Film Matters had the immense pleasure of discussing Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2017) with its one of its coauthors, Vito Adriaensens, in summer 2018. Comprising a variety of topics central to the intermedial crossroads of sculpture and cinema, Screening Statues is a highly investigative text delineating the confluence of sculptural models and film. Adriaensens generously made time out of a busy schedule as a visiting scholar and adjunct professor at Columbia University, in which to further discuss his contributions. Each of his fellow coauthors — Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, and Lisa Colpaert — offers his/her own discussions based on respective areas of research, as Adriaensens’s background in intermedial studies primes his own discussions of animated statuary in both horror and peplum films. While leaving room for further expansion, Screening Statues is a key textual resource in exploring the ongoing relationship between sculpture and cinema. The text is split into two parts. The first of which outlines various historiographic topics of statuary aestheticism from each of the contributing authors, while the latter section provides an extensive reference gallery of 150 films.
Matthew Johnson: It’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss the recent release of your coauthored text Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema. The subjects and discussions within this publication are markedly intriguing and engaging. We would be curious to know more of your experience in working with a collective of fellow authors in fleshing out this material. Has it been beneficial to approach this work as a collaborative venture? Had you envisioned your material alongside the contributions of others, or did this coauthorship develop out of previous, individual works?
Vito Adriaensens: The book is one of a few outputs generated by a research project that Steven, Susan, Lisa, and I worked on from 2010 to 2014 at the School of the Arts, University College in Ghent, concerned with the visualization of art and artists in cinema. We quickly identified a number of tropes that ran across media and spilled over from visual and performing arts onto film, and we set out to bring them together and see where they stood within the realm of film history. Right away, for instance, the prominence of paintings in American films of the 1940s and 1950s caught our eye, and this resulted in the 2014 book The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir Gothic Melodramas and Ghost Stories of the 1940s and 1950s (Steven Jacobs and Lisa Colpaert, Ghent: AraMER). Working simultaneously on early cinema, I had been aware of the large amount of tableaux vivants and living statues used as transformational props, plot points, gags, and for pure aesthetics, and the continuity of motifs such as the Pygmalion myth and spaces such as the wax museum (the place for confusion between wax and flesh). We saw these motifs and others run through the whole of film history and translated them into chapters that correlated with our singular experiences. Since we had over a thousand films on our list, Lisa and I also decided to invest in a second part of the book, The Sculpture Gallery, a collection of short texts for one hundred fifty films that engage with sculpture in interesting ways, and we did not have room to discuss all of these in the book chapters. As such, Screening Statues was always perceived as a collaborative work, indeed because it took a substantial amount of time working together to identify the material and the tropes, and to compile a Sculpture Gallery that was well balanced.
MJ: I see how this text suits a multiple-author format, especially considering the scope of topics for each of the eight chapters in part I, ranging from the statuary motifs of early cinema to studies of film itself as a self-referential, sculptural model. As far as delegating topics and chapters, did each of the authors contribute topics based on respective areas of interest? And did shared interest and research in certain areas contribute to coauthored chapters, such as Lisa Colpaert and Steven Jacob’s section on postwar European modernist cinema, or your opening chapter with Jacobs on the role of sculpture in early cinema?
VA: The chapters were contributed and set up on the basis of respective expertise and interest, and we were more or less fortunate that these fell along chronological lines. My own research into early cinema and tableaux vivants (I am on the executive committee of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema) spawned the first chapter, and given Steven’s interest and research on tableaux and slapstick, a coauthored piece seemed obvious. I also work on theatre and film and saw the Grand Guignol aesthetic move from the stage to silent film, culminating in the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz), a blueprint for many wax museum horror films that play on the possibility of life and death in wax (there was just a great show at the Met Breuer that emphasized the history of the hyperreal wax). My interest in animation (teaching a course at Columbia on animation film history right now) led to me tracing the field in which Ray Harryhausen was working, and finding a rich tradition of sword-and-sandal films set in antiquity or ersatz “ancient” times in which statues played key roles, as they do in literature of the period. In a similar vein, Lisa and Steven’s collaboration on The Dark Galleries evolved into an interest in stasis in European modernist cinema, fueled by statuesque actors and a (as in film noir) focus on death and petrification. Susan’s previous work on experimental and expanded cinema (cf. her 2014 Real Objects in Unreal Situations: Modern Art in Fiction Films) formed the perfect complement.
