7 Films About Art
7. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
Joel McCrea as a director in his pursuit of true art.
Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) asks us if art can be self-consciously political without also being tiresome. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a director of comedies during the Great Depression, thriving in escapist pictures. His social conscience, however, impels him to want to direct a social drama of “stark realism”, a “canvas” for the world’s suffering.
But he finds out in his journey that when art tries to refrain from politics and social issues, it is ideology. And when it is self-conscious of its political message, then it is… bad ideology. There is no way out of it.
The film can be read as an attack on the likes of Spike Lee and other directors of “urgent” films. An aesthetic education of man? Easy does it, artist: make 'em laugh, first. The world is inarguably horrible, indeed, but the artist’s job is not to lecture people on it, but, rather, to take a sad song and make it better.
6. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
The irresistible, though imoral, appeal of art.
Here is an inversion of the Platonist architectonic which identified the Good, the Beautiful and the Truth. In Vincente Minelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) the good is divorced from the beautiful, which is not true, but an illusion: films.
Jonathan Shields is a movie producer of an unscrupulous disposition, a sordid, betraying little weasel, as only Kirk Douglas could portray. Always one step ahead, he consciously instrumentalizes everything in his reach in order to achieve the one thing he cares about: his art. And he gets it, albeit with a trail of ugliness.
Art’s got nothing to do with justice in The Bad and the Beautiful. It’s an irresistible urge beyond morality. The bad, perhaps only the bad, get to access the Beautiful.
5. Limelight (1952)
Chaplin, the eternal street artist
In Limelight (1952) Charlie Chaplin plays comedy and vaudeville legend Calvero, who’s prime has passed and now, an old poor drunk, is forced to the streets again, striving for a penny. A sad story? Not for a street artist at heart, like Chaplin, who rejoices in this alter-ego. “There’s something about working the streets I like; it’s the tramp in me I suppose”, he says.
The street artist can speak more eloquently about life than any novel of ideas could. His body is his art, then and there on the open streets, giving himself away to the world, utterly exposed to its laughter and its booing.
Limelight is Chaplin’s manifesto for a life-redeeming art. Cheesy? Not with Chaplin. There’s something about that tramp in him, the street artist, which allows him to innocently convey the simplest of philosophies: life’s a pantomime.
4. Le mystère Picasso (1956)
Picasso’s hand creating the world faster than the mind can process it.
Le mystère Picasso (1956) shows, and yet doesn’t explain, art being made. Why doesn’t it explain it? That’s precisely the film’s legacy. In Henri-Georges Clouzot’s portrayal of the artist’s mystery we have material lines being traced always ahead of their intentions, which can only afterwards be interpreted as this or that.
Any kind of mental explanation of art, as is so usual in times of neuroscientism, is but a reduction. Picasso does not think his paintings and drawings; they do not constitute a previous sphere of neuro-activity, nor does he have a mental image or idea of them, which he would, then, attempt to represent. His hands paint and draw, not his mind. The brain, his or ours, can’t follow his hands’ trace – it’s always one step ahead.
3. To Be or Not To Be (1942)
A man with a little mustache in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942)
Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942), one of the greatest of comedies, is also, among many other things, a cinematic commentary on Shakespeare’s line “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”.
The world's a stage, or: life imitates art. The structure of reality follows the patterns of fiction. Our sense of verisimilitude, what seems veridical or false, and how we act, is not given by the crude facts of a reality behind all masks, but by art, make-believe in all its forms, the illusory itself structuring the real. The only true way to engage in reality, and change it, is by playing it.
The verb “to act” has a double meaning: it means to do something generally, i.e., an action, but also to play a role, i.e., as an actor. To Be or Not To Be thrives in this ambiguity. An action, it turns out, is always playacting.
2. F for Fake (1973)
Orson Welles as a trickster in F for Fake (1973).
Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973) confronts an inconvenient problem in art: the author, as the presence behind the "original" work. When a faker is more faithful to the author’s work than the author himself–– why keep using such language?
Ever since romanticism thinking of art meant immediately assuming the subject behind it: the artist, the genius. But what is an author really? An… illusion? Welles, the magician, ensnares us into a scheme of fraud and trickery to such an extent we are no longer sure we can live without them.
Once we accept the wonderful world of art and illusion, we also get fraud, fakery and forgery. Beethoven. Shakespeare. Picasso. “Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much…”
1. Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963)
Mastroianni as a mascalzone in Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963)
The artist is a buffoon. That's Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido in 8 ½ (1963). A fraud, a trickster. You press him just a bit— and he's got nothing. Not even the slimmest awareness of how he comes up with things. Like the poet in Plato's Ion, the artist cannot give an account of itself and his craft. Things happen in him, if he's lucky. “Perhaps something will happen…” is the artist's motto.
In Fellini’s 8 ½ cinema becomes the metaphor for art’s ultimate frightening frivolity. What’s the point to any art work, from cave paintings to Dante’s Commedia? If one goes on a journey to the heart of art, one will end up like Guido: a self-conscious childish fraud, indulgent and melancholy.
His film and his inspiration sink once he reaches the bottom of art. It’s like a film set: show it from the outside, with a little bit of trickery, and it impresses. Go in— poof! Nothing. A magic trick. 8 ½ is not only about this process: it is itself this process. A work of art about art looking into itself–– and not finding anything.
