The cross-pollination of visual art and the moving image is a mode of disciplinary interplay and demonstrates cinema’s potential for mediating artworks—the camera, the canvas, the paintbrush, the object behind glass, the projections onto the screen. It asks us, can art movements be translated onto moving images? Are three-dimensional art objects like sculpture enhanced by cinema’s mobilities? Is a six-second taping of a portrait a film? Or as Walter Benjamin poses: “How does the camera operator compare with the painter?” 

With the camera’s potential for consecutive image making and its subsequent ability to disrupt (and develop upon) the significations of visual art, the qualities of the visual art film are sprawling. Such films may include examinations of real or fictitious artists and their creations; films written or directed by painters or sculptors; art crimes (forgeries! heists!); perusals of galleries, museums, and art industries. 

Whether cinema and visual art are intellectually or affectually compatible depends foremost on the lens with which an audience approaches both mediums—but one can also identify a structural logic present in the visual art film which may illuminate its contents. This syllabus serves as a guide to better appreciate films of this niche, across styles and genres, spanning from the late 19th century to tomorrow. It is also the basis for my screening series CONTOURS, which shows art films bimonthly at the Paradise Theater in Toronto, and its accompanying column at Screen Slate. 

Week 1: Earthly Delights

How does art guide us? Where does it take the camera?

Screenings: Dreams (1990, Akira Kurosawa) & Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1976, Salvador Dalí, José Montes-Baquer)

Reading: Lynne Kirby, “Painting and Cinema: The Frames and Discourse” (1985)

Week 2: Early Representations of Onscreen Art

How were early filmmaking modes deployed to capture artwork? 

Screenings: The Dragon Painter (1919, William Worthington) & Even As You and I (1917, Lois Weber)

Reading: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)

Week 3: Biopic City

How are artists’ styles folded into representations of their life?

Screenings: Camille Claudel (1988, Bruno Nuytten) & Yumeji (1991, Seijun Suzuki)

Reading: Gilles Deleuze, “Every Painter Recapitulates the History of Painting in His or Her Own Way,” Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981)

Week 4: Documentary Fare

Does the creative subject allow for an elastic genre?

Screenings: Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988, Agnès Varda) & National Gallery (2014, Frederick Wiseman) 

Reading: Steven Jacobs, “A Concise History and Theory of Documentaries on the Visual Arts,” A Companion to Documentary Film History (2021)

Week 5: Canvas-Stage-Screen

How does the camera mediate theatrical depictions of art? How might cinema, theater, and visual art coalesce?

Screenings: Sunday in the Park with George (1986, Terry Hughes) & A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1965, Lamberto V. Avellana)

Reading: Nick Joaquin, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes (1950)

Week 6: Statuesque

What does the motion of the camera do to static figures? Is hapticity a vital part of sculpture?

Screenings: Statues Hardly Ever Smile (1971, Stan Lathan) & Sculptures by Sofu – Vita (1962, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Reading: Steven Jacobs, “Introduction,” Screening Statues: Sculpture in Film (2017)

Week 7: Art of the Con

Is luxury consolidated by forgery? What is the genre potential of art crime?

Screenings: F for Fake (1973, Orson Welles) & The American Friend (1977, Wim Wenders)

Reading: Jonathan Rosembaum, “F for Fake: Orson Welles’s Purloined Letter,” Criterion Current (2014)

Week 8: Art Parody, Pornography, and the Grotesque

Are we revolted by the conception of art? Are we aroused? 

Screenings: Painter (1995, Paul McCarthy) & Woton’s Wake (1963, Brian De Palma)

Reading: Irving Sandler on Willem De Kooning, Artforum (1978)

Week 9: Horror Aesthetics

Re: are we revolted by the conception of art?

Screenings: La Main du Diable (1943, Maurice Tourneur) & A Quiet Place in the Country (1968, Elio Petri)

Reading: Noël Carroll, “Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery,” The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990)

Week 10: Street Aesthetics

How do representations of graffiti and street art trouble the understanding of “high” versus “low” art forms?

Screenings: Wild Style (1982, Charlie Ahearn) & Downtown 81 (2000, Edo Bertoglio)

Reading: Joe Austin, “The State of the Subways: The Transit Crisis, the Aesthetics of Fear, and the Second “War on Graffiti,” Taking the Train (2002)

Week 11: Queer Aesthetics

How do queer auteurs envision art? Where might their readings of art objects diverge from the canon?

Screenings: Caravaggio (1986, Derek Jarman) & I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987, Patricia Rozema)

Reading: Jean Cocteau, The White Paper (1928)

Week 12: Fuck You, Paint Me

And what of the muse?

Screenings: The World of Suzie Wong (1960, Richard Quine) & Losing Ground (1982, Kathleen Collins) 

Reading: Candy Darling, My Face for the World to See: The Diaries, Letters, and Drawings of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar (1997)

Week 13: Interruption & Interpretation

What happens when one paints on a film strip? Is it possible to imagine seminal artworks as digital figures?

Screenings: The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981, Stan Brakhage), Mona Lisa (1973, Toshio Matsumoto), & 66 (1966, Robert Breer)

Reading: Wanda Strauven, “Between Surface and Interface,” Touchscreen Archaeology: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices (2021)

Digestif: Disillusionment for the Road

“Art is the highest form of hope.” –Gerrard Richter

“Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

Screenings: I Shot Andy Warhol (1996, Mary Harron) & Showing Up (2022, Kelly Reichardt)

Reading: Valerie Solanas, “Great Art and Culture,” SCUM Manifesto (1967)