My thanks go to all the authors for providing me with many moments of reflection and inspiration!
Articles
Arnheim, Rudolf. “Film and Reality.” Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. 151—53.
–. “Painting and Film.” The Visual Turn. 8—33.
Bazin, André. “Painting and Cinema.” What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 164—172.
Brooke, Michael. “Always on Sunday.” Screenline. 2003-14.
–. “Pop Goes the Easel.” Screenonline.
–. “Scottish Painters.” Screenonline.
Davies, Paul. “Quartet: Ken Russell’s Painter Biopics and How they Anticipate the Later Cinematic Work.” ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell. Ed. Matthew Melia. London: EUP, 2023. 109-24.
Flanagan, Kevin M. “Television, Contested Culture, and Social Control: Cultural Studies and Pop Goes the Easel.“ Last Mannerist. 65—84.
French, Philip. “A Bigger Splash.” Sight and Sound 44.2 (Spring 1975): 120-1.
Gardner, Colin. “’It’s Not Blood, It’s Red’: Color as Category, Color as Sensation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, Pierrot Le Fou, Weekend, and Passion.” Criticism. Volume 61, number 2. Michigan: State University Press, Spring 2019. 245—270.
Gomez, Joseph A. “Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch.“ Film Quarterly. Volume 30, number 2 (winter 1976-77). 38—46.
Kirby, Lynne. “Painting and Cinema: The Frames of Discourse.” Camera Obscura 6.3 18 (18 September 1988): 95—105.
Kirchner, Andreas. “Painting in Time: On the Use of Digital Effects in Melancholia (2011).” The Apocalypse in Film. 191-202.
Manovich, Lev. “What is Digital Cinema?” Denson, Shane and Julia Leyda. Eds. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016. Also online at https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/1-1-manovich
Mulvey, Laura. Mary Kelly: An Aesthetic of Temporality. Catalogue for the Mary Kelly Retrospective, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 2001.
-. “Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977—87.” October Files: Cindy Sherman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2006. 64—65.
Rosen, Robert. “Notes on Painting and Film.” Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors. 244—61.
Sutton, Paul. “Ken Russell at the BBC, 1959-1970.” Last Mannerist. 3—23.
Tibbets, John. “A Ken Russell Season at the BFI, July 2007.” Last Mannerist. 237—47.
Tyler, Parker. “The Film Sense and the Painting Sense.” Perspectives 11 (spring 1955): 95—106.
Walker, George Graham. “Film and Fine Art.” Sight & Sound 17 (winter 1948-49): 173—74.
Books
Allen, Steven and Laura Hubner. Ed. Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts. Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2012.
Alton, John. Painting with Light. Original Publication 1947. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995.
For more details see Miscellaneous.
Baxter, John. An Appalling Talent: Ken Russell. London: Michael Joseph, 1973.
Brougher, Kerry. Organizer. Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: The Monacelli Press/New York, 1996.
Chesire, Ellen. Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures. London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2015.
Christie, Ian and Philip Dodd. Ed. Spellbound: Art and Film: Art and Film in Britain. London: BFI, 1996.
Covert, Nadine, Elizabeth Scheines and Vivian Wick. Ed. Art on Screen: A Directory of Films and Videos About the Visual Arts. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1992.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Painting. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
A seminal study in the field by now. Stating its position in the introduction that “the advent of cinema has forever changed the meaning of the word art” (2), it goes on to show how by making use of pictorial sources and the imagery of paintings, eight films variously define painting as an art to comment on the interplay between the arts:
Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou
Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rubleov
Mizoguchi’s Five Women around Utamaro
Antonioni’s Red Desert
Rohmer’s The Marquise of O
Murnau’s Nosferatu
Minnelli’s An American in Paris
Cavalier’s Thérèse
Vacche ultimately argues for an ongoing dialogue, a continuing relationship between cinema and painting.
–. Ed. Film, Art, New Media: Museum without Walls? London: Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2012.
An anthology of essays offering among many other topics close analyses of media relations from dance to painting to performance art, asking us to think about the museum of the future and the crucial role twentieth-century cinema will no doubt have there. See in particular the contributions on:
-art and film in early cinema
-Cezanne and the Lumière Brothers
-abstraction in early film, dance, and painting
-Jean-Marie Straub, Daniele Huillet, and Cezanne -Francis Bacon
–. The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
This conversation between art historians and film specialists from the first silent films to those of the post-Second World period shows how useful it is to consider cinema with the analytical methods of art theory. It also demonstrates that such a fruitful dialogue has in fact been going on for decades through pairing up one original article with a more recent comment on it in each of the seven chapters. To take two examples—the most interesting from the perspective of this website—Rudolf Arnheim’s “Painting and Film” is paired up with Ara H. Merjan’s “Middlebrow Modernism: Rudolf Arnheim at the Crossroads of Film Theory and the Psychology of Art” and André Bazin’s “Painting and Cinema” with Richard Allen’s “Representation, Illusion and the Cinema.”
