermeer, each room is made to look painstakingly observed, and yet each is slightly different - and one must conclude that all are invented, just like De Hooch's courtyards. In such a way of doing things, the idea of detached, neutral vision is undermined. Each image is individually "seen" into existence, with all details precisely tailored to the one revealed view, just as in a dream, or in the kind of film that imitates a dream and not a play. That Vermeer bodice repeated in five different but similar spots raises the question. Did he invent it? Is this garment a real studio prop, worn by a series of models and made to fit each by pictorial tailoring, or did Vermeer "design" it himself only for the paintings, like all these perfect and plausible rooms - ignoring what the girl really had on so as to introduce that brilliant black and yellow? or was it simply always the same model, wearing her own bodice over and over? By 1655 it was out of fashion and appears no more - Vermeer never ignored fashion, whatever other minutiae he transposed." (21) Greenaway took the same idea from the paintings of Vermeer and throughout the film The Girl with the Red Hat is scattered in the cinematic continuity. An actual portrait painting, dressed as live woman is walking freely from sequence to sequence as a painting in movement. Hollander sees the resources of the film camera, in all the visual arts, as she states : “Conscious borrowing straight from theatrical convention for many such elements was clearly necessary to the success of early movies, since they arose in competition with the stage; but the resources of the camera soon made unconscious borrowings from art even more necessary.... the resemblance between a frame from an ordinary commercial

46 American film and a Vermeer may be understood as an example of cultural continuity, of pictorial tradition becoming internalized and naturalized. Such a correspondence between a modern film-frame and old painting might be called an indirect quote, an unconscious allusion like a Latin tag or a Shakespearean phrase.” (22) After we have seen details and fragments from Vermeer's paintings spring to life in “ZOO”, after we have witnessed "real fake", virginal concerts with Alba Bewick dressed up as personage of Vermeer, we begin to appreciate better the special continuous atmosphere of suspended reality so typical of the work of the master from Delft. We realize, for instance, not only that Vermeer's rooms are similar, but that his strangely immovable and intense women move from one picture to another, that there may be some larger overarching story above and beyond separate episodes presented in each painting. We discover all these properties under the influence of Greenaway's cinematic frame. The following paintings by Jan Vermeer of Delft figure prominently in Peter Greenaway's “ZOO”: The Artist in His Studio or Allegory of Painting or The Art of Painting (1665-1670), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, A Girl with a Red Hat, 1664, National Gallery, Washington, The Concert, 1662. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and The Music Lesson, 1662, Buckingham Palace, London. The painting The Artist in His Studio has been identified as both an allegorical painting with the young girl in the center being Clio, the muse of history, and a representation of portrait painting with the girl being Vermeer's own daughter. The whole painting is organized as a multi-dimensional structure of rectangles taken at different angles and proportions. The allegorical nature of the painting is emphasized by the heavy ornamental drapery folded while revealing the central allegorical female figure basking in the strong diffuse light emanating from behind the curtain. The light illuminates the front of the painting leaving its lower half, half disappearing in the dark. The figure of the painter dominates the proportions of the painting. In its somber tones it presents a sharp and mysterious contrast to the visually central figure of the girl effused in light and revealing her demure face to the viewer while the painter's face is hidden hinting at the mysterious nature of his craft. Conversely history, through the map of Holland (its new map!) on the wall and the allegory of Clio, appears bright, discernible and even readable (unlike the almost totally concealed image on the painter's canvas which is destined to remain unfinished forever). Vermeer's painting reminds one of another paradigmatic work which dealt with the mysteries and grandeur of painting at the beginning of the 17th century, Diego Vélasquez' Las Meninas. However in Velasquez' painting the painter's face is clearly visible as seen by his model, the king and his family who are placed in the position of the outside viewer (us). In Vermeer's work the outside viewer (us) is the painter himself who is thus likened to the sovereign . This may explain the exquisitely trusting way the girl is looking at the viewer. The map, in place of Velasquez' mirror serves as a kind of symbolic mirror to the outside reality inhabited by the Dutch painter (Holland itself). The painting The Girl with a Red Hat, 1664, represents a portrait of a young woman sitting sidewise with her right profile to the viewer. However, she simultaneously turns her head even more to the right side exposing her face almost en face. The striking movement of her head is emphasized by the angle of her huge red hat, its plumes fluttering in the air from the sharp movement. The hat is in the center of the upper half of

47 the painting providing a strong diagonal direction from the upper left to the lower right. The motif of movement is even more discernible in the treatment of the young woman's garments, silvery blue going into dark blue, which, in a way, fulfills the function of opening drapes, showing us her striking face with its glittering eyes and half parted lips, as if at the beginning of some unfinished phrase. The entire picture is a perfect example of the "cinematic glance": a perfect whole fragment, at the same time absolutely still and complete, and moving, compressing innumerable, fleeting moments into one small masterpiece. The Painting -The Music Lesson In her book "The Art of Describing", Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century" Svetlana Alpers writes: “In his "Music Lesson", in Buckingham Palace, a man is attendant on a woman, his pupil, who is standing at the virginal. A mirror beyond her on the wall reflects part of the room and the woman's face turned slightly, however, toward the man. On the wall to the right we see a piece of a picture, which depicts the scene known as the Roman Charity: a bound male prisoner, Cimon, leans forward to suck for sustenance at the breast of a charitable woman, his daughter Pero. (. . . ) The inscription on the virginal reads in translation "Music is the companion of joy, the medicine of sadness". The inscription is one of four ways of representing - but also one of four versions of - the relationship between the man and the woman at the virginal. Each one is presented as partial, not just in respect to the others but because each is cut off from total view: the "real" woman is visible only from the back; her face, held in different position, is reflected in the mirror; the picture on the wall is severely cut by the frame; the words inscribed on the virginal are hard to make out and are further interrupted by the figure of the woman. The words are hard to see because this painting created distance, admits light and even paint. Representation here does not add up to and confirm a world. It rather renders the appearance of the world as ungraspable. Vermeer repeatedly thematized this truth in his works as the ungraspable presence a woman offers a man." (23) The Vermeer's paintings we have presented exhibit certain striking features of the painter's art. In all paintings one discerns common features of composition and common motifs which justify, intrinsically, the application of the notion of 'cinematic glance' both in Peter Greenaway's treatment of them and in our own analysis here. The common feature of the composition in the Allegory of Painting and The Music Lesson (Buckingham Palace) is the relative independence and self-containedness of various rectangular fragments of both paintings: the "portrait" of Clio in Allegory of Painting and the double "portrait" of the man and the woman in The Music Lesson are each in themselves almost autonomous self-contained paintings. On the other hand the same may be told of the upper section of both paintings which represent certain whole, and semantically pregnant, compositions. Thus, even a fleeting glance at both paintings may reveal these "sub-paintings", actually fragments, and may impart to them a semblance of autonomy, empowering an artist like Peter Greenaway to extract such fragments and operate with them as with units of his cinematic language.

48 Although, certain motifs and combinations of motifs are, perhaps, less autonomous in purely compositional terms (that is they transcend the composition boundaries of sections), but they are definitely units in terms of semantics, that is relationships between personages and objects in the world represented on the canvas. Thus, in both paintings one witnesses a striking contrast between the angle and posture of the represented figures: the view from the back of one person combined with the disclosure of the face of another person (in Allegory of Painting it is the man engaged in the process of painting that is engaged in the mysterious process of artistic creation who is presented with his back to the viewer; in The Music Lesson it is the woman who is like-wise busy doing her art). Note that it is the tension between the concealment and disclosure which adds to the unknown nature not only of the art, but of the exact kind of relationship between the two personages. Another combination of motifs which adds to the atmosphere of the 'cinematic glance' is the cryptic nature of the representation on the wall facing the viewer : the map with its written text in Allegory and the two images (mirror and the fragment of the painting) plus the Latin inscription in The Music Lesson. In both cases these representations have to be deciphered. In addition both pictures are executed as a complex structure of frames, sub-frames, intersecting lines with flowing draperies which form a kind of curtain. Such frames and intersections appear in the flooring patterns with their sequence of black and white checks, in the forms of the window, in the structuring of the wall with pictures opening a sort of view into another virtual reality etc. On the whole, both paintings appear as almost mirror-images as far as their lighting and figure composition are concerned. The common "fragment" in all three paintings is the glance, the look on the face of the subject: the women in The Girl with a Red Hat and Allegory and the man in The Music Lesson. The look itself, its fleeting nature, some mysterious atmosphere of expectation and query in extremely suggestive and calls for deeper examination. It might well be that Peter Greenaway's “ZOO” was an attempt to provide a clue to the mystery of the expression on the faces of Vermeer's people. The Cinematic Pictorialization of “The Artist and His Model “. This is a superb example of "Painting at a cinematic glance" offered by picto film. Throughout the entire film “ZOO” the visual element of black and white stripes can be traced : a zebra and a striped tiger in the Rotterdam zoo, the cinemaprojector projects white stripes against the darkened atmosphere of the dark room, then the flashes of neon and artificial lightning against a dark background, a character named 'Venus of Milo', a prostitute dressed in black and white dress (Hello Venus, how is the Zebra today? and she unswers "black and white", then we go to the assumed striped black and white panties of the woman with the red hat in the restaurant, which, in fact, she does not wear, although she wore them several sequences before, to the striped fish in the aquarium, the television set represented through its black and white screen covered with horizontal stripes. The bars of the zoo cages which create vertical lines on the cinematic frame are omni-present in the film. The source of this black and white stripes motif is a 'tableau vivant' of The Artist in His Studio. An artist, (a photographer in the film - who is the nephew of the forger Van Meegeren) standing in the foreground in a zebra-striped jacket with his back to the viewer, contemplates his model, who poses in the studio background. This tableau is

49 preceded by a sequence in the zoo involving a black-and-white clad couple and a pacing zebra, and begins it by focusing in close-up on the artist's zebra coat, blurring the boundaries of the two sections with a shot change that seems for a moment to unite them. The camera tracks back, revealing the model, "Catharina Bolnes", (the name of Vermeer's wife), naked except for her red hat, but, as in the original painting, holding a trumpet in one hand and a book against her breast. As the camera movement continues, Van Meegeren comes into view - like the painter confronting his model - but in this version he is a photographer, illuminating the set (as the twin brothers earlier illuminated their experiments) with his flash bulbs. The contemplative pose of the original painting by Vermeer is broken as "artist" and "model" begin to squabble over the extent of her success in distracting the brothers from Alba, until "Bolnes" ("Clio" in Vermeer's Allegory, but in Greenaway's scene The Girl in a Red Hat from another Vermeer's painting) finally throws down her props in anger, revealing, for the split second before the next shot change, her nude torso. The flash bulbs, the nudity, and the obscenity disturb and undercut what appears to be a meditation on the painting (and by extension on the relationship between painting and cinema); the sequence seems perverse and comic. In the substitution of photography for painting, Greenaway shows an artist poised in the act of capturing a split second in the continuum of activity. Thus, the paintings too occasion his examination of the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Stripes and cages can be seen everywhere from the prologue on. The prologue of this film is long and important as it sets and determines the rule of the composition structure. Let us dwell a little more on the black and white stripes which will be enunciated throughout the entire film. In one of the film's most disturbing and beautiful scenes, Milo invites Van Hoyten to enter an animal compound where she stays together with a zebra; she then walks into the enclosure and disappears into the shadows. Greenaway leads the viewer on a path like her own: an elegant and melancholy camera movement propels us across the threshold to witness her disappearance. She disappears at the far end of the frame and is never seen again. The television frame continues the motifs of the stripes, the zebra lines linking them back to the painting. Thus, in Peter Greenaway's “ZOO” the motif of black-and-white stripes fulfils a complex function of a basic artistic structure - some kind of "basso ostinato" in the fugue - and semantic nexus which carries different meanings each time we encounter it. However, all these different meanings can be said to relate to one abstract notion/emotion, that of cutting movement, sharp delineation, something similar to sharp movements of a knife, teeth, claws, of wind or rainstorm. In Vermeer's painting the motif of black-and-white stripes is, in fact, the painter's upper garment with its sharply cut, almost sculptured, narrow folds through which we discern the undershirt of brightly white color. In Vermeer's work, too, this is a structural motif because narrow folds, lines, streams running parallel may be discerned in the painter's dishevelled hair streaming down his neck, in his folded white socks revealing horizontal folds not unlike those of the zebra, in the folds of the drapery on the table and in the

50 alternating dark and bright broad stripes on the margin of the map. Perhaps this motif exemplifies, in some way, the movement of the painter's 'brush on the canvas'. Perhaps Peter Greenaway, in eliciting this black-and-white stripes motif tries to recreate visually the movement of the painter's brush strokes across the moving canvas of his film. The Story of The Girl With a Red Hat. The treatment of the figure of The Girl with a Red Hat from Vermeer's picture is an example of Peter Greenaway's complex poetics and the impact of the cinematographic context on the pictorial material. As we have said, the glance of the woman in a red hat in Vermeer's picture is one of the most enigmatic and entrancing pictorial and psychological centers of the painter's work. One of the ways to treat this enigmatic center could have been, on the part of Peter Greenaway, to try and provide a solution for this enigma. However, Peter Greenaway does precisely the opposite. In many ways the function and psychology of the personage in a red hat in “ZOO” is for more complex and enigmatic and deliberately so - than in Vermeer's original. First of all, let us begin with the name. The director gives this female personage the name of "Catharina Bolnes", that of Jan Vermeer's wife. In a way the film's "Catharina Bolnes" fulfils the same organizing role as the real Catharina Bolnes of Vermeer's life, because she organizes the pictorial part of Greenaway's film which owes its origins to Vermeer. On the other hand, the "Catharina Bolnes" of the film is as enigmatic as Vermeer's real-life wife, because so little is known about her. In general the "Catharina Bolnes" of the film seems to play the same important, but auxiliary role as the real wife of a great painter must have played. But all this is parallel to the development of the inner story of the film in which the lady with the red hat appears to be in some sort of helping/nursing - adversarial relationship with the unfortunate Alba Bewick. She appears to evoke some sort of sensuality among the personages - the surgeon Van Meegeren and the symmetrical twins - who seem to be devoted to abstract ideas of symmetry, composition and painting. However, the enigmas of the woman in a red hat do not find any resolution. Her erotic drives remain unfulfilled, and at the end she is destined to blend back into the world of quasi-Vermeer personages. The mystery of the glance of the woman in a red hat is substituted by a chain of other mysteries in Greenaway's film which not only remain unsolved, but heighten the over-all mysterious atmosphere of the film. Vermeer's Apogee in Greenaway's Concert. The central episode of “ZOO” is a sort of cruel parody on two of the best-known pictures by the great Dutch master : “The Concert” and “The Music Lesson” , the latter was described above. The striking feature of these paintings is the dress worn by the two female personages. Actually, one should talk rather of the upper part of the dress which is a golden-yellow blouse with a wide collar with wide shoulder and back straps over the blouse holding the skirt. What Greenaway does in his film is to make the dress not only the compositional center of his "painting", but its semantic center as well. As a matter of fact, in Greenaway's film there is no "concert" or "music lesson", but only the presentation of the outer shell, as it were, of the combined composition of the two Vermeer pictures. The music played by the unfortunate Alba inserted into the exact copy of the original dress used by Vermeer for his models is banal and uninteresting. The main center of the episode is the fitting of Alba for the dress (rather than the other way

51 around). Her legs are to be removed because they are not needed for the tableau vivant based on Vermeer and in general "fit the frame better". Her dress is actually riveted to the floor to prevent her from falling down and thus spoiling the effect of the tableau. The personages, in Greenaway's "concert", unlike in Vermeer's paintings, display only formal relations with the woman in the dress. The essence of these relationships seems to be some hidden, or even not so hidden, violence which bubbles beneath the surface of the pictorial screen. In fact, the motifs of violence, mutilation, cruelty form some of the central moments of all Greenaway's oeuvre. We will encounter it at length in his "Draughtsman's Contract" and in "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover". Clearly, the writer-director sees it as one of the driving forces behind human creativity. The question is why he had to choose Vermeer's oeuvre to illustrate this point about art. Here, we, probably, encounter the modern artist's desire to create works of art commensurate with the masterpieces of former epochs, but devoid of the desire for artistic harmony which seems either old-fashioned or misplaced in the new epoch or misunderstood. Another possible explanation might be Greenaway's certainty that all art is actually based on making the real complex forms conform to the abstract schemes which, in itself, is a form of hidden violence. Some General Pictorial Categories Prominent in “ZOO” Apart from the extensive use of the "cinematic glance" at the classical pictures by Vermeer, Peter Greenaway's “ZOO” treats extensively other aspects of the picto film. Some of these aspects are not only evident in the actual cinematic work, but are thematized, when the personages discuss them and express their views and attitudes about them. Among such categories are symmetry, stasis versus movement, the frame, the light, the categories of the real, the fake and the collage, as well as the more hidden category of the explicit - hidden. Symmetry- The symmetry which, as we will show, is so prominent in "The Draughtsman's Contract" becomes systematic and even obsessive in “ZOO”, where it is manifested in the motif of duality and the twins which is a very important component in the cinematic picture. Many planes in “ZOO” seem to go back to the complex Renaissance architecture with its strong symmetry, especially the scene using Alba's bed. Framed spaces function to form a closed representative space. All Greenaway's films including “ZOO”, are divided into symmetrical sub-divisions, the whole structural organization, the rhythm, the characters in space and time mutually strengthening each other. Neville's work in "The Draughtman's Contract" is very organized and he will execute 12 drawings and one more of the house and gardens. “ZOO” 's structure includes 8 stages parallel to Darwin's evolution stages: there are 8 documentaries, 8 decayed bodies etc. Alba is obsessed by symmetry and feels that she is its victim. She asks : "Why do we have to have two of everything"? Oliver answers: "Symmetry is all". The film is full of symmetrical compositions constructed so that the left side of the frame mirrors the right - particularly in those scenes in which Oliver and Oswald appear. But Greenaway never tires of stressing the dangers of symmetry and identity . Undifferentiated psychologically because of their obsessive grief, the twins become more

52 physically alike as the film progresses. In one shot, Oliver and Oswald sit naked side by side under twin "Vermeer" self-portraits (another in-joke: Vermeer is thought to have painted no self-portrait), the black-and-white floor beneath them echoing the floor of the paintings; they cross their legs, left over right, right over left, creating mirror images of each other. Desolate and abandoned after their wives' deaths, the twins take some comfort in the two women, Milo and Alba. Soon, Alba becomes both lover and mother. When Alba dies after bearing their twins, their reunion is complete. As their relationship progresses, many scenes appear in which Alba serves as the central figure with Oliver and Oswald on either side in a symmetrical set. In one, they undress on opposite sides of the bed which is centered in the shot and, joining Alba there, roll away from her in opposite directions to reveal the scars that mark their surgical separation. In these symmetrical compositions we also understand that for Greenaway, as for Van Meegeren in the picture Alba is the immobile figure around which the film is constructed. Ultimately, Greenaway's overriding principle of symmetry demands the removal of her remaining leg: as Alba says to the twins: Alba: "What's the point of watching me? My body's only half here." Oliver: "Then you'll fit better into the film frame." Alba: "(Laughing).... A fine epitaph: here lies a body cut down to fit the picture." The twinship is a subject that from the begining can be considered as one of the leitmotifs of the complex compositions. A starting point for virtual series of pairs, doubles, the motif of twin symmetry appears in various scenes and dialogues. Gradually the plural changes to single and in plane 333 both brothers argue about fatherhood, and one of them shouts "we are the father". From the beginning in the introductory list of the participants the cut editing shows them separate, but the name of Oliver is already in the left side of the screen and that of Oswald on the right side of the screen, and this place remains attached to them throughout the film. In the sequence where they are in bed with Alba , Alba suggests "how about changing sides" and Oswald replies "I am satisfied on the left side, I know exactly my place". Greenaway plays with the duplication motif throughout the film. In a rare sequence in daylight, between the planes 253 to 269, he builds a sort of a complex mirror game with multiple details, using the duplication motif. In plane 265 he uses water and a reflection mirror. Oswald puts a round mirror into the water in front of a striped fish called Caged fish. This name is appropriate to the fish and to the cinematic picture as the fish looks at its reflection. The structure of the whole sequence is circular and an imitation of the mirror effect. The last four planes 266 till 269 return in an opposite editing order, and the whole thing looks as a reflection of itself. Both "O" letters at the begining of their names signifies graphically the real twins. Stasis vrs. Movement - 17th century Dutch still-life becomes alive in the film. Greenaway's camera transgresses all thresholds, including that of death; it invades all enclosed spaces; it deadens the quick and it enlivens the dead. Throughout the film, Greenaway continually plays off the parameters of stasis and movement. If stop-motion cinematography is Greenaway's primary means for activating inanimate objects, film technique can elude time and create the illusion of continuous action, thereby presenting the brothers Oswald and Oliver and the viewer with "aestheticized" documents of the decomposing apple, prawns, and crocodile. Photography can, conversely, reduce the

53 movement of animals to a still image: according to the screenplay, Oswald's photographs of the one-legged gorilla record the animal's movement in a set of stills, just as the still photographs of Alba's country estate, L'Escargot, "come to life" and the "live" images of the car crash become "freeze frames" as they are transformed to newspaper images. The Search for "The Real" is a typical feature of picto films on different planes and in different direction. In “ZOO”, the search for the "real" connects Nature and Art in a unique way. Both, are looking for the "real" or for the "reality" itself, from totally unexpected points of view: As scientists, by their experiments the twin zoologist brothers want to arrive at the "real", authentic and objective view of the matter, in several meanings of this word. The pictorial, artistic aspect is based on a desire to delve for a deeper definition of the "reality" itself, to arrive, with the help of the paintings, or of the pictorial elements, at a richer and more palpable description and feeling of the reality of the paintings. Reality as it is defined by the painter's style, his brush-strokes, his colors and composition, is presented here as authentic live matter. And the matter of biology is presented as the reality worked out pictorially. This approach may remind us of Umberto Eco's perception of the so-called "transreality" or "hyperreality" in North American tradition of live reconstruction of the events and situations from the past (24). Just as a reconstructed gold-diggers' camp is "more real", "more alive", "more beautiful" than a real empirical one, a reality viewed through the picto-elements of Greenaway's “ZOO” is more palpable and richer. In short, both sides, scientists and artists want at arrive to the truth of the matter. In “ZOO” Greenaway brings back the Renaissance view of the world, when Art, Science and Philosophy combined together in one whole notion. A different direction of the search for the "real" is the discussion of the "reality" of the paintings themselves. Does the film show us actual, real, historical pictures? Or do we see only images of pictures or their simulations? Logically enough, in this film the fake motif occupies an important place - the portrayal of the nephew of the famous Vermeer's forger Van Meegeren who, by his obsessive yearning for 'real' Vermeer's pictures transposed into reality with 'real' personages, symbolizes the forgeries of his presumed uncle. Thus, the real "Concert" in “ZOO” turns to a kind of 'cinematic fake' which represents 'pictorial fake'. In a way. the cinematic fake is the real fake. Van Meegeren's character manifests science and art as he is a surgeon, but he is also obsessed by Vermeer. The film's Van Meegeren has a definite task: as a surgeon to cut Alba's second leg for the sake of symmetry. As an obsessive collector of Vermeer to reconstruct and bring to life some of Vermeer's paintings as 'tableaux vivants'. The "real fake" is thus a contradictory notion, and it is manifested in this film by the desire to frame and master nature and art with both scientific and cinematic mechanism. It is also significant that "The Girl with a Red Hat" which is so extensively discussed here, has been one of the disputed paintings by Vermeer (as it was mentioned before). Some scholars were convinced that it was a fake. (25) Yet it is Vermeer's visual sense, not the number of his authenticated works, that most fascinates Greenaway.

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The Collage of Quotations and Cultural and Art References. A big part of Greenaway's work relies on the use of quotations and cultural and art references arranged together in a complex dense collage. He uses abundance of details that cannot be understood at first sight and in fact appeal to the subconscious. Painting and cinema combine and organize the unknown reality, and put the aesthetic and conceptual into technological limitations. The music in all of Peter Greenaway's films is organized around the changing and haphazard elements in the picture. The search is for the music written by Phil Glas, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley and John Cage. "The music framed the picture in its representative cage as it is an icon and there is a display of rhetoric structures which give validity and weight to the cinematic picture". (26) Unseemingly it looks as if cut off and remains as a permanent painting. (27) The Dominance of the Visual Pictorial and Cinematic Style in “ZOO” is prominent. The visual style repeats vivid pictorial images in varied contexts. One feature of such style is parallel horizontal space elements: stripes of all kinds interspaced within the cinematic frame. The black-and-white streamers that blow laterally across the frame as Oliver gathers broken glass from the site of his wife's death, the billowing curtains that form a lateral arc behind Alba's deathbed. Another such feature are circular shapes which often dominate the frame: the "O"s of the huge neonlit zoo sign that hovers in the background of many shots; the spinning circular film reels that hold the BBC documentary; the white circle bite in the decomposing apple. Light creates circles too: in the gorilla house, the brothers' flashlights cast twin circles of light reminiscent of the car headlights at the crash site much earlier in the film. The interplay between light and darkness, like the juxtaposition of the black and white and the dialectic of stasis and motion, activates the film's images in ways that assert aesthetic over narrative values. Flickering light bouncing off the reflective surface of the reptile pool transforms the brothers' faces, upstaging their conversation about being eaten by a crocodile; flickering lights from film projectors and television monitors articulate parts of otherwise darkened spaces in which our view of characters is obliterated while our appreciation of light's jagged power is heightened. The film's ending reverses this process of contemplating the absolute power of aestheticized, artificial light - the inexorable snails short out one strobe after another, returning us in the final shot to the natural light of dawn - while at the same time reminding us that over the course of the film, we've been enveloped in a world marked by the dominance of artificial style. The power of the visual and the aural transcends the narrative, supplanting any emotional response one might have to the deaths of the twins or the cruelty of the surgeon. This film is an example which shows a new dimension to paintings of the past we all knew before. The new way of seeing paintings and the possibility of the mass-media bringing to the spectator a visual celebration of high art of the past, is manifested in this film. This film gives us Vermeer's oeuvre as we never knew it before. A whole new insight about his compositions, light, colors, frame, dresses, hidden legs, Dutch and Renaissance

55 influences etc.This is a new mode of experiencing the art of painting the"Vermerishness", the holistic new insight. The insight we get here about the art of Vermeer is not intended or forced, it's there if we read it right. The semiotic codes are there if the spectator is ready to gather and open them. After this film, Vermeer's paintings will gain a new dimension, fit to the 20th century spectators. We enter the process of his paintings, composition, light, symmetry discovering new details. High art becomes closer and more easy to digest. Pictorial language acquires a new dimension. The "Vermeerishness", the holistic knowledge will stay with us all along. The static portrait of The Girl with the Red Hat will never be static anymore. "Picto film" exhibits new and old elements, which provide us with new enlarged cultural reference. “ZOO” as Realization of the Concept of the "New Museum" From the analysis which we carried out above, it should be clear that, almost like the legendary Van Meegeren, Peter Greenaway was obsessed in this film with the special, almost ineffable qualities of the paintings of the Dutch master. This obsession functions in several ways, on several levels and leads to different results, some of which might have been quite unintended by Greenaway himself. He seems to have been drawn between the two polar extremes of aesthetic condition : appreciation and re-creation. In the mode of appreciation he definitely wanted to linger as much as possible on the mysterious qualities of Vermeer's paintings discovered through the appreciation of the 'cinematic glance'. In so doing, he had to grapple with the dilemma of movement (which distracts our attention away from the lovingly captured elements of Vermeer's style) and stasis (which diminishes the emotional strength of appreciation). Thus, instead of fixing our attention on one specific work of Vermeer, he, as it were, "frees" the inhabitants of the paintings from the confines of the frame, lets them wander in the fictional world which he created in the film. Vermeer is transformed into "Vermeerishness" which starts to exist and function independently of the creations of the painter. The imagination of the writer-director is fired into creating a world in which the qualities of Vermeer are seen as real, continuing, rather than imagined and reconstructed. The "new museum" in this sense is not a museum of pictures alone, it is also a museum of pictorial fragments, attitudes, gestures, shapes, compositions, light-and-shade forms made existential, real. The process of creating a "new museum", in this case, is not concentrated on the pictorial masterpieces alone. The writer-director invents, by recreating, reassembling new works from old pictorial elements, new unfamiliar contexts for art, and it is this new unfamiliar context which may be linked to a process of scholarly and critical re-interpretation when new generations of critics invent (or discover) new epistemological frameworks for familiar objects of art. In the case of “ZOO” the cinematic glance of Peter Greenaway adds new contemplative perspectives to the works of Vermeer, transplanting Vermeer's unsettling qualities (the paucity of his works, the tentative nature of our knowledge of the painter, the mysterious nature of the personages' posture, the glance and demeanor) into well-articulated propositions concerning the relationship between art and life, life and death, artifice and nature.

56 Whether these propositions clash with "Vermeerishness" or add new features to it, is immaterial, because the "new museum" which "Houses" "Vermerishness" is not a solid structure, but a changing, dynamic "hyper-text" which should admit new "exhibits" and "installations".

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"All the Vermeers in New York" Unlike Peter Greenaway, Jon Jost is not an international film celebrity. He is a freelance cinematographer who works in the framework of small, very low-budget productions, and his "Vermeer" film is a perfect example of such an approach. "All the Vermeers in New York" is an "auteur" film. Jon Jost operated the camera himself. The film is a story of an encounter between the two principal characters: Anna, a would-be actress from France living in New York, and Mark, a hard-working, burned-out Wall-Street broker who is significantly older than she is. For her the world of art is intimately familiar, and as a European she has an immediate rapport with and knowledge of it. He, on the other hand, is from the world of practical pursuits in which art is valued only as a commodity for the high price it may fetch on the market. Anna and Mark meet, by chance, in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two of them find themselves together in the room devoted to Dutch 17th century painting in which the three New York Vermeers are exhibited. One might surmise that for both of them this visit to the museum is not something planned for much in advance, but rather, a spontaneous affair. However, he is visibly moved by the paintings which provide him with a much needed distraction, respite from the hectic and cruel world of finance. She, on the other hand, seeks familiarity and reassurance, rather than total escapism. The very manner of their visit to the Metropolitan Museum may be regarded as a projection of certain features of the concept of the "new museum" - in spite of the fact that the actual museum they visit is quite traditional. The heroes include the museum and its exhibits as every-day fragments of their day-today New York life. And the Museum provides them with such fragments, very precious and valuable, to support their battered existence. It is quite remarkable that for the filmmaker himself the road to actual paintings of Vermeer's went though the cinematic glance of sorts which he throws at the place of his story. True, the world of money serves as the main focus of the personal drama which takes place between the two protagonists. However, the film-maker found it necessary to look at this world not only directly in the face, but through the prism of New York's early Dutch history when it was known as Nieuwe Amsterdam. Probably the director's own evident Dutch family origins played a role in this choice. Be that as it may, he related to this circumstance quite explicitly: Researching Vermeer's life in the 17th century, I began to formulate a subtext for the film. In Vermeer's time, an absurd speculative market for tulip bulbs collapsed, as did the Dutch empire; New Amsterdam was taken by the British and became New York. These were some elements that influenced the story... It was my intention to capture the spirit of a specific time and place - in this case New York in the waning days of the eighties. "All the Vermeers in New York" is an elegy for a decade bathed in delusions and corruption, of both the social body and the individual spirit.(28) The museum and the paintings of Vermeer serve here, as in Peter Greenaway's”ZOO”, as a background for the director's cinematic reflections on his own times, society and the

58 nature of human relations. However, unlike in Greenaway's work, Jon Jost does not "open" the pictures, nor does he release its "prisoner" characters into the real world of New York (former New Amsterdam). His 'cinematic glance' at Vermeer has a more subtle, psychological aim. Camera Work and the Museum Sequence. The psychological import of Jost's film is expressed in the difference between the camera work which he employs in the sequences showing the personages in their everyday New York surroundings and the sequences in which they are shown in the New York Metropolitan Museum. The sequences outside the museum are characterized by mercurial camera movements, interrupting the continuity of the story, by blackouts, repetitions and quick shifts. On the other hand, the scenes in the museum are shot in a calmer, more continuous mode. Jost introduces the images of Vermeer's paintings quite early in his film where they are presented in the form of artistic postcards in Anna's apartment. Later some of these images which at first were presented as mere commercial and "cheap" copies - at a very quick and depreciating glance - are transformed into real, we can say "hyper-real", images which grow out of their frames, and as the camera's glance at them becomes more concentrated and focused, they, in turn, start looking, or should we say, staring at the heroine, at the hero, Mark, who is looking at her and at them, and at us, the spectators. The psychology of the museum sequence in the film may be regarded as an attempt on the part of the director to understand the enigmatic glances and expressions of Vermeer's sitters and to relate them to our modern-day concerns and cares. In the museum sequence Anna, the heroine of the film, enters the museum in order to experience once more the powerful pull of Vermeer's paintings which she happens to like very much. Between the scenes in her apartment where she is actually surrounded by Vermeer's reproductions, post-cards and albums and the museum sequence the director juxtaposes the sequences which present the hectic and profit-oriented life of modern New York: the Wall-Street Stock Exchange, the art gallery with its substitution of money for art.Anna wanders from one museum room to another, going through Rembrandt rooms, until she finally comes to the room where the three New York Vermeers are exhibited, hanging on the wall, each small picture next to the other. The order in which she contemplates these pictures is as follows: first she sees the picture Woman with the Water Jar (about 1663). In this picture the female figure is in the center of the composition. The woman in the picture is slightly reclining in the direction of the window placed at the lefthand side of the composition, trying to pry the window slightly more open than it is. An impression of movement is very strong and it is supported by the expression of the woman's face: a mixture of curiosity, expectation and satisfaction. The face is shown at three quarters, but it is lit with a typical mid-day light so characteristic of Vermeer and leaves the impression of inner readiness, composure and openness. At the same time there is something about the woman's posture and expression which leaves the typical Vermeer taste of the unknown, perhaps some psychological nuance which is related to the story which is behind the composition and is perfectly clear to the heroine of Vermeer but concealed from us. In Jost's film the heroine of the Woman with a Water Jar seems to usher in Anna, the film's protagonist, becoming, momentarily, another figure in the painting. And this is not

59 entirely serendipitous, because Anna's face is strikingly similar to the female face depicted in the second Vermeer painting hanging next to the previous one and which is thus the natural aim of Anna's progress: Head of a Young Woman (1671). This painting, unlike two other Metropolitan Museum Vermeer's, has belonged to the Metropolitan collection only since 1979, being the gift of the Wrightsman family. This novelty, and the fact that the figure in the painting is reminiscent of the film's personage may explain why she, and not only her, but Mark, the stock-exchange trader, and the director himself, all are drawn to this image. Unlike the previous Vermeer female face, this young girl's face looks the viewer straight in the eye. However, this is not a stare or a fixed look, but a glance, and a fleeting glance at that. The posture of the figure in one of straight profile being seated with her left side to the viewer, her head, is turned almost en face to the viewer, again leaving the impression of a movement, consonant with some unknown personal story which is happening at this very moment. The dynamism of the story is further enhanced by the fact that the young girl's eyes run ahead of her face and are fixed at somewhere at the extreme right-hand side of the composition. The third painting Lady with a Lute (about 1664), presents a sitting figure of a young woman, again, with her head turned away from the axis of her posture (she sits facing the viewer, and her brightly lit face is turned to the left), and her eyes directed away from the direction of her face. Here too, as in the picture of the Head of a Young Woman, the painter created visible tension in the figure of the sitter, the tension which, in this case as well, may run parallel to some unsolved psychological problem. Here too, the facial expression is meaningful in many aspects. The young woman seems to be listening closely to the music which comes from the lute she is playing. She may be reliving some inner psychological dilemma or, may be in the process of waiting for something or someone. Again the glance of the personage both betrays some complex and unresolved problem, as well as invites (or should we say provokes) the viewer to place oneself in a psychological situation similar to the enigma presented by the sitter. After examining all the three Vermeer paintings, Anna, the heroine of Jost's movie, returns to the second painting, the one in which the young girl's face is directly in the center of the composition. At this point Jost not only establishes the visual and emotional similarity between the two heroines, the girl from Vermeer's picture and Anna, but places them into a similar, although hypothetical context: both glance back: Anna, at Mark who established himself as "the viewer" sitting in front of Vermeer's painting, and the girl in the painting who "glances back" at all the participants in this situation. We may represent the dynamic scheme of this sequence as follow: The three paintings create a continuous movement in a frame-by-frame fashion. C B A From the spectator's point of view there are also three frames:

