🎨 Inneresting #248 - Where Film Meets Fine Art

Painting, film, and television all use a framed image to communicate with the audience. If you're watching for them, you can see the moments that filmmakers bring to life from someone else's canvas. Vugar Efendi assembled a great collection of examples in a video series Film Meets Art:

You can also watch part 2 and part 3 for additional examples.

Jamie Limond and Samuel O’Donnell take a broader view on paintings in movies, focusing on not only the use of existing paintings as a visual touchstone, but the ways that films will commission artists to create new work or interpret existing schools of art. Dominic Witek gathers 10 moments where art becomes a prominent reference point, including the doubly meta use of the Louvre museum in The Dreamers to not only feature the art on the walls, but a scene that calls back to a mad dash through the museum done for the film Bande a Part.

There's also a searchable archive of times paintings appear in movies at Paintings in Movies.

Let's not forget when artists are the subject of a film. George D. Allan considers the term “suffering artist” and what it means when applied to the 2002 film Frida, which dramatized Kahlo’s life and the creation of many of her works:

We might find it impossible to comprehend how a woman whose baby “came out in pieces” could possibly harness the strength to interpret the trauma of that experience through calm strokes of a brush—while fully understanding how that kind of loss might only be adequately articulated in a way that reaches beyond words. This is why Diego, who lives through the language of art, only breaks down in tears over the event after looking at the painting Frida creates in the immediate aftermath of their loss. This devastating scene reminds us how the power of great art can break the dams holding back emotions we often labor so mightily to keep in check.

Jascha Hannover responds to the Artist as Protagonist genre with a withering take on the exclusionary nature of depicting artists as pre-ordained geniuses, and not showing the process of creating art that could inform and de-mystify this process for the potential artists of the future.

"But aren't these things that a cinematographer and director would think about? How does this apply to writers?" That's a fair point, contrary reader I just made up.

• Exposing yourself to paintings can help you think about how to write visually. What elements of the painting tell a story? What could be the purpose of each thing within the frame? Why focus on this moment?
• When depicting artists, or any other person whose craft requires practice and skill, an appreciation for the reality of making these works can help find ways of telling these stories without relying on the expected cliches and shorthand.
• Imagine your characters walking around an art museum. What would grab their attention? What would confuse them? Make them cry? What would make them sit down and ponder? Even if there's no place for it in the story, what can you learn about their inner life from their reactions?

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Previously on Inneresting…

In case you missed it, last issue’s most clicked link was, "On the Best (Worst) Best Man Speech Ever (at My Super Mario-Themed Wedding)" by Mike Drucker.

What else is inneresting?

• Corey Taylor tells the story of how seeing Faith No More perform on the Video Music Awards helped pull him out of the lowest point in his life. 
• Sophia Satchell-Baeza takes a closer look at films made by children.
• Nate DiMeo's podcast The Memory Palace shares the story of The Six Triple Eight: The WAC unit that organized mail delivery for Allied soldiers in Europe.

And that’s what’s inneresting this week!

Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team. 

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🗣 Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, Bluesky @ccsont.bsky.social, or Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art.