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200 III. COMPOSITION
actuality. Paintings resemble musical production numbers in that they do not essentially belong to the common everyday world which attracts the camera; hence the need for reintegrating them into that world in which they have a foothold also, after all. So it is not surprising that the methods used for the adjustment of musical performances to camera-life are applied in art documentaries as well.*
Two of them have become standard practice; they frequently concur in one and the same film. First, representations of paintings are embedded in a narrative devoted to their creator— his life circumstances, his ideas, etc. A typical film of this kind is Grandma Moses, which mingles glimpses of the venerable lady's art with scenes of her life in the countryside. In order to intensify the real-life atmosphere in which the camera can breathe, the biographical statements are sometimes supplemented by shots of the people and landscapes from which the artist has taken his inspiration. Lust for Life, a feature film about Van Gogh, indulges in such confrontations of art and reality. Along with the Toulouse-Lautrec film, Moulin Rouge, this screen biography can be considered a counterpart of the many music films whose renditions of concert pieces and the like seem organically to grow out of the romanticized life of a virtuoso or singer. It need not be a biographical sketch; occasionally the artist is introduced as his own commentator, with the emphasis on his thoughts, his whole outlook. Numbers of art documentaries thus meet John Read's dictum, which he himself follows in his Henry Moore, Walter Sickert, etc.— that "the film on art should be about art and artists."13 The art works exhibited in these films either function like stage interludes, increasing, by way of contrast, the spectator's sensitivity to the incidental events about them, or help implement the human-interest story with which they are interwoven. (Whether this gain in cinematic quality always serves the cause of art appreciation is quite another question.)
Second, as with Duvivier's The Great Waltz, which shows Johann Strauss composing his Tales from the Vienna Woods, other art documentaries concentrate on the genesis of a work of art rather than the work itself. The principle is the same here and there: since the finished work lends itself to being rendered on the screen only in as much as the cinema is also a reproduction technique, the film maker prefers to present the work not as it is but as it becomes; in other words, he has us witness the creative processes from which it arises. In picturing the prenatal stages of a painting, he lures it back into the very dimension which is the camera's hunting ground. This procedure is strikingly illustrated by Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Mystery of Picasso, in which the camera, often placed be
"Cf.pp. 149-51.