MODOS DE REVER: CINEMA UNDER THE INFLUENCE (OF PAINTING)

Cinema, or as Robert Bresson prefers to call it, “le cinématographe,” was the last contribution made by civilization to the arts and letters, bringing together all other forms of artistic expression in a single, immaterial form.

- Manoel de Oliveira, Ditos e Escritos (2005)

In this third edition of the film programme Modos de Rever, we will see films that show how filmmakers from different periods immersed themselves in pictorial culture, allowing themselves to be influenced, or even contaminated, by the visual arts. From the Renaissance to the Contemporary, from Romanticism to Impressionism, from Surrealism to Pop, several created images that previously lived in painting.

Manoel de Oliveira was one of the earliest filmmakers who best understood the importance of the image (common to painting and film) by seeing cinema as “a monument supported by four columns, in the manner of a Greek temple, the first column being that of the image.” As Aby Warburg taught, images survive through various means. And so, when we watch films, we are struck by a feeling of déjà vu: each of us, when watching a film, makes associations between cinematic images and painted images.

Godard, who understood this legacy of painting, in one of the first chapters of Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988/98), presents cinema “as the heir to the artistic movements and techniques of the 19th century (photography)” and noted that “the young filmmakers of the nouvelle vague are the youths of the liberation of the museum.” And, in his Introduction to a True History of Cinema, Godard clarifies that “what I find interesting about cinema is that you don’t have to invent anything at all. In this sense, it is similar to painting: in painting, nothing is invented: you correct, you place, you add; nothing is invented.”

In this edition of the film programme Modos de Rever, over eight sessions, from Pasolini to Oliveira, via Hitchcock, Renoir, Kurosawa, Syberberg, Greenaway, and Antonioni, we will explore the labyrinths that connect different periods in the history of art to the history of cinema. The programme begins with Pasolini’s Decameron, evoking the Renaissance, and ends with Oliveira’s The Cannibals, an allegory of the contemporary.