Art (and by this I mean the ‘‘other’’ visual and plastic arts: painting, sculpture,
photography, architecture, etc.) has been reflected and represented in, thematized
by and structured into narrative films in myriad ways throughout the
history of cinema. This book considers a range of such incorporations, drawn
from the postwar classical and contemporary narrative cinema—European and
American. I am particularly interested in attending to patterns relating to the
signification and symptomatization of sex, gender, sexuality, and psyche in the
way art and artists figure in film, as I believe these to be the basic problems from
which much else in human nature and culture derives. The ‘‘otherness’’ of the
other visual arts has, to cinema, a significant, although rarely simple or directly
correlative relationship to the way that other ‘‘othernesses’’—primarily, but not
exclusively gender difference—function in the larger culture and society within
which cinema operates. Committed to no onemethodology, I have found a complex
of formalist, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic
methods—those in which I was educated and am, for better or for worse, most
fluent—necessary for pulling apart the tangled relationships I see around art and
psyche in cinema.
If I employ no one single methodology per se, there is method here, however,
and that method is essentially art historical. From the field in which I was
trained, I inherit a tradition of close looking and close description—at and of
form, structure, and style—and ways of approaching historical and cultural patterns
in art and imagery: the iconography and iconology so aptly defined by
one of art history’s great innovators, Erwin Panofsky.1 Panofsky, to the eternal
surprise of many who think of art history as a conservative and stodgy discipline,
was of course a rather early and very eloquent articulator of the cinema’s
close relationship to the other arts, who perceived the applicability of art historical
method to cinematic objects.2 But Panofsky was not my teacher. Among
those who were, foremost for me are Linda Nochlin and Rosalind Krauss, from
whom I learned that the disciplinary rigor of art historical method need not be
abandoned under the influence of newintellectual paradigms.Nochlin’s brilliant
feminism and Krauss’s incisive and protean critical insights are always rooted
to the object and its problematic nature by investigation, fascination, and close
regard. They are my exemplars. Methods and attitudes about seeing and interpreting
objects learned fromthem and others have strongly influenced my viewing,
teaching, and writing in the field of cinema studies. For me theory never
precedes my interest in an object but always follows from it.
There is a small but significant body of scholarly work that has been done in
and around this border area between cinema and the other visual arts in the past
decade, including JohnWalker’s Art and Artists on Screen, Brigitte Peucker’s Incorporating
Images: Film and the Rival Arts, Angela Dalle Vacche’s Cinema and
Painting: How Art Is Used in Film, Katharina Sykora’s As You Desire Me: Das
Bildnis in Film, and volumes of collected essays edited by Patrice Petro (Fugitive
Images: From Photography to Video), Dudley Andrew (The Image in Dispute: Art
and Cinema in the Age of Photography), Dietrich Neumann (Film Architecture:
From ‘‘Metropolis’’ to ‘‘Blade Runner’’ ), Linda Ehrlich and David Desser (Cinematic
Landscapes: Observations on theVisual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan),
and Angela Dalle Vacche (The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History),
as well as a number of landmark exhibitions. I hope and believe that my
work contributes to this meaningful interdisciplinary trend in several ways.
My background in art history enablesme not only to approach the film object
art historically, but to comprehend and elucidate the art objects within it. I recognize
art historical citations and investigate the particularity of the works that
are shown, be those relatively minor elements of the mise-en-scène or deeply
imbricated with the narrative. I hope that my knowledge of modern and contemporary
art, in particular, has enabled me to represent the complexity of its
representations on film with sensitivity. Another contribution I hope this study
makes is in connecting this interdisciplinary project to one of the dominant
paradigms in cinema theory: psychoanalytic feminism. I find the basic tenets
of psychoanalysis deeply persuasive and I am a feminist: I believe gender is the
foundational difference that has ordered human society, in many ways thatmust
be exposed, understood, and often, if not always, dismantled. However, it is
the more basic and pragmatic aims of psychoanalytic and feminist theory that I
adopt. They are not ends in themselves but elements of a particular project: to
uncover the meanings that the incorporation of art has for and in movies.
