Painting and Cinema: The Frames of DiscourseLynne 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 hisessayson relations between painting and cinema will not concern filmsabout painters or famous paintings; nor will they focus on paintingsconsidered to be "cinematographic" in the representation of move­ment. Rather, Bonitzer is interested in a less obvious, more subtle, andmore or less secret relation between the two media. The connectionshave to do with shared techniques and premises: "The cinema wouldmeet with artistic problems, or use for its own purposes, effects thatpainting had already treated . . . for the cinema is concerned, in itsway, with the still image, while painting has, in its own way, somethingto do with movement" (p.7).

Instead of painterly cinematic compositions or iconography handeddown from art history to film, it's point of view, framing, perspective.Instead of Lust for Life or Le Mystere Picasso, it's VHypothese dutableau vole and Gertrud. In other words, the comparison is non­mimetic; it's about effects rather than imitation. In this respect, Bon­itzer doesn't merely add to the study of "Painting and Cinema," in asense he creates it. Though Jacques Aumont and Claude Gandelman,working independently, have each undertaken serious studies of re­lations between cinema and painting,1 studies that are long overdue,there really is no field as such- nothing that compares with, say, "thenovel and film," or that assumes a common theoreticallanalyticallan­guage as with film theory and literary criticism.

Most work that deals with painting and cinema concerns the ap­pearance of paintings within a film's diegetic space. Another trackfollowed commonly is analysis of films like Murnan's Faust, whichlooks at film style as in some sense "painterly," seeing lighting, com­position and other aspects of mise en scene as analogues of paintings­or 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'sparticular visual motifs might be said to derive from a pre-existingpainting.

Bonitzer wants to draw attention to how we look at painting andcinema, to the kinds of spectatorship that are demanded by each. Hebegins with a double hypothesis: 1) that cinema inherits the Quattro­centro project of scientific perspective, realizing what the great arthistorian Alois Riegl called the Kunstwollen of the Renaissance; and2) that cinema and painting are caught up in many of the same rep­resentational processes, in effects like the mise en abyme and thetracking shot.

The first hypothesis will not surprise students of film theory, andmore specifically, followers of debates in the early 1970s over theideological "neutrality" of the apparatus. These debates took place inFrance around the work of Jean-Patrick Lebel (the camera is ideolog­ically neutral) and Jean-Louis Baudry (the apparatus is the purelyideological descendent of Renaissance perspective). Bonitzer spends alot of time rehashing these debates, only in order to arrive at theunremarkable conclusion that there is always a little art in the scienceof recording on film, and a "grain de reel" (a grain of reality) in themost imaginary of photographed images.

Bonitzer's contribution mercifully does not lie in this retelling, whichoccupies most of the first essay in the book. This serves as a point ofdeparture for the second thesis about similar representational processeswhich is significant insofar as it allows Bonitzer to say something aboutthe frame, and the way in which it orients, or disorients, the spectator'sgaze. The disorienting frame, the "deframing" (decadrage) of mod­ernist painting and cinema, is Bonitzer's central concern, and provideshim with his most intriguing insights." The notion of decadrage is itselfpremised on the key concepts of trompe l'oeil and the "grain de reel,"which he eventually synthesizes through his own "deframing" criticalapproach.

Trompe I'oeil and anamorphosis are critical keystones supportingdecadrag». Bonitzer sees Renaissance one-point perspective as a kindof track-in allowing the spectator's entry into a painting-a linear paththat moves vision through an imaginary depth of field. In classicalanamorphosis as represented by Holbein's The Ambassadors, however,he finds a more proper speetatorial equivalent of the cinematic gazeinscribed in the painting. The sense in which movement, a physicaldisplacement, is required of the viewer suggests comparison with thecamera movement of a tracking/panning shot. This deframing impliesin both cases a relation with death. In the painting, the Vanitas skullis the secret that rereads representation as merely representation, as a

The Ambassadors (Hans Holbein, the Younger, 1533)

98 vain and mortal enterprise. In film,deframing, whether through cameramovement or editing, reminds us of an off-screenreality that in a sensethreatens the reality or realism of the on-screen image/space. The"mobile eye" (Vertov) of cinema then always has the potential todisturb the double play of film's truth/denial (belief/disbelief). Thetruth of both painting and cinema would be trompe l'oeil, and incinema, this is linked with off-screen space, where the means of rep­resentation lie beyond the spectator's mastery.

