'Pictures': Art on the Move

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 30, 2007; Page WE48

Look closely at the labels and you'll find perhaps the most telling thing about "Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film," an exhibition at the Phillips Collection pairing art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries with roughly contemporaneous film clips.

Check it out: Whereas the paintings, prints and drawings on the walls are attributed to such well-known artists as Maurice Prendergast, William Glackens, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins or Mary Cassatt, the snippets of early cinema -- which tend to parrot the composition and subject matter of those art forms -- are typically credited to such production companies as the Edison Manufacturing Co., the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. and Cinematographe Lumiere. When a single person is credited, as with film pioneer Birt Acres's 1895 loop of crashing waves, "Rough Seas at Dover," it's the rare exception.

What that tells us, rather obviously, is that filmmaking, unlike painting, was always a collaborative art form, even from its birth. It takes bunches of people to produce. Not just people, but money. Hence, it was far too labor- and cash-intensive for the average Joe to just pick up a camera, instead of a brush and palette, and start making art.

Only very recently has that begun to change, as the ease and affordability of digital video and editing software such as iMovie have put moviemaking in the hands of the masses. Listen to filmmaker David Lynch, writing in his new book, "Catching the Big Fish," of his first attempt at filmmaking, a crudely animated stop-motion short from 1966 called "Six Men Getting Sick," made while the director was a young painting student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: "I thought that was going to be the extent of my film career, because this thing actually cost a fortune to make -- two hundred dollars. I simply can't afford to go down this road, I thought."

When cinema began, as the Phillips Collection show makes clear, it was a more expensive, and somewhat gimmicky, i mitation of the dominant visual art form: painting. That impulse to take a static picture and make it move has never really gone away. Here's Lynch again, writing about the art-school epiphany he had while painting a scene of a garden at night: "All of a sudden, these plants started to move, and I heard a wind. I wasn't taking drugs! I thought, Oh, how fantastic this is! And I began to wonder if film could be a way to make paintings move."

To be sure, it was representational painting that set the tone for what early filmmakers such as Thomas Edison and French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere first decided to record: a couple kissing, the rushing waters of Niagara Falls.

But as I wandered through the Phillips, a question started forming in my head, albeit one that "Moving Pictures" doesn't explicitly raise, let alone answer: If film technology has evolved to the point where any conceivable combination of image and sound can be made -- just as painting has evolved to include abstract expressionism, surrealism and any number of other movements -- why is conventional narrative cinema (in other words, moving representational pictures) still the dominant mode of expression?

The answer, I believe, lies in those labels. Because film was, and still largely is, such a collaborative (read: costly) art form, the business model inhibits most producers from making films that deviate from anything that will be less than resoundingly popular with the largest number of people. That's why films such as contemporary artist Fred Worden's experimental black-and-white, Rorschach-like abstractions get relegated to the Whitney Biennial and stuff like "Are We Done Yet?" opens in every multiplex in every city across the country.

As technology changes, so does art. Artist-musician Brian Eno's latest project, a generative software program called 77 Million Paintings, wouldn't even have been possible a few years ago. In a way, it's like a film, only one that plays on your computer monitor instead of on a screen in a movie theater. Eno's almost endlessly randomized "light paintings" definitely aren't narrative, any more than they're representational, but they're moving pictures all the same.

In a sense then, 77 Million Paintings is where the Phillips Collection's "Moving Pictures" is pointing, without knowing it. Yet the sad and ironic truth that this exhibition reminds us of is that despite the early promise of film, it is art that kept moving, and movies that got stuck in the past.

'Moving Pictures': Haven't We Seen This All Before? Phillips Collection Exhibit Traces the Painting-to-Film Progression

By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 4, 2007; Page N04

How do we learn to see? Does art simply mimic the human eye, or have audiences, over time, accommodated their vision to the artist's eye? And why, when a new technology and artistic medium emerges, does it so often simply conform to the notions of composition, perspective and framing that have gone before?

Such are the questions raised (and not always answered) by "Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film," an exhibit of paintings, photographs, posters and films that recently opened at the Phillips Collection. The diverting -- if blinkered -- exhibition, which features 60 of the earliest films to be made in the United States and Europe, invites viewers to consider how, if art doesn't necessarily repeat itself throughout history, it certainly rhymes, advancing similar formal dictates, iconographic subjects and archetypal themes regardless of the medium.

The show also tacitly reminds visitors how emerging media and the new forms of cultural expression they foment are less novel than they might first appear. Seen in the context of "Moving Pictures," YouTube is simply the latest iteration of a long line of artistic begats that reaches back centuries.

In this modest, often beguiling, ultimately vexing exhibition, which takes up 11 small galleries on the Phillips's top two floors, the connections between 19th-century painting and the beginnings of cinema are made immediately clear. The show opens, appropriately enough, with one of Thomas Edison's most famous -- and at the time of its release, notorious -- films, "May Irwin Kiss" (1896), which depicts a dapper, mustachioed gentleman planting a prim buss on the cheek of an equally proper lady; the scene was taken from a touring play at the time, "The Widow Jones," but evokes a timeless piece of iconography, reminding us that the fundamental things applied long before Dooley Wilson sang about them two generations later in "Casablanca."