When a film undertakes the representation of ‘‘art’’ as a theme or engages
an artwork as motif, it is, whatever else it is doing, also more or less openly
and more or less knowingly entering into a contemplation of its own nature
and at some level positing its own unwritten theory of cinema as art. Narrative
films, then, can reveal much about their individual and collective undertaking
and their sense of their own and their medium’s origins through the incorporation
or figuration of art. The particular film objects I discuss are ones that
strikeme as significant for the ways in which they, generally in relation to others,
put these problems of art, origins, and difference into high relief, making somewhat
clearer underlying conceptions, assumptions, and ideologies of the narrative
cinema that tend otherwise to remain obscure and ambiguous.
Mainstream—that is feature-length, commercial, narrative—films that foreground
art, as well as most that background it, can induce a rather curious tension,
as the reflexive presence of art threatens the seductive flow of the fictional
world within the film with a spasm of viewer self-consciousness. This is why
we refer to such works as reflexive: it is as though a mirror has been held up to
the beholder. The work of art en abyme (shown in-depth) reminds the viewer
that she is viewing. It is interesting, then, to consider what is at stake in such
potentially disruptive representations. For one, status: not only does the subject
of ‘‘art’’ confer a certain stature; the reflexive use of art en abyme is a hallmark
of modernist art, and therefore a nod (albeit an ambivalent one) to the ‘‘highbrow’’
viewer. Second, a claim: one knows that the film may have a (more or
less articulate) contribution to make to the ongoing, unwritten theory of the
art of cinema that the movies themselves are always telling, or to the ongoing,
unwritten debate about cinema’s sometimes uncomfortable and always shifting
position among the worlds of art, commerce, industry, and mass media.
Themeanings that arise fromthe heightened presence of painted portraits in
a number of Hollywood films of the 1940s, discussed in chapter 1, ‘‘TheMoving
Picture Gallery,’’ anticipate many of the closer readings that follow. Surveying
more than a dozen films of various genres—from Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) to
Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)—I observe not only the way in
which objects of art are objects of desire, and the existential and psychological
consequences of contemplating still images in relation to moving ones, but also
the underlying problematics of mimetic representation generally and portrayal
specifically. The painted portrait in these films often ‘‘represents’’ a dead person,
but even when it does not, I demonstrate, it always stands for death, as well
as art, two realities that the classical Hollywood film, it has been often argued,
represses or disavows.
Many of the same issues aroundmortality, mimetic representation, portrayal,
and desire are explored in greater depth in chapter 2, ‘‘A Form of Necrophilia
(TheMoving Picture Gallery Revisited).’’ Here, it is not merely the appearance
of portraits—in this case photographic and painted—that is meaningful, but
the narrative pattern in which they appear. In-depth analysis of five films that
share a poignant narrative trope—men meet and fall in love with women who
uncannily resemble their dead love objects in Corridor of Mirrors (1948), Pandora
and the Flying Dutchman (1951), Vertigo (1958), Obsession (1976), and The Last
Tycoon (1976)—demonstrates that the representation en abyme is a reification of
a component part of the cinematic apparatus itself. The poignant theme is, in
effect, allegorical.
Chapter 3, ‘‘The Birth, Death, and Apotheosis of a Hollywood Love Goddess,’’
considers the way that sculpture—as three-dimensional object of art—
fleshes out (as it were) problematics of corporeality, carnality, and embodiment,
adding to the morbid and aesthetic mix around the classical cinema. Analyzing
the intriguingly symmetrical relationship between two films starring Ava Gardner
and featuring statuary—One Touch of Venus (1948) and The Barefoot Contessa
(1954)—I describe the paradigmatic aspect of Gardner’s stardomin relationship
to an iconology that sheds light on inherently allegorical aspects of these films,
as well as problematics around eroticism and moviegoing.
