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THE FILM OF FACT 199
unconcerned for any outside purpose, aims at building from the elements of the paintings used a self-contained whole as valid artistically as the originals. Like experimental films in general, these creations may emphasize rhythm or content. To begin with the former, think of those sequences of The Titan focusing on Michelangelo's sculptures: gliding at close range along them, the camera distils from their surfaces flat rhythmical patterns of lights and shadows.9 Small wonder that Calder's mobiles, which are a natural for abstractions, have repeatedly given rise to similar exercises.10 Compositions featuring content usually evoke a sort of spiritual reality; as Bolen puts it, they mold the art material according to "metaphysical, esoteric, and philosophical considerations."11 In his Carpaccio's Legend of St. Ursula, Emmer juxtaposes scattered details of the paintings so as to make them bear out the legend narrated by an invisible speaker. (To simplify matters, the relations between sound and visuals in art films will not be covered here.) Of Demon in Art Bolen rightly says that its author, Enrico Castelli Gattinara, "does not hesitate to express his own conception of the world with the aid of materials borrowed from Bosch, Memling, or James Ensor."12 This trend reaches, perhaps, its climax with Storck-Micha's Le Monde de Paul Delvaux in which, to the accompaniment of a poem by Paul Eluard, figures, objects, and fragments of the artist's works jell into a dream-like universe. Is it Delvaux's, experienced from within? In any case, it is not his paintings. Configurations of phenomena all but unidentifiable in them jut out on the screen and challenge the audience to guess their meanings; and camera movements establish contexts of which the painter himself may have been entirely unaware. The films of this last group employ cinematic language not to transfer the work of art from the orbit of the fine arts to that of the cinema but to metamorphose it into an autonomous screen work which again claims to be Art. Whether abstractions or compositions with a surrealistic flavor, they are an extension of contemporary art rather than genuine films. The center of the medium lies elsewhere.
The documentary trend
Nearer to the center are those art films which, according to Read's definition, are made "for the same reasons that one makes films about ships and shipbuilders or savage tribes." And for what reasons does one make them? They are made not simply to represent ships— or primitive masks, for that matter— but to incorporate these objects with the real-life developments from which they emerge. Similarly, films on art which follow the documentary tendency do not isolate the work of art and feature it as an autonomous entity; rather, in keeping with the medium's affinity for natural material they try to make the work appear as an element of