The recent exhibition of Tim Burton at the MoMA in New York, the constant appearance of articles about some films and filmmakers (Haneke, Tarkovski, Kiarostami…) in specialized art magazines and, above all, the way in which some artists insist on offering a cinematic experience in their installations in museums and art centers, demonstrate the absolute permeability of the borders between art and cinema. Nothing new, of course, but increasingly evident.
There is no doubt that the most widespread form of image experience in today’s societies is the moving image. If we add to this that artists enjoy the flexibility to use all the means at their disposal to develop their discourses, it is not strange that for many artists cinema is the great reference, that it is increasingly common for filmmakers to exhibit in art institutions or for artists to become filmmakers and present their feature films at festivals and movie theaters.
Let us recall some cases: Andy Warhol filmed the Empire State Building for eight hours and Douglas Gordon “refilmed” it. In 1993, the same artist took Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 24 Hour Psycho and slowed it down to give it a duration of 24 hours, the same as the duration of the action. In Remake, Pierre Huyghe made a homemade but absolutely faithful version of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In Walt & Travis, Martí Anson filmed a road movie full of allusions to Paris, Wim Wenders’ Texas and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lance Blacktop, but including all those scenes or dead times that would never appear in a conventional road movie. In The Right Distance, Mabel Palacín analyses our relationship with images, based on a protagonist who lives surrounded by scenes from films with whose characters he connects and identifies.
Another variant is that of museums that exhibit the creative universes of filmmakers, such as Stanley Kubrick or Federico Fellini, or cases such as those of some authors of experimental cinema of the 60s, such as Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow or Harun Farocki, who exhibit in museums works that could hardly have a career in commercial cinemas. And finally, the most striking case is that of artists who take the opposite path, making the leap to film production. Thus, Julien Schnabel is now a consolidated director; Steve McQueen is the author of the feature film Hunger (2008), which deals with the subject of political prisoners of the IRA and is preparing to shoot a film about Fela Kuti; Shirin Neshat, in Women without Men (2009), tells the story of four women during the days of the coup d’état in Iran in 1953. All three have been recognized with awards at prestigious festivals such as Venice or Cannes.
This makes us think of the character of the art field as a testing laboratory. The museum can be a refuge for filmmakers and also a testing ground for artists whose ambition is to become filmmakers, make films and show them in cinemas.
[Article published in Bonart, 2010]