Two of the films discussed in chapters 2 and 3, Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying
Dutchman and, especially, Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa, are meaningful
sources, I argue, for the two European art films that are explored in considerable
depth, both independently and in relation to each other, in chapter 4, ‘‘Survivors
of the Shipwreck ofModernity.’’ Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963)
and Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991), as ‘‘art’’ films and, moreover, as
adaptations of modern literary landmarks (Alberto Moravia’s Il Disprezzo and
Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, respectively), claim an artistic heritage
much more readily than even the most self-conscious of the more ‘‘hollywoodienne’’
films discussed previously. But the art film’s readiness to bare its
own devices comes to seem predicated on its insistence on baring the female
body, too, and preserving, indeed naturalizing, a sexist ideology of culture for
which the nude is emblematic. This chapter explores each film’s complex engagement
with its literary sources and with the other plastic arts, as well as with
the distinct architecture of its location, and uncovers a veritable archaeology of
the myth of the feminine in modernWestern culture.
It is not only veterans of amovement of arguably preconscious (or should that
be precocious?) sexism—Jacques Rivette and the New Wave—who perpetuate
retrograde myths in contemporary films, though. The mythology bodied forth
so elegantly in Rivette’s ‘‘masterful’’ contemplation of artists and models is uncannily
similar to that I uncover in two very different contemporary films from
the 1980s in chapter 5, ‘‘Out of Her Element.’’ In most respects, Splash (1984)
and Children of a Lesser God (1986) could not seem more different from La Belle
Noiseuse. Certainly, neither is an ‘‘art’’ film; these were two very commercial films
made in the very commercial climate of Hollywood in the mid-1980s. Indeed,
art is a mere diversion, or detail, in these movies, not a central theme. But art
objects emerge as symptomatic of the construction of a mythic femininity in
both films, which share an image of woman as elemental, immanent, fluid . . .
an image that psychoanalysis brings to the surface.
There is an elemental aspect to the representation of women, too, in three
other American movies of the 1980s, those I discuss in chapter 6, ‘‘Playing with
Fire.’’ After Hours (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), and Backtrack (1989) all manufacture
an incendiary mix of women, art, money, and danger in stories set in and
around the contemporary art world. Perplexity and suspicion swirl around art,
particularly around the new, conceptual, and performative forms that proliferated
in the art world of the 1980s and that are here associated with women. I
explore the ways in which these three films frame this association, and expose
the symptomatic ways in which their scorn and suspicion of both (seemingly)
nonremunerative, noncrafted art forms and women artists reflect upon their own
sense of viability (never mind virility).
Craft, gender, and virility are all themes, too, in chapter 7, ‘‘Dirty Pictures,
Mud Lust, and Abject Desire: Myths of Origin and the Cinematic Object,’’
which focuses on three other contemporary films—Artemisia (1997), Camille
Claudel (1988), and Life Lessons (1989). In these films, the theme of the heterosexual
artist couple is employed to embody a myth of the origins of art—as the
outcome of the art act’s inherently erotic aspect—and at the same time to perpetuate
a gendered view of art in which what is great and virile in the male artist
is pathological in the female.
The films considered in these chapters range fromones in which statues, figurines,
photographs, or portraits are metonymic images of larger thematic preoccupations
(Suspicion, Splash, or Children of a Lesser God ); to ones with structurally
significant art objects, artist characters, or settings related to the art world
(One Touch of Venus, Legal Eagles, or After Hours); to others entirely pervaded
by art and artiness (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman or Contempt); to those
wholly concerned with art, the lives of artists, and art making (La Belle Noiseuse,
Artemisia, or Life Lessons).
This is not an encyclopedic endeavor, though: I make no claim to considering
every film in which art is a theme; that would be an unwieldy and probably
boring undertaking, even if limited by country or period.Neither is my selection
arbitrary. I attempt to cover a range of Anglo-American and European narrative
films from the postwar period to the present and to discuss films’ representation
and incorporation of a wide range of art forms and media: painting, sculpture,
photography, and architecture, as well as performance, installation, and
conceptual art. I had originally intended a final chapter on the contemporary
artist biopic, focusing on a number of recent films about twentieth-century artists:
Carrington (Hampton, 1995); Basquiat (Schnabel, 1996); Love Is the Devil:
Study for a Portrait ( John Maybury’s 1998 film about Francis Bacon), Pollock
(Harris, 2000); and Frida (Taymor, 2002). But I have decided that this is really
the subject for another book, perhaps my next, especially since more biopics are
in the offing, including a soon-to-be-released movie starring Andy Garcia as
modernist painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani.
