The painters dealt with range from Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol to less well-known ones like Joseph Cornell, Bruce Connor, Bruce Lacey and Derek Boshie.
Walker (161—62) provides a list of 20th century “artists, designers and photographers” who “have made films at some point in their careers.” The painters on this list are Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Fernand Léger, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Connor, Bruce Lacey, Derek Boshier, David Dye, László Moholy-Nagy and Andy Warhol (these last two are dealt with in more detail see 165—78). Walker then names the British artists Peter Gidal (who also wrote Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings in 1971), William Raban, Mike Dunford and Malcolm Le Grice as examples of painters who “have made film their principal medium of expression” before going onto mention Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Robert Breer, Paul Sharits, Ed Emshwiller, George Landow, Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway all of whom have “switched their allegiance from painting to film.” Walker concludes his review by mentioning the case of Luis Bunuel, who “made cinematic contributions to a radical modern art movement before gravitating towards mainstream cinema” (a reference to Bunuel’s work on the dream sequence in Hitchcock’s 1944 Spellbound see also 150—60). There now follow some films by these and other painters in (very roughly) chronological order. First, though, a chance to experience a whole bevy of (male though Peggy Guggenheim did coproduce) avant garde painters in one film:
Man Ray
(1890-1976 US)
Home Movies
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Emak Bakia (Leave Me Alone)
France 1926
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See also Knowles (bibliography).
Viking Eggerling
(1880-1925 born in Sweden but moved to Germany at 16)
Symphonie Diagonale (1924)
In this film “the sense of rhythm and musical structure that develops frame by frame produces an imagined kinetic space” (Vacche, Museum without Walls? 73):
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Walter Ruttmann
(1887-1941 Germany, director of Germany: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927))
Lichtspiel Opus I—IV (1921 score by Cuthead, Bony Stove and Sandro M)
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Fernand Léger
(1881-1955 France)
Ballet mecanique (1924)
The “discontinuous visual narrative” on display “disengages our voyeurtistic passivity” and asks that we “decipher and unify what we see in some other way” (Vacche, Museum without Walls? 73):
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Marcel Duchamp
(1887-1968 France)
Anemic Cinema (1926)
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Hans Richter
(1888-1976 Germany)
In his films, “Dada artist Hans Richter of the 1920s … seems to be replaying early cinema’s pure joy in the visual qualities of movement” (Vacche, Museum without Walls? 58).
Rhythmus 21 (1921)
Here the “moving images create volumes and spatial differentiations that engage the viewer’s desire to enter into the screened image.” In addition, “the forms create depth through the phenomenon of perceived foregrounds and backgrounds,” allowing us to both project our vision into and extend “the plane of the movie screen” (Vacche, Museum without Walls? 73):
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From the Circus to the Moon (1921)
Ghosts Before Breakfast (1926)
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Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947 financed by Peggy Guggenheim and photographer/film-maker Kenneth MacPherson)
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This is “a compilation of seven unrelated dream sequences linked together by a shared frame story, each of which was filmed by Richter and ‘designed’ in collaboration with one of his artist friends from Europe (in order: Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Hans Arp) and, finally, Richter by himself” in which “the soft colour palette, expressive use of a subjective camera, deep-focus cinematography and enigmatic narrative” all combine to reproduce “the texture and flow of a dream” see
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/great-directors/hans-richter
and for an exhaustive description of each sequence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_That_Money_Can_Buy
8×8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements, an experimental exercise produced (in the USA), written and directed by Surrealist painter and Dada film-theorist Hans Richter in 1957. A project begun in 1944 while Richter was director of the Institute of Film Techniques at City College in New York and combining short scenarios written by Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamps, Man Ray, Alexander Calder and Fernand Leger, the film took three years to complete.
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A smorgasbord mingle-mangle of surreal(ist) ideas from chess (pieces/boards; both film and screen divided up into the segments of a chess-board), adult toy constructions, mobiles (Alexander Calder constructs one and breathes life into it), masks, (gloved) hands coming out of the earth (with a ball) to filmic gimmicks like film played backwards, for example water ‘poured’ back to where it came from, clocks/clock faces as when clock hands turn counter clockwise erasing the hour numbers then clockwise again to reveal a sentence as well as a cacophonous soundtrack with trains/automobiles/factories, music and singing, and a melange of (partly invented?) languages sometimes played backwards, sometimes fast forward. Filmed partially on the lawn of Marcel Duchamp’s summer house in Southbury, Connecticut, the film is divided into the eight sections (the cast and those responsible are listed at the end see website below) of Prelude, Black Schemes, A New Twist, Venetian Episode, the Self-Imposed Obstacle, Middle Game, Queening of the Pawn and the Fatal Move. According to the text we see onscreen right at the start, the film deals with the world of fantasy and is a fairytale for grownups that explores the realm behind the magic mirror which served Lewis Carroll 100 years ago to stimulate our imagination. All pure randomness perhaps, but that’s exactly what the Surrealists sang the praises of.
Dadascope (1961)
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Maqbool Fida Husain
(1915-2011 India)
Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967)
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Gaja Gamini (2000)
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The Italian brothers Arnaldo Ginna (1890-1982 Italy) and Bruno Corra (1892-1976), (screen) writer, collaborated on the following short films:
A Chord of Color (1911)
Study of the Effects of Four Colors
Song of Songs
Flowers
See also: http://handmadecinema.com/mobileview.php?id=20
Adolfo Best Maugard
(1891—1964 Mexico) and his one film
La Mancha de Sangre / Blood Stain (1937)
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Source: YouTube by Sofia FP