You are on page 1of 11

Painting and Cinema: The Frames of Discourse

Lynne Kirby
Pascal Bonitzer, Decadrages: Peinture et cinema (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema/
Editions de l'Etoile, 1985)
From the beginning of Decadrages, Pascal Bonitzer tells us that his
essayson relations between painting and cinema will not concern films
about painters or famous paintings; nor will they focus on paintings
considered to be "cinematographic" in the representation of move-
ment. Rather, Bonitzer is interested in a less obvious, more subtle, and
more or less secret relation between the two media. The connections
have to do with shared techniques and premises: "The cinema would
meet with artistic problems, or use for its own purposes, effects that
painting had already treated . . . for the cinema is concerned, in its
way, with the still image, while painting has, in its own way, something
to do with movement" (p.7).
Instead of painterly cinematic compositions or iconography handed
down from art history to film, it's point of view, framing, perspective.
Instead of Lust for Life or Le Mystere Picasso, it's VHypothese du
tableau vole and Gertrud. In other words, the comparison is non-
mimetic; it's about effects rather than imitation. In this respect, Bon-
itzer doesn't merely add to the study of "Painting and Cinema," in a
sense he creates it. Though Jacques Aumont and Claude Gandelman,
working independently, have each undertaken serious studies of re-
lations between cinema and painting,
1
studies that are long overdue,
there really is no field as such- nothing that compares with, say, "the
novel and film," or that assumes a common theoreticallanalyticallan-
guage as with film theory and literary criticism.
Most work that deals with painting and cinema concerns the ap-
pearance of paintings within a film's diegetic space. Another track
followed commonly is analysis of films like Murnan's Faust, which
looks at film style as in some sense "painterly," seeing lighting, com-
position and other aspects of mise en scene as analogues of paintings-
or at least certain styles of painting (Romantic or Baroque, especially).
And the other most common way to approach comparisons between
96 film and painting is through iconography, the sense in which a film's
particular visual motifs might be said to derive from a pre-existing
painting.
Bonitzer wants to draw attention to how we look at painting and
cinema, to the kinds of spectatorship that are demanded by each. He
begins with a double hypothesis: 1) that cinema inherits the Quattro-
centro project of scientific perspective, realizing what the great art
historian Alois Riegl called the Kunstwollen of the Renaissance; and
2) that cinema and painting are caught up in many of the same rep-
resentational processes, in effects like the mise en abyme and the
tracking shot.
The first hypothesis will not surprise students of film theory, and
more specifically, followers of debates in the early 1970s over the
ideological "neutrality" of the apparatus. These debates took place in
France around the work of Jean-Patrick Lebel (the camera is ideolog-
ically neutral) and Jean-Louis Baudry (the apparatus is the purely
ideological descendent of Renaissance perspective). Bonitzer spends a
lot of time rehashing these debates, only in order to arrive at the
unremarkable conclusion that there is always a little art in the science
of recording on film, and a "grain de reel" (a grain of reality) in the
most imaginary of photographed images.
Bonitzer's contribution mercifullydoes not lie in this retelling, which
occupies most of the first essay in the book. This serves as a point of
departure for the second thesis about similar representational processes
which is significant insofar as it allows Bonitzer to say something about
the frame, and the way in which it orients, or disorients, the spectator's
gaze. The disorienting frame, the "deframing" (decadrage) of mod-
ernist painting and cinema, is Bonitzer's central concern, and provides
him with his most intriguing insights." The notion of decadrage is itself
premised on the key concepts of trompe l'oeil and the "grain de reel,"
which he eventually synthesizes through his own "deframing" critical
approach.