To a greater or lesser extent, the films that I am considering are exceptional.
That is, to the degree that they make art part of their explicit subject matter,
they tend to skew toward the self-conscious end of the narrative cinematic spectrum.
Most of them have received at least a modicum of critical attention and
praise. A few of them are controversial, a few obscure. Some were successful at
the box office, some not (Splash was the tenth highest grossing film of 1984, for
instance,3 while Backtrack was never released theatrically). They are all, in some
way—and perhaps this goes without saying—fascinating tome. It is my conviction
that films such as those examined here offer a privileged view into a complex
of overlapping and interlocking cultural and industrial problems, assumptions,
and attitudes, in which issues of sex, gender, identity, and psychology generally—
group and individual—entwine with those of art, commerce, class, and
power. Some of these complex relationships might be fruitfully introduced by
means of a particularly suggestive case study.
Artists and Models
All you very lovely ladies in your very fancy frocks,
And you fellows with the palettes, in your most artistic smocks,
Use your thumb to get perspective of a world that’s drab and gray,
Add a lot of color and frame it just that way . . .4
Among the many weirdly revealing images in the musical comedy Artists and
Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955)—in which Jerry Lewis plays Eugene Fullstack, a
gifted dreamer whose nightmares (he talks in his sleep) are converted into lurid,
rather surrealist comics by his painter roommate, Rick (Dean Martin)—is one
found in the title production number, staged for an on-screen audience at the
‘‘Artists and Models Ball.’’ In it Martin and Lewis sing a song of artists and
their models as women (showgirls) emerge from heaps of colored chiffon fabric
representing daubs of paint on an oversized painter’s palette.
The production and the song’s lyrics (see the first verse, above) graphically
define artists as male and models as female (a profoundly typical formula in
Western culture—see the discussion of La Belle Noiseuse in chapter 4), despite
the film’s strong homoerotic overtones and artist-characters of both sexes:
Dorothy Malone plays Abigail Parker, a successful comic book artist who uses
Bessie Sparrowbrush (Shirley MacLaine) as a model (!) for her successful ‘‘Bat
Lady’’ character. The title number also echoes the dichotomy between male
Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955; photo courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie
Material Store).
sexual confidence and insecurity usually displayed in the dynamics of the popular
comedy team of Martin and Lewis: while the daubs toward which the suave
Rick (Martin) gestures as he sings—red, blue, green, and yellow—magically
produce women who fawn over and embrace him, those that the puerile Eugene
(Lewis) selects—violet, lime, gold—contain mere material. This part of the
number ends as Eugene sings, ‘‘you will never hear me knocking any pink that’s
really shocking,’’ as fromthe last daub of paint emerges a woman who just keeps
on emerging, even after reaching normal height (amechanical pedestal and prodigious
lengths of pink fabric permit her to achieve monumental stature); ‘‘I
think we’re going color blind,’’ the two ‘‘artists’’ exclaim finally in unison.
In the second, instrumental, part of the number, Eugene and Rick leave the
stage and take their brushes into the audience, where they use the skin of scantily
clad models (showgirls) as canvas, sketching amusing figures (and love letters)
on exposed flesh, sometimes transforming it into the support for what are rather
like animatedmotion pictures, as when—rather uncannily—one blonde’s supple
knees are turned into cartoonish heads for dolls dressed just like herself (although
it might be more accurate to say that she is dressed like the dolls, in a
farcical, short blue gingham frock and petticoat).5
In the first part of the number, the female body (gob of paint) was the painter’s
medium, or vehicle; now she is the ground, or support. So, represented as
the very stuff of which art is made, in this one colorful musical scene the female
body is an ambivalent medium—simultaneously figure and ground, object of
desire and ridicule, and source of inspiration and anxiety.