Ehrlich, Linda C and David Desser. Ed. Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: U of T, 1994.
Felleman, Susan. Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Texas: UTO, 2006.
Flanagan, Kevin M. Ed. Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
Gerlach, Nina. Gartenkunst im Spielfilm: Das Filmbild als Argument. München: Fink, 2012.
Though its main emphasis is on the representation of garden art, design and landscaping in film, Gerlach’s study inevitably includes the painterly aspects of such filmic depictions in the films of the Lumière Brothers, Fred W. Wilcox (The Secret Garden), Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle), Stanley Kubrick (Barry Lyndon), Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), Vittorio De Sica (The Garden of the Finzi-Contini), Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract) and Ang Lee (Pride and Prejudice). The study also considers some filmic representations of paintings such as Magritte’s The Schoolmaster in Being There and Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea in Pride and Prejudice.
Germaine Greer. The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. London: Secker and Warburg, 1979.
Hensel, Thomas, Klaus Krüger and Tanja Michalsky. Das bewegte Bild: Film und Kunst. München: Fink, 2006.
This collection of articles analyses the ‘moving images’ of its title from the point of view of both art history and the newer discipline of visual cultural studies. Films by Renoir, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Lynch, Greenaway and Jarman provide the starting point for an art historical consideration of film history, film praxis and the socio-institutional and medial-technical framework of the cinematic discourse.
Inc, Museyon. Art + Travel Europe: Munch and Oslo. N.P.: Museyon, 2013.
Jacobs, Steven. Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts. Edinburgh Studies in Film. Edinburgh: EUP, 2012.
Knowles, Kim. A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
Knowles concentrates on Man Ray’s four short experimental home movies from the 1920s when he worked with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, René Clair and Hans Richter among others. Together with “a series of cinematic essays” they “represent the most important contribution to the development of an alternative mode of filmmaking in the early twentieth century” [quotations from back cover and see Films by Painters].
Lawder, Standish. The Cubist Cinema. New York: NYUP, 1975.
Standish Lawder was a film artist and an art historian. From the mid-1960s on he made a series of inventive 16mm films. Lawder also pioneered art historical research on the European avant-garde cinema of the 1920s. The Cubist Cinema connects the history of film with how it impacted on modern art and uncovers evidence of the Cubist movement in painting in what was quiet possibly the earliest alliance between film and modern art. The preoccupation with film on the part of Picasso, Kandinsky, Schönberg and Léopold Survage is covered as are Bauhaus, Surrealist painting of the late 1920s and the short films of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Walter Ruttman. Particular attention is paid to Leger’s 1924 Ballet Mecanique for how it is situated within the wider context of Leger’s paintings [see (More) Films by Painters].
Lanza, Joseph. Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007.
Lyons, James. Miami Vice. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Marschall, Susanne. Farbe im Kino. Second Edition. Marburg: Schüren, 2009.
Marschall’s study is nothing more than a (successful!) attempt to establish a theory of colours for film art, concluding with a consideration of the effect, symbolism and dramaturgy of colour in film. Particular attention should be drawn to the section on Carlos Saura’s 1999 Goya in Bordeaux, subtitled “The Spirals of Life”, including 25 colour plates to back up the investigation of the narrative context of the symbolic meaning of colour. Ultimately Marschall sees Goya in Bordeaux as a filmic homage not only to Goya, but also to one of his predecessors/role models, Rembrandt, whose two Slaughtered Ox paintings are filmically reproduced. She also convincingly demonstrates how graphic art, painting and film are continually intertwined in Saura’s film with images taking on a life of their own, ghostly figures threatening their artistic creator, and the colour red flowing out of paintings like real blood. The theatre group La Fura dels Baus provide the climax when they act in and play with Goya’s paintings: Film, theatre and painting all come together in a series of ‘living paintings’ the lighting for which is predominantly green, red and black.
McIver, Gillian. Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
This is a study of the relationship between art and cinema history and the history of art and visual storytelling, examining the mutual influences of painting and film regarding light, composition, subject matter, theme and style. Concrete examples are taken from the world of film -Peter Greenaway, Martin Scorcese, Peter Webber, Stan Douglas, Guillermo de Toro and John Ford among others-and the world of painting/art history (Dutch Baroque, Realism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Minimalism). A podcast interview about the book between the author professor of art history Kirstin L. Ellsworth is available at
Pascoe, David. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.
Peucker, Brigitte. Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
–. Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Petersen, Karen and J.J. Wilson. Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 1978.
Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Writing of Art’s History. London: Routledge, 1999.
-. Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Ritzenhoff, Karen and Angela Krewani. Ed. The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World. New York/London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
Robinson, Jeremy Mark. Ken Russell: England’s Visionary Film Director and Music Lover. (Maidstone, Crescent Moon, 2015), 199.
Russell, Ken. A British Picture: An Autobiography. London: Southbank 1989, revised 2018.
Sager, Laura M. Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.