Trompe I'oeil and anamorphosis are critical keystones supporting
decadrag. Bonitzer sees Renaissance one-point perspective as a kind
of track-in allowing the spectator's entry into a painting-a linear path
that moves vision through an imaginary depth of field. In classical
anamorphosis as represented by Holbein's The Ambassadors, however,
he finds a more proper speetatorial equivalent of the cinematic gaze
inscribed in the painting. The sense in which movement, a physical
displacement, is required of the viewer suggests comparison with the
camera movement of a tracking/panning shot. This deframing implies
in both cases a relation with death. In the painting, the Vanitas skull
is the secret that rereads representation as merely representation, as a
The Ambassadors (Hans Holbein, the Younger, 1533)
98 vain and mortal enterprise. Infilm, deframing, whether through camera
movement or editing, reminds us of an off-screenreality that in a sense
threatens the reality or realism of the on-screen image/space. The
"mobile eye" (Vertov) of cinema then always has the potential to
disturb the double play of film's truth/denial (belief/disbelief). The
truth of both painting and cinema would be trompe l'oeil, and in
cinema, this is linked with off-screen space, where the means of rep-
resentation lie beyond the spectator's mastery.
Trompe l'oeil as "la verite en peinture" (Derrida) means simply a
consciousness of representation, of illusion-a very modernist notion.
According to Lacan's discussion of The Ambassadors, which Bonitzer
cites here, this is the pleasure of the game of trompe l' oeil, specifically
of anamorphosis:
What is it that seduces and pleases us in trompe l'oeil?When does it capture
and elate us? At the moment when, by a simple displacement of our look,
we realize that the representation doesn't move with it (the look), and that
it's only a trompe l'oeil. For it appears then to be other than what it said
it was, or rather now it presents itself as being this other thing (pp.34-
35).
An example of the Ambassadors-effect in filmis found in Paris, Texas
in the shot of Dean Stockwell speaking on the phone beneath wha
seems to be a blue sky- until the camera pulls back and reveals the
sky, and the building juxtaposed against it, to be part of a billboard
that forms a background to his conversation.
As a technical trope that implies movement, classical perspective as
represented by a painting like Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of
Christ induces a crisis with respect to the spectator's placement by the
image. "The crisis bears on the subject, and the subject, in painting,
is point of view" (p.52). If Medieval painting is all about the size of
figures and objects as an index of cosmic status (the more divine the
figure, the larger its size), Renaissance painting is more about size as
a function of distance-distance from the earthly, and a location in
some realistic space. The key factor is the introduction of time, of
temporality, which is most clearly articulated in images like Diirer's
St. Jerome in His Study, where the obliqueness of point of viewinvites
the spectator into the image as if happening upon St.Jerome by surprise
(Panofsky). This is a decadrage by comparison with Medieval spec-
tatorship.
The consciousness of time inaugurated by Renaissance painting be-
comes characteristic of modern representation in general, and can be
seen as the basis for modernist experimentation with temporality and
point of view in Manet, Degas, Cezanne, and Picasso. Ironically, Ren-
aissance perspective's consciousness of time, which implies conscious- 99
ness of space, of depth, is what in modernist painting destroys space
and, by consequence, rational temporality. This stems from the trans-
formation of space and time into speed, which eludes the fixity of
painting's static gaze. The speed of modem life as represented by the
railroad is an iconic example of what cannot be represented- hence,
the foreclosure of the subject in paintings like Maner's La Gare Saint
Lazare: a cloud of steam, a trace of speed interposes itself as a screen
between the spectator and the object, and dramatizes the exclusion of
the subject from apprehension of time. In classical anamorphosis, as
Bonitzer insists, the spectator has a role to play, and an enigma to
uncover, and is caught up in the game; in modernist painting, ana-
morphosis is accelerated, pushed to its limits, out of control, which
thus undermines the basis for spectatorship.
Degas is the central example that unites Bonitzer's various consid-
erations on painting and cinema. The transformation of point of view
with respect to the frame and time, what Bonitzer calls Degas's "rev-
olution of the frame," also bears a direct relation to photography, to
its revolution of the frame and its "grain de reel." Bonitzer sees cinema
in Degas's framing, the process by which Degas imposes his off-center
frame on odd bits of reality, cut out and thrust at the viewer with all
the force of an inverse tracking shot. "Decadrage" is thus an ironic-
sadistic framing premised on the nomadic arbitrariness of the frame
and the violence of its imposition on whatever reality it articulates or
cuts out. This is a modernist technique - framing as perceptual dis-
placement, as cutting off. If Renaissance perspective leads its spectator
into the space of the painting, the modernist destruction of perspective
excludes its subject from any meaningful entry into representation; its
decadrage destroys the idea of the frame as a window-frame, and the
idea of the subject.