60 Vermeer's paintings "girl" Anna Mark

The Viewer Vermeer's paintings demand very close contemplative attention by their very special quality of suspended and very dramatic time-space. They demand utter concentration on the point of view and crystallization of attention. One of the most dramatic expressions of this concentration is precisely those strange and mysterious glances thrown askance at the viewer by the strangely distracted personages on the canvases of Vermeer, and especially the "look back" of the girl in the second Metropolitan Museum picture. These wistful glances seem to invite film-makers and film-viewers to contemplate Vermeer's paintings from most different and sometimes unexpected point of view. One of the examples of such a points of view is the development of the story in Jost's film. The "Look Askance" and the World of Money. "The Head of a Young Woman" from the Wrightsman bequest is one of the last paintings of the great Dutch painter. This small portrait drew Jon Jost's attention probably not by chance for it is the one portrait by Vermeer in which the female glance becomes more than an emblematic sign. Here it expresses in a very concentrated, distilled form the essence of Vermeer's (and the Dutch genre painting in general) achievements in the field of human psychology. To put it concisely: it appears that Vermeer's insight into (mainly female) psychology proceeded from his absorption with the world of human achievement, wealth, desire and virtue. In this largely very moralistic Protestant worldview, the central problem was the blurring of lines between the two obvious and conflicting poles of virtue: human achievement and the wealth which accrued due to it, with the accompanying beauty and luxury, versus the virtues of restraint, humility and good-heartedness which called for modesty of display, concealment of conspicuous feelings and features. Thus, in Vermeer's treatment of the female face and its expression much weight is given to the mysteries of motivation, decision, expectation. Sometimes the glance of the female figure seems to conform to the emblematic sign compositions, sometimes it is in conflict with them. The smile or the laughter may be accompanied by an open straight glance as in the painting “The Soldier with the Laughing Girl” (1658), and then it directly corroborates

61 the moralistic judgment of the girl's folly ready to succumb to the soldier's worldly seductions. Or the girl's smile may be inner, demure and in direct contrast to the lewd gesture of the soldier in the “The Procuress” (1656). Be that as it may it seems that Vermeer, in keeping with the Protestant outlook, identified the world of money with temptation, sin and crime which prey on poor and credulous or too naive women who are viewed, as often as not, as victims or even objects. Note that in The Procuress the center of the picture in the upper golden section is the shining rim of the golden coin held by the soldier in his right hand, as though offering it to the viewer, while his left hand, in open and shamefaced view, is resting on the young woman's breast. The shining golden rim is, in a sense, a borderline between might and defenselessness, greed, lust and naivete. In many other paintings of Vermeer, the woman figure, in one way or another, is associated with the symbol or act which represents either straightforward vice, like drinking Wine (especially at home during daytime, like in Girl asleep at a Table (1656), or receiving or reading love letters, or leaning towards vice, like numerous female figures playing musical instruments. It is only in his later paintings that Vermeer turned to straightforward face portraiture, like in Head of a Young Woman. In this painting the sitter is really just a sitter. The woman figure is not accompanied either by other female or male figures, or by elaborate interiors or accessories, emblematic or atmospheric. This is, probably, the most Rembrandt-like of all Vermeer's paintings, and the glance imbibes all the emblematic, symbolic and psychological "meanings" of Vermeer's previous cues for the interpretation of the figure and its glance: no glasses of wine, no gold coins, no parallel paintings on the walls, or musical instruments. Everything which is to be said is expressed in the face and the glance. It may be surmised that by juxtaposing together two significant glances - the glance of Vermeer's girl and Anna's glance, Jost draws some parallels between the untold psychological story behind Vermeer's personage and the screen story of Anna. In other words he offers in Anna's story of disguise, deception, greed and lust, the semantic parallel to the possible story of Vermeer's young girl. Her glance appears to us as concealing some possible deception, or trick, or even vice, but all this under the guise of defenselessness, frailty and even goodness. It seems that the enigmatic glance of Vermeer's heroine is able to throw light on such central questions in Jost's film as: a) why Anna betrayed Mark, b)why he agreed to offer her money and suggested that she drink some wine before that, c) why, suddenly, all life leaves him and he drops dead in the Metropolitan Museum right after he sees the painting Head of a Young Woman. The Light it throws on the story of Anna is that the dangers and intrigues of the world of striving, achievement and success deprive people of their soul and, ultimately, of life itself. It is as though the emblematic outlook of Vermeer's pictures is realized in the metaphors of Jon Jost's sad New York story. On the other hand this story enables the present - day viewers of Vermeer to identify with his subjects not only outwardly, through style and composition, but inwardly as well, by interpreting their enigmatic glances through the fleeting glance of modern cinema. This interpretation of the Jost/Vermeer relationship is enhanced by the fact that the director himself seeks to establish parallels between the world of his movie and the world of Vermeer in many different ways, including socio-economic comparisons between the

62 17th century tulip mania in Holland and the world of corporate takeovers in the 1980's. One of the more compelling images, common to Vermeer/Jost and to a psychological interpretation of both, is the cinematographic sequence of interiors with doors open leading to other interiors right at the beginning of the film. This corresponds to numerous perspectives of interiors within interiors found in Vermeer's work, as well as in other Dutch genre painters, like Ter Borch (1617-81) and Pieter de Hooch (1629- 84). It also points to a process of ever deeper entrance into human psychology illustrated both in Vermeer's life-work and in Jon Jost's one film.

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Chapter Two: Painting at a Cinematic Glance Notes: (1) "Take 10 contemporary British film Directors", eds Jonathan Hacker & David Price, Oxford, (1991), p. 189. (2) From an introducton to a retrospective of Peter Greenaway's films in "Castro" movie theater in San- Francisco,(Spring 1997). (3) Greenaway in "Haifa's Film Festival", (1995). (4) "Peter Greenaway", Serie Entrevues", Dis Voir, Paris, (1987). (5) "L'Avant Scene Cinéma", n 417/418, (Dec 1992/Jan 1993). (6) "Prospero's Books", Album - Film Script and Commentaries, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by Peter Greenaway, London, (1991), Published by Four Walls Eight Windows. (7) Peter Greenaway's "Fear of Numbers", A Commentary in one hundred parts of Drowning by Numbers.(1989), Dis- Voir. (8) Peter Greenaway, "Drowning by Numbers", (London, 1988). (9) Peter Greenaway, "The Belly of an Architect" (London, 1988) (10) "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio", The Complete Film Script and Commentaries by Derek Jarman , (1986), Thames and Hudson. p. 75 (11) Sight & Sound, (Winter 1985). (12) Monthly film Bulletin (Dec 1985) v.52 n 623, p.366 (13) Ibid. (14) "Peter Greenaway, Serie Entrevues", op cit,. P. 41 (15) Film Quarterly (winter 1993-94) vol.47 n2, p.38, (16) Paul Zucker , "Styles In Painting, a comparative study", New York, (1963), p. 319-311. (17) Hollander, op cit., pp.16-17. (18) Ibid., pp. 19-20. (19) Ibid., p. 406 (20) Ibid., p. 445 (21) Ibid., p. 156-157 (22) Hollander. op cit, p. 440-443. (23) Svetlana Alpers, "The Art of Describing, Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century" Chicago, (1983) P.188. (24) Umberto Eco, "Travels in Hyperreality", (1973), first Harvest edition, San Diego, (1990). pp. 3-58. Metioned before in chapter one p. 39. (25) The authenticity of "The Woman With a Red Hat" is doubted by Van Thienen (1949), and by Swillens (1950) who gives no reason at all for his doubts. In fact, there are none; critics are still suffering from the Van Meegeren shock". Goldscheider Ludwig; "Vermeer", Phaidon. p.139. Mentioned before in p.66.

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(26) Didier Goldscmidt, In "Cinematographe" n98, Mars 1983,p.36, in "Peter Greenaway, Serie Entrevues", op cit., p. 47. (27) "Peter Greenaway, Serie Entrevues", op cit., p. 43.

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Chapter Three: The Enhancement of the Picto-Message. In the previous chapter we dealt with the phenomenon of a 'cinematic glance' in specific and clearly identifiable works of pictorial art. In the case of both pictures which we discussed there, the paramount object of 'cinematic glance' was the work of the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer of Delft. Vermeer's works were placed in the fictitious context of the so-called "real life" shown in the films and were subject to re-thinking and rearrangement, similar, in a way, to the use of visual material in the video-clips. All this is consonant with the feverish rhythms of contemporary life and communication. The 'cinematic glance', a fleeting exposure of some visual detail which attracted our attention in the crowd, is a consequence of our constant "lack of time", deficit of attention. The fact that film-makers make use of the fleeting glance, freeze it and interpret its object as something which we might see in the pictures of Vermeer, serves to "redeem" our banal and mundane everyday reality, to anchor it in the great cultural tradition from which we draw values and meaning. It also makes this great tradition relevant to our existence. In the present chapter we shall examine another aspect of the same process of actualization of great art. In contrast to the previous chapter this analysis will deal not with a "fleeting" glance, but with a very close and attentive stare. The director and the cameraman do not examine a feature which has to be "saved", "rescued" from a multitude of other features sometimes involving almost subliminal mechanisms. This time they dwell with almost painful deliberation, on a feature of style, motif, composition, atmosphere etc, which originally appeared in a work of great art. These features are presented over and over again, in the context of the film story, or as some parallel line; they are created and recreated in the visual contexts which may resemble those of the original pictures or clash with them ; they are seen in their "true" scale or deliberately blown up, shifted, transposed. In all those cases one can speak of the enhancement of picto-message. The enhancement is understood here in several connected and unconnected ways. To begin with, the filmmaker might wish to dwell on pictorial detail because he simply is attracted to it and wishes to present it time and again, reluctant, as it were, to part with it. A good example of such a treatment, although it has other definite artistic aims as well, is Peter Greenaway's almost obsessive love of Dutch 17th century still-life compositions in his "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover". Another reason might probably be the film-maker's desire to enhance certain stylistic, compositional, coloristic or other qualities of the original paintings which might have "suffered" certain attenuation, either due to a "wrong" interpretation in the hands of the history of art, or because we have become too accustomed to them and they have to be renewed, or, maybe, because the original painter never thought of the possibilities concealed in his images (this is true, probably of Peter Greenaway's interpretation of painting in his "Draughtman's Contract"). The enhancement may take the simple form of presenting a feature for a much longer time than it would require during "normal" contemplation", or on a much larger scale

66 (and longer), or with clearly enhanced colors ( Peter Greenaway said in an interview about " The Draughtman's Contract" : The English Landscape [in "The Draughtman's Contract"] is perpetually greener than anyone could really expect an English Landscape to be for more than three days at a stretch"), or with enhanced and enlarged forms, like the wigs in "The Draughtman's Contract" etc. The film-maker might wish to enhance not only visual aspects of a feature or motif, but its semantic connotations as well, preferring to stress one or more meanings of the motif placed in new and unfamiliar contexts. Here the dynamic nature of the film serves as a convenient vehicle of enhancement, such as when eating, sex and excretion are placed alongside the visually beautiful "still-life" compositions in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", thus imparting to the "original" still-life compositions enhanced meanings not immediately evident in their pictorial form. In a way, the cinematic "enhancement" of picto-messages simulates the movement of the point of view of the spectator who might approach the picture closer or move back to where it is perceived at a greater distance. Enhancement also reflects the film-maker's preoccupation with revealing "the secrets" of great-art, its "true" meanings, its hidden background and purpose. One has to view the operation of "enhancement" as reflecting two real trends in to-day's culture: our constant preoccupation with great art of the past and our desire to preserve and increase its aesthetic value and effectiveness. Moreover, there is a clear tendency to make this increased value available to a wider public. On the other hand, enhancement is, in itself, a commentary, of sorts, on a process of aesthetic and cultural attrition: because of our constant exposure to great art our senses and sensibilities have become accustomed to the ambience of great art and have to be attacked with ever larger doses of "larger" (in every sense of the world) art. In a sense, "enhancement" evident in the movies which will be discussed here is parallel to the increasing financial value of the "real thing" (classical paintings) which will be discussed in the next chapter. Such "enhancement" mirrors the process of increasing sophistication in the technical analysis of the minute details of the painting. This process sometimes might lead to the depreciation of value of the paintings which have been removed from the accepted repertory of classical works because of the greater attention to minute technical details in the work of art historians. In film and in the art historian's laboratory a detail is significantly enhanced. It may well happen that in both cases enhancement will lead to depreciation. In technical analysis the discovery of mismatching traits will lead to doubt of real authorship. In film enhancement with the emphasis on brighter color, deeper shade, the blowing up of enlarged details is always the enhancement of those stylistic and semantic features which somehow are the most prominent in the consciousness of art-lovers, especially of laymen. Thus, ultimately enhancement of picto-message in film may even lead to the elevation of precisely those features which facilitate the multiplication of "real originals". All this poses the question of what does film enhancement of picto-message do to original paintings presented in the movies. Some concrete answers will be given in the course of the present analysis, but one general answer should be given at the outset. Enhancement of picto-elements almost always has as a consequence: (intended or unintended) clearing the structure of the

67 "language" of painting. Certain traits which when unenhanced might appear as "natural", or proceeding from the nature of the depicted objects themselves, become features of a more abstract system, almost grammar of a certain school, or approach. Then the use of such features in modern mass culture, or even in the mass culture of great traditions {like the enhanced color in modern advertisements or even the HDTV (high definition television) or religious art} will appear as a legitimate extension of certain "grammatical" features of pictorial style, rather than objectionable kitsch. The films which will be discussed in this chapter are all films created by the British director Peter Greenaway. They were made during the 1980's, and as is often remarked in this connection they clearly reflect the prevailing cultural and socio-economic mood of that decade in the West. They are: "The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), "The Belly of an Architect" (1986) and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" (1989). Peter Greenaway's "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982) was the first of Peter Greenaway's full-length features and it bears all the traces of the aesthetic break-through, the "Sturm und Drang" of the great artist who having discovered his great vocation and style, is eager to communicate it to others. One can summarize the gist of the film's overall aesthetic message: that today the great pictorial tradition of the past is not only alive and carries enormous emotional weight for the contemporary viewer, but it can also give rise to great visual images of the cinema. The images that carry forward this great tradition, endow it with new and relevant meaning and enhance it in ways inaccessible to painting. Since the film enjoyed great commercial success, the synopsis of the film is too wellknown, for us to give it here. Suffice it to say that plastic arts - drawing, painting and sculpture - form the basic semiotic code of the film-work, so that no one single shot remains outside the reach of this pictorial interpretation. Plastic arts also serve as the main carrier of the complicated detective plot of the film. Both the man whose wife orders the drawings and the draughtsman are eventually murdered, but not before the secret of their death has been laid bare in the plastic images of drawing, painting and sculpture. The visual code also determines the fate of the artist, Mr Neville, who is presented as both innocent and sophisticated, corrupt and noble, cruel and understanding, thus embodying the dilemma of the artist. This and more: the visual atmosphere of the film combines striking instances of enhancement and deconstruction, combination of different styles, images and conventions against the general background of elation and beauty. All images of the film are instances of pictorial visual enhancement. The device of "picture within a picture", double frame, "mise-en-abyme" is amply used by Peter Greenaway here so that the so-called "real reality" does not impinge anywhere on the visual purity of the film. The feeling of "reality" is created through the double frame and is never left purely to the mercy of the extra-cinematographic knowledge of the viewers. The enhancement is especially important in this film, because, due to the double frame construction, one frame, as it were, enhances the other and the other way around. The cinematographic color sequences of the estate are in themselves striking enhancements of the taut drawings masterfully executed by Mr. Neville, while the drawings enhance

68 reality which hides itself so skillfully in the film images: it is in the details captured by the draughtsman's eye and hand that the enhancement which leads to the discovery of the death plot lies. The pictorial aspect of the film is closely connected to all other levels of this work of art: story, characters, ideas, emotions, passions etc. The deeper, almost mythological meaning of the film-plot in "The Draughtsman's Contract" is related to Peter Greenaway's almost obsessive, and at the same time very pertinent, musing about the connection between artistic and physical creativity and the function of sexes as reflected in this creativity. In "The Draughtsman's Contract" the underlying "mythological" story is related to the detective plot: the reigning "queen-mother" Mrs. Herbert seeks to make sure that the perfect artistic creation of her country estate of Compton-Anstey should pass as a perfect work of art to her male heir. However, due to her daughter's husband's (a German) evident infertility, the heir is unavailable. Unwilling to have her own husband, whose conceits and pretenses she hates, become the owner of Compton-Anstey should anything happen to her and/or her daughter, Mrs. Herbert contrives both to get rid of her husband, to impregnate her daughter by the draughtsman and, finally, to get rid of him as well. The whole story may be read as a period incarnation of the eternal mythological plot of Persephone's abduction from Demeter and her subsequent return to the world of the living with the ensuing resumption of fruitfulness and creation. In "The Draughtsman's Contract" Demeter's function is fore grounded, and Mrs. Herbert is presented as the ever-powerful mother-goddess who is willing to prostrate herself before the male principal only to obtain redemption for her daughter and for her (not her husband's) heritage. Similar mythological "conceits" will be central to two other films of Peter Greenaway which we will discuss here: "The Belly of an Architect" and "The Cook, The Thief, his Wife and Her Lover". Peter Greenaway's presentation of the mythological story is, in fact, not at all mythological, but informed by the author's profound personal artistic complexes and searches. His picture of the "mother-goddess" is as deeply ambivalent, as that of the central male hero, the draughtsman-creator. She is presented not in the mythological mode, but with the psychological motivations and descriptive nuances of our own modern age. The same is true of the draughtsman Mr. Neville. This multiple perspective interacts and interfaces with the pictorial language used to design and create the continuum of the film. This interaction, among other things, explains why in this movie, unlike the "Zed and Two Noughts" we do not encounter any direct coherent quotations from well-known paintings by the relevant painters (apart from Januarius Zick's "Allegory of Newton's Service to Optics", 1785, shown in the film and even discussed there anachronistically by the personages). Rather, Greenaway prefers to treat the entire film as a great canvas which he fills with motifs, figures, constructions and techniques from the world of contemporary painting. Not all of the paintings used by Greenaway to build the world of "The Draughtsman's Contract" were actually made by painters from the period which he depicts. It is not just the exact historic period which he strives to imitate and recreate through his pictorial images, but a wider historical perspective from the Renaissance to late Classicist

69 painting, from the 16th to the 18th century, the formative cultural period which Greenaway so clearly appreciates and prefers to the later 19th-20th centuries. Not only is the presentation of the film as a huge pictorial canvas valid, which we will try to show presently, but - in the opposite direction - the "conceit" of painter - in this case draughtsman - as a film-director. In fact, it is this utter presumption on the part of Mr. Neville, to stage the reality which he draws as a completely rehearsed film, which proves to be his undoing. Mr. Neville does, in many episodes of the film, behave like some manic modern film director, he has his camera - his optical frames, double frames, perspective "machines", his "director's chair", his "crew" and "extras" - all of which he manipulates in the accents of the auteur-director" of today. However, this "movie", although technically perfect in the end in the form of the 12 drawings, is not perfect as a synthetic work of art, as real "film", for, and here Peter Greenaway prefers painting over movie-making, the painter's "conceits" and devices are far more ingenious and beautiful than those of the misguided "director" like Mr. Neville. Pictorial language is dominant in the entire composition of the film. From the prologue scenes onwards, Peter Greenaway represents the world he chooses to build as a sequence of "pictorial events", each event defined by pictorial technical means: frame, internal composition, pictorial genre, color, perspective, depth etc. It seems that three basic pictorial paradigms may be distinguished in "The Draughtsman's Contract" while some of these paradigms also lend themselves into genre subdivisions. The three paradigms are: the portrait (significantly group portrait), the interior (with Dutch, Flemish and Italian genres distinguished within this group), and the outside (the landscape in its various versions). One should additionally, pay close attention to still life which never appears here in isolation (compared with "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"), and to the role of sculpture within these paradigms. The paradigms mentioned, nevertheless, are never absolute or static. Peter Greenaway uses them dynamically, often in mixture and always with creative tension between the semantics of the paradigm or genre in the painting (and even more so in the history of art with which Greenaway likes to argue) and its meaning in the film. In a sense Peter Greenaway uses pictorial paradigms and elements as some computer artist would, borrowing freely from sometimes "incompatible" models and mixing these borrowings together into some new, very modern and always startling unity. The Portrait The portrait paradigm is especially significant in the film because it is the first to appear sequentially. It organizes the entire prologue sequence and as such, determines the viewer's attitude to future personages and events. Two trends seem to dominate this opening paradigm : one is the challenging nature of the opening portraits in the psychological, narrative and descriptive senses, and the other is the opposite, formal, almost abstractly compositional role of these portraits. The portraits which appear in the opening scenes are featured as formal portraits of the restoration period with the clothes, wigs and general attitudes of the figures, reminding us of the formal art of portraiture of that period, which stressed the status and the general semblance of the figures. However, the facial expressions of Greenaway's personages, their makeup and gestures definitely undermine this pictorial background. They are , in a

70 way, enhancements on the formal and semantic structures of the portrait, and use striking pictorial elements from schools and painters completely different from those of the formal Restoration portraiture. Much of these enhancements serve to bring forth, as it were, the "true", "real" nature of the Restoration mores, something which the contemporaries knew, something which we know now for sure, but the painters preferred to hide, mask. This contrast between the visible, the pictorial, the literary and the cinematic will always be central to Greenaway's art. His rhetoric is quite strident, if not to say didactic, which, again, contrasts with the borrowed pictorial images and their intrinsic semantics. The psychology and appearance of Peter Greenaway's personages owes more to William Hogarth's way of social satire in painting than to the period portraiture. This anachronistic borrowing, again, serves to enhance and dynamize the pictorial images. Greenaway's use of typically Hogarthian facial features exposes the incipient embourgeoisment of what should be Restoration aristocracy. The "quotations" from Georges de La Tour with their recognizable candlelight chiaroscuro and female profiles lit by this soft light, seemingly engaged in pious meditation, seems to suggest both a new reading of de la Tour and a new emotional angle to the film scene. Let us not forget at this point that for de La Tour, and others like him, or before him, who invented this use of hidden and warm light, it symbolized the concealed (but suddenly revealed) world of regenerated human soul. Painters of the 17th century were not possessed, like Peter Greenaway seems to be, by deep mythological complexes which they needed to accommodate, bring out or castigate. Their world-view was more ordered, more harmonious, more in keeping with a certain religious model. What happens in those portraits where Greenaway resurrects Georges de La Tour's pictorial images is a complex tug-of-war between de La Tour's deeply felt religiosity and Greenaway's estranged and unmasking, but at the same time, highly intense and mythologically ambivalent view of human relations. Instead of peace and inner reconciliation Greenaway's "de La Tour" homages invoke the feelings of unease, despair and understanding which disturbs any notion of peace. Maybe what Peter Greenaway manages to bring into Georges de la Tour's pictorial motifs is his 20th century sensitivity of a lone human being's broken heart and spirit. But despair and distress do not completely overcome the world of "The Draughtsman's Contract". It is in the paradigm of the portrait that we witness another aspect of enhancement, this time not the enhancement of hidden disturbing truth, but the enhancement of the harmonious perfection of the world. Peter Greenaway achieves this by skillfully arranging the formal composition of the sequence of portraits in the opening. Each shot is masterfully contrasted with the right and left hand sides and the center clearly featured, designed and marked, with the center and foreground extremely visually important and semantically meaningful. The structure of the portrait is especially articulated, as we have already stated, in the prologue sequence. Peter Greenaway seems to achieve here a completely new concept of the portrait which he enlarges by subordinating it to motion and to still life. In each plane two human faces, sometimes taken as sheer faces, sometimes as sitting figures, sometimes as shoulder portraits, are posed facing each other, or the viewer, with still life compositions occupying the foreground and/or the background.

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Usually lighted candles serve as vertical coordinates and sources of light (as often as not two three or four candles, depending on the overall composition: two with a candle occupying the right-hand and the left-hand corners - upper or lower - of the shot, three and four - with a candle or a couple of them placed additionally in the center). Such a composition is periodically presented as the prologue sequence unfolds, each composition divided from the previous one by very sharp cuts. In each composition two personages stage a miniplay of sorts. The static impression of stage composition is enhanced by a device of a completely static camera. The only motion within the portrait composition is verbal exchange between the portraits and their super-animated facial play. Each composition is, in a way, a musical phrase which is stressed by the musical continuo. Thus, the sinister meaning of each mini-play is somehow mitigated by a very rehearsed and symmetrical composition within each composition. However, because of this symmetry one can also discern some kind of paradigmatic structure, a sort of point counter point when a succession of faces in the left-hand or right-hand side of the screen acquires a certain narrative and semantic import. In the final scene of the prologue Peter Greenaway decides to break with the symmetry. In the composition Mrs. Herbert standing on the left side (from the spectator's point of view), Mr. Neville in the middle of the composition - the right side is left empty and dark. After Mr. Neville agreed to his draughtsman's contract, Mrs. Herbert suddenly, leaves her assigned place in the left-hand side of the composition and moves conspicuously to the right-hand side into the empty space, leaving the left side empty. The composition is asymmetric, with the black empty space in the right side, then in the left side, indicating her claim to him (the half circle she makes behind him) and his eventual demise (the asymmetry and the black spaces). This fugue structure underlines the harmonious aspect of the film, almost the idea that the very unfolding of the narrative, even of its import is threatening, harks back to some untold order, harmony. The Interior - The Outside One of the basic conflicts in this film is the conflict between the interior and the outside. From the outset there is an implicit (and often explicit) struggle between the inside and the outside. On the whole both domains have to be sharply delimited, with one area completely shut off from the other. However, as the film unfolds, the viewer finds himself in an ever increasing degree of confusion. The inside is, as often as not, the domain of disorder, passion, conspiracy, while the outside, at least as far as Mr. Neville is concerned, has to be completely ordered, arranged like a perfect interior. Gradually, however, both domains begin to invade each other, the perfectly arranged exterior becomes more like the inside of the house, especially by the end of the film where big sumptuous feasts are set outside at night, by the light of the candle. Much of the interior atmosphere in the film is a complex pastiche of the 17th century Dutch genre paintings of the interior. True, the costumes of the personages are deliberately anachronistic and definitely not those of 17th century Holland; however, the interior design and setting of this allegedly English stately home betrays Peter Greenaway's attachment to Dutch 17th century interiors. The multiple frames in his interior scenes echo the view of multiple entrances and exits as seen through the door leading to the interior of the house in the paintings of Jan Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch or

72 Ter Borch. Personages talking to each other inside Compton-Ansty's rooms are often positioned as they would be in Dutch genre paintings. This is especially evident in Peter Greenaway's treatment of people standing or who are seated near windows. Scenes of debauchery and sexual licence are taken from a different pictorial source, that of Flemish 17th century painting with its love of the naked body and its unabashed delight in earthy pleasures. Near the end of the film, after the contract has been fulfilled rather luxuriously on a huge bed, a different setting from their rather constricted exertions at the time of the contract, is shown. This scene could be lifted straight from Rubens or Jordaens. One can discern clear Italian influences here as well. As far as the depiction of the outside is concerned one cannot help but notice rather a different approach in the film. The landscape depicted in the film is thoroughly artificial. This is what sets its apart from the organically grown world of the interior with its disorder, passion and human involvement. In the gardens of Compton-Anstey occasional details from the interior (figures, details of clothing) only detract, in the eyes of the draughtsman, from their harmonious beauty. In fact, any movement is felt as an intrusion. This is why the favorite motifs of the 17th century landscape painting, the animals and/or people within landscapes, here appear as highly incongruous, something which interferes with beauty and harmony and has to be brought together into some higher unity. Animals, cows and sheep so enamored by the foremost 17th century artists, here appear as a nuisance. The cows or sheep so painstakingly and with such love depicted by Albert Cuyp, here simply invade the aristocratic privacy of the country estate, the draughtsman ordering to banish them. Thus, the dialogue with the "Source-painting" becomes deeply ironic when Greenaway turns his attention to sculpture which forms an important element in the film's plot. The sculpture in "The Draughtsman's Contract" is, as it were, a double pastiche. Firstly, its placement and meaning seem to parody the role of sculpture in Nicolas Poussin's classical paintings. In Poussin's paintings the human figures are very sculptural in their composition, gestures and relative treatment. The sculptures, on the other hand, are always embedded in the human milieu, as in, for example, his famous Golden Calf or Et in Arcadia Ego. In Poussin, figures and landscape support each other, carry each other's meanings and flow almost effortlessly into each other's forms. Peter Greenaway evidently realizes all this and makes this artistic construction the subject of the very ironic visual metaphor. He places human subjects as disguised sculptures in the midst of the artificial landscape. He does this in a spirit which mocks the pictorial original: instead of Poussin's embeddedness one finds that Compton-Anstey's human statues in fact are not embedded at all. They are the real protagonists of movement, conspiracy and action. However their actions and meanings are low, lewd and lugubrious. They are ugly, they revel in all kinds of carnavalistic practical jokes and they are invisible - but except for someone who shares the conspiracy. The outside in "The Draughtsman's Contract" ultimately triumphs over the inside, but it is the chthonic, mythological outside of the mysterious pond rather than the ordered outside of the beautiful garden. In the "Draughtsman's Contract" we find a key sequence which summarises the aesthetic message and the structural essence of the whole film. This is the 'Bushes Boulevard' sequence - plane 204 when Mrs. Talman (Mrs. Herbert's daughter), is walking from the

73 deep plane in the upper rim of the screen toward the first plane of the picture, in a zig-zag manner. Plane 204 - a long sequence, the camera is static, Mrs. Talman moving slowly in zig zag motion from the right far deep end of the frame, to the left again and again, undressing and hanging her clothes elegantly on the bushes while she moves. She moves as a ballet dancer, disappearing each time among the tall cypresses. Finally Mrs. Talmann pronounces: "It is time, Mr. Neville". The passing of time - evokes here the main paradigm of painting versus cinema (the clothes are being hung as pictures in a museum exhibition). The refusal to relate to the changing nature and time, and movement was Mr. Neville's big mistake. In fact, in this sequence, Peter Greenaway lays bare not only his unwilling female personage but the underlying concept and conceit of the "new museum" as well. It brings to mind André Malraux's "Museum Without Walls". The new museum is a museum without walls, limits, frames, or boundaries, a museum not only open to everybody, but one in which the exhibits are a mixture of the works of art, ready-made objects, natural objects etc. In Peter Greenaway's film the draughtsman wanted to effect the ultimate feat of conferring the status of art onto life by immortalizing passing life in its uniqueness as exactly as possible. However, not only does it prove unattainable, but it transpires that in its relentless drive of life, in the form of the beautiful, the unimpregnated, Mrs. Talman, turns everything into a kind of museum for the occasion . The "new museum" in "The Draughtsman's Contract" manages to capture the capricious fragments of the painter's and film-maker's craft and imagination and present them in an imaginary exhibition.

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Peter Greenaway's "The Belly of an Architect" (1987) Introduction: This film by Peter Greenaway develops all the artistic directions first indicated in "The Draughtsman's Contract" and adds a new intricate pathway into the overall patterns. What is definitely new in "The Belly of an Architect", is Peter Greenaway's almost obsessive preoccupation with the multi- layered (in many senses) structure of the meanings of the city, this time of the city of Rome. When he abandons (not completely), his EnglishDutch painterly milieu he embraces with gusto, the complex world of historic and modern Rome. Rome is infinitely more complex and interesting than England for an artist like Peter Greenaway. In order to present Rome in all its complexity he has to leave the single focus which is so natural for any artist dealing with it: the focus of antiquity and the modern everyday life contrasting with it, as we see in the films of Federico Fellini ("Roma"). Peter Greenaway presents his Rome as a complex riddle, a riddle similar in a way to the one in the center of the plot of "The Draughtsman's Contract", but one which evolves in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to guess who killed the victim, as in "The Draughtsman's Contract", we are led to wonder whether the victim will be killed in the end. This riddle, however, is enhanced by numerous semiotic devices and constructions skillfully built around the main motifs of the film: that of a belly and that of architecture. Both motifs are presented as extremely powerful metaphors, where successive "solutions" become new metaphors to be presented and discussed by the heroes in the course of the film. The new points of view which Peter Greenaway introduces throughout the film are those of America, modern and past, which is the home of emigrants and fugitives from Italy, including Rome, France, which is the venue of the activity of the architect Etienne-Louis Boulleé, England, the home of Sir Isaac Newton, the hero of the forgotten French architect (Boullée) who designed the tomb which was to immortalize the discoverer of the force of gravity, and Italy not only of our modern times, but of other epochs, like the one of King Vittorio-Emmanuel or Mussolini. All these points of view produce a complex and multi-perspective construction of Rome which, somehow, comes into very sophisticated play with the figure of the fictional hero of the film, the American architect Stourley Kracklite. There is something not entirely accidental in Greenaway's choice of the first and family names for his hero. Unlike the hero of "The Draughtsman's Contract' with his perfectly euphonic English name Mr. Neville, the hero of "The Belly of an Architect" bears the names which betray his artificiality, but at the same time his lack of culture and sophistication. Mr. Neville is the ultimate author, auteur, the complete stage-manager, although defeated in the end by those he chose to be his actors. Stourley Kracklite, on the other hand, is utterly unaware of what is happening to him. He is laboring under a multiple set of illusions: that he is the organizer of the exhibition, that he is the ultimate lover and his wife adores him for that, that he understands his subject, Boullée, architecture and Rome better than anybody else, that he is the victim of an elaborate plot to poison him etc. He is at once very naive and very presumptuous. Without delving too deeply into his names let us point out only that they resemble the names of a very wellknown political figure of the 1960's-1970's in America:

75 Stockley Carmichael, a Black Panther activist forced to immigrate to Algeria.The use of this "prototype" for a figure of a fictional architect who is, in all probability, a racist white misogynist is highly ironic. The irony is compounded by the very skillful choice of orthography for Kracklite: K instead of C which creates the effect of a brand name and which reminds us of the family names of Groucho Marx's characters. The name symbolism does not end here. The form of the name of the French architect Boullée includes the French word "boule", 'ball, 'sphere', suggestive of the domes which he was so fond of designing. We will use Peter Greenaway's own synopsis as given in various notes for the presentation of "The Belly of an Architect": "The Belly of an Architect" is the story of a distinguished American architect, Stourley Kracklite who goes to Rome - museum and mausoleum of Western Art - to put on an exhibition in memory of his hero, the 18th Century visionary French architect, EtienneLouis Boullée. Kracklite forgets the Present to honour the Past. But at what cost? He ignores his wife, his child and, finally, his health. The penalty for such obsession is the loss of his Exhibition - the very thing he sacrificed all other parts of his life to achieve. Kracklite's occupation and first concern is architecture - arguably the most significant, and certainly the most enduring, of all the arts. Rome is the undeniable example of that a city of hundred architectural styles, each age showing its bones through the flesh of the one that follows it. The visual style of the film aims to create a very strong image of townscape - a continual background of architecture to indicate that man is persistently lost in its shadow. Its imagery is not the perishable aspects of urban life - neon, paint, street furniture, advertisements, but the long-standing bones of the city - the bones under the marble that was so readily stolen, when the time came, from 'the Forum' to clad 'the Colosseum, from the Colosseum to clad St Peter's, from the Palatine to clad the Victor Emmanuel Building, from the Circus Maximus to build Mussolini's Cinecitta. The time scale of the story is nine months - the period of pregnancy - highlighting the idea that, despite the pain and anxiety of one individual, civilisation continues regardless in a city of some thousand significant buildings that reflect, in genesis, every aspect of Western urban life. (1) The architect who served as the prototype, was important for the meaning of the film. The production notes stress: Boullée did exist. He is not a fiction devised by Stourley Kracklite or by Peter Greenaway. He was born in Paris in 1728 and died in 1799, the year that Napoleon rose to power... He reacted strongly against the Rococco style associated with the French monarchy, and was a devotee of the neo-classical architecture fashions that swept Europe in the 1770's. However, he built little and what little he built has largely been demolished, destroyed or converted out of all recognition. What he is remembered for is the visionary architecture he devised in his later years, though not one single piece of this later work was ever realized. He drew up designs for series of monumental public buildings - opera houses, city gates, lighthouses, publicbaths, churches, halls-of-justice and most significantly tombs,

76 mausoleums, cenotaphs and memorials for the dead. These were inspired, for the most part, by Roman architecture... In fact his ability as a draughtsman in evoking scale, mood, drama and atmosphere are why his plans are so effective. The buildings are grand heroic gestures based on the Platonic geometry of the circle, the square and the triangle - thence the sphere, the cube and the pyramid, three figures which to various people at various times have invoked the elements, the Trinity, the humors and the primary colours. Boullée made much play to obeying concepts like "truth to nature". He believed strongly in his own versions of egalitarianism: he believed architecture should serve the public good and he had an optimism about man's creative role in the Universe. However, he has been described as the first fascist architect, for to a Twentieth Century eye, aware of the political and architectural excesses of the last 60 years, there is something totalitarian about his designs - man is dwarfed by his buildings and often belongs to a large, decorative toga-clad crowd that stands stock still in awe at such grand scale or is swept up and down mighty flights of stairs in gesticulating enthusiasm for the works of mankind. (2) Gary Giddins wrote in his review of "The Belly of an Architect" : Set in a Rome crowded by architectural landmarks, the film recalls the early paintings of De Chirico: Perspectives are determined by the surpassing vistas of Pantheon Square, the Colosseum, and the monument of Victor Emmanuel; the light play is worked into a chiaroscuro of burnt and yellow umbras set against brilliant primaries, all irradiated by the illusion of natural luminescence. (3) Synopsis Stourley Kracklite is a celebrated American architect from Chicago who travels to Rome to set up an exhibition in honor of his hero the little-known French architect, EtienneLouis Boullée. He takes with him his young wife Louisa. Kracklite is middle-aged, heavily built and obsessed with his work. Louisa is in her late twenties, attractive - and restless. The Kracklites have been invited to Rome by the Speckler family : Io Speckler, a prominent Roman architectural authority; his elegant and arrogant 28-year-old son, Caspasian, an architect; and his daughter, the enigmatic Flavia, an architectural photographer. The Specklers welcome the Kracklites to Rome at a restaurant in the Pantheon Square an appropriate setting since the imposing building of the Pantheon, like many of the buildings in Rome, greatly influenced Boullee's work. It is Kracklite's birthday and he is presented with a cake fashioned in the shape of Boullée's most famous design - a domed memorial to the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton. Boullée, who lived in Paris in the 18th Century, built very little but his designs are of considerable interest to contemporary architects. The Newton Memorial is to be the centerpiece of Kracklite's exhibition. Later that evening, back at the Kracklite's apartment, Stourley teases Louisa about Caspasian's excessive attentions. Louisa, in turn, teases Kracklite about Boullée, claiming that like his hero, he has designed many buildings but built very few.