This spectacular equivocation in which women are elevated as materialmuses
and also reduced tomere material is powerfully suggestive. In Artists and Models,
through the use of comedy, travesty, and pop cultural forms—elements of the
‘‘bricolage’’ Paul Willemen says is most characteristic of Tashlin’s method of
‘‘assembly and disassembly (dismantling)’’ 6—various aspects of the relationship
between cinema and other visual media are vividly exemplified, embodied, and,
along with other cultural problems, satirized. As some of the complexities of
this relationship—generally more obscure or subtle, indeed often repressed in
movies—are the subject of my study, perhaps this unsubtle film can be used to
expose and introduce the problem of figures and themes relating to art and artists
in the classical narrative film and the always gendered scenarios in which
these are framed.
It is for reasons having to do with history, genre, and perhaps even authorship
that Artists and Models lays bare such complexities more nakedly, as it were,
than most movies. Made in the very middle of the 1950s, in the waning days
of the studio system, it revels in flaunting possibilities that had been typically
denied or suppressed by the classical Hollywood film. As Henry Jenkins and
Kristine Brunovska Karnick have noted in the context of this kind of postwar
‘‘formalized’’ comedian comedy—a genre already characterized by a high degree
of reflexivity—this was a period that spawned some other rather ‘‘baroque’’
subgenres (i.e., the adultWestern, the self-reflexivemusical, the excessivemelodrama,
and film noir), ‘‘marked by a blurring of previous genre distinctions,
increasingly flamboyant visual and performance styles, self-conscious acknowl
edgement of their own construction and destabilized identities.’’ 7 And although
most American auteurists (with the notable exception of Peter Bogdanovich)
have been reluctant to treat the sublimely silly Tashlin as a major figure, certainly
there are those who would attribute any such notably self-conscious and constructed
qualities to this director’s singular sensibility(among them the French
in the 1950s—e.g., Jean-Luc Godard and the critics of the French postsurrealist
journal Positif—and some associated with the British journal Screen in the
1970s).
Contrary to the image conjured by its title, Artists and Models takes sex, violence,
popular art, mass culture, and their psychosocial intricacies as its basic
subjects, not high art, which is marginalized and to some extent lampooned.
This is all vividly summed up in the opening scene of the film: Rick and Eugene
are working on (and in) a huge animated billboard advertising Trim Maid cigarettes.
The first shot is an extreme close-up of what, when the camera zooms
out, turns out to be the hand of Rick, on a scaffold several stories above the
New York City sidewalk, painting the red upper lip of a colossal woman’s open
mouth. As the client and his employer look on from below, the artist is putting
the finishing touches on the visage of a sexy, oversized, female smoker. Rick tells
Eugene, who is inside the mechanical billboard, to turn on the smoke machine,
but Eugene is too passionately wrapped up reading comics to attend properly
to his job (‘‘Wait,’’ he insists, ‘‘I’m on the third murder. It looks like the Bat
Lady’s gonna blow one of the RatMan’s heads off!’’). He then neglects to connect
the smoke tube to the aperture of the open mouth and absently flips the
switch the wrong way. The big tube starts sucking instead of blowing. First it
sucks up all Eugene’s comic books, putting him into a panic, and then, when he
scrambles after them, it sucks him in (in a cutaway shot, we see him struggling
in what is a virtual birth canal). When Rick finally sets things straight—rescuing
Eugene, reconnecting the tube, and flipping the switch—tattered comic
books spew out of the open mouth of the Trim Maid girl. ‘‘She’s not smoking;
she’s spitting!’’ complains the dismayed client. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst
to grasp the sexual innuendo of material like this.
Tacitly homoerotic relationships are another nonnormative feature of Artists
and Models’ plot that stands out in high relief, as one Internet Movie Database
‘‘user’s’’ comments underscore:
Lewis and Dean Martin play ‘‘roommates’’ who met each other way back when
they were Boy Scouts, sleep in separate twin beds in the same room, take baths
with the door open, and at one point talk about getting a divorce. At one point
the semi-retarded Lewis (and he admits as much himself ) says to Martin: ‘‘I
can’t keep my dickie down, Ricky.’’ Um, he’s putting on a tuxedo I think. Similarly,
Dorothy Malone lives in the apartment directly above them, unmarried
with thick, black glasses and earning a good living on her own. She spends her
time dressing the barely adult Shirley MacLaine, who has a cute little butch
cut, up as the Bat Lady. The homosexual content seems to me almost too obvious
to be meant. It’s usually much subtler in Hollywood movies of the era.
