A quick look at the place of artworks in movies and tv series: The tableau vivant or living picture The frame within a frame The fictitious artworks

1. Funny face, Stanley Donen, 1957

3. Vocabulary
• Shout-out: a mention, credit or greeting, an allusion to another
work or inspiration
• Iconology: the analysis of the contextual significance of an image or
symbol
• Prop: short for theatrical property, refers to anything movable used
by the cast on stage
• Cinematism: Word created by Serguei Eisenstein to define a theory
of aesthetics based on the parallelism between painting and cinema
“It seems that all the arts, throughout the centuries, tended toward
cinema. Conversely, cinema helps us to understand their methods”
• Screencap: short for screen capture
• Bingewatching: A marathon viewing of tv shows

4. ToC:
1. Tableau vivant: from reenactment to allusion
2. A frame within the frame: the always
thought-out place of artworks
2.2 James Bond and the intertextuality of
paintings
3. Art of fiction: New dimensions for narration

5. A subjective interpretation:
Ophelia, oil on canvas, John
Everett Millais,1851-1852, Tate
London
Bright Star, Jane Campion, 2009

6. The tableau
vivant:
Arrested Development, S01E08,
Created by Mitch Hurwitz, 2003
A fixed image captured within
the art of movement.
Introducing an actual living
work of art in a movie or series
motivates the spectator to
question the ability of the film
to bring life on screen. It blurs
the frontier between the frame
of a painting and the one of
the film, the acting and the
incarnation of the actor.

7. The tableau vivant is an ancient tradition, dating
back to the directing of Mysteries in front of
churches in medieval times, it later became an
upper-class distraction, as depicted in this movie.
Ceres, Antoine Watteau, oil on canvas,
1717, National Gallery
The House of mirth, Terrence Davis, 2000,
based on the book by Edith Wharton

8. Arrested Development, S01E08 In the case of this comedy, the tableau vivant is a setting for the
characters’ storyline, but also meaningful on the topic of family bonds,
the artwork being the most obvious possible to serve the purpose of
the narration.

9. Christus, Giulio Antamaro, 1916
Viridania, Luis Bunuel, 1961
History of the world, part I, Mel Brooks, 1981
The Simpsons, S16E19, Matt Groening, 2005
Da Vinci’s last supper is one of the most
referenced artworks in movies, often as a
parody, but also as a visual comment on
characters.

10. The tableau vivant most of the time is reduced to a more or less implicit reference:
La marquise d’O, Eric Rohmer, 1972 The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry
Gilliam, 1988
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jim Sharman,
1975

11. Frozen, Disney, 2013 A shout-out to The Swing, by
Fragonard,1767, Wallace Collection,
redesigned to fit the aesthetics of the
animated movie.

12. Of course, the different uses of an artwork as a prop can, and
many times do coexist
Gotham, S01E04, 2014 In the background, a reproduction of the Oath of the
Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David, 1784

13. Titanic, James Cameron, 1998
Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso, 1906-1907

14. Artworks are also often used in post-apocalyptic
worlds, as a way to evoque the last traces of humanity,
or the attempts to salvage its patrimony.
Children of men, Alfonso Cuaròn, 2007
David, Michelangelo, 1501-1504, Firenze

15. The Fall, S02E02 & S02E03,
Allan Cubitt, 2014
Few to no artworks usually
appear in crime stories and
investigative series. In The Fall,
we follow both the killer and
the investigator. The computer
screen of the first shows an
unidentified engraving of a dark
subject whereas hers is almost
literaly a blank page.

16. However, once the killer has entered her room, leaving behind
a new screen wallpaper as a clue, the nightmare is literaly
shared, and the search becomes personal.
The Fall, S02E03 & S02E06
The Nightmare, Johann Heinrich
Füssli, 1781, Detroit Institute of
Arts

17. Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965
Above Ferdinand’s head, three postcards :
Les Amoureux, Picasso, 1923, National Gallery
Paul en Pierrot, Picasso, 1925, Musée Picasso Paris
Cap Ferrat, Chagall, 1952, colored lithography
“Pierrot-Ferdinand reads a paperback
edition of Elie Faure's Histoire de l'Art and
frequents works of art in the form of
postcards that can be pinned to the wall.
His experience is that of the ordinary
twentieth-century man who accedes to art
through commentary and reproductions”
(Jean-Louis Leutrat Kaleidoscope p.85).