MJ: One can see certain interests evident through the topics explored, such as your interest in animation and Felleman’s attention to avant-garde cinema and modern art. The subject of the text itself is intriguing as you and your colleagues further discuss sculpture as an integrative intermedial art within cinema. The conflation of these arts works well, as you and your team note how three-dimensional, sculptural models are mobilized through the movements of camerawork, along with editing, within the two-dimensional space of film. In the Introduction of Screening Statues, Jacobs has a rather choice line about “the tensions between volatile filmic images and stable sculptural volumes” (21). And as evidenced in part I, there are a number of statuary tropes to be found within varying genres and movements throughout film history. I have also noticed that Kenneth Gross is often referenced in the text. Was he a key figure within your research? In the opening of your chapter “Anatomy of an Ovidian Cinema: Mysteries of the Wax Museum,” Gross and yourself highlight the uncanny nature of sculptural figures in noting how “the idea of a statue coming to life could be bound to an opposing thought: that the statue was once something living” (83). This presumption seems key in understanding the tensions between spectator and statue in horror genres, with the corporeal, yet uncanny nature of these figures. I’m excited to use Screening Statues, particularly the Sculpture Gallery in part II, as a reference for exploring more films! The works of Maya Deren and Alain Resnais were more familiar for me while reading through the text— focusing on the aforementioned stasis of modernist cinema. I’d be interested in looking more into Grand Guignol theatre and peplum films in the 1950s and 1960s.
VA: Yes, Kenneth Gross was key for us in his exploration of the uncanny in the (representation of) sculpture across media (literature, painterly representation, sculpture itself, cinema); in his other books he extends his ideas to the realms of puppetry and dolls, which, as Maureen Furniss also points out, possess a lifelike quality that is haunting when animated frame by frame because they exist in three dimensions. I think the horror films in the wax museum tradition and the peplum films by Ray Harryhausen make an interesting commercial counterpart to the puppet animation of Ladislas Starevich, Jiri Trnka, and Jan Svankmajer. I am very glad to hear that the Sculpture Gallery has spurred on some extra viewing in your life. We very much intended it to be a reference gallery for both further viewing and future research, and it was also the ideal place to explore some ideas we could not fit into the book, because there is such an incredible amount of statuary tropes in cinema’s brief history.
MJ: Indeed, Screening Statues points out a number of statuary forms, ranging from wax figure, animated sculptures to static imagery. As for static imagery, evidenced in the works of Maya Deren, Chris Marker, and (perhaps) more famously in films by Truffaut, would you find any more verisimilitude in frozen imagery as a true intermedial crossroads between cinema and sculpture — as the film creates sculptural entities by suspending mobility? Works such as Marker’s La Jetee [1962] and Si j’avais quatre dromadaires [1966] fully comprise these still corporeal entities, whereas it may appear as more of a stylistic flourish peppered in films like Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time [1946] — as explored by Felleman in chapter five, or even in more contemporary features like Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho [1991]. As noted, these immortalized, yet localized moments seem to inverse the Pygmalion myth. In addition, in chapter seven, you mention that the “added dimensionality” (153) of statuary figures helps to elicit our suspension of disbelief when they are uncannily brought to life within film. Do you find that spectatorial intrigue in sculptural forms stems from an inherent Pygmalion or even scopophilic interest?
VA: You are right in pointing out that static imagery in film can be perceived as a legitimate intermedial form, the film and its maker showcasing its base components (still photographs) and reducing human elements to frozen bodies. I think static imagery on film is deserving of a special category, depending on its technical nature and its contextualization within the narrative. There is an indexical difference between capturing photographs on film — wherein the body was and remains static forever — and duplicating frames to leave actors in suspended animation. The freeze frame (and its rich history from slapstick comedy, through Russian montage, French modernism, to commercial popularization) seems to have different implications each time, though it always reveals cinema’s correlation to both still photography and sculpture. For many nouvelle vague directors, as for directors today, the freeze frame might have been, like slow motion, mostly about form. I certainly think that scopophilia is inherent in all of us and that it is the key driver behind the attraction of realistic and hyperrealistic statuary – in life and on film. They represent bodies we can turn our gaze to for prolonged periods of time, but there is always the gnawing idea that our look might be returned. The Pygmalionist idea coupled to this is, I think, not coincidentally represented in almost every culture’s creational myths, in which man and woman are construed out of organic matter — so why should these other proto-humans not possess the possibility of life?
MJ: I would love to see further expansion on the subject of static imagery, though Felleman does a keen job of noting this in chapter five, in her discussions of Maya Deren. In revisiting My Own Private Idaho, for example, one can notice how the actors seem to pose (moving ever so slightly) during those stylized “freeze frames” sequences. It’s interesting to have the actors model stillness, versus manipulating the frame itself through stasis. Indeed many nouvelle vague filmmakers capitalize on those shifts between movement and stillness, or slow motion as medial form. Such instances seem to be staple trademarks even in current directors (like Wes Anderson’s habitual, slow-motion flourishes) while also sharing a long history and stylistic threads of age-old films such as Jean Vigo’s Zero de conduite [1933]. As for voyeuristic tendencies inherent in film, you are keen in noting the inherent desire for these proto-human statues embodying the reflective desires of ourselves, and of life. In fact, corporeal entities (sculptural, humanistic, or otherwise) seem to be a primary focus within most features. Considering cinema’s ability to animate such statuary figures, Felleman’s discussions in the closing chapter of part I seem to reframe the sculpture-to-film relationship. In highlighting cinema’s capacity to be a sculptural form in and of itself, textual themes of the tension between motion and stasis are explored in a creatively revised fashion. Was this chapter envisioned, early on, as a fitting close to part I of Screening Statues? In addition, how did you and your team map out the design of the text, in order to delegate equal portions for each monograph?