Then again, it’s impossible to miss it, even if you’re a 1950s housewife. Eventually,
the two gay couples meet and change partners, Martin getting Malone
and Lewis MacLaine.8
As Frank Krutnik notes regarding an almost identical plot pattern in another
Martin-Lewis vehicle, Sailor Beware (1951), ‘‘The two female partners . . . mirror
the terms of difference inscribed in the Martin-Lewis partnership . . . Like is
paired with like, and this serves to minimize the importance of heterosexual differences
whenmeasured against the familiar differences between the twomen.’’9
Thus the essentially homoerotic terms of the relationship are not genuinely disrupted.
As Krutnik additionally notes, the entire genre of comedian comedy
is characterized by a strong undercurrent of misogyny and sexual hostility, as
it ‘‘repeatedly offers controlled assaults upon, or inversions of, the conformist
options of male identity, sexuality and responsibility.’’ 10 The misogyny in the
genre is typically enhanced in the work of the male comedy duo, asMolly Haskell
has noted, which ‘‘from Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello, is almost
by definition, or by metaphor, latently homosexual: a union of opposites
(tall/short, thin/fat, straight/comic) who, like husband and wife, combine to
make a whole.’’ 11
But there’s nothing latent about the marital qualities of the relationship between
Rick and Eugene in Artists and Models. The first scene set in their apartment—
they’ve come home after being fired for the billboard debacle, we learn—
begins with Eugene, a dishrag tied around his waist, asking Rick how he’d like
his dinner prepared. As the ludicrous dinner scene continues, Eugene sets up a
virtual (there’s virtually no food) romantic dinner for the two of them, complete
with candlelight (real) and wine (imaginary). After dinner, he plays an imaginary
piano and serenades Rick, singing to him (‘‘When You Pretend’’), even
sitting in his lap briefly. Before the scene is over, Rick has spoken to Eugene
of divorce. This explicit travesty of marriage is a kind of cover for the underlying
reasons for the homosocial bond between the two males, though. Its raison
d’etre is to maintain the partnership and ward off the potential disruption
of women: ‘‘within the genre, women tend to signify the demands of integration
and responsibility for the male.’’ 12 The relationship between two men only
mimics marriage, while it in fact protects the men against economic and sexual
maturity. Rick may castigate Eugene for his inability to hold down a job and
Eugene may play at the dutiful and loyal ‘‘wife’’ to his philandering ladies’ man
roommate, but they really stick together out of amutual commitment to warding
off the financial and conjugal obligations of marriage and family.
Here, then, what might appear a wholly transgressive attribute is really more
of a generic one, along with most of the film’s other ‘‘inversions,’’ including the
very amusing image of female sexual initiative offered through Shirley Mac-
Laine’s performance. Again, it is the dynamic of the comedian-couple that
necessitates this. If Martin’s character is dominant, sexually confident, suave,
and seductive, then Lewis’s must be passive, sexually insecure, klutzy, and coy,
which he is, in uproarious contradistinction to the aggressive MacLaine. The
delightful inversion of her characterization notwithstanding, most of the many
female parts in Artists and Models seem to be the products of a very misogynist
imagination, comprising a range of carping and castrating types—emasculating
wife, scolding mother, nagging landlady, mannish masseuse—and more
than the usual array of seductively clothed, seemingly dimwitted, nubile beauties
(‘‘models’’), along with a campy dose of femme fatale (Eva Gabor as Sonia,
an Eastern bloc agent—this is the height of the cold war, after all—and the
comic book vamp, the Bat Lady). The credit sequence alone features—in twelve
shots—twenty different eye-popping ‘‘models’’ (these lookmuchmore like fashion
models or, again, showgirls, than artists’ models), although six of them are
only shown from the hips down, as a row of six sexy pairs of bare leg.
One of Artists and Models’ silliest and most symptomatic conceits is that a
comic book artist would require live models.What at first looks like a gag turns
out to be a more motivated device, though. It is the source of one major thread
of themovie’s romantic farce: because Abby draws fromlife, Eugene encounters
Bessie dressed as the Bat Lady and is smitten—in a paralytic, abject sort of way.