18. Close-ups on three of the postcards in
Marianne’s apartment, are inserted in the
sequence, not motivated by a look but
used by Godard as a comment on the
stillness of their dialogue:
Femme nue, Renoir, 1880, Musée Rodin,
Paris
Paul en Pierrot, Picasso, 1925, Musée
Picasso, Paris
La blouse roumaine, Matisse, 1940, MAM
Paris
The frame of the shot has become
the frame of the artwork, integrating
the fixed image in the grammatical
structure of the movie

19. James Bond and the intertextuality of
the series through the use of paintings
Skyfall, Sam Mendes, 2012
Meeting in the National Gallery, Q is backed by Joseph Wright of Derby's cutting-edge
scientific piece Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump of 1768 and Bond is framed by
Thomas Gainsborough's The Morning Walk of 1785, each painting giving a character trait
to the men we have on screen

20. They are facing another painting:
The "Fighting Temeraire" Tugged to Her Last Berth
to be Broken Up, J.M.W. Turner, 1839
They each give their opinion:
- Q : the inevitability of time
- Bond : a big bloody ship
At the end of the movie, Bond meets the new M in his office, where a painting of Thomas
Buttersworth, Trafalgar victory, 1825 shows the Fighting Temeraire at the height of her glory,
right behind the HMS Victory, the boat of the heroic Amiral Nelson.

21. But boat paintings and marines are not only meaningful in this one movie, it
actually calls back the whole Bond saga : Here is Sean Connery in M’s office in Dr.
No, Terrence Young, 1962, the very first Bond movie.

22. Skyfall, 2012
The Thomas Crown Affair, John
McTiernan, 1999
Where Pierce Brosnan steals a Monet
from the Met.

23. Art of fiction, for fiction:
Arrested Development, S04E01, 2014
A fictional artwork can have two distinct roles:
• More than a prop, it can become the center of the plot
• It is directly directed towards the spectator, with comedic or other intent, since it is
considered a real piece within the fictional dimension.

24. The grand Budapest Hotel,
Wes Anderson, 2014
Boy with apple, Johannes Van
Hoytl the Younger, XVIth
century
The painting is actually the creation of Michael Taylor for the
needs of the movie. The main inspiration is a painting of
Bronzino, but the name of the fictional painter indicates a
northern artist.
Lodovico Capponi, Agnolo Bronzino, 1550-1555, Frick Collection

25. In The Big Lebowski, by the Cohen Brothers, Julianne Moore plays Maude, an artist
specialist of action painting. Naked and hanging from the ceiling, she sprays paint on
canvas in a Pollock manner, making art that has been described as “strongly vaginal”. The
spectator shares the Dude’s dumbfounded look in front of the scene.

26. Of course, comedy and/or horror can derive from an existing piece. In those cases, the
characters’ interaction with them leads to a fictious and comical situation, often
deriving from the damaging of the work, an iconoclasm :
Mr. Bean, 1998
Portrait of the artist’s mother, Whistler, 1871,
Musée d’Orsay
Batman, Tim Burton, 1989
Selfportrait aged 63, Rembrandt, 1669,
National Gallery

27. Vincent Van Gogh: L’église
d’Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890, Musée
d’Orsay
Below : Detail with a Krafayis at
the window
Doctor Who,
S05E10, 2010

28. Vincent Van Gogh: The Pandorica opens or Blue box
exploding, 1890
Doctor Who, S05E12, 2010

29. Ferris Bueller’s day off, John Hughues, 1986
As a way to conclude on the various ways an artwork can be used in a
movie, a sequence which combines the several uses of an artwork and
offers an aesthetic questioning of the links between the arts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubpRcZNJAnE

30. QUIZ
QUIZ