This is a framing inaugurated by photography, which casts a me-
chanically indifferent eye on any and every subject, thus rendering all
subjects equally banal, equally trivial, and equally vulnerable to sci-
entific scrutiny. The glorification of the trivial givesframing an obscene,
almost pornographic power, especially in relation to the "grain de
reel" of the photographic image. Bonitzer links the realism of the
photographic signifier explicitly with the obscene, that which spoils
the "art effect" of those old nineteenth-century photos that imitate
masterpieces of classical art, but seem vulgar, unsuccessful and banal
precisely because of their "too-real" quality. This "trop de reel" is
Barthes's punctum, the third meaning that remains outside of codifiable
explanation, yet fails to generate "aura" in any Benjaminian sense,"
The Absinthe Drinker (Edgar Degas, 1876)
The "grain de reef' that borders on the pornographic in the pho- 101
tograph extends to film as well. Bonitzer sees a complicity between
the medical and the pornographic via photography: both scrutinize
and cut up previously unremarked anatomies. Film takes this process
one step further with the close-up, which Bonitzer considers to be
obscene almost by its very nature, in its process of magnifyingotherwise
unnoticed details and inscribing them in a montage of effects-sus-
pense, horror, eroticism (p.87). The close-up is for Bonitzer virtually
what defines cinema's modernity:
The close-up in effect plays a simultaneously terroristic and revolutionary
role in the space of the cinema: revolutionary in that, by reversing the
hierarchy of proportions, events, bodies, making the large small, and the
small large, it initiates by and with montage a new order of appearances
and images, indifferent to reality "such as it is...." The close-up is in this
sense a particular case of the enlargement and cutting up of signs desired
by Formalism, Dadaism and Futurism, which are all linked in spirit to the
instability of the revolutionary era. Terroristic, finally, in that it derives
from a violence inflicted on an undifferentiated space, on the homogeneity
of bodies, leaving the spectator's eye with no choice: big heads, cut-off
heads, membra dis;ecta-this is how the astonished audiences of early
cinema sawfilm's first close-ups. Trained as it was to contemplate paintings,
landscapes, panoramas, and the homogeneous space of the theater or music
hall, the spectator's eye was unprepared to confront a vision that wasn't
framed in medium or long-shot (p.88).
As a "cine-sign" that almost demands montage to make sense of the
violence of the shot, the close-up designates the limit of the precarious
equilibrium of editing in presenting the horror, the ambivalence of the
seduction of the body. This is particularly true of close-ups of the face,
where the aura of the portrait threatens to disintegrate when the camera
gets too close. On the one hand, we have Garbo's ravishing close-ups;
on the other, Cassavettes's Faces, in which every pore is revealed in
excruciating hugeness. This is the "grain de reel" that always threatens
to contaminate the beauty of the image."
The notions of "decadrage" and the "grain de reel" are Bonitzer's
major axes of comparison of painting and cinema. Where he does
touch on the imitation of paintings by film, however, it is to say
something about an oblique relationship. Rohmer's Marquise d'O, for
example, models one shot on Fuseli's The Nightmare. The interest is
not so much to what extent Rohmer's tableau vivant is faithful to
Fuse1i's work; it is rather the fundamentally "a-narrative" quality of
such tableaux in films, the way in which the image "stops" the narrative
and functions as metaphor, as the ellipsis of a secret. Like paintings,
Bonitzer is saying (similar to the way others have seen the function of
102 photographs in films), these moments of stasis in film are invitations
to interpretation, contemplation, deciphering on the part of the spec-
tator. As an oxymoron-immobile movement-the tableau-shot, as he
calls it, draws attention to the struggle between the still and the moving
image, a struggle that in Godard's Passion becomes one between paint-
ing and cinema.