77 Their love-making is interrupted when Kracklite suddenly doubles up with excruciating stomach cramps. Louisa accuses him of overeating and pulls away in annoyance. As she falls asleep Kracklite remains awake working on the plans for the exhibition. The exhibition is to be housed in the halls of 'the Victor Emmanuel Building' - Italy's monument to the unknown soldier, affectionately known as the "wedding cake", situated in the heart of the oldest section of Rome. Preparations get underway with a formal mealthis time a lunch on the north terrace of the building. As Kracklite gorges himself with figs, Caspasian shows off in front of Louisa and, pointedly teasing Kracklite, recounts the gruesome death of the Emperor Augustus whose wife allegedly murdered him with poisoned figs. The story disturbs Kracklite who suddenly becomes sick and has to leave the table. As Kracklite leaves the Victor Emmanuel Building he notices postcards of Augustus and his Tomb. He steals them and secretly xeroxes the portrait of Augustus - enlarging the belly area of the postcard. He later uses the Augustean stomach as a template noting down the symptoms of his own aches and pains. As they prepare for bed Louisa and Kracklite argue. Jealous and in pain, Kracklite accuses her of trying to poison him. Enraged, she storms out of the bedroom suggesting scornfully he see a doctor. In his uneasiness and uncertainty he starts to write a postcard, addressed to Boullée in Paris - the first of a series of postcards to his dead hero in which he confides his fears about his increasing sickness, the slow progress of the exhibition and his wife's growing disaffection. Kracklite decides to visit a doctor who is amused by the Augustean medical progress cards and briefly dismisses the pains as a result of a change of diet, over-work and a surfeit of ego. He returns to work, relieved but not convinced. But on a picnic trip to the ruins of 'Hadrian's Villa', just outside Rome, the pains return in force. As he writes another postcard to Boullée he witnesses Caspasian and Louisa together in the ruins. While he has become increasingly obsessed with his work and his stomach pains, Louisa has turned to Caspasian for amusement and affection. That night Kracklite confronts Louisa with her supposed infidelity, but she retaliates by telling him she is pregnant. She assures him it is his child. Kracklite continues to work night and day to get the exhibition ready. Caspasian is scornful of Kracklite's plans and with the help of his friend Frederico, Caspasian begins to divert funds to finance his own private projects. Kracklite begins to grow suspicious when one night Io Speckler, concerned for Kracklite's health, suggests that Caspasian take over the running of the Exhibition. Kracklite angrily rejects the idea, claiming that Caspasian has already taken over too much of his life. As he returns home at dawn to his residence opposite the Victor Emmanuel Building, he hears laughter from the next door apartment and witnesses Caspasian and Louisa making love and playfully cavorting around with one of the architectural models from the exhibition. Kracklite is devastated and wanders out into the morning as the sun arises over the Roman Forum. Visiting spa baths, with Io Speckler and Dr. Trettorio, Kracklite, growing anxious about his health, is mocked but is advised by the Italians to visit a stomach specialist for tests. He is told it will take time to process the results and the distracted Kracklite lets his work slide and spends his time wandering around Rome taking photographs of the bellies of fountain statuary. One day he is in Piazza Navona when Flavia approaches him. She seems sympathetic and takes him to her studio. There he is horrified to discover a series of her photographs which chronicle minutely the disintegration of his marriage and the growing relationship

78 between Caspasian and Louisa. Flavia has silently been observing and recording everything. Kracklite is distraught. They make love and are discovered by Caspasian. Kracklite fears blackmail. But Kracklite's obsessive behaviour has already begun to worry the backers of the Exhibition. Io confronts Kracklite and informs him that more money is required, but the bankers will only pay up if Kracklite resigns. He refuses angrily, storms off and vows to raise the neccessary funds himself. Feeling completely out-manoeuvred by Caspasian and the Italian financiers, Kracklite tells Louisa that he plans to mortgage their Chicago house to raise the money necessary for the Exhibition and that once it has been opened they will return to America. She tells him it is too late. She is due to give birth shortly and she is leaving him. She will live with Caspasian until the baby is born. She doesn't need him anymore. Nor do the Italians. Io informs Kracklite that he has been fired from the exhibition. As Kracklite writes his last desperate postcard to Boullée the final blow is delivered when he is informed that he is terminally ill and only has a few months to live. On the eve of the opening of the Exhibition Kracklite gets drunk, rages through the city and is finally arrested in the Pantheon Square, the scene of his former triumphs. The next morning he makes his way to the Victor Emmanuel Building, but hesitates before entering. In Kracklite's absence Louisa is invited to officially open the exhibition. As she takes the microphone to speak in Italian in front of the magnificent reconstruction of Boullée's Newton Memorial, Kracklite sneaks into the building. He climbs the balcony overlooking the Exhibition hall and watches. Louisa cuts the ribbon to open the Exhibition. As she does so, she promptly collapses and goes into labour. Kracklite leans against one of the giant windows of the balcony and as we hear the crying of his new-born child Kracklite throws himself to his death. Whilst his corpse lies on the roof of Caspasian's car, the Roman rush-hour traffic, heedless of his fate, roars around the Victor Emmanuel Building. (4) The Semiotic Enhancement The origin of the concept of "The Belly of an Architect" is in Peter Greenaway's preoccupation, as a young student, with painting, and his later discovery of the importance of architecture in culture. As is stated in the booklet of 1987 accompanying the film: Peter Greenaway first visited Rome in the early sixties as a student of painting, but returned home more impressed by the architecture than by the painting. He had always wanted to make a film in Rome, but the specific idea for "The Belly of an Architect" emerged many years later when he returned to Italy to publicise his highly acclaimed "The Draughtsman's Contract". (5) Greenaway explains: The moment my plane touched down in Rome, I was struck by silent stomach-cramps which stayed with me for the entire four days. As soon as the plane took off the pain vanished: it provided me with a scenario about a man who comes to Rome and is struck down by a psychosomatic illness. I had to find a way of welding together a delight in the architecture of Rome with psychosomatic illness. (6) "The key turned out to be a little-known French architect, Etienne-Louis Boullée, who lived through the French Revolution. Although he never left Paris, his many extraordinary drawings were inspired by the ruins of Rome". (7)

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He was a visionary architect, who designed a great many buildings, but built very few. He had never been to Rome and envisaged a city much greater, and larger than it was. Boullée's designs are enormous: they consist of tombs, monuments, and triumphant arches - buildings of this same genre exist all over Rome.(8) Thus, the original idea was to unite disparate aspects of the semiotic idea of Rome by the common thread of semiotic enhancement. The key to the idea of semiotic enhancement lies in Peter Greenaway's description of Boullée's concept of Rome: "Greater and Larger than it was". In other words: painting is an enhancement of reality, architecture is an enhancement of painting and visionary, utopian architecture is an enhancement of real architecture. Another aspect of semiotic enhancement in the film is concerned with the development of the initial impulse for the script, the story of Peter Greenaway's psychosomatic illness which, in the film, becomes a deadly element enhanced to such a degree that it kills the film's protagonist. All aspects of the signifier are isolated, turned into independent signs arranged according to the logic of the overall scheme: City = Body; the aspects of the signified - the artistic and architectural elements of Rome, paintings and buildings, are enhanced by virtue of their becoming unusually active, interfering in the lives of the figures. What Peter Greenaway seems to aspire to in this film is to juxtapose personal frailty, pettiness and nastiness with the eternal value and beauty of architecture. Human body (and mind), according to Peter Greenaway, are but a very poor semiotic counterpart to the eternal Platonic perfections of architecture which even in its dilapidated state, as ruins and fragments, loom majestically over the poor carcass of man. "The Belly of an Architect" has been extensively analyzed, almost shot by shot, in the french Journal "L'Avant Scene Cinéma" (Dec 1992/Jan 1993). This enables us not to duplicate their very intricate and inventive analysis, but choose larger cultural and semiotic issues which appear relevant now, more than ten years after the appearance of the film. The notion that human body and works of plastic art, including entire cities, are in some kind of meaningful relationship to one another is definitely not new. On fiction, this notion was developed, among others, quite extensively using the images of the 17th century Paris, by Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables" and Emile Zola in his "Le Ventre de Paris". What Peter Greenaway does in "The Belly of an Architect" is to focus on the real and quite concrete human body of his architect hero, played brilliantly by Brian Dehenny and on Rome which is presented as some giant monumental body half-hidden in the ground and half sticking out of it. The ancient and Renaissance monuments, the Colosseum, the Forum, the tomb of Augustus, the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona and St. Peter's are like gigantic body parts of this enormous body, at once living and dead. The living aspect of the city is emphasized not by its present-day "epithelium", its automobiles or traffic jams and neon lights, but by historic and semiotic succession, by the fact that old monuments continue to live and function side by side with their "grandparents" and "grandchildren", that they may be viewed, alternately as being a signifier, or a signified, the text or the context. The deadly aspect of the city becomes active when people with their quite ephemeral desires and phobias encroach upon the city, interact with it.

80 The architecture and the historic ambience of Rome impart enhanced meaning on human travails and endeavors which take place against its background. It seems that Peter Greenaway is torn between the empathy for his architect hero and the empathy for the Eternal City and its fickle and enigmatic people. There are several ways to treat Stourley Kracklite's story which evolves during the nine months which it takes his wife to deliver her child and his illness to overpower him. In fact the entire film is, as it were, spanned between the three main tension points: Kracklite, the American, his wife Louisa, the daughter of the Italian immigrants to America, who upon her contact with her "historic homeland" "goes native" and Etienne-Louis Boullée, the enigmatic utopian architect. One may interpret each of these three poles in different ways: Kracklite: a) Epitome of certainty, naiveté. b) Epitome of crassness and shallowness. c) Victim of Rome's ageless perfidy. d) A victim of his own passionate and highly sexual "entry into Italy". e) A Christ-like figure who seeks to imitate mythological cultural archetypes and make himself an offering to the deus absconditus ("absent deity") - Boullée. f) A victim who has to be sacrificed so that the eternal body of Rome can go on living in the eternal darkness of the architectural underground, a sort of inverse Persephone. Louisa: a) The real "belly of an architect", real in the sense of progenitrix; the outside belly which he impregnates. b) The embodiment of nature, as against culture - that nature which always takes creative impulses from culture, but turns then back into nature. c) The vehicle through whom the interfering "pseudo-creative" impulses of Kracklite are neutralized and only what fits the eternal Rome is let through. d) The instrument of history's revenge against a historic creative impulse. e) By bearing the child she becomes Kracklite's best "architectural" work. Etienne-Louis Boullée: a) The platonic, ideal "belly of an architect", the creator of the ideal dome which had to embody the idea of the Newtonian universe. b) The embodiment of culture and not nature, that Platonic culture which has to fructify nature from time to time so that "nature", in this case Rome, would not go to seed, would not become introvert and threatening. c) The absent father figure, or, perhaps, the ideal absent husband who, in the end, takes Louisa, who never related in full seriousness to the idea of Boullée exhibition. d) The disembodied spirit of pure architecture which never be realized, which exists only in the realm of ideas; incidentally, Peter Greenaway in his explanatory notes to the film is forced to explain in great detail that Boullée is not his invention, but, in fact, existed. e) One could also surmise that Boullée is a sort of Commendatore to Kracklite's Don Giovanni, and that Kracklite's hubris in trying to revive Boullée is equal to Don Giovanni's invitation to the "statua gentillissima" to appear for the supper (= "the Last Supper"), the invitation as a result of which Don Giovanni is carried to Hell and Kracklite literally falls down to Earth.

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The fact that Rome is the symbolic space over which these tensions are presented turns the metaphor of a city as an organic body into a kind of a literal plastic image in which, as in every mythological image, the signifier interchanges freely with the signified. The actual images of the city of Rome are presented in the film as gigantic fragments of some unimaginably ancient carcass in which old ruins, monuments and other "parts of architecture" are presented as primeval fossils sticking out of the huge buried ground which is Rome. Thus architectural elements are made organic, vital, belonging to the general category of body. Their naturalness is enhanced. On the other hand, Kracklite, in his painful journey towards the realization of his dream, feels his own body as some oversized, enhanced assemblage of disjointed parts. His body parts and functions are "out of synch": his own belly, which is gnawed at by cancer, appears larger than his other body parts. Moreover, he tries to placate his pain and his illness by isolating, as it were, his own belly when he produces numerous copies of the belly of the well-known statues of the Roman Emperor Augustus and substitutes those copies for his own aching belly. Here the sign of the sign of the sign (the xerox copy of the photo of the statue) serves to enhance the signifier (the form of the belly) while striving to eliminate the signified (the pain which is inside). This idea of enhancing human body by deliberately enlarging it and dividing it into parts (in this case oversized, extremely huge parts) definitely acts in two contrasting semantic paradigms. One appears in the sequence in which Kracklite waits for interrogation at the Rome police station. He is surrounded by gigantic plaster copies of ancient statues, hugely enlarged human hands, toes, feet, torsos etc. Kracklite's own rather puny and insignificant figure against the background of this gigantic collection of human body parts suggests the idea of some kind of Platonic vision of man, immovable, unperturbed, immune to pain and sickness. Another paradigm of human body appears to be that of the primeval sacrifice where the body of the original man is cut up and the parts are buried in the ground to assure its future fecundity. Be it as it may, Peter Greenaway explores the story of the enhancement, showing its different and often contradictory impulses which always combine and juxtapose opposite semantic poles. In presenting human body and Rome as two aspects of one semiotic construction Peter Greenaway is forced, by the logic of his aesthetic pursuit to arrive at extremely far-flung meanings. On the one hand he is fascinated by the organic nature of the body, its size, feel, smell, its functions, its life, and thus one is faced with the images of love, food, blood, meat, wine; one is forced to interpret the present-day clinical story of a "real" architect from Chicago in terms of its ancient mythical proto-story, that of Augustus' wife Livia poisoning her husband. On the other hand, in the organic forms which bear their own meaning and serve as counterpoint to the unfolding plot: the round forms of the dome, cupola, sphere, the linear forms of the obelisk, pole, outstretched hand or sword ( or railway track), the triangular forms of the two parallel lines converging at the point of the far-away perspective rectangular frames and posters - all these serve as indications of plot devices and complications, as well as coordinates in the interpretation of the visual plane. The interpretation of the visual plane is, of course, at the heart of this complex work of cinematic art. Peter Greenaway himself stressed repeatedly in his numerous interviews

82 that he views his own work as something more complex and all-embracing than the work of "mere" film-director. Among other preoccupations of his, he once singled his passion for manipulating works of pictorial art: "... C'est une merveilleuse occasion de manipuler des Botticelli, des Rembrandt, et je trouve ca passionant ". (9) The rectangular frame of the cinematographic screen coupled with Peter Greenaway's preference for medium-length shots creates the perfect opportunity for viewing his images in the par-adigm of paintings. To this one should add, of course, his conscious use, in "The Belly of an Architect" of pictorial prototypes. However, unlike in his "The Draughtsman's Contract" and "Zed and Two Noughts", here he uses the context of the film to enhance the paintings rather than the paintings to enhance the context of the film. In "The Belly of an Architect", Peter Greenaway resorts to numerous painters and paintings, among them Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Bronzino, his favorite Pre-Renaissance and Renaissance painters; the classicist Jean-Louis David; the impressionists Edouard Manet and Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse; Rene Magritte, Mark Rothko, and even Andy Warhol, among the moderns. All of them serve as "providers of stylistic features"; their paintings are, as it were, analyzed into constitutive elements, these elements are then re-assembled into new entities and combinations. The enhancement of paintings occurs when these new combinations enable the viewer to go back to, for instance, stone, marble textures of Mantegna's paintings and relate to the fact that in Peter Greenaway's film these textures are discovered in highly movable, dynamic scenes. Or Mark's Rothko's color arrangements are suddenly discovered in settings of Roman ancient ruins. Jean-Louis David appears vicariously in the various interiors representing the suffering Kracklite as a kind of parody of Marat in his bath.(10) The scene at Villa Adriana in Rome where Kracklite is accompanied by his hosts reminds one, alternately, of some of Nicholas Poussin's mythological compositions, like his Flight to Egypt or of Manet's Breakfast on the Grass. Andy Warhol's technique of assembling paintings and sculptures of multiimages of one person or object is amply represented here in Kracklite's attempts to copy numerous images of sculptural bellies with which he surrounds himself. Two pictures are singled out, in our view, by Peter Greenaway for "special treatment" in the framework of "The Belly of an Architect". They are Leonardo's The Last Supper and Raphael's The School of Athens. In both cases the treatment is so dynamic as to verge on something like parody, without, at the same time, crossing this line. Leonardo's The Last Supper is represented in one of the first scenes in the film when all the protagonists assemble in Rome in one of the restaurants outside the Pantheon and against its majestic background. The guests are seated in the arrangement reminding one of Leonardo's famous composition of Jesus and the apostles with Jesus towering over them in the center of the painting. In Peter Greenaway's composition this center place is given to Kracklite who alone among the guests exhibits the facial growth similar to that of Jesus in Leonardo's painting. The guests' taunts and thinly-veiled hostility echo somehow the dramatic atmosphere of Leonardo. However, the parodic edge is taken out of the comparison when Peter Greenaway begins to lead his protagonist along his own private Via Dolorosa

83 which ends with Kracklite's symbolic fall from grace (real and mythological) at the Monument to Victor-Emmanuel. In a way one can say that Peter Greenaway's pastiche of Leonardo's The Last Supper opens the plot of satanic pride and folly. The cinematic discussion of satanic pride and folly is enhanced in the scene in the public baths fresco room. In this scene four men are sitting in a painted room. They are all wrapped in large white towels, looking like some distinguished ancient Roman figures, Roman senators, wise men or mythological or heroic figures. They are sitting on a stone bench. Frescoes of aquatic mythology cover the walls. On the ceiling there is the painting of the death of Phaethon, an allegory of hubris and gravity. All people in this scene look like four Roman sages of some allegorical significance. All this not only reminds one of the generalized ancient Roman figures but brings in specifically, especially, on the verbal level, the memories of Raphael's "School of Athens". The sages of Peter Greenaway are, in fact, mock-sages, their wisdom is rather hollow and their aim is far from the pursuit of truth. The pursuit of truth is, in effect, another facet of the heroes' being blinded by their own pride, folly and pettiness. One of Peter Greenaway's more persistent motifs is this juxtaposition of truth versus pride and folly. This juxtaposition is never simplistic or onedimensional. Kracklite is both blinded by his pride and suspicion, but he also is in constant pursuit of some hidden but eternal truth. Boullée is both a great architect who pursued dreams of pure architectural vision and some crazy monomaniac who was, perhaps, a protagonist of Fascist and Nazi architectural fantasies. This dualism extends, among other things, to the dualism in such things as language, script, image. All of these can be the vehicles of truth and beauty, and, if followed slavishly or too literally, can hide cruelty, ugliness and deceit. Thus Peter Greenaway lavishly presents us with the visions of lofty inscriptions on Roman mon-uments, including such famous examples as the Pantheon inscription "Italiae limina sacra artis restitutiae" ("Italy's sacred frontiers are now restored by the arts"). Among those somewhere he flashes, for a few seconds, the infamous Fascist slogan: "Un popolo di artisi, di eroi, di santi, di pensatore, di scienziati, di navigatori, di trasmigratori" on the walls of Mussolini's "Chamber of Labor" on the road to Rome. One feature of the plot of "The Belly of an Architect" serves to underline the fact that Peter Greenaway is more than a mere "director". Several times in the course of the film Kracklite is seen buying postcards of Rome from street vendors. These postcards are popular, rather stereotyped representations of the most famous and frequented sights of Rome which appear static, devoid of life, just like Kracklite's xeroxes of ancient sculptural bellies. However they, in fact, serve a certain purpose which is not entierly laid bare before other protagonists and the spectators of the film. Several times we notice that what Kracklite writes on these postcards are letters, messages to the long deceased Etienne-Louis Boullée. This creates an impression of some momentary lapse, idiosyncrasy, a sign on the road of Kracklite's physical and mental deterioration. However, Greenaway intimated in his written script that there are, in fact, one hundred and twenty-four such postcards, and all of them were printed in the book of the script (11) The text of the postcards creates a parallel story to that of the visual line of the film, some kind of mysterious real truth which is destined to remain hidden forever from the viewers.

84 The first postcard begins with Kracklite's intimation to his dead correspondent that he thought that his wife was poisoning him. Then he develops a whole story line in which he relates his suspicions to the possible rivalries between famous architects ("maybe Corbusier should have been poisoned and not drowned. Maybe that's what happened. What was Corbusier's favorite drink? He drank a glass of poisoned aqua minerale, went swimming and sank") (12), to the peculiarities of ancient Roman Culture ("The Romans had rooms for everything, didn't they? [...] perhaps they had a room for poisoning husbands") (13), to his accidental encounters ("I met a violinist playing by himself in the toilet. He could never play in public because of the shits - his nerves went to his stomach [...] He asked me of I had a nervous stomach"). (14) Among Kracklite's postcards there are some which sound like parables. The postcard from Wednesday, 5th June 1985 relates the story of the carpenter and his childless wife Mary which definitely alludes to the story of Jesus: A fortnight ago on the train from Paris and Rome I met a film director who said he had once been a carpenter. I asked him if it had been a big jump. He said no. He still kept a sharpened pencil behind his ear and wore corduroy trousers. He plunged his hands in sawdust every night so that his wife could still enjoy the smell of wood. Her name was Mary. They were childless. Neither of them were happy. They were waiting for a miracle. (15) Other postcards serve as providing a missing historical (and pictorial) dimension: Why didn't you ever come to Rome? 1785 would have been a good year. No doubt there would have been cows in the Basilica Julio and 427 species of plants in the Colosseum. The Piazza di Rotonda would have been slimy with fish and offal - you would have to have looked at the Pantheon over a sea of fishwives. Still seeing the real thing is better than looking at that charlatan Piranesi. He has a lot to answer for. All Europe, thanks to him, thought the Piazza Navona was a mile long. (16) Here one begins to glimpse the motives of the future films of Peter Greenaway with their explicit desire to uncover and show to the world "the real state of things" in classical painting. The slime, dirt, blood and refuse will figure prominently in his film "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", as will the motif of some higher truth, hidden from the eyes of the uninitiated in the mysterious, maybe lost, books and texts. Actually the 124 postcards by Kracklite represent Greenaway's own, highly sophisticated and not altogether self-evident analysis of his film. Certain lines that are only slightly or even imperceptibly hinted at in the film, are developed into full-blown story-lines, like the story of Boullée's connection with the French Revolution and its leading figures. Thus the totalitarian and even fascist nature of utopian architecture is revealed in Kracklite's conjectures about Boullée contacts with the practitioners of Revolutionary Terror. Another thematic line which is prominent in these texts is the influence of the present on the possible realizations of utopian architectural dreams: Little democratic Flavia asked me where the toilets were in the Newton Memorial; where could you get an ice-cream to give to the children; how far away was the car-park. I might have added where was the sick room and could an ambulance come right up to the main entrance" (17).

85 This motif will be developed in "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover". The semiotic enhancement of "The Belly of an Architect" does involve the spectator in his most intimate, organic reactions. "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" does this on a much deeper and more violent level of personal involvement and identification.

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"The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" (1989) . Synopsis The Thief named quite ambiguously Albert Spica, accompanied by his Wife Georgina and his motley gang of cronies regularly visits a large restaurant, Le Hollandaise, run by a laconic French cook, named Richard. One evening - the first of the ten evenings that make up the film - the Wife sees a quiet, modest figure in the restaurant who is so unlike her bullying, vociferous husband, that she is immediately drawn to him. The attraction is mutual and an initial enthusiasm that could not be described other than straightforward lust, the Thief's Wife and the quiet, modest diner - the Lover, Michael - a man whose main passion in life has always been books meet and make love regularly under the Thief's very nose - so to speak - in the restaurant toilet. The clandestine passion develops, with the wife finding any excuse whatsoever to leave her husband's table where he holds court and is so sure of his control over her life that he becomes entirely oblivious of his Wife's infidelity. The Cook, without comment or judgment, silently watches the relationships develop, and when the Thief repeatedly comes looking for his Wife, he hides the lovers in various of his pantries in turn - where - among the cooked meats, the plucked poultry, the creams, salads and desserts, their love-making develops into something more valuable than vicarious sex. Eventually the Thief discovers his Wife's secret. Unable to find her, in a rage of severely wounded pride, he intimidates the diners, bullies the kitchen-staff, smashes up the kitchens and finally threatens to kill his Wife's lover and eat him. This threat is heard by the lovers as they stand shivering among the hanging meat in the restaurant cold store where the Cook has hidden them. The Cook eventually manages to spirit the lovers away to a temporary place of safety among tens of thousands of books in a book depository where the Lover feels at ease. Maybe too much at ease - for the vengeful Thief tracks the lovers down, and when the Wife is temporarily absent, kills the Lover. Having found and then lost a great love, the Wife is distraught. She steels herself to plan a terrible revenge in which the Cook is essential. She persuades, cajoles and pleads with him to help her. With the Cook's fastidious culinary expertise, the Wife finally fulfills to the letter, the Thief's melodramatic threat. (18) The Delight and Disgust of Dutch Still-Life. The process of the semiotic enhancement in the film "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover" takes another involuted and highly imaginative turn. Here Peter Greenaway decided to tackle the inside world of the painting parallel to exploring the interior of some imaginary space, entirely built of images of classical European painting, delving into the entrails of the human personages who, in their turn, look as though they stepped down from the painting canvas. "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover" was made by Peter Greenaway in 1989. It is Greenaway's first movie in which he makes direct comments on the socio-moral

87 conditions of his own place and time. The story of the film involves personages who are clearly identified as the English criminal 'nouveau riche' of the Thatcherite era. No mixing of periods occurs in the story line (as in "Zed and Two Noughts" where the mysterious figure of Van Meegeren appears) but at the same time the exact time-space model is presented in such broad outlines and vivid colors that it may suit other epochs and places. A certain paradox lies inside the tightly-knit world of Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover": it is the juxtaposition of the world of Dutch 17th century painting, with its love of the material world, and the violent feelings envoked by the same material world when it is managed by the likes of Mr Spica and his gang. The attentive cinematic stare which the film-maker focuses on this self-referential, but at the same time eminently understandable, world enhances both its outward and its inner crudeness and barbarity. The enhancement begins with the title which, unlike the titles of previous films by Peter Greenaway, does not create any impression of double or multiple meaning. It is the straightforward nomination which aims at enhancing the moral aspect of the story: the Cook is really a Cook with the capital "C", the Thief is the epitome of the evil of any theft, the Wife with the possessive "His", is the proverbial submissive wife who does the bidding of her husband, and Her Lover is the ideal gentle and responsive lover. The maximum enhancement is achieved by naming the Thief Mr. Spica. In addition to the usually adduced meaning of Spica as part of the word "despicable" one may suggest two more directions of interpreting this name. One is based on the graphic form of the word which alludes to the form "spic" in "spic and span", the exact opposite of the utter untidiness of the personage, or to the word 'aspic' which places the hero in the culinary context, or even evokes the word "spit" which is how Mr. Spica chews his food. Another path of interpretation is entirely aural: the pronunciation of the words Mr. Spica is exactly the same as "Mr. Speaker", the highest functionary in the House of Commons in Britain. Thus Peter Greenaway accomplishes his aim of enhancing the scope of his hero to be the real representative of the New Thatcherite Britain. This might explain the role of Frans Hals' group-portrait of The Officers of the St. George archers' company placed in the center of the restaurant dining hall. Frans Hals' protagonists confidently viewed themselves as the true pillars of the new bourgeois society. Their utter delight in their own social function, roles, appearances and ambience is projected not only within the depicted interior, but also outside the painting, to the world of the viewer, both in the restaurant and in the screening hall. The personages of Frans Hals are, as it were, the "real" viewers of the tragi-comedy played out by Mr. Spica, as well as its judges. They also appear as the real spectators of whatever happens in the projection- hall where the present-day viewers watch both Mr. Spica and the gentlemen of St. George's Company. Thus, the two poles of history: its golden past embodied in Frans Hals' classical panel and its ever-shifting present point look into each other bearing silent judgment : the past is being constantly interpreted and re-interpreted by the present, and the changing present is being judged by the immutable past.

88 The act of cinematic enhancement which Peter Greenaway performs cannot and does not remain one-directional. Mr. Spica's masquerading as one of Frans Hals' personages cannot pass as a simple act of barbarism and cultural expropriation. It also contains a comment of sorts from "our" present back to Frans Hals' times. In other words, not only Mr. Spica is ridiculous as Frans Hals' captain of the archers, but the captain in the painting begins to look disturbingly like Mr. Spica. This is connected to the broader aesthetic framework of the film. In a way, the general narrative framework of all four Peter Greenaway films discussed here is quite similar: a man connected to art entertains close or intimate relations with a woman (women) who later either betray him or cause in some direct or indirect way his demise which also reveals the world of art as somehow different from what it appeared in the beginning. Thus, in "The Draughtsman's Contract" Mr. Neville, the artist, entertains liaisons with two women, mother and daughter, in the course of which he is murdered, his art destroyed and, in general, the former aesthetic system (that of a formal garden) is superseded. In "Zed and Two Noughts", two men (the twins) enter into a relationship with a woman who gradually becomes "less than a woman" due to amputations, and this relationship leads to their death. Parallel to this, the obssessive surgeon Van Meegeren "improves" on the work of Jan Vermeer, adding a dimension of hidden violence and sadism to the painter's images, thus degrading the aesthetic ambience of the great painting. In "The Belly of an Architect" the artist figure, as in "The Draughtsman's Contract" is both obsessively engaged in trying to erase the dividing line between art and life (or in semiotic terms, between the signifier and the signified), and he is also doomed to death because of the real imagined conspiracy of his wife. In the end the whole project collapses. However the figure of Kracklite brings in something new to this scheme, namely the hero's coarseness, rudeness, his naivity which explains his inability to distinguish between reality and appearance. In "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover", this general storyline of the connection between art, lust, death, betrayal and downfall is treated in a much more direct and powerful way. Peter Greenaway seems to abandon meditation and understatement in favor of emphasis, repetition and the general building up of passion. This building up of passion is achieved by painterly, cinematographic and psychological means. The entire film, unlike previous films by Peter Greenaway, is like one uninterrupted scream of disgust and delight punctured by groans of fear, pain and suspense. The entire visual and narrative world of the film is divided into four domains, each circumscribed and separate, but allowing for interpenetration and contact. The world outside the restaurant which is the utilitarian world of our drab modernity with its vans, automobiles, tarmac streets and neon lights is the world of filth, excrement, urine, putrefaction, spoiled food, refuse and like. It is lit up by a spurious bluish light punctuated by bright red neon signs. It is the world of fear and humiliation, death screams and coarse swearing, the world of naked carcasses and physical violence. From this nightmare of the outside which reminds the viewer of the world of Francis Bacon, Philip Motherwell or Jackson Pollack, one passes into the world of the kitchen. Here everything changes: it is the world of classical painting which combines the images of Pieter Bruegel the Elder with his scenes of peasant parties, those of the Dutch still life masters like Frans Snyders, Pieter Claesz, Isaac van Duynen and Abraham van Beijeren, the compositions by Masaccio and Mantegna, Veronese and Tiepolo. The overall

89 atmosphere here is completely different. It is the opposite of the gratuitous violence of the outside. The food and the cookery are combined into the image of a reassuring world peopled by timeless inhabitants who are forever busy performing their ageless chores of plucking fowl, cleaning fish, sifting flour, warming water, arranging silverware. This world is managed through common consent by teams of devoted toilers presided over by the wise and tolerant French Cook with his kind and ironic smile. A quasi-angelic figure of sexless kitchen apprentice with a white mop of hair appears at critical moments supplying the musical accompaniment. He sings airs in a castratto-like fashion, reminding one of some invisible celestial choir. The color-scheme in this domain is exquisite green-gray-silver, very earthy and clean at the same time. From the kitchen one proceeds to the third visual domain, that of a dining-hall which imitates some ultimate vision of a 19th century bourgeois restaurant, rich with red draperies hanging everywhere, gilded textures and red flush furniture. In the middle of these kitsch surroundings Greenaway places Frans Hals' painting, as though making a sharp distinction between the kitchen world of fresh nature (exemplified by still-life) and the world of pompous quasi-high culture. In this world Mr. Spica reigns supreme. Moreover, Greenaway stresses the fact that he belongs to the same world as Frans Hals' heroes by dressing him in the quasi 17th century costume. It is the world of domination, verbal and physical violence, vulgarity, utter lack of taste (Mr. Spica and his friends speak in all kinds of uneducated argot and only His Wife and Her Lover speak educated English). The placing of the Frans Hals' painting into the surroundings of the 19th century evokes the general atmosphere of the 19th century when the values of great art were first placed at the disposal of the general public. The works of art were transferred from great private, aristocratic or municipal estates into public museums where they could be viewed by the likes of Mr. Spica. Peter Greenaway evidently dislikes the artistic and cultural ambience of the 19th century bourgeoisie. He combines in this domain of the eating hall the features of vulgarity, utter lack of taste, the aesthetics of the great 19th century opera plots, and the cruelty and utter lack of manners which he believes were the true characteristics of the 17th century. Amy Lawrence quotes in her book "Peter Greenaway", the following personal communication to her from the film-maker: The Militia Clubs were male drinking-societies that had little to do with home-guard military defence against the Spanish. They were an excuse to dress up and get drunk with the boys... Complaints of rowdiness , drunkenness, the boisterous firing of firearms, ill-disciplined use of gunpowder and insults to women were commonplace... The giant reproduction of the restaurant is a template for bad behaviour not good.(19) This is a very revealing testimony by the film-maker himself who openly admits that the classical painting has been used as a paradigm for moralistic interpretation of contemporary society. We are convinced that Peter Greenaway was perfectly aware of the fact that the prevailing "reading" of the Frans Hals' painting even in Holland where, presumably, the "memory" of what he described should be preserved, is the exact opposite of what he offered. This is a vivid demonstration of the director's deliberate use of cinematic context (Mr. Spica's gang) in order to change our contemporary interpretation of the classical painting in the light of his perception of modern times.