Trompe l'oeil as "la verite en peinture" (Derrida) means simply aconsciousness of representation, of illusion-a very modernist notion.According to Lacan's discussion of The Ambassadors, which Bonitzercites here, this is the pleasure of the game of trompe l'oeil, specificallyof anamorphosis:

What is it that seduces and pleases us in trompe l'oeil? When does it captureand 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 thatit's only a trompe l'oeil. For it appears then to be other than what it saidit was, or rather now it presents itself as being this other thing (pp.34­35).

An example of the Ambassadors-effect in filmis found in Paris, Texasin the shot of Dean Stockwell speaking on the phone beneath whaseems to be a blue sky- until the camera pulls back and reveals thesky, and the building juxtaposed against it, to be part of a billboardthat forms a background to his conversation.

As a technical trope that implies movement, classical perspective asrepresented by a painting like Piero della Francesca's Flagellation ofChrist induces a crisis with respect to the spectator's placement by theimage. "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 offigures and objects as an index of cosmic status (the more divine thefigure, the larger its size), Renaissance painting is more about size asa function of distance-distance from the earthly, and a location insome realistic space. The key factor is the introduction of time, oftemporality, which is most clearly articulated in images like Diirer'sSt. Jerome in His Study, where the obliqueness of point of view invitesthe spectator into the image as if happening upon St.Jerome by surprise(Panofsky). This is a decadrage by comparison with Medieval spec­tatorship.

The consciousness of time inaugurated by Renaissance painting be­comes characteristic of modern representation in general, and can beseen as the basis for modernist experimentation with temporality andpoint of view in Manet, Degas, Cezanne, and Picasso. Ironically, Ren-

aissance perspective's consciousness of time, which implies conscious- 99ness of space, of depth, is what in modernist painting destroys spaceand, by consequence, rational temporality. This stems from the trans­formation of space and time into speed, which eludes the fixity ofpainting's static gaze. The speed of modem life as represented by therailroad is an iconic example of what cannot be represented- hence,the foreclosure of the subject in paintings like Maner's La Gare SaintLazare: a cloud of steam, a trace of speed interposes itself as a screenbetween the spectator and the object, and dramatizes the exclusion ofthe subject from apprehension of time. In classical anamorphosis, asBonitzer insists, the spectator has a role to play, and an enigma touncover, and is caught up in the game; in modernist painting, ana­morphosis is accelerated, pushed to its limits, out of control, whichthus undermines the basis for spectatorship.

Degas is the central example that unites Bonitzer's various consid­erations on painting and cinema. The transformation of point of viewwith respect to the frame and time, what Bonitzer calls Degas's "rev­olution of the frame," also bears a direct relation to photography, toits revolution of the frame and its "grain de reel." Bonitzer sees cinemain Degas's framing, the process by which Degas imposes his off-centerframe on odd bits of reality, cut out and thrust at the viewer with allthe force of an inverse tracking shot. "Decadrage" is thus an ironic­sadistic framing premised on the nomadic arbitrariness of the frameand the violence of its imposition on whatever reality it articulates orcuts out. This is a modernist technique - framing as perceptual dis­placement, as cutting off. IfRenaissance perspective leads its spectatorinto the space of the painting, the modernist destruction of perspectiveexcludes its subject from any meaningful entry into representation; itsdecadrage destroys the idea of the frame as a window-frame, and theidea of the subject.

This is a framing inaugurated by photography, which casts a me­chanically indifferent eye on any and every subject, thus rendering allsubjects equally banal, equally trivial, and equally vulnerable to sci­entific scrutiny. The glorification of the trivial givesframing an obscene,almost pornographic power, especially in relation to the "grain dereel" of the photographic image. Bonitzer links the realism of thephotographic signifier explicitly with the obscene, that which spoilsthe "art effect" of those old nineteenth-century photos that imitatemasterpieces of classical art, but seem vulgar, unsuccessful and banalprecisely because of their "too-real" quality. This "trop de reel" isBarthes's punctum, the third meaning that remains outside of codifiableexplanation, 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- 101tograph extends to film as well. Bonitzer sees a complicity betweenthe medical and the pornographic via photography: both scrutinizeand cut up previously unremarked anatomies. Film takes this processone step further with the close-up, which Bonitzer considers to beobscene almost by its very nature, in its process ofmagnifying otherwiseunnoticed details and inscribing them in a montage of effects-sus-pense, horror, eroticism (p.87). The close-up is for Bonitzer virtuallywhat defines cinema's modernity:

The close-up in effect plays a simultaneously terroristic and revolutionaryrole in the space of the cinema: revolutionary in that, by reversing thehierarchy of proportions, events, bodies, making the large small, and thesmall large, it initiates by and with montage a new order of appearancesand images, indifferent to reality "such as it is...." The close-up is in thissense a particular case of the enlargement and cutting up of signs desiredby Formalism, Dadaism and Futurism, which are all linked in spirit to theinstability of the revolutionary era. Terroristic, finally, in that it derivesfrom a violence inflicted on an undifferentiated space, on the homogeneityof bodies, leaving the spectator's eye with no choice: big heads, cut-offheads, membra dis;ecta-this is how the astonished audiences of earlycinema saw film's first close-ups. Trained as it was to contemplate paintings,landscapes, panoramas, and the homogeneous space of the theater or musichall, the spectator's eye was unprepared to confront a vision that wasn'tframed in medium or long-shot (p.88).

As a "cine-sign" that almost demands montage to make sense of theviolence of the shot, the close-up designates the limit of the precariousequilibrium of editing in presenting the horror, the ambivalence of theseduction of the body. This is particularly true of close-ups of the face,where the aura of the portrait threatens to disintegrate when the cameragets 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 inexcruciating hugeness. This is the "grain de reel" that always threatensto contaminate the beauty of the image."

The notions of "decadrage" and the "grain de reel" are Bonitzer'smajor axes of comparison of painting and cinema. Where he doestouch on the imitation of paintings by film, however, it is to saysomething about an oblique relationship. Rohmer's Marquise d'O, forexample, models one shot on Fuseli's The Nightmare. The interest isnot so much to what extent Rohmer's tableau vivant is faithful toFuse1i's work; it is rather the fundamentally "a-narrative" quality ofsuch tableaux in films, the way in which the image "stops" the narrativeand 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 invitationsto interpretation, contemplation, deciphering on the part of the spec­tator. As an oxymoron-immobile movement-the tableau-shot, as hecalls it, draws attention to the struggle between the still and the movingimage, a struggle that in Godard's Passion becomes one between paint­ing and cinema.

It is in those films, then, that are in some sense about painting thatthe truly non-narrative dimension of film is realized- for example, thefilms of Godard and Antonioni. In other words, modernist cinema'sinsistence on the image, on an image that demands painting's modeof spectatorship, is in a sense the truest cinema. (Bonitzer refers hereto Bazin's distinction between those who put their faith in the imageand those who put their faith in reality.) The "painting-effect" wouldhere translate as the "looking-effect." Though we might take exceptionto the idea that a "truth of cinema" could be determined on the basisof the problematic narrative/non-narrative distinction, we can stillrespect the effort to place the "contemplative" gaze of painting in filmas the inverse of painting's cinematic panning gaze. What is neededhere is a way of thinking the two processes together through conceptsof the spectator that are oriented more toward history and perception.

Critically speaking, Bonitzer's contribution is that of a discursiveframer (or de-framer), a critical trail-blazer who dears a path for futureexplorers. His insights are precisely that-in-sights, glimpses in, in­tuitions that beg to be developed further. Bonitzer is not to be re­proached for this; he is; after all, not a theorist, but a critic (and avery art-literate one, as his Cabiers essays have shown over the years),and his essays do not pretend to lay a theoretically systematic foun­dation for considerations on painting and cinema. We can, nevertheless,wonder why he invokes some theorists and concepts over others, giventhe reliance on predictable figures like Lacan, Foucault and Panofsky.For example, Bonitzer's repeated engagement withPanofsky's theoriesof perspective prompts the question: why not make use of Panofsky'sessay on film? Though this may have seemed too obvious a choice toBonitzer, "Style and Medium inthe Motion Pictures" at least has theadvantage of reminding us of the oxymoron of the tableau-shot. Panof­sky saw early films in terms of movement added to originally staticworks of art: "The living language, which is always right, has endorsedthis sensible choice when it still speaks of a 'moving picture' or simply,a 'picture,' instead of accepting the pretentious and fundamentallyerroneous 'screen play'."s The "pictures" Panofsky identifies at theorigin of early cinema are rooted in popular culture and a folk artmentality-:-postcards, comic strips, dime novels, etc. These imagescater 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 oppor­tunities missed in Bonitzer's neglect of Panofsky's provocative, if prob­lematic, discourse on film.