But Eugene—despite opportunities and hints—refuses to recognize Bessie out
of costume as the same alluring, fatal creature of his fantasies (and Bessie wants
to be desired for herself, not for her two-dimensional associations, so doesn’t
pull her trump card to secure his interest). The ‘‘gag’’ actually instantiates, then,
not only the relationship between two- and three-dimensional representations,
and between still and moving images, two formal conundrums of pictorial arts
generally, but also the relationship between model and image, or performer and
role—that is: the intriguing puzzle of portrayal and portrayed. Eugene, in this
respect, is a mere exaggeration of the prototypical moviegoer: caught in the web
of illusion, he cannot or will not extract himself, even enough to see what Bessie
continually throws under his nose—that she and the Bat Lady are one and the
same. So, in fact, Tashlin’s Artists and Models peppers with laughs the very same
cinematic trope that is bathed in melancholy in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the
other films I discuss in chapter 2.
Indeed, although wholly lacking in seriousness, Artists and Models manifests
many if not most of the traits that I find meaningful and analyze in the coming
chapters. In addition to giving form to the seemingly magical propensity of representations
to seduce and perplex viewers—a propensity I analyze throughout,
especially with regard to the use of portraits and statues en abyme—Tashlin’s
film, like those discussed in chapters 3 and 4, also regards the female body—
excessively—as simultaneous object of desire, source of anxiety, and cipher of
cultural meaning. (Frank Tashlin himself was co-author of the screen adaptation
of One Touch of Venus, the first in a ‘‘trilogy’’ of Ava Gardner films discussed
in chapter 3). And, as with two deceptively different films, La Belle Noiseuse
and Splash, femininity is associated with animality in Artists and Models. Bessie
Sparrowbrush is both Bat Lady and, by virtue of her name, bird woman.Women
are treated as predatory and carnal.
The comic book and nightmare themes of Tashlin’s film permit bold expression
of the obscure but powerful connection between women, art, and violence
that I observe in chapter 6. Most symptomatically, Artists and Models, like the
films I discuss in the final chapter, assumes that the practice of art—at any and
every level, from comic books to high art—is infused with psychosexual energies.
A scene in which Abby substitutes herself for a female model with whom
she is posing Rick in a clinch, and is then aroused, seems a mere comical variant
of the scene in AgnèsMerlet’s Artemisia in which the lustful young painter puts
down her brushes and inserts herself (sexually) into the scene in which she has
posed her fellow painter Tassi as Holofernes. Of course, one ought not forget
that one of the meanings of ‘‘art’’ to American moviegoers of 1955 was precisely
‘‘sex,’’ since this was the period when themore mature fare produced abroad was
increasingly being seen in the United States, usually in ‘‘art houses’’ under the
rubric of ‘‘art film.’’
Thus sexuality constitutes a source of slippage between the terms of art and
film, at least in the (English) language of movie going in the postwar period.
But this is obviously no vernacular accident. Although maybe ‘‘foreign’’ to the
movies in America (in a somewhat naïve, simplistic reading of the classical
Hollywood film), sex is always already a component of all art, along with death
and other basic human preoccupations. This study explores the ways in which
art, when taken up by cinema, becomes its speculum, revealing at many levels
the psychic, social, and cultural components of the apparatus . . . returning the
repressed . . . baring the device.
photography, architecture, etc.) has been reflected and represented in, thematized
by and structured into narrative films in myriad ways throughout the
history of cinema. This book considers a range of such incorporations, drawn
from the postwar classical and contemporary narrative cinema—European and
American. I am particularly interested in attending to patterns relating to the
signification and symptomatization of sex, gender, sexuality, and psyche in the
way art and artists figure in film, as I believe these to be the basic problems from
which much else in human nature and culture derives. The ‘‘otherness’’ of the
other visual arts has, to cinema, a significant, although rarely simple or directly
correlative relationship to the way that other ‘‘othernesses’’—primarily, but not
exclusively gender difference—function in the larger culture and society within
which cinema operates. Committed to no onemethodology, I have found a complex
of formalist, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic
methods—those in which I was educated and am, for better or for worse, most
fluent—necessary for pulling apart the tangled relationships I see around art and
psyche in cinema.