90 Indeed, the past has never been so relevant to our present-day concerns as in this example. Having thus enhanced our perception of Frans Hals' work Peter Greenaway proceeds to increase the visual dimensions of the dining-room realm. The director has placed the Frans Hals painting on the most prominent wall of the dining-hall, precisely as it is hung in Room 21 in Frans Hals museum in Haarlem. Mr. Spica's table takes the place of the bench put before the painting. Near the painting and close to the entrance to the pantry the director places the door which leads to the wash-rooms of "La Hollandaise". These are decorated in the sleek utilitarian style of modern bath-room design with bright white porcelain and ceramics dominating the view. It is here where the first contact occurs between Georgina , the Thief's Wife, and Michael, her Lover. This "realm" is totally devoid of any classical painterly connotations. However, each time the two lovers find themselves together in the lavatory its color seems to change to pink. Two modern painters who were used in this sequence are Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko, the first in the striking use of geometric lines and planes, and the second in the juxtaposition of the white and the various hues of off-white with red, pink, mauve etc. The fourth realm of the film is the book depository where Michael the Lover, works cataloguing discarded books which are no longer in use, evidently books written and published in previous centuries and "evicted" from public libraries in the new era of utilitarianism. This realm is an equivalent of paradise where Georgina and Michael find their happiness. This is how Peter Greenaway describes this space in this script: A large - very large - dusty hall of books with high vaulted ceilings. The light comes at regular intervals from a row of squat, arched windows between short columns along one wall which overlooks the city. The hall in on at least the fifth floor of a 19th century building - a museum or library or grand municipal town hall building. There are ornate mouldings. The color is brown - various browns from almost cream to almost black. Overall the color is predominantly a Rembrandt golden brown with touches of orange - a warm, inviting space despite its huge size. Deep chiaroscuro - dramatic dark spaces and bright highlights on pale brown polished wood. There are stacks and stacks of books ranged on tall bookcases whose upper shelves can only be reached by ten foot high wooden banistered ladders on wheels. The bookcases are ranged in parallel rows in long perspectives - for the most part ticketed and labelled in italic script. The books are both old and new - hardbacks with leather bindings and paperbacks with bright covers. (20) Into this edenic world comes the messager boy from the Restaurant and crowns the delight of our heroes with a wonderfully set picnic meal which brings back the atmosphere of the previous still-life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. The incipient idyll of the crowned and victorious love is smashed by the fascist gangs of Mr. Spica who despoil the sanctuary and kill Michael. Thus Peter Greenaway finds the true historic and aesthetic culprit: it is the upstart, 'nouveau riche' bourgeoisie of the Thatcherite era and its historic ancestors who are responsible for the death of beauty, culture, learning and refinement and who find their only delight in violent and disgusting orgies. It is the nearest the director comes to a straightforward political statement connected the reality of high art. The latter is treated by the film-maker in a very ambivalent manner. On the one hand it is precious and is constantly threatened by coarse money-grubbing cads. On the other hand, there may be something in the production,

91 consumption and appreciation of high-art by the corrupted society which goes hand in hand with this corruption. This motif is especially prominent in the final scenes of the film where the avenging down-trodden Georgina arises (literally and metaphorically) to destroy the reign of Spica. The director cannot find any other manner for Spica's destruction but the most decadent and cruel imaginable: he is made to partake of the last meal (Last Supper if one wishes) which is the cooked body of Michael which acquired the same golden brown color in death that his books had when he was alive. The meal is prepared by the Cook who is helped by all the kitchen staff who are thus linked to the proletariat. This kitchen proletariat remind the viewer of the revolutionary pictorial compositions of Eugene Delacroix. This, in turn, brings to life the subjects of the books on French Revolution which Michael was so fond of reading in the Restaurant. Thus, 19th century high art while having been exposed in the plastic atmosphere of the dining-hall is, nevertheless, indispensable to achieve the victory of the downtrodden and the downcast. The three films by Peter Greenaway which we analyzed in this chapter have each been devoted to art as obsession. In each film the director tried to show us how the artist's utter involvement with his art leads to the veritable creative explosion of certain aspects of the pictorial oeuvre treated in the cinematic way, be it aspects of drawing and geometry in "The Draughtsman's Contract", of multi-figure composition in "The Belly of an Architect" or the group portrait genre and still-life in "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover". At the same time this explosion definitely involves not only purely formal and pictorial moments, but the fate of dramatis personae as well. Reality begins to impinge upon art and culture as in the destruction of drawings in "The Draughtsman's Contract" or of the book depository in "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"), and art changes reality, as in "The Belly of an Architect" where Kracklite sacrifices himself on the altar of his idol Boullée. However, Peter Greenaway is too involved in the complex process of the mutual impact between film and painting to be able to step entirely outside the double (or treble) frame of his picture within a film within a picture construction. The search for the real is possible, as a full-blown aesthetic task, only for those filmmakers who include the so-called "prosaic", "unembellished", "non-artistic", "nonpictorial", "non-cinematographic" reality into their aesthetic framework.

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Chapter Three: The Enhancement of the Picto-Massage Notes: 1. A Booklet written by Peter Greenaway, "The Belly of an Architect"; Mondial Ltd/Tangram films, Srl (1987), P. 3. 2. Ibid; pp.14-15. 3. Gary Giddins, "Corpus Interruptus", in Village Voice, San-Francisco (May 8,1990), p. 72. 4. A Booklet by Peter Greenaway, op. cit., pp.7-10. 5. Ibid., p.11. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Entretiens avec Peter Greenaway par Agnes Berthin-Scaillet In: "L'Avant-Scene de Cinéma" n. 417/418, (Dec 92-Jan 93) p.13. 10. "The Belly of an Architect", The published script, written by Peter Greenaway. London, (1988), p.178. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 118. 13. Ibid., p. 119. letter n.4 14. Ibid., p.119, letter n.5 15. Ibid., p. 120, letter n 6. 16. Ibid., p.121 letter n.8 17. Ibid., p. 174 letter n 110. 18. Peter Greenaway's Publication accompanying the film, "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover". London, (August 1989). 19. Amy Lawrence, "Peter Greenaway", Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom. (1997), p.170. 20. The published script, "The Cook, The Thief, his Wife and her Lover". written by Peter Greenaway, (1989), Dis Voir, Paris, pp. 68-69.

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Chapter Four: The Search for the Real. In this chapter we are going to discuss various aspects of the treatment of the so-called "real" or "reality" in picto-films. For this purpose we have chosen four works: Robert Altman's biographical film "Vincent and Theo" (1990), Akira Kurosawa's treatment of Vincent Van Gogh in one of the chapters of his epic film "Dreams" (1990), Jacques Rivette's film "La Belle Noisseuse" (1992) and Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns" (1988). It is probably not accidental that three of the directors are not of European origin: Akira Kurosawa is Japanese; Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph are Americans. The case of Jacques Rivette's film is separate, because the film is a modernized cinematographic version of Honoré de Balzac's philosophical story "Un Chef-d'Oeuvre Inconnu" which, for the first time, posited, still at the outset of the modern age, the question of the relationship between works of art and reality. The fact that film-makers of non-European origin chose to dwell specifically on the problem of the real in art, is related, it appears, to the specifically American roots of post-modernism. Umberto Eco in his path-breaking study of popular American cultural paradigm "Travels in Hyperreality" emphasized the specifically American, in his view, aspects of cultural paradigm of post-modernism. He stressed the American need for reality, for extolling reality, for creating it again and again. Probably it is related, at least in Umberto Eco's view (1) to the fact that American cultural thinking is still haunted by the fear that American culture lacks originals in the sense in which they exist in Europe. There is a need to negate the unique role and position of the cultural original objects: We will give you the copies so good that you won't ever need the originals. Umberto Eco wrote: "To speak of things one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The 'completely real' becomes identified with the 'completely fake'. Absolute unreality is offered as real presence". (2) The intervention of the cinematic medium into the entire sphere of the "real fake" makes the problem much more complicated and ambivalent, not only does "the real fake" denote "the real reality" but "real reality" always prompts the question whether what we are being shown is not, after all, just a cinematographic play. Because cinema was created in order to convey the sense of real presence (Lumiére's famous train arriving, as it were, straight into the viewing hall). Even the application of the most extreme cinematographic techniques tends to convey onto the represented images the imprimatur of reality. Therefore film-makers who tackle reality as a separate self-contained problem have to contend with having to resort to additional levels of meaning and additional cinematographic aspects in order to arrive at the "real reality". The double frame of the film, the frame of the represented image and the frame of the camera, needs to be made more complex, more convincing, need to be expanded or even subverted for the "real reality" to emerge. On the one hand, in the aesthetic-cultural convention of today, the film is still the most complete and perfect representation of the visual reality.

94 On the other hand, existentially, the film is the complete opposite of the physical reality in which we exist, bringing it only to the level of sheer spectatorship, while almost always manipulating the audio-level in the direction opposite from reality (in the film we always hear better and in a more focused manner than in life) and ignoring all other sensual, existential and spatio-temporal possibilities of reality. If a film-maker ever wishes to comment on these aspects of reality he or she has to render all these other aspects vicariously, through vision, sound and story-line. To all these one should add the dimension of the painting depicted or otherwise treated in picto-film. Are paintings shown in Picto-film (any picto-film) endowed with more (or less ?) reality than those which we view in "real life" ? Are paintings by famous painters actually shown on the screen real canvases painted by those late geniuses, or are those just copies (Umberto Eco's "real fake"), something like reproductions in art albums, skillfully executed for the only purpose of being filmed in the film ? Is the reality depicted on these canvases of the same order as the reality filmed by the camera ? Can a film-maker enhance the reality of the filmed painting by putting it next to the reality filmed by the camera, or, conversely the reality of the depicted world by placing it in the context of the painting ? What semiotic processes occur during this juxtaposition and do they extrude into our own existential reality outside the painting and the film ? All these problems are put into sharp focus in Robert Altman's film "Vincent and Theo". Meet the Real Vincent Van Gogh - "Vincent and Theo", (1990) Robert Altman's film is one of a whole group of films depicting, in a more or less fictional way, the life and work of the great Dutch-French painter. Apart from the chapter in Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams" which will be discussed further, other films were made in the late 1980's early 1990's which contributed to the cinematic image of Vincent Van Gogh: Paul Cox's "Vincent, The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh" (Australia, 1987) and Maurice Pialat's "Van Gogh" ( France, 1991). Robert Altman's very sophisticated and ambitious film is different from all other depictions of the great artist, because he concentrates on trying to discover and present "the real Van Gogh". The "reality" which Robert Altman discovers is precisely the reality of the painter's inner state when he approaches the task of painting. It is also the reality of his life as a "physical painter", that is, his dealing with the physical matter of his canvas: paints, brushes, turpentine, the physical effort of carrying all those to the locations, the physical effort of staying long hours in the open sun - and the physical surroundings of those paintings - their galleries, store-houses, modern-day auctions and sale-rooms where they are handled, exhibited, passed from hand to hand, or left unsold, retiring as it were, back into obscurity. Finally, it is the devastating reality of an almost symbolic tie between the two Van Gogh brothers, both fanatically devoted to art, both passionately attached to life and both mortally ill, their, opposite, afflictions (Theo's syphillis and Vincent's mental anguish) affecting their fortunes, their careers, biographies and ultimately their lives. Indeed, Robert Altman is, so far, the first and only student of Van Gogh who chose to make the two brothers equal protagonists of the story, almost as though he were saying: "Until now you have seen only one Van Gogh, while in reality there were two of them. And now I am going to show you the real Van Goghs."

95 The film begins (the title sequence), not accidentally, by showing real thick paint brushstrokes on canvas which is at the same time the space of the cinematic screen, with the signature "Vincent Theo" together. This signature executed by the cinematic brush, in Vincent's handwriting emphasizes the real "authors" of the famous paintings. Then the film switches over, rather dramatically and even violently, to Christie's auction house, for documentary footage of an entirely real sale of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, placed in the center on a grandstand. The painting was sold for 22,500,000 pounds sterling. The viewer is then immediately struck by an awarness that this specimen of Van Gogh's is not only real, but really real, because its reality is vouched for by its huge price. Thus, in this Picto-film a painting is represented not as a passive object to be filmed and admired, but as a dynamic personage, as something which can fetch real price in a real world, and be admired as a very precious prize. From that point on, the film examines different aspects of the reality which surrounded Van Gogh and which he helped to transform through his art. It is important to stress here that successive discoveries of ever new, deeper and more unexpected "realities" work in a very intricate and sometimes even whimsical manner in the film. Sometimes one "really real" image supports the "real reality" of the images that precede or follow it. Sometimes their "realities" clash, contradict each other or even cancel out. Overall, Robert Altman wants to erect a complex edifice of different layers of reality which will help viewers better discover their own real perceptions of Van Gogh. It is clear that in the course of his work on the film, Robert Altman made one conscious decision to which he sticks throughout. He never explores the reality, the real physical reality of real existing Van Gogh's paintings. Nowhere does his camera dwell on any "painting" filmed in the movie long enough for the viewers even to begin asking themselves questions about the reality of Vincent's art as it is distilled in his actual paintings. This reality is somehow taken for granted. We are all expected to have been exposed, at one stage or another, to Van Gogh's paintings. One begins to wonder here whether the reality exists at all. Robert Altman seems to insist that the painter (the filmdirector, the viewer) arrives at one level of reality only to discover that it is somehow fictitious and to strive at deeper, more "real" reality. This, in Altman's view, seems to be the root of Vincent Van Gogh's madness. All in all there seem to be three "tests" of reality in the film: - first, and probably the most superficial one, is the similarity between a depicted camera image and some pictorial likeness (generally, taken from paintings by other famous French painters, like Dégas, Cézanne, Monet, Manet etc). This reality-establishing device is generally somewhat ironic and serves both to prove the reality of these painterly images and to show that what is being filmed indeed existed because it was documented, independently, as it were, in paintings by other people who saw that same "reality". - second, the socio-biographic aspect which serves to undermine our expectations of the social reality of Van Gogh's life. The "real" reality in Altman's film always appears more cruel, demeaning, painful, but almost without exception more human, more moving and sincere than the "outward" reality of bourgeois conventions. - third, the inner psychological aspect of reality which highlights the artist's inner feeling of experiencing reality; this aspect of Altman's film-work finds direct expression in the creative effort of the two actors who play the Van Gogh brothers: Tim Roth who plays Vincent and Paul Rhys who plays Theo. Experiencing "real" reality is, according to

96 Altman, very difficult, therefore both actors illustrate this by playing people who have extreme difficulty in communicating with others, who always are preoccupied by their own inner states and emotions. Their faces, always strained, almost rigid, show this almost autistic quality very vividly. They talk in short spurts, as though answering to some inner conversation which is to them much more real than the one in which they actually participate. These three planes of reality intersect and in film-editing they provide fascinating counter-point. Robert Altman's film begins, as we have just mentioned, with the modern documentary sequence of the famous Christie's auction at which "The Sunflowers" were sold for a completely unreal price of 22,500,000 pounds. No sooner do we finish wondering whether the painting we saw in the film was the real canvas by Van Gogh, than we hear the words of the auctioneer proclaiming the finished sale for the fabulous price. The numbers of the price still reverberate in our ears, and we begin hearing other, different numbers intoned by somebody else's voice and then we, for the first time, quite clearly and at close distance see the face of Vincent Van Gogh which imparts reality to the "authorship" of the painting sold at Christie's. The face itself is filmed in such a way as to remind us not of Van Gogh's own portraits of himself, but of the portraits made by Cézanne. This quotation from a different pictorial style serves to create the impression of a certain "pictorial reality", the world of the French late 19th century painting to which Vincent Van Gogh belonged when he was alive. It turns out that the numbers recited belonged to a conversation between Vincent's brother Theo and some unnamed art dealer who teaches Theo the reality of art trade: "what matters is that the art sells". We see the interior of the Paris art gallery filled with paintings and we learn that Vincent's paintings do not sell. Having just watched the fascinating sequence of the auction one begins to wonder at different appearances of reality: that which the contemporaries take (or, probably, mistake) for reality, and that which we, with the generous help of hindsight, know to be the opposite: Vincent's pictures not only do sell, but they are the ultimate of all sales. Definitely, somewhere along the way something happens to the "real" reality, and Altman proceeds to discover it which is ultimately to enhance certain aspects of it. Unlike in Greenaway's work, these are not necessary aspects of visual form and structure, but aspects of events, characterization and story. A fitting example of the search for the real with the help of the pictures is the longer sequence representing the relationship between Vincent and a Paris prostitute who serves as his model and whom he makes his live-in companion. At some point the woman says to Vincent: "you are not allowed to paint me as me". She seems to distinguish between different realities which merge into one for Vincent. She clearly distinguishes between her socio-economic "me" of being a Paris prostitute in order to provide a living for herself and her little daughter Maria, and her intimate, informal "me" squatting to urinate in Vincent's room. That "real" me is something different in her mind from the one who poses in the nude for the painter, the "real" me of fake (for her) art. The irony of these different planes of reality is emphasized by Altman when he, with a voyeur's delight shows us how working women in late 19th century France could very quickly relieve their bladders by unpinning rear portions of their skirts while not wearing

97 any underwear. This clever trick of "outside reality" serves to enhance the reality of the depicted life. In contrast to this "piece of reality" the whole postural structure of the woman's body is entirely lifted from Degas' paintings of squatting women performing toilet ablutions. Thus, even this entirely realistic characterization turns out to be heavily indebted to contemporary painting. Vincent himself is depicted as turning all different planes of reality into one, that of constant obsessive painting. If that were at all possible he would have painted all the time with no interruptions for other bodily, intellectual or economic needs. This obsessive activity is driven by some manic desire to render visible his ultimate feeling of inner reality. This driven ness, in the final analysis, will prove to be his undoing. Robert Altman was forced, by his own admission (3) to condense much of Vincent Van Gogh's rich biography into the rigid framework of a two hour movie. In the process he omitted certain, less dramatic, aspects of his life. However, when he felt obliged to address them he did it expressively with the purpose of examining the notion and problem of reality, juxtaposing painted and filmed reality. One such scene is the scene at the painted panorama at Scheveningen near The Hague which he visits with his live-in companion and her daughter Maria. Robert Altman wrote about this sequence: "The panorama, which they visit in The Hague, I used simply because it was surreal. When you actually see it, you can tell how the illusion is created, with a beach that has been built out in front of the painting. But when you photograph it, it loses that threedimensional quality, reality and illusion merge, an there is no way to tell what this is". (4) In this film the panorama functions twice, once as a representation of reality which, in many ways is more real than the reality itself, and as a real beach into which one, as it were, steps out right from the panorama. Again the connecting link is a realityestablishing urinating woman, but this time this is not a real grown-up woman, but the little girl Maria, who seems to mistake illusion for "real reality" where one can urinate freely. The obsession with the "real reality" played out in the context of the ultimate artificiality, the work of cinematic art, leads to the director's unceasing effort to show that the reality which has just been presented to us as "real" can be subverted by another, much more "real" reality. This subversion works in three directions: one, showing that the process of creating a work of pictorial art involves intense participation of physical senses, another, showing that the work of pictorial art is a "real" object - a canvas, a paper drawing, and the third one which aims at showing "real", that is poor, striving, suffering, people in "real" socio-economic circumstances. The Picto-film emerges at those points where these directions actually intersect, meet each other, creating complex structures of repetition, counter-point, especially bearing in mind that Robert Altman's explicit intention was to show the reality not only of Vincent Van Gogh, but his brother Theo Van Gogh as well. Thus, many of the "reality-enhancing" motifs in Vincent's story recur, with a different emphasis, in Theo's story, as though the two brothers were actually living one life - the point which turns the "real reality" of these two lives into something fantastic. The "real reality" proves to be attainable only in a sort of fantasy, a point which will be well worth remembering when dealing with other films obsessed with the same problem.

98 The "reality" presents itself in two different forms to Theo and Vincent. For Theo the reality is the outward reality of orderly bourgeois existence in which the center of the entire life, including art, is making money and creating a solid middle class family. This outward reality is represented in the film by Theo's career as an art dealer during which he tries very unsuccessfully to build up his brother's career and reputation as a successful commercial (that is "real" = "realistic") painter. The family reality is brought to the fore when Theo meets his Dutch fiancée, a very solid and stolid bourgeois girl who evidently, expects from her fiancé all the outward signs of success and respectability. However, these are not forthcoming. Very soon we learn that behind the outward reality of bourgeois existence lies the "real" reality of Theo's life, the dreadful secret of his incurable disease, syphilis. This reality inside reality explodes the entire myth of Picto-film reality and shows us that the only real reality of life and art is some hidden passion which, as often as not, presents itself as abnormality, deviance, something which can be achieved only at the price of enormous suffering, be it physical or mental. For Theo the "real" reality is his striving to achieve recognition for his brother's genius and his striving for sexual contact with his bride which is bound to remain unfulfilled because of his illness. Incidentally, it will be this woman, Theo's wife, who will save Vincent's work for the future and who will preserve and enhance his reputation as a genius. The film cannot impart to us the real physical anguish of Theo and Vincent, but it does the next best thing: it shows us that the ultimate striving of genius is as close to suffering and abnormality as can possibly be. The anguished face of Theo, his strange face, his constricted speech, all seem to convey the same idea of this unachievable reality bursting from inside his tortured soul. If in Theo's case the socio-economic reality is the empty shell which is to be broken, in the case of Vincent it is something to be achieved, to be touched, almost physically. Vincent achieves this by, taking the French prostitute woman as his lodger-model. In his case the sexual aspect does not serve as some dark hidden inner reality, but as something completely outward, creating a bridge, as it were, between the painter's obsession with the inner real reality of the art of painting and the outward existence. The cinematic device which exposes this point is "the double Scheveningen panorama" where we first see the painter, his companion and her daughter at the Scheveningen realistic panorama of the seaside and then, without any transition this shot is transformed into a "real" scene in which Van Gogh is shown talking to Anton Mauve, a minor Impressionist painter, setting up his painter's gear at a "real" seaside beach with real waves. Van Gogh's "family" is contrasted with Mauve's model as unconventional, real, too conventional and bourgeois. In fact, Robert Altman presents the two realities, the one of Vincent's obsessive painting without economic reward and his evident indifference to sex, and another of his companion's using sex as a means to earn a living as two equally valid "real" life stories. In the end Vincent stays with painting. Painting is then examined in detail in Altman's picture as a physical process : Vincent examines commercial pigments by tasting them, later he would actually drink turpentine. Altman seems to regard Van Gogh's self-mutilation as another case of striving to find the

99 "reality" of art, but this time by changing the objects which are being painted, as though the very act of painting changes them physically and therefore causes them pain. As syphilis makes poor Theo more real, thus madness makes Vincent's art more real. Both seem to strive to arrive at the very end of their endurance to reach for this elusive reality. Altman may even hint that his heroes' predicament stems from their physical separation from one another. At one point, in the scene where Vincent kisses Gauguin, Altman even hints at the homoerotic roots of their situation. Again, the kiss, the feeling in the mouth as the ultimate proof of "reality" is presented as something which brings one as close to reality as possible. The kiss is the most intimate and passionate form of contact between Theo and his wife. All this serves to provide the viewer with the semantic background for Van Gogh's painting. This passion for real reality illuminates, according to Robert Altman, the actual plastic images of Vincent's paintings. Of these, however, we see surprisingly little. One might say that Vincent's paintings appear in the film as "real" objects - something stacked against the wall in Theo's gallery or in Vincent's room, something which can be unceremoniously held, thrown or even disfigured, but not as an object of contemplation. The reality has passed from the canvas onto the screen of Robert Altman's film where cinematic elements - camera movement, lighting, editing etc. - stand for Vincent's impassioned brush strokes. Robert Altman's film is, Vincent Van Gogh's film about himself and his poor brother. Altman seems to tell us that this is how Vincent would have shot and edited this movie, had he been a film-maker instead of an artist. One would be entitled to say that in Robert Altman's film, the "Vangoghishness" resides not in the visual analysis of his paintings as represented on the screen, but in the director's passionate desire for some unfathomable "real reality" which seems to repeat Van Gogh's longing for the same reality in his canvases.

Dreaming of Vincent - "Dreams" ("Crows") (1990) The theme of meeting the real Vincent Van Gogh was treated in a very original manner by Akira Kurosawa in the fragment entitled "Crows" in his film "Dreams" (1990). Kurosawa included this episode into his sombre and magisterial work as a kind of metastatement on art and time, the statement which quite appropriately, in the film entitled "Dreams", enlarges on the topic of art and life, the reality of life and the real reality of art. In fact the reality of Akira Kurosawa's Van Gogh is the very opposite of the approach taken by Robert Altman. There is absolutely no attempt to examine either the socioeconomic reality, the physical reality of the process of creation or the inner psychological striving for the "really real". The search for the real in Kurosawa's "Crows" follows the same path of examining the fantasy, the dream, the delusion that was taken in other fragments of his "Dreams". In each fragment the film-maker departs from some improbable dream-like premise in order to arrive at a deeper understanding and formulation of inner truth. The improbable premise is examined, developed and explored as if it were completely realistic.

100 In "Crows" the improbable premise is the realization of the metaphor "to enter into somebody's art" meaning "to try to understand the circumstances and structure of art". The metaphoric expression becomes reality when a personage, a Japanese visitor, actually steps inside one of Van Gogh's pictures at some imaginary exhibition of the painter's works. The sequence starts with a shot showing one of Vincent Van Gogh's famous self-portraits staring straight from the screen at us. It turns out that "our" place, the place of the spectator is taken by somebody else, by a personage who is engrossed in contemplating this picture. His back is turned to us, and at first we do not realize that this person is Japanese. Then he is shown standing in the exhibition hall with several of the most famous paintings by Van Gogh arranged in a row on the wall, the visitor looking intensely at each of them in turn, they are: the famous "Starry Night" landscape with huge sun-like stars illuminating the night sky, one of his "Sunflowers" and the picture of crows flying over the wheat-field. The pictures are shown in orderly sequence with the Japanese man looking very intently at them. Then he sits down on the bench looking at the paintings. He takes his time doing it. We are shown an ordinary real man engaged intensely in the process of visual contemplation. He then picks up his belongings (his carrying bag, a tripod, two canvases) and moves to the left side of the screen. New paintings appear in the exhibition: the Van Gogh chair, the picture of a draw-bridge near Arles with a group of women doing their laundry at the bank of the river, ("Pont de l'Anglois") and Van Gogh's bedroom. The rhythm of the sequence becomes more dramatic; the famous paintings again succeed each other in a rapid succession, imitating, as it were, the viewer's intense preoccupation with them, his anxiety in the presence of really great art, his desire to capture its reality. He goes back to the "Pont de l'Anglois", the camera lingers on the painting and then the painting of the bridge is blown-up as though we approach the painting very closely trying to apprehend the technique of painterly execution. At this point the details of the painting become elements in the actual landscape and we see the Japanese visitor enter the painting, in the world of 19th century Arles, near the bridge, talking to the women. The entire landscape is built in such a way as to resemble very closely the structural quality of Van Gogh's canvas - his brush strokes, the paint layers, the color harmony. At this stage we begin to grasp the new potential which the Picto-film brings to bear upon art appreciation. In Akira Kurosawa's case this new potential is somehow intimately related to the intercultural situation presented in the picture. The fact that the spectator is, in this case, Japanese facilitates the choice of the estrangement mode. Van Gogh's pictorial world is represented as something which has to be entered into, something which, at first glance, is bound to defy the visual conventions and perceptions and demands a special contemplative effort. On the other hand, the fact that the spectator is Japanese explains a certain ease with which Van Gogh's pictorial world is dismembered, dissected, disassembled to be put together again in a different mode, a mode which would be impossible in any other medium, but picto-film. Akira Kurosawa, being Japanese, approaches Van Gogh both with greater awe and reverence than would a European, but then he disassembles and builds his pictures again with the lack of reverence that can

101 exist only when you deal with a work of art which is, intrinsically, unfamiliar to you, and without this dissection and reassembling you would not be able to enter its world. Incidentally, the very painting Akira Kurosawa chose to become the gateway into Van Gogh's recreated landscape is heavily indebted to Japanese engravings which had fascinated the painter. Here, again, we encounter the same device of making real something which otherwise would remain purely metaphoric. The Japanese spectator enters the world of Van Gogh through the painting depicting a bridge, because this painting is a metaphoric bridge through which cinema crosses into painting and painting into cinema, and art crosses into life. The Japanese gentleman talks to women who, strangely enough, exhibit absolutely no surprise at seeing a Japanese, in their 19th century Arles countryside, a rare, if not impossible sight indeed in those days. The women warn him to be aware of Van Gogh who has just been released from a lunatic asylum Then the visitor goes along a village road in a Van Gogh landscape alive with bright colors until he sees a figure which is the real Van Gogh played here by Martin Scorsese. At this juncture the visitor finds himself in a real ( as opposed to Van Gogh imitation) landscape talking to the painter about the secrets of art and its relation to life. In a few brief exchanges Akira Kurosawa presents what, to him, was the essesnce of Van Gogh's artistic and existential predicament. Kurosawa, like Altman, sees Van Gogh as an obsessive painter constantly driven by his manic desire to grasp the real life. Kurosawa's Van Gogh explains to the visitor that it is not he who paints, but, rather, "it is the scene that paints itself for me". He says "I consume this setting, I devour it ; it is difficult to hold it inside". Again, the relationship between the painter and his object seems to be more real than simply real: they seem to be linked by some kind of mysterious bond. Thus, the notion of reality and art's connection to it becomes problematic and dynamic. If the creator is capable of consuming reality and reality paints itself through the medium of the painter, both outside world and painting become relativized, lose their self-identity and, ultimately, dissolve one within the other - the world in the painting and the painting in the world, and the reality which emerges is the reality of the picto-film, or, to make it, perhaps, more relevant to the social concerns of our times, the reality of the media. Akira Kurosawa is excellent at pointing out the problematic nature of this emerging relationship. In "Crows" Van Gogh explains his self-mutilation by the need to make reality conform to art : in the painting the ear did not come out well, so it had to go in the face of the man. While talking to Vincent the Japanese visitor suddenly hears the hoot of the locomotive. It reminds him somehow of the need to come back into "reality", so he runs from the real landscape with Van Gogh into the reassembled world of Van Gogh landscape transformed with "real" houses, roads, fields, sky, train, etc., all borrowed from the actual paintings of the great Dutchman. The hoot of the locomotive rather than coming from the outside world comes from one of Vincent's paintings. In his hurry to catch the train the visitor runs across Van Gogh's landscape. This landscape loses more and more of its "realistic" nature becoming more conventional, contrived and even parodic. Suddenly the viewer finds himself (and us with him) in a kind of a synthetic environment reminding the viewer very strongly of the artificial villages of Umberto Eco's "real fake" American reconstructions of 19th century life.

102 The Japanese gentleman enters Van Gogh-like streets, crosses Van Gogh-like pathways, runs along Van Gogh-like houses. He becomes like a small speck in this huge universe of colors, paint-blobs, paint-paths, brush-strokes. Here one sees that for Kurosawa the essence of Van Gogh is color. The Japanese gentleman finally disappears in the only reality of Van Gogh's work, his exuberant color, being swallowed by enormous paint-blobs. Thus, the real reality of Van Gogh's work is his way with paints. But in the final sequence of "Crows" the "real", not imitation Van Gogh landscape reappears, we see the Christ-like figure of Martin Scorsese as Van Gogh immobile against the background of real Van Gogh Wheatfield with crows flying upwards creating a very good semblance of the painter's last picture. The fragment is closed by the shot of this very picture in the museum with a locomotive hoot heard very distinctly somewhere nearby. In contrast to Robert Altman's work, Kurosawa's treatment of Van Gogh and his work was completely at the level of art analysis and exegesis. Perhaps, this is the best example so far of the extraordinary power of Picto-film in that it allows its creators complete freedom in dealing with the questions of pictorial art. One final remark concerning both films. Altman and Kurosawa succeeded in relating the painter's art to reality and examining the aspects of reality inherent in the work of art itself. However, it must be emphasized that their explicit preference for the "real reality" as they see it, deprived the figure of Van Gogh and, especially, his work, of the cultural and historical depth which is, definitely, the great painter's due. Kurosawa's intentionally naive look at the great painter from a culture which at first was not really his own, presents us with a great transformation of very mature and somber art into a semblance of a child's world, be it a child of immense talent and genius, but child nevertheless. Altman's view of the Van Gogh brothers as highly motivated, dedicated but deeply disturbed individuals at the margins of society, as people obsessed with the psychological "content" of reality and its real social meaning left aside the art-historical aspects of Vincent's training, his deep and extensive learning, his extreme and very touching religious faith. In short, all those aspects of reality which cannot be experienced by an untutored mind, soul or eye, all those aspects of reality which transcend immediacy and exist in historic mode. The Reality in the Film and the Reality on the Canvas. The two films we are going to examine in this section are engaged very intensely in the discussion of the reality of art and its relationship to life in its various aspects. But, unlike the two films which were discussed in the previous section that dealt with the work and personality of the great, well-known and absolutely real painter, Vincent Van Gogh, the films that are our subject here, Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse" (1991) and Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns" (1988), present fictional painters whose imaginary masterpieces we are invited to contemplate and evaluate. The fact that we, the viewers, know that these imaginary painters do not exist, that they and their work are devoid of any reality outside the framework of the Picto-film imparts a new poignancy to the eternal art-life question. We are compelled to view the film-makers' artifice not only as absolutely real, but, as it were, possessing some enhanced reality and realism, because

103 we know that art which emerges in the bosom of this cinematographic reconstruction of life is, in fact, an invention. It is supposed to acquire aesthetic reality from the film ambience which the director and the camera-man create. The painters, Frenhofer in "La Belle Noiseuse" and Nick Hart in "The Moderns", are fictional characters and their "work" does not exist. It does not exist in two senses: first, because it does not exist in the real reality outside the film, and secondly, because both stories explain to us why no specimens of their work will be available in the fictional world after the film story achieves its end, therefore the film-makers have to resort to new additional artistic devices whose aim is to make us believe, at least for the time of the viewing, that we are dealing with real art. These devices may be grouped into two categories: the cinematic work on the so-called "life" aspect of reality and the cinematic devices which concentrate on the painter and his work. Here, unlike in the Van Gogh films, the emphasis on the art cannot take for granted our previous knowledge of the painter's work. We have to be convinced that what we are shown, are in fact, real works of real artists. Thus, instead of concentrating, like in Van Gogh films, on the elusive psychological "reality" of great art within the painter's soul, "La Belle Noiseuse" and "The Moderns" concentrate on two different aspects of art which could not have been shown with Van Gogh: the actual physical reality of drawing and painting with the emphasis on the painter's eyes and hands while we see the actual process of drawing, painting, and the actual relationship between the model and the painted image. Both films approach this in their own specific way. Significantly, neither film could tackle the problem of presenting fictional art as real on its own, without anchoring it in some historic background. "La Belle Noiseuse" is based on a story by Honoré de Balzac "Un Chef-d'Oeuvre Inconnu" which deals with a problem of what is more real - art or life. "The Moderns" presents the fictional Nick Hart, in the company of the real Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, faking "real" pictures by Matisse, Cezanne and Modigliani. "La Belle Noiseuse", (1992). The story in the film is a retelling of Balzac's "Un Chef- d'Oeuvre inconnu" in modern circumstances. The characters taken from Balzac's story have original names. These are certain modifications necessitated by the film-maker's choice of artistic perspective: the young painter is Nicolas, but he loses his family name Poussin which in Balzac's text imparts additional depth to the story (we know the greatness of the future talent of the real Nicolas Poussin, whose fame is incomparably greater than poor Frenhofer who is just a footnote to Balzac's work), Nicolas' companion Porbus who in Balzac's story is a painter is presented as a greedy and altogether repulsive art-dealer of Jewish (sic!) extraction (the fact overlooked by most reviewers of Rivette's film). The three friends, Nicolas, his girl-friend Marianne and Porbus, the art dealer, visit the house of Frenhofer who in Rivette's film is an ageing (but still quite attractive, as played by the French actor Michel Piccoli) painter who found his inner peace and happiness in the surroundings of his majestic provincial residence which is a half dilapidated church, half feudal manor in the south of France. Frenhofer is much talked about as a sort of forgotten artistic genius, very famous in his time, but now hardly active at all.

