by Jon Lackman | 30 November 2010 | Film
In the summer/fall double issue of Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne devoted to “Cinema Surprised by the Arts,” editor Jean-Pierre Criqui writes:
From Eric Rohmer and Nabuhiro Suwa to Albert Lewin and Gus van Sant … the arts that preceded cinema historically – painting and sculpture first of all, but also, among others, theater and opera – ceaselessly haunt it, like zombies and other body snatchers. This haunting has been cultivated, constructed, by the most varied of means – that cinema has so often been “surprised by the arts” attests above all to cinema’s eminently productive and transformative capacity for astonishment, as the “most modern of modern arts” … [To quote Jacques Aumont] “Cinema was born outside art, as a scientific curiosity, a popular entertainment and also a média (a way of exploring the world); however it was quickly reclaimed as an art (even, remarkably, as the first inventedart) and as a médium (a means of creation).”
Artists discussed in the issue include Tintoretto, Simon Vouet, François-Joseph Navez, Manet, Gauguin, Braque, Ernst, de Chirico, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Daniel Buren, Robert Morris, Ed Ruscha, and David Hockney.