We can also wonder at Bonitzer's studied avoidance of terms like"voyeurism" and "fetishism." Though in many cases he is describingsimilar processes, especially in the obscenity of decadrage and themagnified cut-up in close-up, he stops short of placing his discoursein the context of psychoanalytically-informed film theory. This mustbe an intentional avoidance, since his primary concern is with thespectator. Degas, for example, is commonly referred to as a "keyhole"painter; his "slice of life" (tranche de vie) approach to modern life isso much about the kinds of voyeuristic and fetishistic investments madein cinema that a failure to probe more deeply the kinds of subjectivitythey appeal to overlooks what is truly deframing about Degas's vision.

Equally puzzling is the absence of any notion of identification. Atthe very least, a glance at any of the paintings or filmsBonitzer discussesis obliged to pause in the relay of looks, the delegation of point ofview within the frame that is set up via framing, perspective, andrepresented figures or characters, a relay that either invites or excludesthe spectator's gaze. This strikes me as a productive path to follow inlinking the spectator of painting with that of cinema. The closestBonitzer comes to broaching identification is in his discussion of LasMeninas, which in any case depends almost wholly on Foucault'sanalysis of the painting, and adds little to an understanding of thehistorical, psychoanalytic or perceptual underpinnings of spectatorshipin painting and film.

Finally, in his reference to the "acceleration" of modern life and theextent to which painting tries, with difficulty, to register this trans­formation, Bonitzer's analysis would have benefitted from an engage­ment with Wolfgang Schivelbusch's notion of "panoramic perception,"which is a historical and more perceptually-based reading of the sameprocess defined theoretically by Paul Virilio. For Bonitzer, movementand acceleration become, in cinema, conditions of the subject thatimply multiple points of view, fragmented and partial vision, variabledistances, while the same factors spell the end for painting. This wouldapply even to the "cinematographic" experiments of Duchamp, Ma­rinetti et al., which Bonitzer sees as connected more fundamentallywith later experiments in abstract cinema of the 1920s. Bonitzer char­acterizes the "end of painting" as follows:

It's as if painting opened itself up to its fourth dimension, Time, throughacceleration and extravagance. With the speed that takes over the painter'shand 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 thatis like a catastrophe (p.57).

In Schivelbusch's account of the perceptual revolution of speed, theloss of perspective, distance, and point of view is an effect of a veryspecific new mode of perception symbolized by the experience of therailroad. 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 in­tervening between the spectator/passenger and the landscape outsidethe train window/frame. Ultimately interwoven with theories of shockby Benjamin, Freud, and Simmel, the Schivelbusch narrative plucks itssubject from a technologically, economically and socially conditionedcontext for shifts in perception and representation."

Though future studies of painting and cinema may emphasize dif­ferent approaches-historical, psychoanalytic, or narratologicai, forexample-they should not ignore the critical tracks laid by Bonitzer.His work provides film studies with a provocative point of departurefor 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 appro­priate, as Bonitzer wishes to distinguish between decadrage and recadrage,the reframing that narrative cinema uses to reposition its spectator withincontinuity editing. Nor is "unframing" proper to convey the sense of adisplaced framing that decadrage always implies.

3. Bonitzer does refer to Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age ofMechanical Reproduction" in seeing photographic mass reproduction ofthe 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 Merz­bauen) to a mass level.Mass-reproduced imagesare imagesof the masses­of the ordinary, the insignificant, the indifferent. They represent a flatteningnot only of the concept of the subject, but of the space of the image aswell.

4. Similar effectscan be determined in opposite techniques. Thus, against theterror of the close-up, we might insist on that of the long-shot. PatrickBokanowski's :c:Ange, conceived in its essence on the basis of painting,

provides us with several potent shots of masked figuresat a distance, figures 105that, like Jason in Friday the 13th, terrify by virtue of their visual inac­cessibility-much as Max Ernst's Two Children areThreatened by a Night-ingale produces a terror-effect for the spectator in its miniaturization ofcipher-like figures frozen in mid-stride (the equivalent of the long-shot inpainting would be the tiny, the small image). In a sequence derived fromVermeer, a female servant with a pitcher of milk traverses a black screenas if literally drawing the space; shown in bird's-eye view, this montage­within-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 isfrightening by virtue of her representation in long-shot, a long-shot thatis defined fundamentally by decadrage.

5. In FilmTheory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1979), p.245.

6. Mast and Cohen, p.246.

7. SeeWolfgangSchivelbusch,The RailwayJourney (New York: Urizen Press,1979).