Volume 117 of an international research project on general and comparative literature, this interdisciplinary study compares the uses of painting in literary texts and films. While ekphrasis normally refers to a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art, here the net is cast wider to include Goya’s Sleep of Reason in Carlos Sauras’ Goya in Bordeaux, in Lion Feuchtwanger’s This is the Hour: A Novel about Goya (1951) and Konrad Wolf’s film adaptation from 1971, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits In Korda’s Rembrandt, and the private, aesthetic and socio-cultural identities of Vermeer’s Women in The Girl with the Pearl Earring (novel and film version).
Sanders, Steven. Miami Vice. TV Milestone Series. Detriot: Wayne State University Press, 2010.
Schönenbacher, Richard. Bildende Kunst im Spielfilm: Zur Präsentation von Kunst in einem Massenmedium des 20. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Scaneg, 2000.
Schönenbacher examines the role of works of art in film over and beyond their purely decorative function and role as props. His main thesis is that they can also have a narrative function because they provide coded background information about a film’s characters and their environment that we in turn as spectators then have to decode. In addition he demonstrates what sort of image and significance art works convey to spectators and how artists both real and fictitious are portrayed. There are further sections among others on galleries and gallery owners, forgery, art historians and art conservators. Feature films of the 1940s to 1990s form the main focus with a particular emphasis on US film productions of the 50s and 60s.
Stukenbrock, Christiane and Barbara Töpper. Meisterwerke der europäischen Malerei. Cologne: Konemann, 1999.
Sutton, Paul. Becoming Ken Russell. Volume One. Cambridge: Bear Claw Publishing, 2012.
Viéville, Camille. Petite histoire des couleurs. Paris: Flammarion, 2023.
An illustrated guide to the history and symbolism of colours as used in artworks including the materials and techniques used to achieve chromatic effects.
Walker, John A. Art and Artists on Screen. Manchester: MUP 1993.
Wilson, Emma. Alan Resnais. Manchester: MUP 2006.
Online Sources
Accompanying filmpedagogical material for school teaching prepared by the film’s distributor Pandora.
http://www.paula-film.de/assets/cnt/pdf/paula_docs_schulmaterial.pdf
“Biography.” Henri Julien Rousseau: The Complete Works. https://www.henrirousseau.org
Bovey, David. “Sex doesn’t dominate my life at all, really. I think painting does” (David Hockney): The emergence of the queer artist biopic.” http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/viewFile/287/129
Lannom, SC. “46 Storyboard Examples from Movies, Animation, and Games.” June 8 2020. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/storyboard-examples-film
“Female Painters.“ The Art of Painting. http://www.theartofpainting.be/AOP-Female_Painters.htm
Greenaway, Peter. “The Draughtsman’s Contract.” http://old.bfi.org.uk/greenaway/material.php?theme=2&type=Greenaway&title=draughtsman
Holt, Nancy. “Robert Smithson: Films.” Robert Smithson. September 2011.
http://www.robertsmithson.com/films/films.htm
“Leonor Fini.” http://www.leonor-fini.com/en/biography/filmography
Malpas, Jeff. “The Role of Memory: Image, Place and Story in the Films of Wim Wenders.” Academia Education. http://www.academia.edu/3982949/_The_Role_of_Memory_Image_Place_and_Story_in_the_Films_of_Wim_Wenders
Musée d’Orsay website https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en
Nastasi, Alison. “The Fifteen Artworks that Inspired Films.“ Flavorwire. June 29 2014.
http://flavorwire.com/464926/the-famous-artworks-that-inspired-15-films
Nield, Anthony. “Every Picture Tells a Story at the BFI Southbank in May.” The Digital Fix: Film. 25 April 2013. http://film.thedigitalfix.com/content/id/76518/every-picture-tellsstory-at-the-bfi-southbank-in-may.html#ixzz4CtyxFI59
“A Private Universe.” https://www.berghahnbooks.com/downloads/intros/KucBoro_intro.pdf
“Schamoni Film.“ Schamoni: Film und Medien GmbH. http://www.schamoni.de/filme
Shafte, Sally. “On Straub-Huillet’s Une Visite au Louvre.” Senses of Cinema 53 (December 2009). http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/on-straub-huillets-une-visite-au-louvre-1
Watkins, Peter. Website. http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/munch.htm
Wilkes, Robert Wilkes. “Pre-Raphaelites on Film: Ken Russell’s ‘Dante’s Inferno’ (1967).” Pre-Raphaelite Reflections: A Blog Devoted to the PRB. https://dantisamor.wordpress.com
“Women and Arts: Painting.“ About Education. http://womenshistory.about.com/od/artpainting
“Women Artists.“ Art Cyclopedia. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/women.html
“Women Artists.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_artists
Zinman, Gregory. “Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra.” Handmade Cinema. http://handmadecinema.com/mobileview.php?id=20
Miscellaneous
BBC WAC Scottish Painters Monitor File “Wild Track” 3 and 5 November.