Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts

Through the feature films and documentaries of directors including Emmer, Erice, Godard, Hitchcock, Pasolini, Resnais, Rossellini and Storck, Jacobs examines the way films ‘animate’ artworks by means of cinematic techniques, such as camera movements and editing, or by integrating them into a narrative. He explores how this ‘mobilization’ of the artwork is brought into play in art documentaries and artist biopics, as well as in feature films containing key scenes situated in museums. The tension between stasis and movement is also discussed in relation to modernist cinema, which often includes tableaux vivants combining pictorial, sculptural and theatrical elements. This tension also marks the aesthetics of the film still, which have inspired prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. Illustrated throughout, Jacobs’ study of the presence of art in film, alongside the omnipresence of the filmic image in today’s art museums, is an engaging work for students and scholars of film and art alike.

Reviews of Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts

Framing Pictures is a welcome, major addition to the literature on the relationships between film and the other visual arts. Lucid, thorough, and wide-ranging, it is the work of a scholar both deeply grounded in the histories of art and cinema and current with contemporary art and critical discourses. Jacobs covers the entire intermedial territory, balancing wonderfully succinct overviews with close consideration of art documentaries, artist biopics, tableaux vivants, film stills, and the cinematic turn in contemporary art. — Susan Felleman, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006) Framing Pictures is a welcome, major addition to the literature on the relationships between film and the other visual arts. Lucid, thorough, and wide-ranging, it is the work of a scholar both deeply grounded in the histories of art and cinema and current with contemporary art and critical discourses. Jacobs covers the entire intermedial territory, balancing wonderfully succinct overviews with close consideration of art documentaries, artist biopics, tableaux vivants, film stills, and the cinematic turn in contemporary art.