104 The friends are met by Liz, his wife and muse, who devotes herself completely to the service of the genius, but has an "artistic" hobby in her own right, being a taxidermist of birds. The meeting between the young and the old, the modern and the traditional exposes the problematic nature of art and of modern life which to Rivette appears as shallow, devoid of all meaning and fraught with some hidden violence. On the other hand, the painter Frenhofer and his wife who represent the artistic tradition appear thoroughly cultured but opinionated and somehow sheltered from the real world by the circumstances of their life. They rarely see other people, rarely communicate with townspeople, apart from the little girl who lives in their house. The visitors heard of some fabulously beautiful painting called "La Belle Noiseuse" which Frenhofer had painted many years before but never exhibited. Aroused by the energy of the visitors and, mainly, by the sexual appeal and beauty of Nicolas' girlfriend Marianne, Frenhofer announces that he will paint a new version of "La Belle Noiseuse" (loosely translated as "The Beautiful Rebel"). Marianne agrees to pose for the old painter, while Nicolas feels that this arrangement will deprive him of his girl-friend. Rivette's picture is an interesting experiment in presenting art on film. In the uncut version which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 1991 where it won "La Palme d'Or" award, the film occupies 240 minutes of which a good portion is taken by showing the actual painter's hand drawing, mainly in ink, studies for the eventual painting. In this the film-maker tries to repeat , as it were, the cinematographic feat of Henri Clouzot who showed in his 1952 film about Picasso, the actual process of painting by the great painter who agreed to execute his work especially for the movie. In the Picasso film the effect depended entirely on the fact that the viewers knew that they were witnessing the actual work of a real renowned genius. Rivette's task was immeasurably more difficult, because although he wanted to impress with the image of Frenhofer's working on his painting he could not show Michel Piccoli imitating the real draughtsmanship of a painter. We see Michel Piccoli's eyes, his relationship with the model, but the painter's hand seen preparing the paints, the ink, the pen and drawing the contours of the sketches and studies belongs to a real painter Bernard Duffour. It is this painter's hand which is the real "hero" of the film. The painter's hand and the drawing and sketching which we actually watch on screen are not only the real hero of the film. They express a certain attitude towards art and life which takes sides, as it were, in the argument about reality. It is significant that the only aesthetically important impact is left by the drawing of the sketches and studies to a picture which we never see on the screen. This might be taken as expressing an idea that the unseen finished painting is ever more beautiful than the sketches and drawings. But in fact the full-length paintings, examples of Frenhofer's work (though not the unseen painting itself), are quite pedestrian. Their aesthetic impact is, if anything, negative. In contrast, the drawings and sketches are very beautiful as is the cameraman's work throughout the film. One can conclude that the aesthetic, the beautiful in Rivette's film inheres in the process of the painter's work rather than in the finished product and in the dynamic result of the cameraman's work. The film is, therefore, according to Rivette, a better medium of capturing reality, both the elusive, ultimate reality of beauty and the reality of everyday life. However, this is done solely by investing the process of painting, or filming with the

105 same magic attentiveness which it possesses in the best works of art. Reality, according to Rivette, is capturing the spirit of painting by filming. The reality of life, which is outside life (human relations, social conditions) is viewed by Rivette as demeaning. In his film the actual participants of the drama of "La Belle Noiseuse" are infinitely less interesting than the process of their filmic presenta-tion. The model Marianne is only as beautiful as the camera allows us to see when she poses for Frenhofer. Filmed in neutral, non-painterly, surroundings she is an ordinary, rather plain and sulking girl who loses all the beauty which the camera imparts to her. All other characters are just as ordinary and "realistic". They only become aesthetically significant when placed in the context of the cameraman's presentation of the beautiful interior or as part of a luxurious garden scene. Thus in Rivette's film the camera, armed with the painter's skill, culture and intuition triumphs in this creation of reality which definitely appears much more real on screen than "in real life". "The Moderns" (1988) Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns" presents a diametrically opposite approach. If in "La Belle Noiseuse" the model is much more beautiful when sketched than when left alone, in "The Moderns" it is the real living girl who commands the scene, produces the reality and makes everybody (including the art itself) conform to this new reality. In the final analysis this new reality is the age of the movies (and talkies), - the dream-world of Hollywood which appears infinitely more real than the world of modern art in Paris of the 1920's as seen by the director. In the center of the plot of "The Moderns" lies a clever conceit: Nick Hart takes upon himself the task of forging three paintings: one by Cézanne, one by Matisse and one by Modigliani. At first he, an unsuccessful painter by himself, but highly accomplished technically, is unwilling to execute the forgery. After being cleverly persuaded by the owner of the paintings and the art-dealer (both of whom are women) that this is not going to be forgery but rather copying, he embarks upon his task. We are shown in great, painstaking and fascinating detail how Hart uses projections of photographs of the pictures to reproduce absolutely exactly all the contours and strokes of the originals, how he adjusts the colors so that in the end one cannot distinguish between the originals (are they, indeed, real originals? - hardly, most probably copies made for the purpose of "playing" in the film) from the copies. The central moment in the plot is that while he is engaged in this work he meets, in Paris, the girl who had once been his wife. She is now the wife of a rich man, named Stone, a man of Asiatic origin who lives in Paris surrounded by many criminal types who do his muscle - jobs and also tries his hand in collecting art. Rachel, the girl, is drawn back to Hart, and he to her, so that when he "does" his Modigliani which is a voluptuous nude looking straight at the viewer he brings his passion for Rachel into the painting. The resulting portrait is made to resemble the real girl who never poses for Hart but whose image is always before his inner vision. Thus, the little nipple on the breast of the "Modigliani" nude and the strange gleam in her eyes are strange features of real reality brought into what should have been a perfect forgery by the forger overcome by his real-life passion. However, the question of the reality of life and art is further complicated in the film by the intervention of the

106 numerous sociological factors. We are witness to at least three points of departure in this respect: First, there are the art critics who apply all sorts of spurious, according to Alan Rudolph, criteria to distinguish real masterpieces from plain imitations. These criteria are, in the final analysis, just empty words. Then there is a point of departure of the owner (collector) / art dealer who is looking for the provenance of the painting, and finally there is a point of view of rich upstarts, like Stone, who do not care for names or "real art", but proclaims that art which costs more is that much more attractive and valuable. The viewer is invited to "judge for him/herself" whether Nick Hart's "copies" are as "real" as "beautiful" as the "originals". Evidently there is actually no objective basis for such a comparison, and the juggling of the "originals" and the "copies" on and off the screen only serves to create the impression that, in modern art, the dividing line between the real and the fake does not exist. This motif of the "reality" of the fake and the unreality of the originals is further developed in the film in the striking central scene in which Stone, who bought the originals from Hart after the owner who had commissioned the copies stole the copies mistaking them for the originals, discovers (mistakenly, again) that the paintings he bought were forgeries (the owner claims that she has the certificates authenticating her paintings) orders them to be destroyed. So in the climax scene we see how "real" Cezanne, Matisse and Modigliani are being defaced, destroyed and burned. Here, again, violence, destruction seem to confirm the "reality" of art. The final irony, of course, is the historic exhibition of modern art in the New York Museum of Modern Art which was inaugurated that same year, 1929, when the three paintings were exhibited. The only people who know about the forgery are the three characters, Hart, Rachel and the critic Oiseau (who, incidentally, is another instance of the victory of "imaginary" which becomes real over real, having orchestrated his own fictitious death) - and the viewers of Alan Rudolph's film. However, the art critics at the opening of the exhibition are so unanimous in analyzing and praising the virtues of the paintings that it is clear that from now on they will be safely ensconced in the shrine of great art. What can be concluded, then, from our discussion of the motifs of the "real" in art and and life in the picto-films which we presented here? Probably, the integration of painting and film in one cinematic work of art is the best way, to date, to examine this reality. The creators of the Picto-film are actually aware of the limits of classical and modern painting in dealing with the problems of our own world. Taken separately, both forms of art, one belonging to an old and venerable tradition, and the other comparatively new and ever-changing, do succeed in touching and creating some form of the real - the real art, the real passion, the real existence, the real history. Painting is best suited, in our view, to giving us the intellectual and spiritual framework for interpreting the world as it presents itself in the line of aesthetic tradition. Film strives to catch the immediate, present-day reality in its, mainly, visual aspects. But it also allows us, more and more, to experience, vicariously, through seeing, other aspects of sensual, emotional and effective reality. In this it comes closer and closer to painting in its traditional role: the camera performs the work of the brush or pen. However, only when this contact with the real is couched in visual images which are taken from the world of painting do we succeed in merging the reality of experience with the eternal reality of art. Then we recognize our reality as the more real reality represented in the painting.

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Chapter Four: The Search for the Real Notes : (1) Umberto Eco, "Travels in Hyperreality, Esays"(1973) First Harvest / HBJ edition, San Diego, (1990). (2) Ibid., p. 7 (3) Robert Altman's interview with Richard Combs "The World is a Bad Painting", published in "Monthly Film Bulletin", July 1990, vol 57, n. 678, p. 186. (4 Ibid

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Chapter Five: Picto-film and the High Art of Our Time Theoretical Aspects of Art and High Art in Our Times. In the preceding chapters we have discussed the salient features of picto-film : its privileging of the detail and fragment which made it possible to use painting as language, code, its enhancement of certain formal and semantic aspects of this code and its attempt to use the picto-code as the key to open the realm of the real. These features of picto-film are consistent with the nature of the two media: painting and film, both visual, based on the perception of the whole (Gestalt), both having an unmediated relation to the world. They are central to the definition of picto-film as art form. A film which uses its cinematic language to present, analyze and discuss art, announces, by this very fact, its nature as a work of art. For films, the entry into the world of art was not at all something which went without saying. It should be remembered that films first established themselves as newsreel, reportage, as direct conduit from life. Only gradually did film begin to establish its own place in the world of art, and, always, very tentatively, in, as it were, collusion with reportage and newsreel, pretending to transfer the viewer to the places and epochs for which no direct reportage was possible, but creating something similar to virtual direct reporting. In order for film to claim its own rightful place in the world of art it had to transcend the framework of the virtual reportage, of "life-like" narrative and privilege direct visual (that is almost painterly) language, as in the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance, Carl T. Dreyer, Friedrich W. Murnau etc. Other directors combined some of these striking visual discoveries with emphasis on more artistic literary and dramatic devices (Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné). Thus, the genre of artistic film came into being and managed to establish itself firmly in the annals of high culture of the 20th century. The story of the film as a medium of high culture is fascinating and not quite as uni-directional as it might appear. In other words, just as in other forms of visual art, the story of film has been the story of artistic discoveries and losses, of certain forms and genres being developed and then abandoned, of other forms being at first aesthetic messages, but then discarded as kitsch, propaganda or false pathos. If anything, these processes took place with greater intensity in artistic film than elsewhere. The story of the reception of Sergei Eisenstein's films could serve as an illustration of this trend. Side by side with artistic films, numerous films were shot and shown as pure entertainment, with no pretensions to aesthetic achievement or originality. It is clear that the two "streams" always mixed, influencing one another so that by the end of the 20th century the very notion of artistic film underwent significant change, and film as

109 entertainment appropriated, often without being conscious of it, many of the aesthetic feature of artistic film. Artistic film to-date has somewhat exhausted the reservoir of aesthetic discoveries and approaches. The invention of montage has followed its course, and now appears to be just one more device of editing. The discovery of other visual techniques and devices has been appropriated into the general inventory of camera work, lighting and special effects. The specifically artistic qualities which remained in film belong now more to the realm of "human material": the story and the characters. More and more "artistic" in artistic film becomes the synonym of "non-commercial" "belonging or pertaining to a special type of story with a special type of message". Increasingly, artistic films are "auteur films", that is vehicles for the film-maker to convey his/her own special story, ideology, sub-culture. Hence they are introverted, selfreferential, exclusive (in the sense of speaking to a very limited audience). In a sense, the fate of the artistic film in our time parallels, to a certain extent, without repeating the same evolutionary path, the fate of painting. True, painting is undoubtedly, a much more ancient art form, and its development has followed a more complex and convoluted way, but there is something along this way which may contain a lesson for film. Painting, at a certain stage of its development, became synonymous with the notion of high art. Putting it differently, one might say that the very notion of high art has developed from the experience of painting as art form. Not always did high art exist as a specially recognized realm of art. Having developed from the archaic cultural-religious synthesis where there was no distinction between art and ritual, visual arts in all cultures combined, basically, three aspects which, together, formed the basis of what we may call aesthetics: a high degree of technical accomplishment, a high degree of identification with the mythological and ritual model of the world, and a high degree of evaluation and acceptance in the community. High art arises where the ritual-cultural complex becomes the province of special social groups of high status and hereditary nature (priests and sacral kings). In fact, here high art means simply highly accomplished art. The situation changed when additional, special, unique qualities began to be attributed to high art, as such, and it began to be viewed as valuable in itself and not by virtue of technical and religious accomplishment. In the world of classical antiquity artists, poets, playwrights and musicians began to be recognized as valuable for their own special purely artistic achievements. However, with the collapse of classical civilization the situation returned to one in which artists went back to being auxiliary, albeit very valuable, servants of the cult. This situation remained until the birth of European humanism and the discovery of classical culture. From then on high art is regarded as a special unique realm of culture which acquires significance, autonomy and value in its own right, independent of any other cultural sphere, especially religion. Following Aristo, (1) art moved closer to philosophy, or, at least, philosophy took it upon itself to discuss art, its nature, aims and instruments.

110 Thus, with the establishment of philosophy as the discourse about man and nature, high art was established as a unique human philosophic problem which was related to the value of man and man's place in nature. In some subtle way, high art began to be seen as the equivalent of man's highest achievements in intellectual and moral fields, as proof of man's ability to contact the transcendental. It was not by chance that Kant (2) found a special philosophic notion of the sublime which expressed the meeting place of high art, science of nature, moral achievement and nature itself. In the 19th century the idea of high art as the synthesis of architecture, painting, music and poetry (in the wide sense of the term, including drama) and simultaneously the ultimate expression of culture in its universal and national aspect became central in the philosophical and even political thinking of many prominent cultural protagonists (for example Richard Wagner, John Ruskin, Vladimir Solovyov, Friedrich Nietzsche). Painting occupied the pride of place in the cultural system of high art alongside classical music and poetry. By the middle of the 19th century this was institutionalized and canonized through the establishment and building of public museums, like the National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna or the Louvre in Paris. These museums not only included former royal collections, but expressely made their aim the support and collection of the best of national plastic arts. Museum buildings became architectural and aesthetic centers of metropolitan and provincial capitals. Painting and sculpture were oriented to the classical models of antiquity and the Renaissance produced powerful visual symbols of national and cultural self-consciousness which quickly became part and parcel of universal education. In the second half of the 19th century, landscape painting, historic narrative and symbolic painting surpassed former classic painterly models in their symbolic role as concentrated expressions of national high art. This socio-cultural development was parallel to the growing self-awareness of art as autonomous activity. This awareness found striking expression in 19th century philosophic systems which allotted to art the loftiest place in human endeavor. Especially significant, was the attribution of the same qualities of spiritual grandeur to nature and to high art. Such equivalence made it possible for art to be treated as the highest expression of human nature simply because it was art. The discovery of "art for art's sake" as quintessence of humanity, however, occurred at a point in the development of high art at which the meaning of the attribute "high" became problematic. To put it concisely, the autonomization of the aesthetic value of high art resulted in high becoming equal to real, deep, intense. If, historically, high art was opposed to utilitarian, common or low-taste art, with the coming of age of classical philosophy, aesthetics and art education and with the artist becoming a figure of cultural authority and spiritual influence not only for the chosen elite but for "the whole people", then art came to be viewed as belonging to the nation, the people. Rather than a bastion of classical ideals of eternal beauty it became a school of cultural values and images for all. This change of

111 orientation from normative to expressive, from idealization to functionalism, from elitism to mass-participation occurred slowly but surely, roughly speaking, during the latter third of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century. Moreover, it appears that the greater part of the 20th century was occupied culturally and politically speaking, with trying to divorce art from its 19th century "high art" connotations. It seems that in societies which chose, on purpose, to cultivate the ideal of high art, the latter lost much of its quality of art and what remained was a rather vulgar medium through which society tried to impose some thoroughly discredited political ideas on a population deprived of any choice. Thus, any discussion of "high art" in our times, and of picto-film as its possible venue should proceed from this historical perspective. To recapitulate: artistic film joined the overall system of the arts in the 20th century, and at some stage, managed to capture, quite successfully, the pinnacle of artistic invention, expressive force and popular enthusiasm. However, its artistic achievements became assimilated into the more powerful industry of film as entertainment and today films are no longer made for purely aesthetic or artistic reasons. The idea of "high art" itself after achieving unheard-of degrees of influence, sophistication and success became compromised in the wake of its misuse by totalitarian societies. The idea of "art for art's sake" which, at first, was an organic outgrowth of the idea of high art, led to the appearance of an art of a special kind, the one which, in the course of its development , resulted in the seeming destruction and abandonment of all previous notions of high art or even art at all. But before arriving at this juncture, brief mention should be made of some of the directions European art took after it interiorized the ideal of "art for art's sake". Earlier it was pointed out that, at some stage, high art was replaced, in the thinking of artists and critics, by the attributes of "real", "deep", "intense" art. These qualities, correspond to the characteristics of picto-film in its treatment of painterly material. The extensive use of detail and fragment has been discussed before, as well as, the emphases on enhancement and the search for the real. In fact, all these qualities of picto-film were developed in great detail and sophistication in modern European painting. Ann Hollander, in her book on cinema and painting (3) quoted in the Introduction, dwelt on the process of developing a dynamic point of view in static painting. The beginning of the process dates from early 15th century Northern European painting. A certain generalization of her observations can be made now. In fact, one might speak of three stages in the development of point of view: the point of view of the thing itself, the point of view of the art or the process of art and the point of view of the viewer. In the point of view of the thing each represented object is viewed as possessing its own immutable nature which dictates its mode of presentation{angle of viewing, its relative size, its place in the represented space (high - low, left - right), its neighbors and its color}. This structure of point of view is represented in medieval art. The point of view of art developed from this first type of point of view. In a way, the point of view of art is the

112 point of view of the represented thing, but taken in its autonomous and always changing individuality rather than in its immutable nature. The point of view of art presupposes that there is a unique plastic way of seeing and representing a particular thing or person so that it would reveal its utmost beauty. The notion of immutable nature shifts here from things to the process of artistic vision and representation. It is somehow suggested that if a painter, any painter, succeeded in capturing this eternal immutable essence of art, his or her work would encapsulate all the absolute qualities of the work of beauty. This notion of a point of view presupposes the existence of ideal norms of representation, ideal taste etc. The implicit value in establishing this point of view is beauty. It is interesting to observe how within the overall point of view of art, new systems of representations strive to appear, being guided by a desire to expand the range of subjects or to expand the notion of beauty. This expansion is always driven by a desire to achieve greater expression, greater reality and depth. Painters discover, unexpectedly for themselves, ineffable beauty in things formerly deemed outside its realm (one of the most outstanding examples is the work of Albrecht Durer). The things themselves, in their own right, acquire the status of beautiful objects (in Durer's case, plants and animals), and the point of view changes (in this case, plants and animals move to the center of the represented space). Then, gradually, the new beauty became more and more distilled, idealized, and the painters found it in new things, points of view and compositions. Thus new plastic genres, such as still life and landscape painting established themselves both as new norms and as additions to old norms. The striking new addition to the point of view of art was the discovery by Hieronymos Bosch, and on a completely new scale by Pieter Breugel, of a new, carnavalistic system of aesthetic cultural values. This discovery did much to expand the frontiers of art, but also to formulate sharply the opposition between high art and popular, common art. Later this new perspective of art contributed much to changing the idea of high art altogether. In Breugel's work much of the received notions of beauty have not yet been formulated. On the other hand the idea of presenting the point of view of art as the point of view of the people, or even of the crowd added new dimensions to the point of view: it became multiple, with each narrative fragment governed by its own laws and proportions, it incorporated the notion of reality (even ugly reality) as something which included and generated beauty rather than was subjugated by it. The multiplicity of points of view in Breugel's work became a precursor of sorts of the momentous change in plastic arts which started with the advent of Impressionism and continued afterwards. The substitution of the point of view of art for the point of view of the viewer did not occur at one point in time or even in one epoch. It was a continuous process in the course of which earlier concepts of point of view coexisted with new ideas. New ideas did not, at first, recognize themselves as coexisting, multiple points of view, but asserted the uniqueness of their own style as the only possible and aesthetically acceptable point of view. The possibility of the work of art being expressive of the point

113 of view of the viewer emerged, at first, when painting started to experiment with "naive", folkloristic" styles, first incorporated as "quotations" within other styles and then claiming their own primacy. The "Fauve" movement in France and its followers and contemporaries in Germany and Russia (especially the "rayonnisme" of Mikhail Larionov) did much to expand the point of view towards expressing the outlook of new masses, of simple people, returning, as it were, to some of the discoveries of Breugel and Bosch. Simultaneously, the new horizons opened by Cubism and Futurism included, for the first time, within the time-space of the painting, real attempts to render multiple points of view of dynamic, moving, interacting objects and situations. Thus, the same impulses of democratization and technology which were crucial in the creation of cinema became decisive in changing the outlook of painting. Somewhere between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, painting began to shed its mantle of high artistic exclusivity - as regards both the nature of its practitioners and its function and role in society. The appearance after World War II of new directions in visual arts - collage, pop-art, conceptual art, happening, installation etc. - the fusion of aesthetics with social and group psychology, the inclusion of visual arts in the sphere of mass media, on the one hand, and into the sphere of social work, on the other hand, all this radically changed the nature of art, in our case painting and cinema. It rid it, as it were, of any elitist status whatsoever. It also changed the nature of the viewer's (in this case, consumer's or client's, patient's) relation to art. In order to grasp the nature and degree of this change one should focus, first, on the concept of art-viewer relationship during the epoch of high art painting. This relationship was treated at length at the beginning of the 20th century in philosophical aesthetics, especially in the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (4), one of the pillars of the Neo-Kantian Marburg school. One of the basic premises of Cohen's aesthetics is the notion of "pure feeling", the category which accounts, in his view, for the powerful influence which art has over people. Pure feeling is not only a feature of the work of art, it is also the necessary and objective condition for the proper contemplation and appreciation of art. It is developed through proper training and choosing the right mind and soul set. In fact, Cohen's aesthetics of pure feeling privileged the classic and romantic traditions of high art demanding that the viewer/ reader/listener should strive for the ideal aesthetically pure attitude as regards works of art. Thus, viewers should not only prepare themselves mentally and emotionally for the utmost concentration of aesthetic effort, they should also be physically in the best possible position vis-à-vis the work of art. Ideally they should position themselves at the only place in front of the art object that would ensure its ideal contemplation. It goes without saying that this position should be in theory, that of the creator contemplating

114 the accomplished work of art. In reality rarely was such contemplation possible even when art appreciation was confined to the privileged leisured classes. The introduction of art reproductions into the current practice of education and appreciation changed the notion of ideal viewer, transforming the very goal of human transactions via art from rare unique and all-defining summits of feeling and communion into multiple and familiar communications through well-known and readily available signs and images. The reproduction and multiplication of art images began to influence artists themselves who began to view their own work more in terms of production, of being guided by the dynamics of art as language, of seeking new ways of managing, inventing and re-inventing artistic codes which more and more started to dominate artistic thinking and the very aesthetics of art. For a painter at the beginning of the 20th century the travails of Balzac's Frenhofer who strove to create one perfect image in one perfect painting would look incomprehensible, because the emphasis shifted from creating one work of art to creating a unique language in which to fashion multitudes of such works. One overwhelming séance of concentrated contemplation gave way to numerous stimulations which works of art should produce in viewers, stimulations aimed at shaking the viewers' conceptions, their attitudes towards nature, art and themselves. One could say that this change in the definitions of the aims of art ultimately brought together high art and common, popular, commercial art. Examples of high art becoming hugely popular, bringing with it enormous economic rewards for the artist and turning into successful socio-economic organization are too numerous to be dealt with in any detail. Suffice it to mention in this connection such painters as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall or Salvador Dali. Alternatively, something which started as popular art with direct roots in "low-brow" cultural forms could acquire, in the 20th century, the whole range of meanings and significance of high art. The best example is the film work of Charlie Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein. This interplay of high and popular art did not, however, obviate the intrinsic need for both streams in art. What should be emphasized is the fact that all examples of successful and enduring art which may be thought of as high art in the 20th century were, to a greater or lesser degree, hybrids of traditional forms of high art merged with folk, primitive, popular forms of art. One can even say that such hybridization always characterized really great high art. What is important about the 20th century here is that this hybridization occurred as part of a conscious, often theoretical, effort on the part of the artists. Suffice it to mention the folk-art roots of such highly speculative and even elitist artistic trends as Surrealism and Cubism, as well as the role of folk and "primitive" genres in avant-garde music. While the philosophical continental aesthetics of the early 20th century still stressed the importance of a unified concentrated and highly trained point of view, the shifts in the over-all conception of art resulted in new perspectives in aesthetics. For the purposes of this exposition, Mikhail Bakhtin's monumental (5), although, unfortunately, fragmentary efforts at constructing a new aesthetic approach which would subsume both opposing poles of art: high art and popular art should be singled out. Bakhtin's theory of carnival

115 which became so influential after the appearance in France of Julia Kristeva's work (6) enabled the European reader to get the first glimpses of Bakhtin's theory developed in his books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais. What Bakhtin did in his theory of carnival was to unite into one coherent whole two formerly opposed practices of art: high art based on Kant's notion of the sublime and popular art which Bakhtin preferred to call "unofficial" based on diametrically contrasting principles of the aesthetics of grotesque. It is this aesthetics of the grotesque which is the basis of all carnival, and in general primitive and archaic ritual art. The official and unofficial culture form unity within which both trends are engaged in continuous dialogue, contestation, borrowing, subversion of each other's aims, forms and messages. The common thread which runs through both is, according to Bakhtin, aesthetic love (Cohen's term), or, in other words, a deeply positive attitude, on the part of the artist, towards the object of his art. The "love" and the "positive attitude" do not imply any desire, on the part of the artist, to validate or to approve of the object as a phenomenon outside the realm of art (the painter may draw "ugly" objects or express negative, critical attitudes, the film-maker may present immoral or criminal situations). What this term means is the striving of artists to create whatever they create in the best possible way, imparting their utmost love to their art- and through it to the person who comes into contact with art. Bakhtin's theory of carnival is important because it was created during the worst excesses of the totalitarian regime in the former Soviet Union. His extolling of the unofficial, the subversive and the individualistic, the grotesque and the low, came as direct protest against the ideals of high art expounded by the theory and practice of Stalinist socialist realism. Socialist realism insisted on the importance of utterly serious, "beautiful", "harmonious" and edifying images in all genres of visual art and cinema. The same trends existed in other totalitarian cultures (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). One can safely say that the "classic" ideals of high art - without any admixture of the carnavalistic and the individualist - became thoroughly discredited in the practice of totalitarian art. After Auschwitz and Gulag, lofty and beautiful images which carry an unmistakable impression of moral and social authority cannot but remind us of the most horrible perversions of social and aesthetic high art at the top of their social and ideological structure. Carnivalization therefore, became a universal feature of art in the 20th century adding new dimensions to traditional forms and genres, transforming them and, in general, promoting contact between arts and cultures. Part of the artistic evolution which occurred in the 20th century had to do, as we have already mentioned, with the expansion of the scope of aesthetic impact and the introduction of new variety into the functioning of art. Former frontiers of art genres and confines of individual works of art were swept away in favor of placing art in the midst of everyday life and experience. Art became not only part and parcel of everyone's experience, but its numerous occurrences intruded into every sphere of evidence: work, leisure, intimate spheres, entertainment, commerce, trade, industry, medicine, social work, warfare and the like. One can even venture to say that in the postmodern world art and life almost become interchangeable. Any fragment of existence may acquire the status of art and any work of art may and does participate in the hassle of

116 everyday human activity. The question arises: then what distinguishes between one sphere and the other. It seems that, as in Herman Cohen's aesthetics, some sort of emotion, feeling, only not "pure", but intense. Life is the province of "useful", socially acceptable emotions, while art is the sphere of real, untamed, intense, enhanced emotions. Any presentation of emotion may be regarded today as art, especially if it is accompanied by socially recognized conventions of exhibition, criticism, social framework, commerce etc. And, as pointed out earlier, "artistic" film has been replaced by "serious", "responsible", "non commercial" film which has been centered around social emotions of protest, indignation, hatred and the like. In fact, people have been separated from the entire province of former high art. In art schools and in public lecture they are taught to regard all art, and high art in particular, as a tool for self-expression or for social/national liberation/betterment. Viewers and creators have been made interchangeable, and all mention of artistic taste, excellence, perfection has been expunged. However, people in the position of untrained and unwilling creators when faced with art devoid of its former aesthetic criteria, have discovered that their contact with this new art leaves them dissatisfied, unfulfilled and, in the final analysis, inadequate vis-`a-vis those emotions which art took upon itself to express, present and enhance. People who visit modern exhibitions of conceptual art, installations, "found objects" agree to participate in these artistic events, as it were, "on condition" that they (these events) form part of a much wider art scene which includes traditional art, including traditional high art. They need this traditional art in order to preserve a basic frame of reference which helps to establish the aesthetic and commercial value of the work of conceptual art. If one were to imagine for a moment that the art tradition vanished completely then the new conceptual art would lose any attraction whatsoever. At the same time we seem to be witnessing the beginnings of a process: this "traditional" frame of reference, strives to reestablish itself not merely as a frame of reference but as "a source of primary images" in the words of Peter Greenaway himself at the interview he gave at 1996 Film Festival in Haifa. It also projects itself into the future as new high art. In high art today the forms and genres of mass, popular and commercial art are fused with the images of traditional high art. These images of high art are needed not as a spoof or parody (as happened in earlier works, like the sketch "Summarizing Proust [pronounced Praust]" in one of the 1960's TV comedy classics "Monty Python's Flying Circus"), but as a source of values, meanings and forms. Thus, on the one hand the modern framework of the images of classical painting serves as a new interpretative model for these images, as was evident in Robert Altman's film about the Van Gogh brothers. On the other hand the presence of classical painting serves to elevate the low, mundane and democratic framework to the level of new high art. The result, as we have pointed out, is, by necessity, a mixed genre in which the rules of the carnival and carnivalization prevail.

117 The carnivalization of high art and the resulting victory of the carnival genre as the mainstream of art, is traced by Mikhail Bakhtin to the work of such cultural giants as Cervantes and Dostoevsky. In general the victory of the novel over other traditional high literary genres (namely tragedy and epic) was accompanied by the transformation of numerous literary motifs from "low-brow", low-taste" to "high-brow","high-taste". Thus, entire plot structures which could not be used in high literary genres became not only widely accepted but acquired an aura of artistic achievement. One example, is the evolution of the detective genre in literature which started as a very low-brow medium of narration, but, after being perfected by such masters of artistic prose, as Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoevsky, became associated with carnivalistic ideological narratives and with the stories of personal individuation. Our topic relates to other aspects of carnivalization. The story of the democratization of painting which developed from the beginning of the 19th century is, in itself, a carnivalized story in which all aspects of painting - the painter, the connoisseur, the owner, the viewer, the subject-matter of the painting, the function of painting in society all become more valuable, more aesthetically significant, the more tension there is between the high technical, semantic and existential degree of the art and the low-brow, democratic nature of these aspects. In other words, for a modern painting to acquire a status of great work of art it should combine intrinsic artistic values with some special "anti-values" of the painter, his life, his circumstances, his artistic trend etc. It adds to the artistic appreciation of the paintings by Van Gogh, Gaugin, Cézanne, Degas, Manet that something in the biography of the painters, in their subject-matter, in their treatment of the subject-matter, is touched by degradation, madness, poverty, low social status, tragedy or the like. It is as though in modern times the passionate, problematic nature of art has to be expressed explicitly, has to become part of the semiotic system of art. This quality is definitely present in the picto-film s which will be discussed in this chapter. Another relevant aspect of carnivalization in visual art is something which we would refer to here, after Mikhail Bakhtin, as the chronotopic (time-space) emphasis present in the work of art. The carnivalization in high art of today stresses not only the meeting between lofty and lowly, but also the meeting-place of this contact, and its intensity expressed by the feeling of time. All the changes and transformations of the point of view, all the combinations of different view-points in one temporal moment, all the deformations of size, scale, proportion, all the mergers between familiar and unfamiliar places and times, between the fantastic and the real, the virtual and the actual belong to the chronotopic sphere and its importance increases the more a work of art aspires to the rank of high art. This turning of time and space into dominant aesthetic domains characterizes the picto-films which will be discussed here. In simpler words, high art of our times is much more explicitly transformed by the artist's imagination than was the case in the 19th century.