It is in those films, then, that are in some sense about painting that
the truly non-narrative dimension of filmis realized- for example, the
films of Godard and Antonioni. In other words, modernist cinema's
insistence on the image, on an image that demands painting's mode
of spectatorship, is in a sense the truest cinema. (Bonitzer refers here
to Bazin's distinction between those who put their faith in the image
and those who put their faith in reality.) The "painting-effect" would
here translate as the "looking-effect." Though we might take exception
to the idea that a "truth of cinema" could be determined on the basis
of the problematic narrative/non-narrative distinction, we can still
respect the effort to place the "contemplative" gaze of painting in film
as the inverse of painting's cinematic panning gaze. What is needed
here is a way of thinking the two processes together through concepts
of the spectator that are oriented more toward history and perception.
Critically speaking, Bonitzer's contribution is that of a discursive
framer (or de-framer), a critical trail-blazer who dears a path for future
explorers. His insights are precisely that-in-sights, glimpses in, in-
tuitions that beg to be developed further. Bonitzer is not to be re-
proached for this; he is; after all, not a theorist, but a critic (and a
very art-literate one, as his Cabiers essays have shown over the years),
and his essays do not pretend to lay a theoretically systematic foun-
dation for considerations on painting and cinema. Wecan, nevertheless,
wonder why he invokes some theorists and concepts over others, given
the reliance on predictable figures like Lacan, Foucault and Panofsky.
For example, Bonitzer's repeated engagement withPanofsky's theories
of perspective prompts the question: why not make use of Panofsky's
essay on film? Though this may have seemed too obvious a choice to
Bonitzer, "Style and Medium inthe Motion Pictures" at least has the
advantage of reminding us of the oxymoron of the tableau-shot. Panof-
sky saw early films in terms of movement added to originally static
works of art: "The living language, which is always right, has endorsed
this sensible choice when it still speaks of a 'moving picture' or simply,
a 'picture,' instead of accepting the pretentious and fundamentally
erroneous 'screen play'."s The "pictures" Panofsky identifies at the
origin of early cinema are rooted in popular culture and a folk art
mentality-:-postcards, comic strips, dime novels, etc. These images
cater to, among other things, a slapstick sense of humor that "feeds
upon the sadistic and the pornographic instinct.?" In relation to the 103
"sadistic" framing of decadrage, one can only wonder at the oppor-
tunities missed in Bonitzer's neglect of Panofsky's provocative, if prob-
lematic, discourse on film.
We can also wonder at Bonitzer's studied avoidance of terms like
"voyeurism" and "fetishism." Though in many cases he is describing
similar processes, especially in the obscenity of decadrage and the
magnified cut-up in close-up, he stops short of placing his discourse
in the context of psychoanalytically-informed film theory. This must
be an intentional avoidance, since his primary concern is with the
spectator. Degas, for example, is commonly referred to as a "keyhole"
painter; his "slice of life" (tranche de vie) approach to modern life is
so much about the kinds of voyeuristic and fetishistic investments made
in cinema that a failure to probe more deeply the kinds of subjectivity
they appeal to overlooks what is truly deframing about Degas's vision.
Equally puzzling is the absence of any notion of identification. At
the very least, a glance at any of the paintings or filmsBonitzer discusses
is obliged to pause in the relay of looks, the delegation of point of
view within the frame that is set up via framing, perspective, and
represented figures or characters, a relay that either invites or excludes
the spectator's gaze. This strikes me as a productive path to follow in
linking the spectator of painting with that of cinema. The closest
Bonitzer comes to broaching identification is in his discussion of Las
Meninas, which in any case depends almost wholly on Foucault's
analysis of the painting, and adds little to an understanding of the
historical, psychoanalytic or perceptual underpinnings of spectatorship
in painting and film.
