Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The visual image is the common denominator of cinema and painting, and indeed many filmmakers have used the imagery of paintings to shape or enrich the meaning of their films. In this discerning new approach to cinema studies, Angela Dalle Vacche discusses how the use of pictorial sources in film enables eight filmmakers to comment on the interplay between the arts, on the dialectic of word and image, on the relationship between artistic creativity and sexual difference, and on the tension between tradition and modernity.

Specifically, Dalle Vacche explores Jean-Luc Godard's iconophobia ( Pierrot Le Fou ) and Andrei Tarkovsky's iconophilia ( Andrei Rubleov ), Kenji Mizoguchi's split allegiances between East and West ( Five Women around Utamaro ), Michelangelo Antonioni's melodramatic sensibility ( Red Desert ), Eric Rohmer's project to convey interiority through images ( The Marquise of O ), F. W. Murnau's debt to Romantic landscape painting ( Nosferatu ), Vincente Minnelli's affinities with American Abstract Expressionism ( An American in Paris ), and Alain Cavalier's use of still life and the close-up to explore the realms of mysticism and femininity ( Thérèse ).

While addressing issues of influence and intentionality, Dalle Vacche concludes that intertextuality is central to an appreciation of the dialogical nature of the filmic medium, which, in appropriating or rejecting art history, defines itself in relation to national traditions and broadly shared visual cultures.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• A Thematic and Intertextual Approach
• Chapter 1 An American in Paris: Painting as Psychic Upheaval
• Chapter 2 Red Desert: Painting as Ventriloquism and Color as Movement-
• Chapter 3 The Marquise of O: Painting Thoughts, Listening to Images-
• Chapter 4 Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou: Cinema as Collage against Painting-
• Chapter 5 Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev: Cinema as the Restoration of Icon Painting-
• Chapter 6 Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema-
• Chapter 7 Five Women around Utamaro: Film between Woodblock Printing and Tattooing-
• Chapter 8 Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In this ground-breaking study, the author shows how eight films variously define painting as an art. In An American in Paris (1951), Vincent Minnelli uses French art "to interrogate himself about his persona as an artist or auteur." The central narrative issue in The Red Desert (1964) is "the power relations between male and female, director and actress." The Marquise of O (1976) "achieves pictorialism by transforming painting into what cannot be seen." Pierrot le fou (1966) advances collage because portraiture, which "stands for a belief in a coherent and unified subjectivity," is no longer possible in modern life. Andrei Rublev (1966) recovers the religious function of Russian icon painting. In Nosferatu (1922) the vampire "stands for Murnau's ambivalence about his historical position between cinema and painting," specifically the German Romantic landscape painting of Caspar David Friedrich. In Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), Kenji Mizoguchi compares cinema to woodblock printing and tattooing, analyzing "the clash of rigid social rules and mercantile demands against the workings of male creativity and the transgressive nature of female desire." Alain Cavalier uses the close up in Therese (1986) to make the still life "no longer the setting for a disturbing female presence but the stage for the positive feminization of masculine figures." For all the wide range of art references, the readings of the films are rigorous and sensitive as film criticism. This art historian knows film. Upper-division undergraduate and above. M. Yacowar University of Calgary