118 This imagination is much more unrestrained, wild, even savage. At the same time insofar as it strives to keep within the confines of high art it cannot abandon all restraint and indulge in any extreme expression. It has to keep itself, firstly, within the confines of a closed work of art, and, secondly, be anchored in both traditions: classic high art and popular low art. Both restrain the creator and make his/her effort acceptable to the viewer/audience. It is this, probably, that Peter Greenaway had in mind when he spoke of "primary images" which his art should provide. They are images rather than impulses, emotions, actions. They are organized according to the chronotopic rules. They are primary, because they reflect primary artistic drives, but they use as primary material complex semiotic structures provided by painting, literature, film and history. Such close, intimate contact between historically contrasting traditions, the inclusion of extremely elaborate and tense imagination into the framework of popular mass culture creates the ground for the emergence of what is commonly known as "kitsch". It stands to reason that kitsch and kitsch-like phenomena will appear wherever there is a need to create high art contiguous with popular culture. The picto-film s discussed in the present work (at least, some of them) may exhibit certain qualities of kitsch, like too much visual enhancement, or a combination of certain naivété with excess of feeling or formal treatment (especially the Van Gogh films of both Altman and Kurosawa). However, in wider perspective it would appear that the kitsch of this type (what might be referred to as "structural kitsch" or of lack of proper proportions") usually ceases to be perceived as such after some reasonable passage of time. "The proper proportions" are no longer relevant and the jarring emphasis of kitsch ceases to jar, it becomes part of the proper historic inventory of accepted traditional artistic devices. In painting such characterization was freely attached to symbolism of the late 19th century (Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau). With the passing of time such characterizations are perceived as less and less relevant. Kitsch of a different type which, if not exactly congenial, is, at least, contiguous with high art and relates to the subjective contents, the message or the author's impact present in the work. It is very easy to pinpoint this kind of kitsch in any type of art which strives to convey a certain propagandistic or ideological message - the usual seriousness, gravity and sweetness of the good tidings. It is much more difficult to define this type of kitsch when the work is ostensibly devoid of any such overt message. This type of kitsch, both overt and, as it were, covert, usually becomes more pronounced, more "kitschy" with the passage of time. It does not age well. The type of kitsch referred to here, will become clearer from some of the examples. In the picto-film s examined in this work this type of kitsch is apparent in some of Peter Greenaway's films, as well as in Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio". In Greenaway's films, both those analyzed and those which were omitted from the scope of the examination, one senses a certain, rather consistently negative, attitude to women and femininity. They are either predatory or scheming cold-hearted or hysterical. Even in "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" the wife is less of a pure victim than her lover. There is a definite glint of steel about her. In Jarman's film, art becomes a vehicle for examining an

119 alternative, homoerotic culture. In both cases one cannot escape the feeling that the filmmakers used art to solve some deeply-embedded personal problems in their lives. If that is correct, then we might have found a salient feature of art ("real art", "high art") which is present in high art of our time - along with the carnivalistic structure which seems to push it in the direction of kitsch. Balancing on the brink of kitsch the above-mentioned films by Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman escape the domain of high art whenever they move into the province of delivering messages dear to their respective authors. Mikhail Bakhtin (7) in his seminal essay on the nature of the aesthetic activity relative to the problem of the author and the hero in works of art spelled out at length, and using different terminology, what to him seemed to be the central core of the artistic attitude. He referred to it as the disinterestedness of the artist, his attitude of being outside the sphere in which his hero is located, the author's refusal to use his work as a means of solving his own existential problems. This, at first, seems to run counter to something which all who experience art know intuitively, namely, to the artist's deep emotional involvement with his work. Bakhtin, however, insists on emphasizing that this emotional involvement should proceed from the author's selfless devotion to his art, rather than viewing art as a means of selfexploration, self-expression or self-therapy. This stress on the selflessness of art seems to us extremely important in pinpointing the qualities of high art of our times. Yes, the high art of our times is of mixed origins. It combines different genres, materials, approaches. It is much more ambivalent, carnivalistic, full of contrasting emphases and emotions. Its structure is extremely complex, heterogeneous and full of more contradictions than in traditional classic high art, but it is just as selfless and disinterested as any high art which is recognized as such. It is this disinterestedness which acts as aesthetic regulator permitting former kitsch to enter the great tradition of art. This short treatise on the nature of the high art in our times, concludes with a suggestion that its mixed, carnivalistic and disinterested qualities may find expression in other art forms, apart from picto-film . This high art of our times is, perhaps, most in evidence in such a mixed medium as architecture where the carnivalistic combination of the old and the new, the high and the low, the elite and the common has always been a prominent feature. Therefore architecture could always combine to the utmost the qualities of high art and low life (compare the present-day state of the ruins of ancient Rome). In our time it is the cinema which seems to strive to obtain the new voice of the primary artistic medium. The works, which, for different reasons, cannot be brought down to one common denominator, but succeed in combining the directness of the story, the grandeur of scope, new technology and a new point of view and voice, are those devoted to history (James Cameron's "Titanic", Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan"). Like picto-film s which have to use traditional art in a framework of cinema, the

120 ultimate creations of popular cinematic culture in order to create new high extravaganzas have to use history, the tradition of serious reading of history. Thereby they create new primary images which may be those of new high art. In these Hollywood films the carnivalistic substructure is revealed in their sheer size. Their epic scope, their extreme dimensions make them stand out from among the art creations of today, just as, for example, Francois Mitterand's La Defence project stands out in its sheer gargantuan size against the background of traditional Paris. But let us go back to the three picto-film s which we chose to illustrate the problem of the high art of our times. The High Art and the Low Life : Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio". The three films which will be examined in this section - Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" (1986), Bartabas' "Mazeppa" (1992) and Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" (1991) are, each in its own manner, examples of high art in our times. They deal with classical painting or literature. They definitely aspire to the status of works of high art themselves. They belong to the category of carnivalistic art which was the subject in the previous section. Moreover, two of the films, Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" and Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" are accompanied by special albums which, more than the films themselves, present "the high art" aspect of the film-makers' efforts. These albums, especially that of Derek Jarman, contain texts written by the directors/authors themselves, so that they serve as additional, highly significant, vehicles of presentation and interpretation, and we will draw liberally from these texts. Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" is the earliest of the three films. Its creator met a tragic end, having succumbed to his illness which he seemed to prefigure, in this film. He probably, was the most intense, personal and explicit in his complete identification with the art he wanted to present, represent and create. He was, definitely, completely aware of the tragic pitfalls inherent in any striving for high art, and he tackled this problem in a very personal way, identifying completely with the life and struggles of his hero, Michelangelo Caravaggio. Derek Jarman saw his own predicament of having to struggle to obtain very modest financing for his film from the British Film Institute as parallel, in new circumstances, to the young Michele (this is how Caravaggio is referred to in Jarman's film) having had to sell his paintings to rich patrons, often, as Jarman stressed, in exchange for sexual favors which he offered them. The clear identification of the film-maker with the tragedy of homosexual eros which he discerns in Caravaggio's work and in what little is known of his life is another striking feature of this film. This identification sometimes confuses the viewer, especially as regards the story line which never distinguishes clearly between the present time of the story of Caravaggio and the present time of Jarman's own story. In Jarman's "Caravaggio" we witness mutual influence between

painting and film.

121 Painting is deliberately presented not only as highly relevant to modern day cultural and psychological concerns, but also as occupying - in our present-day reality - the same highly important place as it did in Caravaggio's time, viewed as the same "collective enterprise" as the making of feature film is nowadays, with Caravaggio as a kind of a Renaissance film-director. On the other hand film-making is presented as driven by the same highly personal, biographic and subjective motives as, according to Jarman, painting was in Caravaggio's time. The result is a film which is strikingly beautiful, extremely idiosyncratic, where the emphasis is, first and foremost, on the painter's/film-maker's personal tortures and on the painting language, which Jarman ultimately, deconstructed but which we view as less convincing than before deconstruction. The entire film may be viewed as one large painting, a kind of large-scale cinematic fresco. The narrative line may be interpreted as a blow-up of every detail within this huge fresco frame. The fact that the film was viewed by his creator as a cinematographic presentation of large-scale painting is further corroborated by the fact that in the album "Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" some of the "special photographs" by Gerald Incandela ( such as the cover page) are executed as Caravaggiesque tableaux in which photo-images are combined with paint-like elaborations of the background, the details etc. (8) In his commentary to "Caravaggio" Derek Jarman mentioned that "the narrative of the film is constructed from the paintings. If it is fiction, it is the fiction of the paintings" (9). One of the central tasks of the film was to present the pictures to the viewer. However, in the reality of film-making it transpired that there was a huge problem in filming the actual ("really real") paintings by Caravaggio. There were two sorts of problems. One, that the dimensions of Caravaggio's paintings did not make them suitable to be presented up front because they did not fit the standard 1:1.75 size for the film screen. Therefore only fragments could be filmed, or the painting had to be presented not as a "scene" on the screen, but as a ready- made object, the way paintings were presented as material objects in other picto-film s. But a problem of another kind made filming actual paintings impossible: All you can do is let the camera wander all over them, which is even more disconcerting than static shots. One of Italy's leading art photographers has photographed all the paintings and we have the finest transparencies possible to work from but these show up the problems, as many of the pictures are in a bad state - scuffed surfaces covered with dirty varnish, and cracks. When the results of the rostrum work are screened, the disaster is enhanced. The cracks look like tramlines. The bloom on the varnish looks as if someone has gone over the painting with a blow-torch... Embalmed in the film the paintings look desperately lonely. Michele Caravaggio, you've gone the way of those old statues, you despised so much. To save you, we'll have to adopt your methods. (10) This brings us to one of the central formulations about the aim of picto-film which was given by one of its most prominent and gifted practitioners. Picto-film is indispensable in resurrecting lost artistic treasures It is an indispensable vehicle for the extension of the life of high art into the present and the future. The method which Derek Jarman referred to as

122 Caravaggio's own method was to create copies, facsimiles of Caravaggio's work and to duplicate his motifs and methods in the actual structure of the film. None of Caravaggio's work is presented in the film as a finished product, exhibited for our contemplation on the screen. If anything, the 'cinematic glance' at the works of art is even more triumphant here than in other picto-film s. The viewer never has a chance to contemplate any of Caravaggio's paintings. All he or she sees is the work in progress, at various stages of completion. Finished paintings are conjured up through highly elaborate and beautiful tableaux vivants, as well as through the overall atmosphere of static tension when shots are presented as paintings on the verge of movement, or as violent movements settling down to a kind of carefully posed group image. The fascimiles were painted by the film set designer Christopher Hobbs. This is how Derek Jarman described this in his remarks: Christopher Hobbs can paint you Caravaggio, every dewdrop in place, but he can't stretch a canvas. So Spencer Leigh (the actor who played the part of Jerusaleme - the author's remark) has spent the whole afternoon with me learning the part of studio assistant, stretching the enormous canvases of this size... Even in the cavernous empty space of the warehouse the canvases look formidable and Christopher is anxious as we are only a few weeks from shooting. He has spent all his spare moments painting the smaller canvases to various states of finish at home (with a constant bemused audience in the street outside his living-room window). In the time we have left he will only be able to block out these huge paintings. I need not have worried, as his confidence has increased in leaps and bounds and when I made my next trip down to Lime house , all the canvases were under way... The most successful canvases had enormous power, though neither he nor I felt that they were more than expert painting for the camera. They are light years better than the mediocre attempts in Korda's "Rembrandt" or our own first bash together when we worked on Ken Russell's "Savage Messiah". The camera will flatten the rough edges, and in certain canvases the bold under paint will register better then the more finished work on film. (11) Several points have to be made in connection with this. Derek Jarman definitely viewed his own work as parallel to that of Caravaggio. It is significant that the assistant of Caravaggio's in the film became, by proxy, Jarman's own assistant in the painting of Caravaggio's facsimiles in the film. The desire to save Caravaggio's art, to redeem it through modern effort, to create new "Caravaggio" paintings is central to Jarman's artistic enterprise. Another moment which stands out in this connection is the triumph of the viewer's point of view in the process of artistic creation, in this case - the creation of Caravaggio "originals" and in the creation of the film itself. The facsimiles are painted in such a way that they should look powerful, impressive in the film, rather than by themselves. And, finally, it is admitted that the picto-film is, in and by itself, an equivalent of the oeuvre of the painter which the film attempts to represent and recreate. Very little is known about the actual life and circumstances of Caravaggio, and the little that is known and used extensively by Jarman comes from the book by Caravaggio's

123 younger contemporary Giovanni Baglione (Le Vite de 'Pittori' 1642) whom Jarman includes, derisively, in the film as a proto-type of a self-important, malicious but ignorant critic. It is generally accepted that the painter was born as Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio in 1571. "He was born in Caravaggio of honorable citizens since his father was majordomo and architect to the Marchese of Caravaggio... At the age of about twenty he moved to Rome...where he had no money". (12) He was taught by a minor Milanese painter, Peterzano, and when he was about ninteen made for Rome. There he became assistant to the artist Cavaliere Cesare d'Arpino; his first patron was the Cardinal Del Monte who employed him to paint genre pieces like "The Lute Player" and later obtained for him the commission for large public religious paintings. It is known that in 1606 he murdered a friend in a knife-fight and fled to escape the trial. In 1610, destitute and sick, he died : "Word has been received of the death of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the famous painter, excellent in the handling of color and painting from life, following on illness, in Porto Ecole". (Notizio, July 28, 1610). He packed his few belongings and boarded a little boat in order to go to Rome... On the beach where he arrived, he was mistakenly captured and held for two days in prison and when he was released, his boat was no longer to be found. This made him furious, and in desperation he started out along the beach under the fierce heat of the July sun, trying to catch sight of the vessel that had his belongings... He was put to bed with a raging fever; and so, without the aid of God or man, in a few days he died, as miserably as he had lived. (13) From this very scanty life-story, and adding a few snippets of information from other contemporary sources Derek Jarman strives to reconstruct not only the tragic and very eventful life of his protagonist, but the psychological portraits of the hero and the people with whom he had contacts. Two clues are used by the director: the fact of the murder which he expands into a full-blooded story of homosexual and heterosexual passion. The victim, a certain Thomasoni, is made to be Caravaggio's homosexual lover (abeit unconsummated). He is also the lover of Lena, a prostitute girl whom Caravaggio paints as he does Thomasoni, and who is killed by Thomasoni after he decides that his true love is Caravaggio. Having found out this, Caravaggio kills Thomasoni. This entire story is the product of Jarman's imagination, although he tries to make it plausible using motifs from Caravaggio's paintings. Another clue is, of course, Jarman's own homosexuality which he used, as it were, from within his personality to fill in the gaps in the story. The connection between the director's sexual - psychological make-up and that of his hero enabled Jarman to present Caravaggio's time, the turn of the Renaissance, as an equivalent of Jarman's own postmodern end of the 20th century, complete with the 20th century costumes, mannerisms and realia in the midst of the purported Renaissance Italy. It is this conflation of epochs which is, arguably, the film's greatest weakness. It also proceeds from the fact that while acknowledging that Caravaggio was, probably, the greatest religious painter of his time,

124 the film-maker fails, in our view, to convey any deeper sense of Caravaggio's religiosity. In the film religious content appears to be the signifier for a deeper signified, that of a homosexual person's suffering at the hands of the heterosexual crowd, or, perhaps, even deeper, the suffering inherent in any phenomenon of love, homosexual, heterosexual or asexual, for that matter. However, it is doubtful that Caravaggio, even being as rebellious as he was, was completely impervious to the purely religious sense of the subject-matter he was painting. Be that as it may, the story-line of the film evolves in leaps and bounds, the film starts with Caravaggio's death and ending on the same motif, begins with the apotheosis of homoerotic relationship, that between the painter, Caravaggio, and his deaf and dumb assistant Jerusaleme, a figure invented by Jarman. Jerusaleme keeps the vigil over the dying Caravaggio. Then the story moves scores of years back to the beginning of this relationship when the child Jerusaleme is being actually sold by his destitute family into Caravaggio's service. What appears highly relevant for the film is the fact that the only true real relationship is this almost master - slave (but also older- younger brother) dependence between the two of them, the emphasis being on one man's complete physical, spiritual and economic mastery over another. In the end, Caravaggio is interpreted as being some sort of Christ of the low life. The question should be asked whether this homoerotic paradigm of love is the model, the ideal of the love that a person has (or should have) towards God? This ambivalence of the relationship is implied in the first instance in which Caravaggio's painting is consciously used by Jarman to provide the background and the clue for this kind of commentary. In the album "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio" we read: Sequence 3, Michele's Studio in Rome. Early Morning. Michele, Voice - over So you saw the stars of your country for the last time, and I took you to my studio in Rome at the palace of the Cardinal Del Monte. You looked a true St. John brought from the wilderness. I taught you the colors and how to grind them. The blood-red cinnabar and verdigris ground in poppy and linseed. The art of priming and glazing with soft squirrel brushes - a companion in my loneliness - nothing can come about without loneliness and I have created a loneliness for myself that no one can imagine. Jerusaleme discovers the serpent - wreathed painting Medusa, as Michele opens the shutters and floods the room with the first light of dawn. He slips the painting from the easel and runs round the room holding it as a shield. Michele sits on the window ledge watching Jerusaleme run over to him. Michele scoops him up and puts him on his knee. Exhausted by their journey, they fall asleep. In the silence a serpent glides out of the basket, the serpent of memory, bringing with it the sounds of the country: the cicadas, and shepherds' bells. Jerusaleme's whistle wakes Michele with a start. Time has passed, the child has grown into a young man who gesticulates and signals to him in sign language. He points at a ram tethered to the studio dais, singing: He's dumb like me. (14)

125 Here we witness the birth of the cinematic device: a painting provides interpretation to the story-line, the album interprets cinematic motifs, the motifs of the painting are interpreted in the light of other visual and mythological motifs elswhere in the film. In the "Medusa" sequence the basic cinematic and narrative problem is to create and resolve the tension between the contents and imagery of the painting and the characters of the story. The characters are still very young, the atmosphere of the sequence is still that of youth , light, almost innocence. The painting is one of the early paintings by Caravaggio (1596-1598). The mythological motif is one of suffering, death, darkness. From Jarman's text we realize that the dominant motif in this sequence is that of memory (past) and time. The serpent belonging to Medusa's head is made alive and is interpreted by Jarman as time. This definitely illuminates the entire narrative line of the film placing the time and the hero's involvement with it, the central dominant theme of the story. It is the terrible time, the all-consuming and cruel time, as inexorable and killing as Medusa's glance. The riddle of the sequence, as well as of the film, and of the real Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's life is that Medusa's head is that of the painter himself. It is the young Michele Caravaggio's head, served, with the eyes open and full of suffering and wrath, which is nailed to the shield painted in the picture. The meaning of this elaborate conceit could be one and one only: art kills, the painter takes away the souls of people he paints. Derek Jarman, probably, invested this image with an additional meaning taken from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of the Reading Goal": Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The Coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword. (15) In Caravaggio's painting the murderous head is also that of an ultimate sufferer. The image compresses the feelings of wrath, pain and pity. It is this horrible complex which, according to Jarman, resided within Caravaggio's (and, possibly, any great artist's) soul. Later in the film the viewer will watch another work by Caravaggio in which he exhibited his own severed head, this time that of Goliath, in the painting David with the Head of Goliath (1605-1606). To this, Jarman adds his own interpretation of the murder of Thomasoni: Caravaggio cuts his throat while, at the same time, giving him the kiss of love. At the end of the film the motif of Medusa's killing glance is taken up once again this time, as it were, in an inverted form, when we see the dead Michele Caravaggio, dressed as a Sicilian mafio don, with two gold coins covering his unseeing eyes. In the early sequences of Jarman's film he resorts to elaborate techniques of building luxurious tableaux vivants which he juxtaposes with the paintings of Caravaggio (sequence

126 6: Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the scene of young Michele, with a basket of fruit, wearing a crown of vine leaves, sequence 7: The Sick Bacchus, Michele in the hospital suffering from hangover etc.). Later tableaux vivants become less attached to a certain painting, or exhibit greater freedom of composition when they do correspond to specific pictures (sequence 8: Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard and Michele standing against the background of plain stucco wall, sequence 10: Concert of Youths and the scene at the Cardinal del Monte's palace). The atmosphere changes with the appearance of Ranuccio Thomasoni, Michele's purported lover. Jarman presents Caravaggio's story from that moment on as a story of artistic struggle, both against his own inner inadequacies and mainly, against the accepted tastes of his patrons and the public. The tableaux vivants are now being shown in the process of being assembled; the painter is shown in constant struggle sinking deeper and deeper in the dark hell of homoerotic passion. If in the first sequences of Jarman's "Caravaggio" tableaux vivants were definitely at the service of the paintings themselves, throwing additional, more beautiful light on Caravaggio's originals. In the subsquent portions of the film the heroes who, appear from the canvases are the center of attention. The paintings explain their passions and are auxiliary to the passionate story which evolves before our eyes on the screen. The album illustrates this with particular emphasis, providing still photographs (new "Caravaggio" paintings) of the protagonists engaged in their life-and death confrontation (16) . Derek Jarman definitely identified very much with what he saw as Caravaggio's passionate struggle against his milieu and his own limitations. One of the more brilliant and satirical sequences in the film is sequence 35 in which he shows the critic Giovanni Baglione as some venomous reptile spitting out venom against the painter: Baglione types his slanders in the bath Baglione's hands buzz around the typewriter like an angry wasp, hunched up in the bath. Baglione: With the support of his cardinal. [he pauses.] No! With the connivance of his cardinal, this second Michelangelo stole the commission of St Matthew: a conspiracy between Church and gutter. Those who love art must be alerted to this poison that seeps into our Renaissance, as insidious as the dark shadows that permeate his paintings, cloaking his ignorance and depravity. [He pauses and types with even greater frenzy.] A SAD REFLECTION OF OUR TIME. (17) What Derek Jarman did not mention in his commentary is the fact that Baglione's image and the composition of the sequence were taken, very meticulously, from Jean-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793), and his final posture of the exhausted Baglioni is exactly that of the dead Marat. Perhaps, the hidden irony of the scene is the not-so-subtle wish, on the part of the director, that some new, modern Charlotte Cordet should assassinate this not-yet-born and all-too-modern Marat in the flesh of an art critic. The textual spoof (with the delightfully anachronistic "our Renaissance") underlines the utter modernity, in Jarman's view of Caravaggio's art and his predicament. This modernity is the source of the film's strength as well as its weakness. The strength is

127 amply evident to any unbiased viewer : it is Jarman's mastery of painterly cinematographic media of lighting, shading, composition, temporal dynamics and repetition; it is in making the social and psychologicalß concerns of the people of the Renaissance close to our own times. Derek Jarman's description of Michelangelo Caravaggio's place in art history is highly symptomatic of his approach to staging and filming: Caravaggio was the first to take a bottle of paint-stripper to the Renaissance. He burnt away decorum and the ideal, splattered the clear clean colors of Mannerism with his lamp-blacks, knocked the saints out of the sky and onto the streets, stole and smelted their halos. This wild youth with his pagan obsession was to end high on the altars of Rome - the fate of successive avant-gardes. His contemporaries said he was a pernicious poison who did a little good but much more damage. Struggling with the contradictions, he phased out. (18). Even more revealing is Jarman's analysis of Caravaggio's apparent homosexuality as a clue to his artistic vision. Derek Jarman wrote: When Caravaggio died in Porto Ercole four years after he fled Rome following the murder of Ranuccio, he left a painting, St John the Baptist, with his belongings. This painting was requested by the Spanish governor of Naples who sent a message that Caravaggio's effects were to be sent to him as quickly as possible. The painting is thought to be the St John now in an art gallery in Kansas. Caravaggio had carried the painting, which was painted in Rome, during the four years he had been in exile. Why was the painting of a naked youth so important for the artist ? There is a clue to this mystery. When the painting of the Beheading of St John in Malta was cleaned in the 1970s, Caravaggio's signature (his only signed painting) was discovered scrawled into the blood which splashed on the floor from the Saint's severed attery. The signature says,'I, Caravaggio did this'. The knife, which is the executioner's weapon in the painting, is very unusual, and it probably refers to the knife that was the murder weapon in the fight with Ranuccio Thomasoni, the knife which Caravaggio always carried. Could these pictures identify the murdered Ranuccio ? Six years before, when he painted “The martyrdom of St Matthew”, he included his own self-portrait, staring wistfully over his shoulder at a beautiful naked youth. A murderer, who he has painted triumphantly, like Christ in Michelangelo's Last Judgment - precursor of Jean Genet's Querelle and the street boys of Pasolini. This painting and David with the Head of Goliath - another self-portrait, in which a tough street boy holds Caravaggio's severed head - show martyrdom at the hands of youth. (19) It is clear from this passage that Jarman viewed homosexual relationships very much as representations of paradigmatic famous religious motifs. The religious hero, be it Christ or King David, is always thought of by Jarman as an object of homoerotic passion who is expected to strike at, to smite the devout worshipper. The comparison of Caravaggio's death with the circumstances of Pier-Paolo Pasolini's death at the hands of his homosexual lover in Rome shows that this was, indeed, the privileged angle of interpretation for Jarman.

128 While this modern view of Caravaggio and his art enables the viewer to recognize his own feelings in the events on the screen, it might obscure, on the other hand, certain important things regarding Caravaggio as a historic figure. We have already stated before that one of the striking features of Caravaggio's art was his novel and forceful treatment of religious motifs. It is this aspect of Caravaggio's religion and its relevance to his art that appears to suffer from Jarman's intensely modernizing look at the painter. To put it concisely: Jarman has marvelously succeeded in rendering Caravaggio, the modern complex and problematic individual. Caravaggio, the mystic, Caravaggio, the devout Catholic, is completely absent from the film, as we are left to wonder why, on earth, he had to struggle with all those religious stories which he depicted in his canvases. Jarman leaves the viewer with the impression that this was due to social pressures, to the Catholic Church being the supreme master of all aspects of life at that time. We should put a different explanation of Caravaggio as a religious painter. This explanation would be consonant with carnivalistic aspects of his art. Yes, Caravaggio was a deeply religious person. This religiosity found expression in visual and contextual aspects of his life. The "pagan" beauty of his portraits and group compositions is an expression of Divine Light and Divine Love as they are reflected in Nature and in everyday life of Man which has its redeeming features in that it reflects this Light. As far as contents are concerned Caravaggio chose to paint martyrdom scenes which showed that suffering and death are not the final destination of man who is found to be redeemed by God's grace. These characteristics of religious outlook, embedded, important precisely in the post Reformation Catholic cultures of Italy and Spain, where, parallel to and following Caravaggio, one finds such deeply religious painters as Murillo extolling the saintliness in terms of everyday life, simple human relations and physiognomic types. It is this basically very simple but profound source of high art which is somehow lacking in Derek Jarman's film "Caravaggio". It is, on the other hand, very much in evidence in the album accompanying it. Summing up the effect of Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" we must reiterate that this was, perhaps, the most deeply personally felt achievement in the field of combining painting and film.

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"Mazeppa" or The Idea of The Horse: Gericault, Byron and Pirosmani. Unlike Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio", "Mazeppa", a cinematic poem on the life of the French 20th century painter Theodore Gericault by Bartabas (1993), is a relatively little known filmwhich did not elicit much critical response. The reasons for that lie in the fact that "Mazeppa" was not shown either in movie - theaters or on television with notable exceptions being the 1993 Cannes Festival where it was awarded the CST Technical Prize and the 1995 Jerusalem Film Festival. In 1996 "Mazeppa" was shown on an "Arte" German-French TV program on the horse. Yet this is one of the most powerful feature films about painters and painting made in recent years; its approach and scope cover new ground and succeed in bridging areas which previously had been the province of specialists: mythology, ethnomusicology, folklore, literature, painting. "Mazeppa" is almost a model picto-film in that it concentrates on the work of a specific painter, Theodore Gericault, which the film presents and interprets with the help of a rich palette of cinematic means that go far beyond other authors' achievement of this genre. Bartabas reaches beyond the usual attempts to represent the work of the painter by cinematic means. He is interested in the painter's personality, but not as a means to interpret his work. He is fascinated by the painter's work but not as autonomous paintings, canvases. He is interested in the painter's subject-matter, but not as a historian or antique dealer (unlike Stanley Kubrick's loving reconstructions of the 18th century objects in "Barry Lindon"). Rather he assumes the role of Theodore Gericault, the painter, in order to study, examine and represent the unique element of his paintings which appears to Bartabas worth examining: the horse. By picturing the young Theodore Gericault as being totally absorbed in his subject, the horse, even infatuated with it, Bartabas recognizes Gericault's involvement with the horse as an important part of the 19th century world. But he goes much further than that. In "Mazeppa" Gericault is totally obsessed with the horse, one can even say, besotted with it. So is Bartabas. For him the cinematic representation of the horse becomes the central aim of his picture. One can pose a certain question in connection with the film-maker's attempt to illustrate the life and work of Theodore Gericault - the painter is famous for his milestone painting The Raft of the Medusa, a huge canvas, hanging in the central place in the hall devoted to French 19th century painting in the Louvre. The Raft of the Medusa was hugely popular with contemporaries, firmly establishing Gericault's eminent position as a master of the new Romantic style of painting. Both the highly expressive style and the striking subject matter which represented a hair-raising modern story of death and tragedy could be successfully treated cinematographically. The question in connection with "Mazeppa" is why Bartabas chose to ignore this work altogether, preferring instead to invoke another, much less known work by Gericault namely Mazeppa, a small painting (0,285m / 0,215m) in a private collection, which was only seldom exhibited publicly. The nature of Bartabas' film helps to understand this choice.

130 The film is a perfect example of carnivalistic high art. The subject matter of Gericault's painting "Mazeppa" and the fascination with the horse made the carnivalistic approach absolutely essential. The Raft of the Medusa did not yield itself, perhaps, so easily to such a treatment. Bartabas' "Mazeppa" takes the horse as the major motif of human culture, the motif wherein one witnesses the true meeting of the cultural opposites: the modern and the ancient, the man and the beast, life and death, male and female, sex and rational analysis, high culture and art and the folklore and mythology, East and West etc. The film helps us feel and understand the unique place of the horse in our modern culture: high society and aristocracy rubs shoulders with low life and the exotic near the places where they all meet for horse-races. In the 19th century the unique role of the horse in warfare, the still very relevant connection between the idea of chivalry and the horse, the role of horse-traders, horse breeders and even horse-thieves - all this made the horse one of the most exalted and most coveted for signs of social status which was, at the same time thoroughly rooted in folk life. One of the most attractive places to present the horse as the cultural symbol was and still remains the circus with its highly aesthetic and exotic horse training. Finally, in the hierarchy of semiotic symbols, the horse occupies the pinnacle of state and military pride, be it during prestigious military parades and pageants or on other solemn occasions like state funerals. The director Bartabas definitely took all these (and other) symbolic aspects of the horse into account when he decided to make his film. Moreover, one is actually aware that Bartabas made a thorough study of the subject. In his film Theodore Gericault's passion for the horse is presented as a super human attempt to recreate and re-live the eternal symbolism of the horse. The film opens with a long sequence showing, the earthly end of the horse: the horse's carcass being processed, cut up and treated at the horse-butcher's. Theodore Gericault is present during this tragic ceremony, imbibing the smells of the dead horse's blood, its skin being slowly treated, salted and tanned, its meat being boiled etc. At the same time the viewer is more and more aware of the fact that, in addition to the quite prosaic ends of this grisly process, something mysterious and awesome transpires through the scenes of the horse's final journey. This becomes evident in the scene in which old women and a young girl prepare the horse for its demise. The old women cut up the carcass, they pour the horse's blood; a young girl slowly carries the ladle full of steaming horse's blood. In the background one sees dismembered parts of horses' bodies. Theodore Gericault, dressed in a blue painter's blouse, is sitting and watching the scene. The young girl pours the horse blood into the can which Gericault holds. The girl slowly goes back. She starts sweeping the stone floor of the basin at the edge of which Gericault sits. The older women start preparing the horse's skins. They spread the wet, dripping skins, salt them. Gericault looks at the girl. She looks back at him and there is a spark of understanding, maybe sexual connivance between the two of them. The huge horse's head hangs from the hook. The older women start treating the

131 entrails of the horse. They take out and present to each other the huge penis of the horse and its enormous testes. The women laugh. They show the horses' sexual parts to Gericault who laughs too. He sweeps his palm over his face. The palm leaves red marks of blood on his face. Slowly the water begins to fill up the empty basin and becomes pink and then red from the horse's blood. This very powerful and suggestive scene not only prefigures many of the motifs of the film: the connection between physical love between man and woman with the idea of the horse, the role of the horse in emotionally connecting the sexual partners, the role of older women as "disclosing" the sexual mysteries to young girls. It also evokes a well-known mythological motif and ritual which serve as foundation for the story of Theodore Gericault. The motif and ritual is asvamedha, an ancient Indian sacrifice of horse whereby the fertility of the king is assured for another lengthy period. Through the fertility of the king the connection is established with the fertility of the land and the entire universe. In asvamedha, the ritual horse, after the whole year of roaming freely in the fields, was delivered into the women's quarters where it was robed into the robes of the king, and after being waited on and ritually prepared by the women, it was killed, its body dismembered and served as a ritual sacrifice to a goddess of fertility. The dismemberment of the horse was necessary to ensure the future well-being of the king, his land and all its inhabitants. This aspect of the horse mythology is represented in the Bartabas film by the "lower", "exotic" participants of the story, namely by the Oriental riders and minders of horses in the exotic "Cirque Franconi" which is shown as visiting Paris in those early years of the 1820's. The Orientals fit the motif of the horse because they, much more than the people of the West, are attuned to the horse as a free unfettered animal of the nomads. In the film the Orientals are Georgians, the people from the mountains of the Caucasus, famous for their riding skills and love of the horse. The Georgians are represented in the film as brave skillful people, their vocal music is used for the sound track. The music is sung by the typically Georgian male choir accompanied by traditional folk instruments. The Georgian men are shown in a stylized manner which owes much to the Georgian folk painter Nikola Pirosmani (Pirosmanishvili) who lived at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century. Pirosmani left many paintings, naive in style, but extremely sensitive and masterful in treatment. Their prevailing color scheme was a delicate blend of dark (black, green and dark-grey) shades with silvery whites and mother-of-pearl tones. His favorite themes were scenes of festive meals, festivals, still-life paintings of fruit and Georgian food. Bartabas borrowed liberally from Pirosmani's repertoire of images and pictorial symbols. His Georgian men are, at once, awesome, impressive and austere, full of vitality, compassion and joy. It is clear that Bartabas discovered Georgian folklore through the medium of the Soviet and Russian (Slavic) motifs. The very title of the film which evokes Lord Byron's poem "Mazeppa" relates to the name and the life-story of Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa, the last independent ruler of Ukraine in the years of the Russian emperor Peter the Great (the beginning of the 18th century). Mazepa came down into Russian history as the embodiment of treason, for he cooperated with Charles the XII, the Swedish king who

132 waged war against Peter the Great on the steppes of the Ukraine and was defeated by him during the fateful battle of Poltava in 1709. In the aftermath of the defeat both the king and his Ukranian ally, after riding for scores of miles to escape from the pursuing Russians, found themselves in the territory of the Turkish Sultan who kept them as prisoners for several years. Charles was ransomed by his country, while Mazepa died in Turkey after joining the army of the Sultan. This historical background is somehow felt in Bartabas' film which shows Paris after another momentous chapter in the martial history of Europe, namely Napoleon's defeat in the hands of the Russians and their English and Prussian allies, as a result of which Russian Cossack horses appeared in Paris. Lord Byron's poem, however, while referring explicitly to Charles' defeat ("Twas after dread Pultowa's day, / When fortune left the royal Swede /Around a slaughtered army lay/ No more to combat and to bleed/ The power and glory of the war / Faithless as their vain votaries, men / Had passed to the triumphant Czar...") takes up an altogether different motif related to Mazepa (during the battle of Poltava he was already an old man) who was believed to have seduced a young and beautiful wife of a rich Polish magnate. The Polish prince in revenge tied the young Mazepa to the stallion and sent the horse riding wildly into the vast expanse of Ukranian countryside. Thus wrote Byron: IX " 'Bring forth the horse!" - the horse was brought; In truth, he was a noble steed, A Tartar of the Ukraine breed, Who looked as though the speed of thought Were in his limbs; but he was wild, Wild as the wild deer, untaught, With spur and bridle undefiled 'Twas but a day he had been caught; And snorting, with erected mane, And struggling fiercely, but in vain, In the full foam of wrath and dread To me the desert-born was led:

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They bound me on, that menial throng, Upon his back with many a thong; They loosed him with a sudden lash Away! - Away! and on we dash! Torrents less rapid and less rash. X 'Away! - Away! - my breath was gone I saw not where he hurried on: 'T was scarcely yet the break of day, And on he foamed - away! - away! The last of human sounds which rose, As I was dared from my foes, Was the wild shout of savage laughter, Which on the wind came roaring after A moment from that rabble rout: With sudden wrath I wrenched my head, And snapped the cord, which to the mane Had bound my neck in lieu of rein, And, writhing half my form about, Howled back my curse; but 'midst the tread, The thunder of my courser's sped, Perchance they did not hear nor heed: It vexes me - for I would fain Have paid their insult back again. I paid it well in after days: There is not of that castle gate,