But the most dramatic examples of how painting informed the earliest films come in successive galleries, where the conversation between the two mediums is writ monumental. Curated by Nancy Mowll Mathews, senior curator of 19th- and 20th-century art at Williams College Museum of Art, where the exhibition originated, "Moving Pictures" is at its most arresting when the gestures are biggest: when, for example, "Niagara, Horseshoe Falls," a 1896 film by French pioneers the Lumière brothers, grandly speaks across the room to the equally magisterial -- and compositionally identical -- "Niagara Falls" painted in 1878 by William Morris Hunt.

Spanning the years 1880 to 1910 and organized thematically to encompass the cardinal subjects of the day -- nature, the human body (both in portraiture and motion), the arts and urbanization -- "Moving Pictures" has been meticulously edited to demonstrate the connections between art forms. Thus we experience such delightful, even startling, synchronies as John Sloan's "In the Wake of the Ferry II" (1907) and Edison's "S.S. 'Coptic' Lying To" (1898). And we understand up close the line that connects the painting and sculpture of Frederic Remington, the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Edwin S. Porter's groundbreaking "Great Train Robbery" (which was shown at the Phillips last week).

But as uncanny as viewers may find such coincidences, and as enjoyable as it is to see film and sleek flat-screen technology integrated so gracefully and tastefully into the Phillips's exhibition space, "Moving Pictures" too often comes across as the programming equivalent of a one-liner, an idea that, albeit supported with lots of visually pleasing examples, doesn't necessarily break much new ground. How surprising is it, after all, that practitioners of a new medium, many of them former artists and photographers, would use the same framing and compositional values as the art forms they were trained in? And how surprising that, while being captivated -- sometimes even terrified -- by film's heightened realism, audiences would find such continuity reassuring?

Then there's the organizational principle behind "Moving Pictures" itself, the assumption that the conversation between painting and film was the only conversation. But at the turn of the century, film was part of the much larger cultural project -- involving not just cinema but painting, poetry, theater and literature -- to create a heroic and healing American story in the wake of a ruinous Civil War. When G.W. "Billy" Bitzer -- who would later film D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" -- made the short film "Spirit of '76" in 1905, was it best understood as an iteration of the chromolithograph "Yankee Doodle 1776" (which itself was an iteration of Archibald Willard's iconic 1875 painting "The Spirit of '76"), or as an example of the larger zeitgeist, wherein an emerging art form was being pressed into service of inscribing a national mythology?

In focusing on so narrow a time period, "Moving Pictures" depicts film as an essentially conservative medium that preserved existing forms and assumptions, rather than breaking them apart. Audiences are introduced to some of the germinal films of the cinematic canon -- "May Irwin Kiss," the Lumières' "Feeding the Baby," the hand-tinted "Danse Serpentine" and "Coming of the Train" are the elements of cinematic style -- but in the context of such on-the-nose comparisons to (relatively minor) paintings, they're rendered inert forms of imitation or reenactment.

Of course, the medium would eventually become a means of storytelling and, just as powerfully, of abstraction, psychological exploration and the refracted expression of consciousness itself. In the narrow temporal and conceptual purview of "Moving Pictures," cinema is both bold and unsure, constantly seeking aesthetic cues and validation from the past. As the YouTube generation finds itself transfixed by its own reflection on miniaturized screens, the Phillips has provided us with a genteel reminder that a kiss was still a kiss is still a kiss.

Robert Bresson said he gave up painting for filmmaking because he wanted to see the leaves on the trees move.

Jean-Luc Godard wrote, "Photography is truth. Cinema is truth 24 times per second."

Merge both directors' statements, and there's a sentiment that makers and audiences of late-19th/early-20th-century film would have agreed with.

It can be difficult for modern viewers to grasp the radicality of kinetoscopes and their kin, but "Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film," which opens Saturday at the Phillips Collection, makes it brilliantly clear.

Paintings, drawings and such have tended to look fresh longer than early cinematic subjects, which suffered from comparison to technologically superior successors. But by hanging loops of early "actualities" alongside similar still scenes, "Moving Pictures" renders ancient footage of blacksmiths, boxers and serpentine dancers stunningly new.

Before movies, the spectrum of popular entertainment included illustrated lectures and magic-lantern shows. Having returned from exotic locales, travelers would hit the rails, stopping to recount their exploits with whatever visual aids they could pack.

This show captures the novelty of armchair adventurers at last being able to witness things - remote waterfalls, a trip down the Grand Canal - they might otherwise have never seen. But it goes beyond that.

There's a scientific overlay to the sensibility of Edison, the Lumiere Brothers et al. If you wanted to see people move, you could go to the theater. Part of the draw for movies was that they arrested movement as they captured it. Individual frames froze life. Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies of animals (the human included) captured precisely how creatures appeared at any spot on the journey from point A to point B.

Early films didn't function merely as moving pictures, seen one-on-one in intimate quarters. They also were public spectacles (in the tradition of large landscape paintings, themselves veterans of the touring circuit). A gay-'90s chromolithograph of "Edison's Greatest Marvel, the Vitascope" shows a packed theater rapt at the sights unfolding before it. A small pit orchestra plays. The screen is wrapped in an ornate gold frame.

--Glenn Dixon (Express, Feb. 15, 2007)