VA: It has been a while since I have seen My Own Private Idaho, but there is certainly a close connection between incorporating sculpture in film and the (for the most part) postwar tradition of treating actors as objects and playing up the self-reflexivity factor, whether overtly through references to Muybridge and the animation of static photographs, through pixilation, or through freeze frames or faked freeze frames. Here, too, the tradition of the tableau vivant looms large — I recently wrote about a Swedish silent film, Victor Sjöström’s Vem dömer [1922], in which, at a certain point, the background actors seem to be painted in. Upon viewing the film on a big screen, however, it is apparent that they are holding a picturesque pose so as not to distract from the foreground and to create a beautiful frame — another “live” freeze frame.
The final chapter, the “coda,” was not envisioned in the very beginning but quickly grew to be a necessity, we felt, as we fleshed out the book. Moreover, it gelled perfectly with Susan’s expertise. Since the book grew rather naturally out of our larger project and our combined specialties and interests, there was not so much, if any, delegating needed. Indeed, the book is a little lopsided in terms of author input as a result. The most difficult part was bringing together and delegating part II: The Sculpture Gallery. We had a massive list to begin with and had to pare this down and rewatch all the films to make a selection that was balanced historically, generically, and geographically. We started out with a goal of two hundred fifty films, and we did a lot of writing on entries that did not end up making the book; but ultimately we found this selection to best represent the large spectrum — both key films represented in the chapters, and many that are not. Lisa and I were also working at different institutions at this point and I was finishing up my PhD work (a different project altogether). It ended up being a difficult task, but we really feel that it contributes to the strength of the book, which can now also be used as a reference work for future research.
MJ: Traditions found in postwar cinema, in connection with modernist films, do seem to often highlight statuary imagery, and cinema’s innate mobile characteristics offer new and creative ways to explore and experiment with the confluence of the two. Such is noted and explored notably in both chapters five and six. As for the Sculpture Gallery, it is certainly a comprehensive, useful guide for the features delineated in the text, as well as a reference of supplemental works. As Screening Statues comes to further serve as a source for readers exploring these statuary topics, have you hopes that such may lead to expanded dialogues, or perhaps foster new topical ideas based on the discussions instigated by you and your colleagues? In addition, would you be willing to share thoughts on any upcoming writing projects for yourself, or perhaps even your coauthors?
VA: I do indeed hope that the book, and the Sculpture Gallery in particular, will lead to expanded dialogues. I, for one, still have many unexplored tropes to delve into — a few of which are featured briefly in the gallery. I recently further explored the cinematic connection between sculpture and surgery, for instance, in films such as Yasuzô Masumura’s Môjû [Blind Beast; 1969] and Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s Boxing Helena [1993], for a Palgrave book on Sculpture, Sexuality and History. I cannot speak for my colleagues when it comes to new projects, but I am looking forward to the publication of my monograph Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2018), on early European cinema’s appropriation of nineteenth-century theatrical and pictorial strategies. I am also working on editing the first English-language volume of its kind, The Tableau Vivant: Across Media, History, and Culture; programming a film series on the forgotten genre of the Finnish “lumberjack and logroller” film; and planning a conference and book on the visualization and imagination of postwar architecture in Japanese animation.
MJ: That’s wonderful, I look forward to reading the text and wish you the best on your upcoming publication! I can see how art history and convergent mediums remain avenues of interest, given your expertise. This will be your first published long-form monograph? Those Finnish “lumberjack and logroller” films also sound like a treat! Any recommended works? All in all, you seem to have much planned in your upcoming career. Is there anything that you wish to further note or address?
VA: The book will be my first long-form monograph, and I am currently working on my second at Columbia, From New Stagecraft to New Cinema: Silent Film Performs the Avant-Garde, which looks to redefine the evolution of cinema against developments in the historical avant-garde in visual and performing arts. It will do so, among others, by putting forward a pre-Caligari canon of modernist films to revise the historiography of the avant-garde in film. For the Finnish lumberjack and logroller program, if you can get your hands on it, Mauritz Stiller’s The Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919) is a great starting point, and Aleksandr Ptushko’s 1959 Sampo a good end point. Should you know of anyone interested in programming the seven films in all, I can always send you the entire program.
And, on October 19, 2018, I will be hosting a book presentation and screening of the Italian silent film Fauno (Febo Mari, 1917) with live music by Tal Shtuhl at NYU’s Casa Italiana.
Nothing further to address at this point, apart from thanking you once more for the interview!
Author Biography
Matthew Johnson is a student at the University of North Carolina studying film and French language. He hopes to pursue a career in critical writing, and plans on continuing his studies at the graduate level. Along with an ardor for world cinema, he enjoys spending majority of his time outdoors, namely backpacking.