134 Its drawbridge and portcullis' weight, Stone, bar, moat, bridge, or barrier left; Nor of its fields a blade of grass, Save what grows on a bridge of wall, Where stood the hearth-stone of the hall; And many a time ye there might pass, Nor dream that e'er the fortress was. I saw its turrets in a blaze, Their crackling battlements all cleft, And the hot lead pour down like rain From off the scorched and blackening roof, Whose thickness was not vengeance-proof. They little thought that day of pain, When launched, as on the lightning's flash, They bade me to destruction dash, That one day I should come again, With twice five thousand horse, to thank The Court for his uncourteous ride. They played me then a bitter prank, When, with the wild horse for my guide, They bound me to his foaming flank: At length I played them one as frank For time at last sets all things even And if we do but watch the hour, There never yet was human power Which could evade, if unforgiven, The patient search and vigil long Of him who treasures up a wrong. XI

135 'Away, away, my steed and I, Upon the pinions of the wind. All human wellings left behind, We sped like meteors through the sky, When with its crackling sound the night It chequered with the northern light: Town - village - none were on our track, But a wild plain of far extent, And bounded by a forest black; And, save the scarce seen battlement On distant heights of some strong hold, Against the Tartars built of old, No trace of man. The year before, A Turkish army had marched o'er; And where the Spahi's hoof hath trod, The verdure flies the bloody sod: The sky was dull, and dim, and grey, And a low breeze crept moaning by I could have answered with a sigh But fast we fled, away, away And my cold sweat-drops fell like rain Upon the courser's bristling mane; But, snorting still with rage and fear, He flew upon his far career: At times I almost thought, indeed, He must have slackened in his speed; But no - my bound had slender frame Was nothing to his angry might, And merely like a spur became: Each motion which I made to free My swoln limbs from their agony

136 Increased his fury and affright: I tried my voice, - 'twas faint and low, But yet he swerved as from a blow; And, starting to each accent, sprang As from a sudden trumpet's clang: Meantime my cords were wet with gore, Which, oozing though my limbs, ran o'er; And in my tongue the thirst became A something fierier far than flame. (20) The fiery dash through the woods, plains and rivers of the Ukraine take the steed with young Mazepa tied to his back through three more chapters of Lord Byron's poem until, at the beginning of chapter XV at the description of the scene which is precisely the one depicted in Gericault's painting : ' With glossy skin, and dripping mane, And reeling limbs, and reeking flank, The wild steed's sinewy nerves still strain Up the repelling bank. We gain the top: a boundless plain Spreads through the shadow of night, And onward, onward, onward, seems, Like precipices in our dreams, To stretch beyond the sight; And here and there a speck of white, Or scattered spot of dusky green, In masses broke into the light, As rose the moon upon my right: But nought distinctly seen In the dim waste would indicate The omen of a cottage gate; No twinkling taper from afar Stood like a hospitable star; (21)

137 For Byron the symbolism of the deathly ride was undoubtedly, manifold. It was the ride of passion where the unworthy female object of youthful lust became replaced by a young and untamed steed. The union of the unwilling rider and the unaware horse is one of mutual dependence, mutual taking and giving. The mad course through the wild Ukraine was both the flight away from the corrupt European civilization and towards the selfrealization and freedom of true manhood. In Byron's poem it was the horse who became a sacrificed victim, while the youth-to-be-sacrificed emerged from the ordeal not only stronger and wiser, but able to assume a new role of the leader of men: his tragic condition of being robbed of bodily freedom and tied -unto death - to the horse was miraculously transformed into a state of power and grace : Thus the vain fool who strove to glut His rage, refining on my pain, Sent me forth to the wilderness, Bound, naked, bleeding, and alone, To pass the desert to a throne, What mortal his own doom may guess? Let none despond, let none despair! (22) In the film the Romantic idea of hero who can subdue his weaknesses and rise above the average station of men is not only vigorously disputed - it is turned into a direct opposite. The noble Cossacks of Lord Byron's poem who save the hero become ominous and carnivalistic Orientals - Georgians, Moroccans, Russians - who agree to accept him only very reluctantly and on their own terms. And it is not the horse who dies but the hero the Romantic painter Theodore Gericault. The film director presents Theodore Gericault as a weaker figure than the director of the circus Franconi who is played by Bartabas himself. In a way the film is Bartabas' attempt not only to create his own vision of the horse which complements Gericault's vision and competes with it, but to prove that nowadays the film as artistic medium achieves the same, and greater, aims of high art that the painting did in the days of Gericault. The story-line of "Mazeppa" runs in several, loosely interelating directions. All of them point to the moment in which high Romantic art dissolves, disappears in favor of the ageless folklore and folk art. The great Gericault is destined to die having exhaus- ted himself in his futile search for the essence of the real horse. To do that he had to shed, according to the film, more of his Western ways become more like the simple Orientals and Slavs of the circus. To do that he had to prostrate himself in the horses' stable, to immerse himself in the din of the horses' hooves and smell their manes. Moreover he had to give up his pretensions of the great Romantic artist and become infatuated with a

138 simple Georgian girl-dancer. This story-line is supplemented by the motif of their double death: the girl dying because she lost her balance and Gericault because he lost his mental balance. Another story-line is that of the circus which is the domain of one man, Franconi, strong and despotic, his face covered by a leather mask, something which is reminiscent of the continuation of a Romantic motif of the Phantom of the Opera of Paris. Franconi dominates his troupe of dancers and horse-riders as completely as he does the horses themselves. He is the master of the ceremony, the master of the horses and the master of the human destinies. The circus comes and goes. Its arrival changes the life of Paris, but the people of the circus remain under the oppressive and at the same time protective, weight of their master. A symbolic figure who unites all the narrative threads is a clown, a strange androgynous figure alternately laughing and weeping, mocking and tenderly protecting others - a person of authority and wisdom and at the same time a fool at the mercy of others. The clown attracts and repels. He is entirely Western and urban, but also Oriental and of the countryside. With the various narrative threads coming together the role of the painter becomes less and less significant. Gericault becomes more and more involved in the life of the horses: he serves as "midwife" while one of the horses gives birth on a virgin green lawn in the park. He appears at horse-races, he comes to identify with the horse completely to the point of physically resembling a horse. This identification with the horses moves him closer to the beautiful Georgian dancer until they, in a climatic scene of passion and tenderness, make love in an equestrian stall, naked amid other "horses" like themselves. This consummation of passion led, in Bartabas' view to Gericault's tragic end. After their moment of passion the young heroes are doomed : the girl trips herself down while riding on the horse's back and Gericault falls ill. In the final scene of the film the painter is fastened, his naked back to the horse's back, like Mazeppa, to the wooden model of the horse in his studio, while the people of the circus make the model move, as though in desperate ride. The mytologeme of the horse looms large in Bartabas' "Mazeppa". The film-maker makes the viewer almost physically experience the grandeur and tragedy of this motif. At the same time we are always almost painfully aware that this is a late 20th century film, with all its technical and artistic possibilities, but also with a special 20th century knowledge and sensibility. The horse becomes a powerful symbol of the power which is inherent in the traditions of the Orient, including the Ukraine, Russia, the Caucasus, the nomadic. This power is challenging the West not only historically and culturally, but politically as well. It is not accidental, in our view, that the Georgian folk-song featured on the sound-track at the end of the film is "Suliko", the favorite tune of the paradigmatic 20th century tyrant, Joseph Stalin who, in himself, united the West and East.

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"Prospero's Books": The Art of Science. Two previous films dealt with in this chapter belonged to the traditional province of art. They dealt with human problems, human feelings, human attitudes. The objects, situations and patterns presented in the perspective of high art were achieved by unaided human contemplation, be it enriched by the knowledge of history, mythology, art. In Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" we deal with a new modern and postmodernist vision in which the contemplation is effected through the medium of modern science and technology. One never simply watches this film. The very act of watching is made sophisticated and complex because one has to follow a breath-taking array of visual structures, one overlapping another, one embedded within another, with text, separate words, sentences being simultaneously flashed across the screen forming stylistic counterpoints to the images. Add to this the complex sound-track - the words of John Gielgud who, as Prospero, not only performs his own text as the hero of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", but also reads for all other characters of the play - and you get the work of complex art built according to new principles. The novelty of the principles is, a return, of sorts, to the novelty with which science and technology commingled, coexisted with and, often, defined art at the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the New Age. It is this, conscious on the part of Peter Greenaway, return to the paradigmatic beginning of our present-day technological vision of high art which dictated the choice of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" as the literary source of the script and Greenaway's extensive use of the 17th century visual imagery in his film. Just as the discovery of the perspective, the chiaroscuro, the integration of the factual and anatomic detail into the overall composition of painting were conditioned by scientific and technological discoveries of the period, that is the discovery of the structure of the eye, the production of the lens and "camera obscura", the interiorisation of the true scale of the micro - and macrocosmos, the scientific and technological breakthroughs of our own times - computer revolution in visual technologies and the use of computer image enhancing in the study of outer and inner (atomic and sub-atomic) space - lead to a revolution in the perception and intuition of beauty. It is the continuation of the process which we discussed at the beginning of this chapter : the transition from the point of view of the object to the point of view of the artist and the art and then to the point of view of the viewer. At the end of the 20th century the viewer is no longer an average naive or even educated connoisseur of painting. He is technologically computer literate, and even more than that the vision of the world through computer images has become part and parcel of his intuitive world outlook. Peter Greenaway in "Prospero's Books" is a prophet of this technologically created and mediated art. His enthusiasm for new art technologies far outweighs his willingness to treat the world which he creates as the world of familiar people and their familiar

140 problems. If Derek Jarman and Bartabas regard the world which they create either as an extension of their own personal world or its projection onto some archetypal psychic model, Peter Greenaway places in the center of "Prospero's Books" not a psychic or emotional problem but a linguistic, or better said, semiotic problem. He approaches his work as a true scientifically-minded artist of the beginning of the 17th century. In this film one distinguishes keen curiosity and delight in the possibilities of technology coupled with desire to pose and solve intricate semiotic questions. Passions and attractions, disappointments and offences, expectations and despairs are treated as elements of some convoluted calculus. There is open delight in being able to attend to all these, to examine them, and to take them in their stride. There seems to be a certain dispassionate quality to Greenaway's kaleidoscopic examinations of the peregrinations and travails of his heroes, crispness tinged with cold. One word comes to mind - "Anatomy", rather common in 17th century treatises, like Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy". Peter Greenaway's fascination with post-Renaissance science, technology and art obliges us to ask the question whether the marriage between these domains, so typical of that age and our own, will manifest itself in the nature of art itself, as well as in the quality of the basic aesthetic insight of both epochs. It is, of course, impossible to give a definitive and informed answer, especially, for the future. Some parallels and divergencies may, nevertheles be pointed out. These will stand out in greater relief if we examine Shakespeare's "The Tempest" as a work of art typical of the epoch and its use by the film-maker in "Prospero's Books". During his talk before the press at the Haifa 1996 film Festival Peter Greenaway insisted that in his work there has to be some primary, basic reality, that of film. He said: "I want to be a primary maker of images". He then went on to remark that "film should not be deconstructed either to literature or to painting". The film poses its own special problems, unknown either to literature or to painting. These are, first and foremost, problems of movement matched against simultaneity. At the same time Peter Greenaway acknowledges the all-important paradigmatic role of painting in his films: "I'm a painter. Painting is very important in western culture". This latter statement explains why the visual world of "Prospero's Books" is a succession of motion- paintings, not tableauxvivants in the usual sense, but paintings arranged in such a way that everything in them moves continuously, sliding, as it were, from one gigantic painter's studio to another. As the main emphasis in the film is on the visual code, and as it consciously operates within what it defines as the painterly world of western culture, its main aesthetic approach is the search for and arrangement of beauty. Beauty takes precedence in Greenaway's interpretation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" over everything else. In that Greenaway probably took the clue from the famous exclamation by Miranda, the pure and beautiful, but unknowing daughter of Prospero:

141 O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in't. Prospero: 'Tis new to thee. (23) The viewer is placed in Miranda's place and is made to marvel at the sheer visual beauty of Greenaway's film. However, the film-maker seems to disregard Prospero's half- ironic, half- commiserating remark. The world is "beauteous" and new not only to Miranda, but to everyone in the viewing-hall. In this "brave new world" all is subordinate to the demands of visual colorfulness, richness and overflowing Baroque form-making. Before our own eyes beautiful, fantastic and fascinating images are rolling in quick succession, human bodies, and architectural details are the formal language of this harmonious flow. Bodies, nude and bedecked in all kinds of period costumery, old and young, male and female, whole and parts of them, sparkling clean, spluttered with mud and besmirched with soot and grime, motionless and performing all kinds of impossible, almost circus-like exertions, bodies of all sorts and descriptions populate this, according to Shakespeare, solitary island. But most prominent are the secret private parts of these human and semihuman figures: their innocently dangling penises, their voluptuous breasts and bellies, their magnificent buttocks and enticing pubic hair. It is as though Greenaway has decided, quite on purpose, to demonstrate how both extremely beautiful and highly inconvenient, from our modern point of view, is this beauteous brave new world of Rubensian male and female figures lively communicating among themselves in their natural state. The architectural largesse is even more striking. The combination of early and late Renaissance palatial interiors with Baroque compositions occupied by multitudes of richly-clad, partly-clad and totally unclad figures leaves the impression of some totally mad Hollywood film-stage managed by a manic director. All that would have been baffling and even bordering on visual parody if not for the introduction to the film where Peter Greenaway, like some latter-day cinematographer Prospero, reveals the secrets of his magic. What we have in mind is his cinematic "paint -boxes" through which he presents "Prospero's Books", the "real" twenty-four books which the good old Gonzalo threw in Prospero's Boat:

142 "... of his gentleness Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine owne Library, With volumes, that I prize about my Dukedom." (24) But before we turn to examine these books of Prospero's that are Peter Greenaway's own masterful cinematic invention, let us examine the difference between the "primary" visual world of images created by him and the non-visual world of human . For Shakespeare in "The Tempest", as in his other creations, the problem which baffles him and his characters is precisely the nature of the world man lives in. This world, on the one hand, is the world of real passions, desires, events and attitudes. On the other hand, man is apt to err, to mislead or be misled as regards the nature of these qualities of the world. The basic qualities and relations which matter in Shakespeare's world, which form the measure of measures are human personal and social virtues whose presence or absence defines the quality of men, women and events in which they are involved. It is these virtues (or lack of them) which are the objects of real interest in Shakespeare's world rather than the art itself which, especially in "The Tempest", is seen as an instrument rather than purpose. What very often lies in the center of the magnificent, aesthetic construction in Shakespeare's plays is the comedy (or tragedy) of errors: errors in judgment, in interpretation, in knowledge, in feeling and emotion, and the unforeseen consequences of such errors. In "The Tempest" Shakespeare tackles, as in other plays, the most basic categories, problems and complexities of his times and of men as they crafted those times. Those problems and complexities were real and really mattered, and first and foremost, the legitimacy of birth, power, succession, knowledge, of familial duties and obligations and the rights they impose. Man is viewed as dependent on the legitimacy (or lack of it), and as deeply involved in the consequences of actions, choices, decisions which derive from legitimacy. The virtues determine these choices, and the first and foremost of these seems to be faithfulness. The story-line in "The Tempest" is constructed from many of the same materials from which other famous plays by Shakespeare are built. The difference lies in the precise significations of the corresponding relations between the personages. In "The Tempest" the basic conflict, historically, is between Prospero, the Duke of Milan, and Antonio, his treacherous brother who has usurped the title and thus broken the line of legitimacy. Thus the conflict as regards legitimacy and faithfulness is between siblings. The cause of the conflict, apart from Antonio's treachery, was Prospero's own lack of proper faithfulness to his own dukedom and its people. This lack of faithfulness on Prospero's part was due to his excessive involvement with Science, as it was understood in Shakespeare's days, that is secret knowledge and magic

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Prospero: My brother and thy uncle, call'd Antonio I pray thee mark me - that a brother should Be so perfidious! - he whom next thyself Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put The manage of my state, as at that time Through all the signories it was the first, And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed In dignity, and for the liberal arts Without a parallel; those being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother, And to my state grew stranger, being transported And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle Dost thou attend me ? Miranda: Sir, most heedfully. Prospero: Being once perfected how to grant suits, How to deny them, who t'advance, and who To trash for overtopping, new created The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang'd 'em, Or else new form'd 'em; having both the key Of officer and office, set all hearts i' th' state To what tune pleased his ear, that now he was The ivy which had hid my princely trunk, And sucked my verdure out on't. Thou attend'st not ! Miranda: O, good sir, I do. Prospero: I pray thee mark me. I, thus neglecting wordly ends, all dedicated To closeness and the bettering of my mind With that which, but by being so retired, O'er - priz'd all popular rate, in my false brother Awak'd an evil nature, and my trust,

144 Like a good parent, did beget of him A falsehood in the contrary, as great As my trust was, which had indeed no limit, A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded, Not only with what my revenue yielded, But what my power might else exact - like one Who having into truth, by telling of it, Made such a sinner of his memory To credit his own lie - he did believe He was indeed the Duke, out o'th' substitution, And executing th' outward face of royalty With all prerogative. [...] (25) Prospero's monologue shows clearly the complex interplay of different aspects of virtue: what was completely lacking in one brother, Antonio, towards the other, Prospero faithfulness - was more than amply present. Faithfulness towards his sibling came at the expense of his complete lack of faithfulness towards his dukedom - and, by extension, towards his own daughter whom he thus deprived of her own legitimate inheritance. So his entire life is spent, afterwards, in an attempt to atone, for his mistake, before his daughter by surrounding her with love, giving her the best care and education possible. This became possible by Prospero's use of his science - magic. He turned his lonely island into a paradise, creating there, by virtue of his magic, not only "the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples", but the retinue of servants and helpers who wait on him and Miranda. However, this solitary existence in the bliss of primordial paradise soon becomes intolerable, because for Miranda to have a proper companion he should be a man, and not a spirit conjured up by the loving father's magic wand. Not only that, but Miranda should, when she comes of age, become a lawful and legitimate heiress to her domain, the dukedom of Milan. For this purpose no other means could be of any avail, but either to transport magically himself and Miranda back to Milan again, or to bring to the island all the protagonists of the original conflict: his brother Antonio, the usurping duke of Milan, Alonso, the king of Naples, Antonio's suzeraine and ally, Sebastian, his brother, Ferdinand, Alonso's son and Gonzalo, Prospero's erstwhile helper. The first option is clearly impractical, because Prospero's magic does not extend beyond the confines of his island, so the second is chosen whereby Prospero by sophisticated artifice and magic brings all of them, in a ship, to his forsaken exile. There he arranges, propitiously, for a tempest to sink the ship and bring all the party to within the confines of his magical influence. There, with the help of Ariel, a friendly spirit whom he himself brought to life, he causes Ferdinand and Miranda to casually meet while others are kept in temporary custody by Ariel. The situation being as it was, Ferdinand and Miranda could not but fall

145 in love with each other without any help from Prospero's magic, even in spite of his constant attempts to thwart their union, to show that the love of Ferdinand and Miranda was real and not something conjured by magic. Because of the unusual success of his enterprise Prospero quite naturally abandons plans, if he, indeed, entertained any, of revenge and retribution against his own brother and those who had helped him. Not only did he pardon everybody, but willingly foreswore any future use of magic, made himself a true and faithful vassal of the king of Naples and thus assured the return of his lost dukedom and the legitimate succession of his daughter. That these motifs represent real foci of auctorial interest, anxiety and insight is evident from other instances of similar troubles with legitimacy and faithfulness in Shakespeare's plays. "King Lear" presents us with a similar story of sibling hatred, loss of legitimacy due to excessive parental faith in his own inner world, retirement from government and general havoc with regards to reality and illusion. In "King Lear" Cordelia like Miranda, is, ill-served by her father's blind (and, in "King Lear", rather belated) obsessive love. "King Lear" being a tragedy, and Cordelia no longer a virgin but her husband's wife, she cannot be safely delivered into the hands of the proper suitor, but has to fall an innocent victim to her own absolutely measured and correct faithfulness, contrasted with treachery and obsession on others' part. Note that in "King Lear" Shakespeare delineated very sharply the borders between the apparent and the real which, according to him, lie in the language. The exuberant language of love used by Lear's elder daughters, Regan and Goneril, and which was, evidently, instilled in them by Lear himself, leads to the undermining of the true and legitimate bond between the father and his children. In other words the over-emphasis on something which is not virtue itself but its outward expression leads to the depreciation of real and legitimate virtue. "The Tempest" being not a tragedy, like "King Lear", but "romance" examined the gap between the appearance and reality in terms of "science" - magic and art - rather than human morals and the way they touch the soul. In "King Lear" the excess of faith proves to be the excess of vain and wrongful selfassurance and conceit. Unlike Prospero, Lear remains self-centered and oblivious to his legitimate duties almost until the very last moment. This results in, not only his own demise, but in the death of all his children. His lineage ends, and the succession goes over to the two people who proved to be the worthiest by virtue of their real faithfulness: Kent and Edgar, the son of the wronged Gloucester. Here vengeance is unleashed on all, and there is something of a force of nature in it. It cuts down both guilty and innocent. "Hamlet" also examines the problems connected with legitimacy and faithfulness. There, however, Shakespeare, maybe somewhat closer to the spirit of "The Tempest", questions the very nature of these concepts and mainly, the result they have on human soul. Be that as it may, for Shakespeare beauty and art appear to be thoroughly subordinate to the real issues which are human qualities and their influence on the fate of those who possess them.

146 Now back to "The Tempest". We have tried to show the importance of the issues of faithfulness and legitimacy in the play, or "romance" as the editors of "The Riverside Shakespeare" (21) refer to it. At the same time it is the most self-referential of all Shakespeare's works. "The Tempest" is aware of the artistic convention, artifice and, in general, of the convention which is at the root of all human intercourse, be it society, art or science. This awareness, present in his other plays as well, leads in "The Tempest" to a structure of counter-currents: while the "real" plot of treachery, faithfulness and redemption which begins and ends, outside the magical time-space of Prospero's island and is a positive, optimistic, the inner plot of Prospero's magic is the questioning of this optimism, actually of all optimism which is shown to be short-sighted, unaware of cause-and-effect logic. A brilliant example of this mockery of optimism is Alonso and Sebastian's discussion of Gonzalo's utopia. This is, perhaps, one of more profound examples of carnivalization in Shakespeare. It is this inner tension of "The Tempest" which is represented in Peter Greenaway's film by its carnivalistic visual tapestry. In fact, there is no place in the film for the real issues which fuel the action in "The Tempest". The very device of giving the voices of personages to John Gielgud, the ultimate magician, robs the collisions of "The Tempest" of their topicality. What remains in the film is the bewildering array of images which, without exception, point to the one source of authority, beauty. However, unlike in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" the beauty inheres not in the real world, unknown, so far to Miranda, but in the world of magic - art and science. Peter Greenaway is fascinated with Prospero's magic, or, rather, with its results, which he sees, in keeping with the main direction of literary and art criticism of our times, as some kind of a complex text, written in an abstruse but beautiful language. The act of creation, according to Greenaway, is an act of constructing a formal language system. The act of aesthetic communication is not contemplation, but deciphering, deciphering images which are blurred and quick but possess unfathomable power over our senses (actually over vision alone. Here vision is made to represent, vicariously, all other senses). Greenaway sees Prospero's island as an ideal place where art can and should be appreciated for its own sake alone. Thus, the film is a celebration of such art. What beauty there exists is completely derivative from art. The instrument to create and appreciate art is science, the science of language, the science of vision, the science of art and culture, the history of art and semiotics. As semiotics and history of art are viewed by Greenaway as sciences, they are instruments of distancing from Shakespeare's 'real world". At the same time this science which is self-referential is also art.

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Peter Greenaway describes this in the following way in the film-script to "Prospero's Books": After twelve years of exile, Prospero's island has become a place of illusion and deception whose references are forged by an unhappy scholar recreating a little Renaissance kingdom fort from Europe. In a place where the indigenous spirits are persuaded to impersonate classical mythological figures, where Prospero dresses like a Venetian doge, where Caliban dances and there are four Ariels to represent the elements, and the world is appreciated and referenced with the architecture, paintings and classical literature Prospero has imported. With such a fabric, it will be no surprise that it is an island full of super-imposed images, of shifting mirrors and mirror - images - true mirages- where pictures conjured by text can be as tantalisingly substantial as objects and facts and events constantly framed and re-framed. This framing and re-framing becomes like the text itself - a motif - reminding the viewer that it is all an illusion constantly fitted into a rectangle... into a picture frame, a film frame. (26) The constant framing and reframing are Peter Greenaway's way of creating a cinematographic language and technique which serve as an aesthetic and emotional, expressive parallel to the world of real human issues in Shakespeare. In short, if in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" we are expected to empathize with the story of the Duke of Milan and his daughter, in Greenaway's film we are expected to be thrilled by the magestic view of artificial beauty. Empathy and thrill, excitement, delight are different aspects of the aesthetic phenomenon. Greenaway has definitely parted with empathy. We are left with thrill and excitement, enhanced and elaborated due to the film-maker's use of special scientific medium, the aim of which is to create "new painting" by means of film and filming. Greenaway's painting by means of film draws heavily, as we have shown in previous chapters, on clasical painting which he views as "rough sketches", as it were, for his work. This is how he describes his method in the introduction to the film script of "Prospero's Books": Prospero, homesick exile, has tried to recreate on his island many characteristics of a far distant Italy. In the building of his palaces, the stocking of his libraries, and in the fashioning of the indigenous spirits into classical allegories he has quoted extant buildings, paintings and books. Most of these are historical or contemporary to his life, but being a magician he can also slip time and borrow and quote the future. This script contains some examples of that referential source material in images which occasionally have been used in the manufacture of the film, though rarely will a direct visual quotation of a painting image be seen in the film. The history of painting is one of borrowing and reprising, homage and quotation. All image-makers who wished to contribute to it have eagerly examined what painters have done before and - openly acknowledged or not - this huge body of pictorial work has become legitimate and unavoidable encyclopedia for all to study and use. With hindsight and foresight Prospero would have used it. So does "Prospero's Books". (27)

148 The beautiful imagery of Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" uses the classical motifs of painting, sculpture and architecture in, rouhly speaking, two ways. One is the usual means of cinematographic filming which includes composition, framing, lighting, costumes, the use of various shots - long, close medium, zoom, traveling etc, - montage etc. the other is Peter Greenaway's own innovation: the paintbox, the complex use, electronic image editing and montage resulting in the appearance on the screen of multiple frames and images which combine simultation of painting process and texture; the use of pictorial, photographic and architectural images from the database and the use of texts created right on the screen by the visible or invisible hand with a stylus. The paintbox is extensively used to introduce Greenaway's imaginative development of the idea of "the volumes" which Prospero took to the island. The more traditional filming is found in the scenes showing the arrival to the island of the party of Neapolitans lead by Alonso, and the romance of Ferdinand and Miranda. Both means, the paintbox, the multiple deep-screen and the usual "flat" screen are also used sequentially, the paintbox and the deep-screen serving as a kind of running commentary on the "main text" of the play. Both means employ visual quotations and allusions from classical sources (painting, architecture, sculpture, mythology). The combination of the rich Greenaway cinematography with highly evocative classical pictorial allusions and the newly invented "paintbox" technique creates a work of art of unparalleled beauty and suggestiveness. Unlike earlier and later films by him, "Prospero's Books", thanks to this unique combination, succeeds in transcending the highly ambivalent view of art, including painting of which Greenaway is so fond of presenting. Perhaps, it is the influence of the original Shakespeare's "The Tempest". The "paintbox" technique is also important because it overwhelms the viewer at the start of the film which opens with the description and demonstration of the 24 magical books of Prospero's. These opening sequences are not only strikingly beautiful visually, they present Peter Greenaway's highly original verbal contribution to the text of Shakespeare. The voice beyond the screen describes each of the 24 books: THE BOOKS These are the twenty-four books that Gonzalo hastily threw into Prospero's boat as he was pushed out into the sea to begin his exile. These books enabled Prospero to find his way across the oceans, to combat the malignancies of Sycorax, to colonise the island, to free Ariel, to educate and entertain Miranda and to summon tempests and bring his enemies to heel. 1 The Book of Water. This is a waterproof-covered book which has lost its colour by much contact with water. It is full of investigative drawings and exploratory text written on many different thicknesses of paper. There are drawings of every conceivable watery association - seas, tempests, rain, snow, clouds, lakes, waterfalls, streams, canals, watermills, shipwrecks, floods and tears. As the pages are turned, the watery elements are

149 often animated. There are rippling waves and slanting storms. Rivers and cataracts flow and bubble. Plans of hydraulic machinery and maps of weather-forecasting flicker with arrows, symbols and agitated diagrams. The drawings are all made by one hand. Perhaps this is a lost collection of drawings by da Vinci bound into a book by the King of France at Amboise and bought by the Milanese Dukes to give to Prospero as wedding present. 2 A Book of Mirrors. Bound in a gold cloth and very heavy, this book has eight shining mirrored pages; some opaque, some translucent, some manufactured with silvered papers, some coated in paint, some covered in a film of mercury that will roll off the page unless treated cautiously. Some mirrors simply reflect the reader, some reflect the reader as he was three minutes previously, some reflect the reader as he will be in a year's time, as he would be if he were a child, a woman, a monster, an idea, a text or an angel. One mirror constantly lies, one mirror sees the world backwards, another upside down. One mirror holds on to its reflections frozen moments infinitely recalled. One mirror simply reflects another mirror across a page. There are ten mirrors whose purpose Prospero has yet to define. 3 A Book of Mythologies. This is a large book - Prospero on some occasions has described it as being as much as four meters wide and three meters high. It is bound in a shining yellow cloth that, when polished, gleams like brass. It is a compendium, in text and illustration, of mythologies with all their variants and alternative tellings; cycle after cycle of interconnecting tales of gods and men from all the known world, from the icy North to the deserts of Africa, with explanatory readings and symbolic interpretations. Its authority and information is richest in the Eastern Mediterranean, in Greece and Rome, in Israel, in Athens and Rome, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where it supplements its information with genealogies, natural and unnatural. To a modern eye, it is a combination of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Franzer's The Golden Bough and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Every tale and anecdote has an illustration. With this as a concordance, Prospero can collect together, if he so wishes, all those gods and men who have achieved fame or infamy through water, or through fire, through deceit, in association with horses or trees or pigs or swans or mirrors, pride, envy or stick-insects. 4 A Primer of the Small Stars. This is a small, black, leather-covered navigational aid. It is a depiction of the sky reflected in the seas of the world when they are still, for it is complete with blanks where the land masses of the globe have interrupted the oceanic mirror. This, to Prospero, was its greatest usage, for in steering his leaky vessel to such a small blank space in a sea of stars, he found his island. When opened, the primer's pages twinkle with travelling planets, flashing meteors and spinning comets. The black skies pulsate with red numbers. New constellations are repeatedly joined together by fastmoving, dotted lines.

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5 An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus. Bound in a battered and burnt, enamelled-green tin cover, this atlas is divided into two sections. Section One is full of large maps of the travel and usage of music in the classical world. Section Two is full of maps of Hell. It was used when Orpheus journeyed into the Underworld to find Eurydice, and the maps, as a consequence, are scorched and charred by Hellfire and marked with the teeth-bites of Cerberus. When the atlas is opened, the maps bubble with pitch. Avalanches of hot, loose gravel and molten sand fall out of the book to scorch the library floor. 6 A Harsh Book, stippled with gold numbers. When opened, complex three-dimensional geometrical diagrams rise up out of the pages like odels in a pop-up book. The pages flicker with logarithmic numbers and figures. Angles are measured by needle-thin metal pendulums that swing freely, activated by magnets concealed in the thick paper. 7 The Book of Colours. This is a large book bound in crimson watered silk. It is broader than it is high, and when opened the double-page spread makes a square. The three hundred pages cover the colour spectrum in finely differentiated shades moving from black back to black again. When opened at a double spread, the colour so strongly evokes a place, an object, a location or a situation that the associated sensory sensation is directly experienced. Thus a bright yellow-orange is an entry into a volcano and a dark blue-green is a reminder into a volcano and a dark blue-green is a reminder of deep sea where eels and fish swim and splash your face. 8 The Vesalius Anatomy of Birth. Vesalius produced the first authoritative anatomy book; it is astonishing in its detail, macabre in its single-mindedness. This Anatomy of Birth, a second volume now lost, is even more disturbing and heretical. It concentrates on the mysteries of birth. It is full of descriptive drawings of the workings of the human body which, when the pages open, move and throb and bleed. It is a banned book that queries the unnecessary processes of ageing, bemoans the wastages associated with progeneration, condemns the pains and anxieties of childbirth and generally questions the efficiency of God. 9 An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead. This a funereal volume, long and slim and bound in silver bark. It contains all the names of the dead who have lived on earth. The first name is Adam and the last is Susannah, Prospero's wife. The names are written in many inks and many calligraphies and are arranged in long columns that sometimes reflect the alphabet, sometimes a chronology of history, but often use taxonomies that are complicated to unravel, such that you may search many years to find a name, but be sure

151 it will be there. The pages of the book are very old and are watermarked with a collection of designs for tombs and columbariums, elaborate headstones, graves, sarcophagi and other architectural follies for the dead, suggesting the book had other purposes, even before the death of Adam. 10 A Book Travellers' Tales. This is a book that is much damaged, as though used a great deal by children who have treasured it. The scratched and rubbed crimson leather covers, once inlaid with a figurative gold design, are now so worn that the pattern is ambiguous and a fit subject for much speculation. It contains those marvels that travellers talk of and are not believed. 'Men whose heads stood in their breasts', 'bearded women, a rain of frogs, cities of purple ice, singing camels, Siamese twins', 'mountaineers dew-lapped like bulls'. It is full of illustrations and has little text. 11 The Book of the Earth. A thick book covered in khaki-coloured webbing, its pages are impregnated with the minerals, acids, alkalis, elements, gums, poisons, balms and aphrodisiacs of the earth. Strike a thick scarlet page with your thumbnail to summon fire. Lick a grey paste from another page to bring poisonous death. Soak a further page in water to cure anthrax. Dip another in milk to make soap. Rub two illustrated pages together to make acid. Lay your head on another page to change the colour of your hair. With this book Prospero savored the geology of the island. With its help, he mined for salt and coal, water and mercury; and also for gold, not for his purse, but for his arthritis. 12 A Book of Architecture and Other Music. When the pages are opened in this book, plans and diagrams spring up fully-formed. There are definitive models of buildings constantly shaded by moving cloud-shadow. Noontime piazzas fill and empty with noisy crowds, lights flicker in nocturnal urban landscapes and music is played in the halls and towers. With this book, Prospero rebuilt the island into a palace of libraries that recapitulate all the architectural idea of the Renaissance. 13 The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotour. This book reflects on the experience of the Minotaur, the most celebrated progeny of bestiality. It has an impeccable classical mythology to explain provenances and pedigrees that include Leda, Europa, Daedalus, Theseus and Ariadne. Since Caliban - like centaurs, mermaids, harpies, the sphinx, vampires and werewolves - is the offspring of bestiality, he would find this book of great interest. Mocking Ovid's Metamorphoses, it tells the story of ninety-two hybrids. It should have told a hundred, but the puritanical Theseus had heard enough and slew the Minotaur before he could finish. When opened, the book exudes yellow steam and it coats the fingers with a black oil.