Finally, in his reference to the "acceleration" of modern life and the
extent to which painting tries, with difficulty, to register this trans-
formation, Bonitzer's analysis would have benefitted from an engage-
ment with Wolfgang Schivelbusch's notion of "panoramic perception,"
which is a historical and more perceptually-based reading of the same
process defined theoretically by Paul Virilio. For Bonitzer, movement
and acceleration become, in cinema, conditions of the subject that
imply multiple points of view, fragmented and partial vision, variable
distances, while the same factors spell the end for painting. This would
apply even to the "cinematographic" experiments of Duchamp, Ma-
rinetti et al., which Bonitzer sees as connected more fundamentally
with later experiments in abstract cinema of the 1920s. Bonitzer char-
acterizes the "end of painting" as follows:
It's as if painting opened itself up to its fourth dimension, Time, through
acceleration and extravagance. With the speed that takes over the painter's
hand and, more and more, the entire pictorial space, right up through
104 Abstract Expressionism, we begin to lose point of view, distance, horizon,
the frame, even verticality-there is only this hyperbolic acceleration that
is like a catastrophe (p.57).
In Schivelbusch's account of the perceptual revolution of speed, the
loss of perspective, distance, and point of view is an effect of a very
specific new mode of perception symbolized by the experience of the
railroad. The "panoramic perception" brought about by the railroad,
which diminishes the spatial and temporal distances between points,
implies the destruction through speed of the sense of foreground in-
tervening between the spectator/passenger and the landscape outside
the train window/frame. Ultimately interwoven with theories of shock
by Benjamin, Freud, and Simmel, the Schivelbusch narrative plucks its
subject from a technologically, economically and socially conditioned
context for shifts in perception and representation."
Though future studies of painting and cinema may emphasize dif-
ferent approaches-historical, psychoanalytic, or narratologicai, for
example-they should not ignore the critical tracks laid by Bonitzer.
His work provides film studies with a provocative point of departure
for thinking through cinema's relationships to other visual media.
NOTES
1. Aumont and Gandelman's works are as yet unpublished.
2. I prefer to translate decadrage as "deframing," "Reframing" is not appro-
priate, as Bonitzer wishes to distinguish between decadrage and recadrage,
the reframing that narrative cinema uses to reposition its spectator within
continuity editing. Nor is "unframing" proper to convey the sense of a
displaced framing that decadrage always implies.
3. Bonitzer does refer to Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" in seeing photographic mass reproduction of
the image as subverting the image by virtue of denuding it of uniqueness,
and by simultaneously promoting the insignificant (Degas's laundresses,
Picasso and Braque's collages, and, we may assume, Schwitters's Merz-
bauen) to a mass level. Mass-reproduced imagesare imagesof the masses-
of the ordinary, the insignificant, the indifferent. They represent a flattening
not only of the concept of the subject, but of the space of the image as
well.
4. Similar effectscan be determined in opposite techniques. Thus, against the
terror of the close-up, we might insist on that of the long-shot. Patrick
Bokanowski's :c:Ange, conceived in its essence on the basis of painting,
provides us with several potent shots of masked figuresat a distance, figures 105
that, like Jason in Friday the 13th, terrify by virtue of their visual inac-
cessibility-much as Max Ernst's Two Children areThreatened by a Night-
ingaleproduces a terror-effect for the spectator in its miniaturization of
cipher-like figures frozen in mid-stride (the equivalent of the long-shot in
painting would be the tiny, the small image). In a sequence derived from
Vermeer, a female servant with a pitcher of milk traverses a black screen
as if literally drawing the space; shown in bird's-eye view, this montage-
within-a-frame is a kind of analogue of the camera stylo, a painting-effeet,
an artistic gesture that only cinema or video can perform. The figure is
frightening by virtue of her representation in long-shot, a long-shot that
is defined fundamentally by decadrage.
5. In FilmTheory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p.245.
6. Mast and Cohen, p.246.
7. SeeWolfgangSchivelbusch, The RailwayJourney(NewYork: Urizen Press,
1979).

You might also like