152 14 The Book of Languages. This is a large, thick book with a blue-green cover that rainbow-hazes in the light. More a box than a book, it opens in unorthodox fashion, with a door in its front cover. Inside is a collection of eight smaller books arranged like bottles in a medicine case. Behind these eight books are another eight books, and so on. To open the smaller books is to let loose many languages. Words and sentences, paragraphs and chapters gather like tadpoles in a pond in April or starlings in a November evening sky. 15 End-plants. Looking like log of ancient, seasoned wood, this is a herbal to end all herbals, concerning itself with the most venerable plants that govern life and death. It is a thick block of a book with varnished wooden covers that have been at one time, and probably still are, inhabited by minute tunneling insects. The pages are stuffed with pressed plants and flowers, corals and sea weeds, and around the book hover exotic butterflies, dragonflies, fluttering moths, bright beetles and a cloud of golden pollen-dust. It is simultaneously a honeycomb, a hive, a garden and an ark for insects. It is an encyclopedia of pollen, scent and pheromone. 16 A Book of Love. This is a small, slim, scented volume bound in red and gold, with knotted crimson ribbons for page-markers. There is certainly an image in the book of a naked man and a naked woman, and also an image of pair of clasped hands. These things were once spotted, briefly, in a mirror, and that mirror was in another book. Everything else is conjecture. 17 A Bestiary of Past, Present and Future Animals. This is a large book, a thesaurus of animals, real, imaginary and apocryphal. With this book Prospero can recognize cougars and marmosets and fruit bats and manticores and dromersels, the cameleopard, the chimera and the cattamorrain. 18 The Book of Utopia. This is a book of ideal societies. With the front cover bound in gold leather and the back bound in black slate, it has five hundred pages, six hundred and sixty-six indexed entries and a preface by Sir Thomas More. The first entry is a consensus description of Heaven and the last is one of Hell. There will always be someone on earth whose utopian ideal will be Hell. In the remaining pages of the book, every known and every imagined political and social community is described and evaluated, and twenty-five pages are devoted to tables where the characteristics of all societies can be isolated, permitting a reader to sort and match his own utopian ideal 19 The Book of Universal Cosmography. Full of printed diagrams of great complexity, this book attempts to place all universal phenomena in one system. The diagrams are

153 etched into the pages - disciplined geometrical figures, concentric rings that circle and countercircle, tables and lists organized in spirals, catalogues arranged on a simplified body of man, who, moving, sets the lists in new orders, moving diagrams of the solar system. The book deals in a mixture of the metaphorical and the scientific and is dominated by a great diagram showing the Union of Man and Woman - Adam and Eve - in a structured universe where all things have their allotted place and an obligation to be fruitful. 20. Love of Ruins. An antiquarian's handbook, a checklist of the ancient world for the Renaissance humanist interested in antiquity. Full of maps and plans of the archaeological sites of the world, temples, towns and ports, graveyards and ancient roads, measurements of one hundred thousand statues of Hermes, Venus and Hercules, descriptions of every discovered obelisk and pedestal of the Mediterranean, street plans of Thebes, Ostia and Atlantis, a directory of the possessions of Sejanus, the tablets of Heraclitus, the signatures of Pythagoras; an essential volume for the melancholic historian who knows that nothing endures. The book's proportions are like a block of stone, forty by thirty by twenty centimeters, the colour of blue-veined marble, chalky to the touch, with crisp, stiff pages printed in classical fonts with no W or J. 21 The Autobiographies of Pasiphae and Semiramis is a pornography. It is a blackened and thumbed volume whose illustrations leave small ambiguity as to the book's content. The pages are grey-green and scattered with a sludge green powder, curled black hairs and stains of blood and other substances. The slightest taint of steam or smoke rises from the pages when the book is opened, and it is always warm - like the little heat apparent in drying plaster or in flat stones after the sun has set. The pages leave acidic stains on the fingers and it is advisable to wear gloves when reading the volume. 22 A Book of Motion. This is a book that at the most simple level describes how birds fly and waves roll, how clouds form and apples fall from trees. It describes how the eye changes its shape when looking at great distances, how hairs grow in a beard, why the heart flutters and the lungs inflate involuntarily and how laughter changes the face. At its most complex level, it explains how ideas chase one another in the memory and where thought goes when it is finished with. It is covered in tough blue leather and, because it is always bursting open of its own volition, it is bound around with two leather strips buckled tightly at the spine. At night, it drums against the bookcase shelf and has to be held down with a brass weight. One of its sections is called 'The Dance of Nature' and here, codified and explained in animated drawings, are all the possibilities for dance in the human body.

154 23 The Book of Games. This is a book of board games of infinite supply. Chess is but one game in a thousand in this volume, merely occupying two pages, pages 112 and 113. The book contains board games to be played with counters and dice, with cards and flags and miniature pyramids, small figures of the Olympic gods, the winds in coloured glass, Old Testament prophets in bone, Roman busts, the oceans of the world, exotic animals, pieces of coral, gold putti, silver coins and pieces of liver. The board games represented in the book cover as many situations as there are experiences. There are games of death, resurrection, love, peace, famine, sexual cruelty, astronomy, the cabbala, statesman craft, the stars, destruction, the future, phenomenology, magic, retribution, semantics, evolution. There are boards of red and black triangles, grey and blue diamonds, pages of text, diagrams of the brain, Arabic carpets, boards in the shape of the constellations, animals, maps, journeys to Hell and journeys to Heaven. 24 Thirty-Six plays. This is a thick, printed volume of plays dated 1623. All thirty-six plays are there save one - the first. Nineteen pages are left blank for its inclusion. It is called The Tempest. The folio collection is modestly bound in dull green linen with cardboard covers and the author's initials are embossed in gold on the cover - W.S. (28) In this fascinating description of the twenty four Prospero's books we can glimpse Peter Greenaway's vision of his art, which, for him, undoubtedly is the ideal high art of our times. This art is a synthesis of all that has been achieved and preserved by mankind over the ages. The passion which seems to inflame Greenaway in this film is the discovery of an ability to create, simultaneously, the art of all the past, present and future epochs, even as far as retrieving the past treasures which seem to have been irretrievably lost. Peter Greenaway insists on reviving the approach to knowledge and art which he believes was typical at the end of the Renaissance: the choice of Prospero's books is both highly systematic and haphazard. They speak of life, death, love, the structure of the cosmos and society, of history in all the senses of this word: history as the grand scheme of human time, history as the way we tell our stories of this human time and history as an anecdote. At the same time the choice of subject, topics, materials, things, drawings and the like included in the books is both highly idiosyncratic and exhaustive; there is definitely no cause-and effect connection between the books themselves. Each book is also an entire world. It is the opposite of the idea of the book as it was known from Gutenberg's time to our own. It is a magical book which physically includes everything it describes. It is also an analogue of a modern computer, only working with matter, colors, movements and body functions and feeling rather than binary codes. In a way, paintbox is the issue, the message in this film of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", almost to the extent that legitimacy and faithfulness were in the play itself. In order to appreciate this one should turn to Peter Greenaway's own description of his technique:

155 THE PAINTBOX IMAGES The script of Prospero' Books calls for the manufacture of magical volumes that embody their contents beyond text and conventional illustration.Prospero, sixteenth-century scholar and magus, would no doubt call upon the most contemporary state-of-the-art techniques that the legacy of the Gutenberg revolution could offer. The newest Gutenberg technology - and to talk of a comparable revolution may not be to exaggerate - is the digital, electronic Graphic Paintbox. This machine, as its name suggests, links the vocabulary of electronic picture-making with the traditions of the artist's pen, palette and brush, and like them permits a personal signature. I believe its possibilities could radically affect cinema, television, photography, painting and printing (and maybe much else), allowing them to reach degrees of sophistication not before considered. Although the paintbox can be seen as a collaging tool of which Schwitters and Heartfield would have been envious, the image manipulation it makes possible cannot satisfactorily be contained in the word collage. For the paintbox can change the shape, form, contrast, colour, tone, texture, ratio and scale of any given material, then store the resulting infinite solutions for reappraisal. With additional equipment, this material can then be reproduced as film, as audio-tape and as still-photograph. If uniqueness is considered desirable, it is possible to make a unique image. If infinite reproduction is required, then as far as the digital paintbox is concerned, there is no fear of quality loss. No special technical ability is necessary to operate the machine and competent familiarity can be achieved quickly. However, its potential, as always, depends on the audacity, imagination and pictorial sophistication of the user. The paintbox operator sits at a table in front of a large television monitor and holds an electronic stylus of familiar pen-like shape and usage above an acutely sensitive electronic pad. On the screen is a menu of functions: select, draw, paint, brush-size, chalk, stencil, cut-out, lay-out, delete, browse, restore, save, overlay, flood, airbrush, mask, erase; there is access to archive and library, and to palette from which colours can be mixed to an infinite number of nuances. The film of Prospero's Books acknowledges its many sources in a text written by a latesixteenth-century English dramatist whose business was illusion and theatre, who wrote about an Italian scholar beholden to books, a man whose imaginative world came from his researches into Greek, Roman and Renaissance scholarship. In the making of the film, there has been an attempt to find those processes at work in image as well as in text. many of these images concern the indigenous spirits of the island that Prospero has refashioned to suit his Renaissance scholarship. One of them is The Juggler, a one-sixthpart attempt to fathom the nature of the Fool, but like all the creatures on the island she had other roles before the advent of Prospero's colonial rule.

156 THE JUGGLER 'Prospero wanted a Fool to enliven his morning procession. He wanted to have some wit about him; someone fearlessly to cauterize his soul with home truths. He could not find one. It was too difficult a post and too irksome a responsibility. The available material, though, willing, was not sophisticated enough to hold the opposing characteristics and the contradictory talents. So Prospero split the Foolish Allegory into six parts. 'why do you laugh at a fool? You laugh at a clever and showy skill. A jester is adroit and plays skilful games. He might juggle. A juggler needs a facility of balance, a quickness of hand and a desire to deceive the eye.' 'Prospero looked for jugglers. He looked for twinkling eyes and the smell of sweat and pepper, for he remembered a Milanese court entertainer who had just those characteristics. After a quick appraisal, for Prospero could not be seen to spend too long on such a humble appointment, the most likely candidate proved to be a naked, brightorange bacchante with wide hips who juggled balls and fruit, scientific instruments and defenseless small animals. But Prospero did not know that he had picked an immigrant. She had been a stowaway in the boat left by the sailors who had brought the disgraced, blue-eyed, big bellied belly dancer Sycorax. Just like Prospero, Sycorax had been sent into exile. But Sycorax had carnally consorted with the Devil. Had Prospero carnally consorted with the Devil? Only The Devil in books. This juggler had juggled figures for the Algerian witch. She had been her book-keeper, her cabbalistic counter, her numbers advocate. 'For Prospero, this little laughing, orange, juggling creature played the juggling part during the day but was a professional fornicator at night. Maybe the roles were interchangeable. She dyed her body orange by laying in a wet iron-pit and her partners soon knew each other. Every marked fornicator could see so many others on the beach each morning. The juggler's eagerness to please Prospero in her diurnal role eventually affected her nocturnal fee. For she asked her satirical clients for objects to juggle with, preferably brightlycoloured, for she had a notion that Prospero had been colour-blinded by reading too many black-and-white books. She savored the eccentric object, a potato shaped like a dwarf's foot, a pebble with holes like eyes, a Venus fruit-nut scarred to suggest rape, a petrified apple bitten by Eve. 'And then a reversal occurred. She began to exchange her roles. Trying to annex quality in her nocturnal clientele by exhibitions of her skill, she juggled with mathematical solids, splashing herself with her own stale milk, fearful that her orange body could not be seen among the dark columned corridors. The clients grew bored and moved to other pastures to browse their sensual taste. To distract her from her ellipses of circulating dizziness, she was left only with the very old, the very young and the very simple-minded. 'Continuing to confuse her responsibilities, she began to accept professional advances by day, especially from the lazy, imitation scholars who ought to have been pretending to read the books in the alchemical section of Prospero's library. Finally she perfected juggling and fornicating by day and by night as simultaneous activities. In disappointed

157 exasperation, Prospero turned his head the other way and sought his Fool elsewhere.' To provide a background for many possible images in the film, a library of some thousand or more small 'field frames' was made - each some 8 by 6 centimeters - painted or drawn on paper in various media - paint, ink, graphite, pastel - in sequential book-form, stressing the painterly characteristics of mass, volume and color in preference to line. Because these images were comparatively small, the enlargement necessary to make them useful also enlarged the grain and texture of the paper thereby stressing their manufacture. The picture ratio of the new Hi-Vision television image is approximately 1 to 1.78-a landscape ratio beginning to approach the dimensions of the cinemascope-screen (conventional television monitors have a ratio of 1 to 1.33), so the first step in the manufacture of the portrait-image of The Juggler - was to record the selected field frame on a Hi-Definition rostrum camera and refashion and rebuild it to fit the 1.78 ratio of the new screen. This process is swiftly managed on the paintbox by selecting desirable areas of colour and texture out of the frame and re-positioning and blending them. Sections of the textured framing of the original small drawing can literally be 'picked up', duplicated and re-deposited to extend the new framing, without in any way diminishing or deteriorating the sections by their removal. Satisfied, for the moment, with the new shaped field-frame (though infinite subsequent alterations are possible), a coloured 35 mm photographic transparency taken of a filmextra personifying The Juggler, is re-photographed on to tape on the rostrum camera linked with the paintbox. The image is electronically cropped to be used twice. First it is enlarged three times to be used in the left foreground of the image and then, decreased by fifty per cent, it is placed in the right midground. These two newly fashioned images are then arranged independently - and with as much touch precision as required. Any extraneous material that surrounds the waist-high portrait of the smiling orange woman can be cut, cropped, shaded away, re-coloured or reblended to emphasize her presence. Obelisk-ornaments from the library behind the smaller woman's head have been left to provide links to the later architectural additions. Since the description of the allegorical creature concerns her dual rules as night-time fornicator and day-time juggler, the larger foreground image is blackened and masked by selecting black graphite texture from a field-frame, and scumbling it on her face in varying degrees of thickness using different sized 'electronic' brush-sizes. As much time and detailing as is considered necessary can be used to apply the texturing and, if the result is not satisfactory, then the effects can be effortlessly wiped and the process restarted without interference to the already existing material - a unique facility not encountered in other image-making experiences. When the night and day-time figures of The Juggler are completed - their relevance to one another and to the total image can be adjusted in tone and contrast, by masking techniques and colour adjustments. Architectural space and architectural cultural reference on Prospero's rebuilt island are suggested by the collaging of a Piranisi print of grandiose architecture into the image. The black-and-white print quality of the original is retained to emphasise the notion of it being

158 a quoted reference - Prospero is acknowledged in the film as an eclectic architectural scholar, perfectly capable of prophetic borrowing (Piranesi wasn't born till 1720, some 161 years after Prospero's island landing in 1559). To place the architecture in the same space as the two figures, the nearer columns have been brushed in with the orange colour 'lifted' from the base of the image itself. With the electronic stylus now used directly as a sharply-nibbed pen, to acnowledge The Juggler's determination to be seen in the dark, the ivywreath leaves in her hair are outlined in a manufactured dark blue, and then, on command, filled or 'flooded' with a flat, matt white. The whole is again toned in with more black 'graphite' scumbling to prevent the sharp white addition jumping forward or creating optical 'holes' in the picture-surface. A distant - and very slightly blasphemous - reference to the architectural framework of a traditional sacra conversatione as painted by Bellini or Mantegna (two serious painters of allegory) sections of the grey frame are taken from the partially manufactured image and reconstructed around the second Juggler's head. She is thus provided with a frame for a line of text spoken by Caliban expressing the true feelings felt by the island spirits towards Prospero's identifying cloak. The secondary message of the sentence is coloured in bright red, Caliban's colour of violence and carnality which is less readable, being partially camouflaged against the background, reflecting Caliban's fear of exposure as a malcontent. Other textural resonances are 'juggled' with in the word 'rootedly'. The printed text itself - with its distressed font - is a direct quotation photographed and enlarged from a facsimile edition of the 1623 folio of Shakespeare's plays - the first known source of the complete Shakespearean opus of 36 works that has The Tempest as its first play. As regards the film, to use the Shakespearean posthumous printed text in this way is an especial irony, since Prospero is seen writing the text of The Tempest with a truncated quill, precursor of the electric stylus, producing a longhand manuscript that - like all other Shakespearean manuscripts - has never been seen. The film's ending interferes with chronology and history and plays a game with this loss that is lamented by every Shakespearean enthusiast. To imply a continuity with the other five parts of the Fool . . . simpleton, pendant, prig, pimp and drunk . . . a residue of the facsimile folio text is seen creeping off into the next frame where the significance of the letters will be demonstrated. To complete the smiling bogus portrait of The Juggler further, she holds two hand-sized balls, conventionalised attributes of her juggling and her sexual services, but converted into flat-colour, 'unjuggleable' discs - representing the day and the night sky - the two opposites of her working role as nocturnal fornicator and daytime juggler . . . and by a further 'unjuggleable' open framework red cube. It is here placed in its own private space beneath, dimly seen from the original library photograph - a three-dimensional model of the juggling of the planets caught in a frozen moment . . . operated by Prospero's Providence, the Great Juggler . . . and indication . . . if by now indication is needed - of The Juggler's original role as Sycorax's numerologist and geometrician. All of which is a nicely tuned conceit to illuminate the role of deception implied by Prospero's magic and by the illusion and deception practiced by a playwright . . . and maybe by a film-maker in

159 the manufacture of cinema, and maybe indeed practiced by a film-maker in his description of the manufacture of an image. (29) The "paintbox" of Peter Greenaway is by now familiar to many users of computer graphics and painting software, like 'Corel Draw'. At the time of the creation of the film it was of the pioneer attempts at combining the new possibilities of computer graphics and painting with cinema. It appears that only Greenaway went in the direction of creating multiple and overlaying images. Others applied these methods to create special effects in animated cartoons or in normal "realistic" films. The highly self-referential description which Greenaway gave to his method of film painting conjures up the potent images of art and science being at each other's service. Greenaway relishes the destruction of "Prospero's Books" which he shows in the closing shots of the film, but he is unwilling to part with the magic of science which produced his own film. Although in his films since "Prospero's Books" he has not returned to the paintbox medium, it is evident from the amount of effort, attention and enthusiasm he invested in the medium and his own description thereof that he views it as his own lasting contribution to art. Another thing seems to be obvious too. In comparison with the paintbox presentation of Prospero's books in the Prologue and with their later development in the film itself, the traditional Greenaway style of quoting classical paintings loses much of its impact. True, such quotations are always highly impressive, especially when the figure of, John Gielgud appears in Greenaway's quotations of de La Tour's St. Jerome and Bellini's St. Anthony. At the same time much of such quoting, direct or indirect, seems somewhat constructed by the interiors of Prospero's "Poor cell" which, in itself, is a representation of Greenaway's idea of Piranesian architecturewhich includes architectural quotations from Michelangelo. The comparison between the use of classical motifs in "paintbox" and "Juggler" images and their use in "straightfoward" film sequences shows, in our opinion, one interesting point. The "paintbox" and "Juggler" sequences have absolute aesthetic value of their own. One almost feels sorry that those breathtaking images of striking beauty and impact disappear so quickly from the screen to give place to "banal" "people" images performing what in, in fact is a traditional play, even if it is in highly stylized sets and in extremely elaborate costumes. This juxtaposition of "real" film-painting and the representation of classical paintings somehow evokes a feeling of parody, vis-a`-vis the latter. This is especially strong when Greenaway creates, in his own words. "Veronese through Dutch eyes", a composition in which his film-extras are seated like the figures in Veronese's Wedding in Cana, but are dressed in Dutch 17th century costumes. The parody may be appropriate for the scene from "The Tempest" which Greenaway wants to represent (Antonio's conspiracy against Prospero), but it damages both Veronese and Dutch painting. This brings us once again to the question of the high art of our times. At the beginning of this chapter we postulated the need for such high art to be

160 carnivalistic. Without any doubt, "Prospero's Books" comes under the category of carnivalistic high art, and thus all the operations which Greenaway performs with classical painting are legitimate facets of the high art in our times. Why then the feeling that in the "paintbox" sequences one witnesses something more intense, more beautiful, more passionate, in short, something much more germane to "The Tempest" itself, than in other parts of the film ? And in "paintbox" and "Juggler" sequences the carnivalistic element, if anything, is even more pronounced than elsewhere. The answer, in our opinion, lies in the Utopia, the other indispensable component of high art. Utopia in Our Time The social and political utopias have exhausted their useful historic opportunities. The 20th century has witnessed their, let us hope, final collapse, but not before they caused death, destruction and misery not seen before in the annals of humanity. But the basis of utopian aspirations has not disappeared. It is the striving for a better solution for the human condition, for a world more perfect than the one we live in. This striving for perfection has traditionally been at the root of our artistic impulse as well. However, the divorce between formal, technical perfection and the message of art which came to its apex in this century has brought all kinds of utopian aspirations into the realm of art itself, and again, the 20th century saw more than its share of art utopias (let us mention the three most prominent art utopists of this century: Vasily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich and Frank Lloyd Wright). In carnival, there is a powerful utopian streak also: it enables people to establish Gonzalo's utopia for a very brief period here, in their own community, rather than on a far - away island. This utopia is well-understood by Peter Greenaway when he presents it in his film, invented by Prospero, as he reads from his "Book of Utopias" which he holds in front of him:Prospero (playing Gonzalo): I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things: for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound at land, tilth, Vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure: No sovereignty; All things in common nature should produce

161 Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. Prospero (playing Sebastian): No marrying 'mong his subjects ? (playing Antonio): None, man, all idle; whores and knaves. (playing Gonzalo): I would with such perfection govern, sir, T'excel the Golden Age. (30) This carnivalistic utopia is mocked by Shakespeare. Note that this utopia, as, indeed, any social utopia is, incompatible with children. Grown-ups themselves turn into children ("...all idle, whores and knaves") and therefore have no need for them. Greenaway's discovery of paintbox enables him to indulge in his own utopia of science/art which is pure magic. In fact it makes possible to create a kind of utopia envisaged by Gonzalo, not with people as subjects, but with virtual images, who would be in no need of toil for sustenance. The fact that he, so far, chose not to develop any further his scientific and technical ideas for creating art shows that the utopia impulse in his later work proved to be not as strong as it appeared in "Prospero's Books". It appears that the picto-film which we have been discussing in this work has made a remarkable contribution towards establishing new criteria for art in film. Classical painting has been "re-invented" and "re-presented" on film and within film. The film, as world and language, has appeared richer and more meaningful as a result of this meeting of two art media. The utopian inclination so prominent in the works of Jarman, Bartabas and Greenaway gives hope that, probably, somewhere along the road new primary language of modern high art will be formulated or re-invented, as classical tradition of painting has been re-invigorated and re-invented in picto-film , and as film itself became part and parcel of this tradition, in "Prospero's Books". So far it seems that the search for new primary imagery leads artists further into the unknown. Just as Peter Greenaway's "paintboxes" are a tantalizing glimpse into new and fascinating possibilities of film-painting in the direct sense of creating film as classical painters created their paintings, so other film experiments, as well as experiments in other artistic fields show us possible directions for future high art which, as we have stressed,

162 will necessarily be carnivalistic and married to popular or folk tradition and mass culture. One way to create such future high art is to take an almost traditional road of re-inventing, re-writing history. As in Abel Gance's "Napoleon" and Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the Terrible", which represent utopias in the sense of opening up past history before enormous masses of people who are history makers themselves, new huge cinematic spectacles using the most modern cinematographic technological media of computer simulation and image creation and enhancement can create the illusion of freely participating in history, being not only its direct witness, but its creator. Such huge creations as James Cameron's "Titanic" or Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan", due to their sheer size, innovation in the point of view and image formation, escape the confines of popular entertainment and approach the borders of "high art". True, it is not readily recognized as such, but going along this road, film-makers are bound to enter its realm, just as medieval cathedral builders, due to sheer amount of effort, art and time spent on creating their edifices created high art. The new "historical utopia" of these modern spectacles is the utopia of time travel, the utopia of enhanced perception, the utopia of virtual presence in space and time lost forever. In these huge and expensive productions the qualities of "enhancement" and "reality" become simultaneously properties of content (we are to believe that we are really witnessing the sinking of "Titanic" or the D day landing) and function (the films cost enormous budgets to produce and bring in even larger revenues becoming part of real life). At the same time the very scale and involvement of messages make both the production of such films and their "consumption" into a really carnivalistic experience. Another tangible utopia in the modern image-world is that of science itself. Images of colliding galaxies and supernovae brought back to earth by the powerful combination of the Hubble space Telescope and computer imaging create another utopian world of primary images of such impact and intensity that they might form the interpretative frame of reference for our own visual experience. This form of utopia does not involve our immediate virtual presence in those far-away fantastic worlds. It promises, to provide some ultimate understanding for our existence. If the huge Hollywood spectacles promise travel in time beyond our immediate possibilities, this visual utopia promises not only travel in outer space, but in inner space as well. And there is another possible form of modern utopia, that of extending our emotions into the world of other cultures , hitherto completely inaccessible, on even inimical to ourselves. It is in this direction that Peter Greenaway seems to be making his tenuous steps in his films after "Prospero's Books": "The Baby of Macon" and "The Pillow Book" where he tries to represent as comprehensible and accessible in images cultures and cultural forms which are absolutely and utterly foreign and frightening to our average sensibilities: human sacrifice, fetishism etc. This utopia of Greenaway's is somewhat over- intellectual and does not seem to reverberate, for the film-maker himself, with the positive chords, as in "Prospero's Books".

163 A striking example of a possible utopia in which high art carries some kind of positive message and promise is Bartabas' "Theatre Equestre Zingaro" , which is active in the French town of Aubervilliers, (in a film called "Eclipse"). As presented at the end of 1998 on a TV program on the French-German 'Arte' channel, this theater, seen also in the film "Mazeppa", presents a new form of art, a synthesis of Western and Oriental traditions, based on the forms of equestrian circus performance in which horses actually perform as ballet-dancers and ballerinas alongside human performers. The interpretative frame of these human-equine dances is borrowed from the Buddhist and Taoist traditions and presented against the background of highly original Korean and Western-Indian (Rajastani) musical accompaniment. The unity of plastic and movement, music and color results in images of striking and sometimes shattering force. This sort of utopia cannot overstep into the realm of violence (as in the big Hollywood spectacles), cruelty (as in "The Baby of Macon") or inhuman cosmos (as in the images from space). Because real animals are involved whose language in informed by some really primal feelings of warmth and immediacy this modern utopia represents new vistas for high art in which, as in the original high art of the Paleolithic caves, animal appears as the highest source of inspiration and judge.

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Chapter Five: Picto-film and the High Art of Our Time Notes: (1) Aristotle, Poetics, (1967), University of Michigan Press. (2) Immanuel Kant, (1933), "Critique of Pure Reason", London. (3) Ann Hollander, (1991), "Moving Pictures", Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Introduction. (4) Herman Cohen, (1907), "Asthetik des reinen Willens", Berlin. (5) Mikail Bakhtin, (1981), "The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays", Ed. Holoquist, M. University of Texas Press. Austin (6) Julia Kristeva,(1978) "Semiotike: Reacherches pour une Semanalyse", Editions du Seuil, Paris. (7) Mikail Bakhtin, op cit. (8) Jarman, Derek, (1986) . "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio. The complete Film Script and Commentaries", Photographs by Gerald Incandel, Thames and Hudson. plates pp. 31, 41, 43, 49, 50 among many others. (9) Ibid., p.75. (10) Ibid., p. 34 (11) Ibid., p.112. (12) From Guilio Mancini, "Considerazioni sulla Pittura", c.1617, quoted from "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio", op cit., p.18. (13) Baglione In : "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio", op cit., p. 9. (14) "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio", op cit., p.13 (15) Wilde, Oscar; (1927), "The Poems of Oscar Wilde", NewYork, Boni and Liveright. (16) "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio", op cit., 47, 50, 61 etc. (17) Ibid., p. 94 (18) Ibid., p. 44 (19) Ibid., p. 78

165 (20) Byron , George Gordon, Lord, "A Selection from his Poems", by A. S. B. Glover, (1954),The Penguin Poets, Great-Britain. pp. 113-116 (IX,X,XI) (21) Ibid., pp. 120-121, XV (22) Ibid., p.128 (23) "The Riverside Shakespeare" (1974) Houghton Mifflin company, Boston. P.1634 (24) Ibid., p. 1614. (25) Ibid., p. 1613. (26) "Prospero's Books". A Film of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" by Peter Greenaway. (1991) Four Walls Eight Windoes, New York, p. 12. (27) Ibid., pp. 12-13. (28) Ibid., pp. 17-25. (29) Ibid., pp. 28-33. (30) Ibid., pp. 113.

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172 Catalolgues L'Exposition - "Peinture - Cinema - Peinture"†, Octobre 1989, Museés de Marseilles et le Centre Pompidu. Paris. L'Exposition - "Passage de L'Image" Centre Pompidu , Paris 1990 &†San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1992. "Art on Screen", a Directory of Films and Videos about the Visual Arts, A Joint Venture of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust ,1991. New York. "Picasso a L'Ecran",(1992), Centre Pompidu. Paris. Scripts Jarman, Derek, "Derek Jarman's Caravaggio. The complete Film Script and Commentaries", Photographs by Gerald Incandel, (1986).Thames and Hudson, London. Greenaway, Peter, Drowning by Numbers, (1988). Faber and Faber, London. Greenaway, Peter, Fear of Drowning by Numbers, (1988).

Dis Voir, Paris.

Greenaway, Peter, Prospero's Books, A Film of Shakespeare's The Tempest. (1991). Four Walls Eight Windows, New York. Greenaway, Peter, The Belly of an Architect, (1988). Faber and Faber, London. Greenaway, Peter, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, (1989). Dis Voir, Paris.

173

The films list: 1. "A Zed and Two Noughts", by Peter Greenaway, (1985). 2. "All the Vermeer's in New-York", by Jon Jost, (1990). 3. "The Draughtsman's Contract", by Peter Greenaway, (1982). 4. "The Belly of an Architect", by Peter Greenaway, (1987). 5. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", by Peter Greenaway, (1989). 6. "Vincent and Theo", by Robert Altman, (1990). 7. "Dreams" ("Crows"), by Akira Kurosawa, (1990). 8. "La Belle Noiseuse", by Jacques Rivette, (1992). 9. "The Moderns", by Alan Rudolf, (1988). 10. "Caravaggio", by Derek Jarman, (1986). 11. "Mazeppa", by Bartabas, (1992). 12. "Prospero's Books", by Peter Greenaway, (1991).

The Album: Painting / Cinema List of Illustrations

1. "A Zed and Two Noughts", by Peter Greenaway, (1985). 2. "All the Vermeer's in New-York", by Jon Jost, (1990). 3. "The Draughtsman's Contract", by Peter Greenaway, (1982). 4. "The Belly of an Architect", by Peter Greenaway, (1987). 5. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", by Peter Greenaway, (1989). 6. "Vincent and Theo", by Robert Altman, (1990). 7. "Dreams" ("Crows"), by Akira Kurosawa, (1990). 8. "La Belle Noiseuse", by Jacques Rivette, (1992). 9. "The Moderns", by Alan Rudolf, (1988). 10. "Caravaggio", by Derek Jarman, (1986). 11. "Mazeppa", by Bartabas, (1992). 12. "Prospero's Books", by Peter Greenaway, (1991).

Film clips 1. "A Zed and Two Noughts", by Peter Greenaway (1985). The Vermerishness: A Cinematic Pictorialization of Vermeer's paintings:"The Girl with the Red Hat", "The Artist and His Model", "The Concert". 2. "All the Vermeer's in New-York", by Jon Jost, (1990). The museum sequence 3. "The Draughtsman's Contract", by Peter Greenaway, (1982). Greenaway's use of the Restoration painting: individual and group portraits and still life. The tree Boulevard sequence: a cinematic presentation of a museum 4. "The Belly of an Architect", by Peter Greenaway, (1987). The city of Rome - architecture and the human body - The motifs of the belly fragments as whole and whole as fragments. The semiotic enhancement and the "providers of stylistic features". 5. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", by Peter Greenaway's Frans Hals and Cinematic Dutch Still Life.

Greenaway, (1989).

6. "Vincent and Theo", by Robert Altman, (1990) Meet the "real" Van Gogh : Reality - (Christie's auction) vs. Fiction- (the Van Gogh brothers). The panorama sequence - "Reality enhancement". 7. "Dreams" ("Crows"), by Akira Kurosawa, (1990) The Cinematic Contemplation - "Entering" Van Gogh's Paintings. The Cinematic visual possibilities at work - Blow-up of Van Gogh's Paintings : Color, brush strokes and composition. 8. "La Belle Noiseuse", by Jacques Rivette, (1992). The Artist and his Model - Actual process of drawing and painting. 9. "The Moderns", by Alan Rudolf, (1988). "The Real Fake" - The motif of the "reality" of the fake and the unreality of the originals. 10. "Caravaggio", by Derek Jarman, (1986). The Title sequence - the film as a large canvas painting of "Caravaggio". The Medusa sequence. Tableau Vivant - "The Concert of Youth" Profane Love

Baglione as 'Marat' in the Bath. 11. "Mazeppa", by Bartabas, (1992). Gericault and the 'Idea of the Horse'. 12."Prospero's Books", by Peter Greenaway, (1991). The New Museum - A proccession of Cinematic Paintings in Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Tableau Vivant - Veronese in Dutch Eyes.

Contents : Overview: I - XVI Chapter One: Introduction : 1 Film on Art: History and Theory: 19 A Theory of Picto-film: 30 Notes: 49 Chapter Two : Painting at a Cinematic Glance: Introduction: 53 Painting at a Cinematic Glance: 58 "A Zed and Two Noughts": 60 - Vermeer the Painter: 65 - The painting - "The Music Lesson": 72 - The cinematic Pictorialization of "The Artist Model": 75 - The Story of The Girl with a Red Hat: 78 - Vermeer's Apogee in Greenaway's Concert: 80 - Some General Pictorial Categories Prominent "Z.O.O.": 81 - The Search for "The Real": 85 - The Collage of Quotation and Culture and Art References: 87 - The Dominance of Visual, Pictorial and Style: 88

- "Z.O.O." as Realization of the Concept of the

and His

in

Cinematic

New

Museum: 90 "All the Vermeers in New-York" : 93 - Camera Work and the Museum Sequence: 95 - The "Look Askance" and the world of Money: 101 Notes: 105 Chapter Three: The Enhancement of the Picto Message Introduction: 108 Peter Greenaway's "The Draughtman's - The Portrait : 119 - The Interior - The Outside: 123 Peter Greenaway's "The Belly of an Architect":

Contract" : 113

Introduction: 129 Synopsis : 134 - The Semiotic Enhancement: 137 "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover":

Synopsis:

153 - Delight and Disgust in the Dutch Still-Life: 154 Notes: 166 Chapter Four: The Search for the Real Introduction: 168 - Meet the Real Van Gogh -"Vincent and Theo": 171

- Dreaming of Vincent - "Dreams" ("Crows") : 184 - Reality in the Film and Reality on the Canvas: 191 "La Belle Noiseuse" : 193 "The Moderns" : 197 Notes : 202 Chapter Five : Picto-film and the High Art of Our Time - Theoretical Aspects of Art and High Art in our 203 - The High Art and the Low Life: Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" : 229 "Mazeppa" or The Idea of the Horse: Gericault, and Pirosmani: 247 "Prospero's Books": The Art of Science: 262 - Utopia in our Time: 299 Notes: 306

Times:

- Byron

Attached: an Illustrated Album and a Video Tape with Visual examples from all films.

The films list: 1. "A Zed and Two Noughts", by Peter Greenaway, (1985). 2. "All the Vermeer's in New-York", by Jon Jost, (1990). 3. "The Draughtsman's Contract", by Peter Greenaway, (1982). 4. "The Belly of an Architect", by Peter Greenaway, (1987). 5. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", by Peter Greenaway, (1989). 6. "Vincent and Theo", by Robert Altman, (1990). 7. "Dreams" ("Crows"), by Akira Kurosawa, (1990). 8. "La Belle Noiseuse", by Jacques Rivette, (1992). 9. "The Moderns", by Alan Rudolf, (1988). 10. "Caravaggio", by Derek Jarman, (1986). 11. "Mazeppa", by Bartabas, (1992). 12. "Prospero's Books", by Peter Greenaway, (1991).