If I employ no one single methodology per se, there is method here, however,
and that method is essentially art historical. From the field in which I was
trained, I inherit a tradition of close looking and close description—at and of
form, structure, and style—and ways of approaching historical and cultural patterns
in art and imagery: the iconography and iconology so aptly defined by
one of art history’s great innovators, Erwin Panofsky.1 Panofsky, to the eternal
surprise of many who think of art history as a conservative and stodgy discipline,
was of course a rather early and very eloquent articulator of the cinema’s
close relationship to the other arts, who perceived the applicability of art historical
method to cinematic objects.2 But Panofsky was not my teacher. Among
those who were, foremost for me are Linda Nochlin and Rosalind Krauss, from
whom I learned that the disciplinary rigor of art historical method need not be
abandoned under the influence of newintellectual paradigms.Nochlin’s brilliant
feminism and Krauss’s incisive and protean critical insights are always rooted
to the object and its problematic nature by investigation, fascination, and close
regard. They are my exemplars. Methods and attitudes about seeing and interpreting
objects learned fromthem and others have strongly influenced my viewing,
teaching, and writing in the field of cinema studies. For me theory never
precedes my interest in an object but always follows from it.
There is a small but significant body of scholarly work that has been done in
and around this border area between cinema and the other visual arts in the past
decade, including JohnWalker’s Art and Artists on Screen, Brigitte Peucker’s Incorporating
Images: Film and the Rival Arts, Angela Dalle Vacche’s Cinema and
Painting: How Art Is Used in Film, Katharina Sykora’s As You Desire Me: Das
Bildnis in Film, and volumes of collected essays edited by Patrice Petro (Fugitive
Images: From Photography to Video), Dudley Andrew (The Image in Dispute: Art
and Cinema in the Age of Photography), Dietrich Neumann (Film Architecture:
From ‘‘Metropolis’’ to ‘‘Blade Runner’’ ), Linda Ehrlich and David Desser (Cinematic
Landscapes: Observations on theVisual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan),
and Angela Dalle Vacche (The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History),
as well as a number of landmark exhibitions. I hope and believe that my
work contributes to this meaningful interdisciplinary trend in several ways.
My background in art history enablesme not only to approach the film object
art historically, but to comprehend and elucidate the art objects within it. I recognize
art historical citations and investigate the particularity of the works that
are shown, be those relatively minor elements of the mise-en-scène or deeply
imbricated with the narrative. I hope that my knowledge of modern and contemporary
art, in particular, has enabled me to represent the complexity of its
representations on film with sensitivity. Another contribution I hope this study
makes is in connecting this interdisciplinary project to one of the dominant
paradigms in cinema theory: psychoanalytic feminism. I find the basic tenets
of psychoanalysis deeply persuasive and I am a feminist: I believe gender is the
foundational difference that has ordered human society, in many ways thatmust
be exposed, understood, and often, if not always, dismantled. However, it is
the more basic and pragmatic aims of psychoanalytic and feminist theory that I
adopt. They are not ends in themselves but elements of a particular project: to
uncover the meanings that the incorporation of art has for and in movies.
When a film undertakes the representation of ‘‘art’’ as a theme or engages
an artwork as motif, it is, whatever else it is doing, also more or less openly
and more or less knowingly entering into a contemplation of its own nature
and at some level positing its own unwritten theory of cinema as art. Narrative
films, then, can reveal much about their individual and collective undertaking
and their sense of their own and their medium’s origins through the incorporation
or figuration of art. The particular film objects I discuss are ones that
strikeme as significant for the ways in which they, generally in relation to others,
put these problems of art, origins, and difference into high relief, making somewhat
clearer underlying conceptions, assumptions, and ideologies of the narrative
cinema that tend otherwise to remain obscure and ambiguous.
Mainstream—that is feature-length, commercial, narrative—films that foreground
art, as well as most that background it, can induce a rather curious tension,
as the reflexive presence of art threatens the seductive flow of the fictional
world within the film with a spasm of viewer self-consciousness. This is why
we refer to such works as reflexive: it is as though a mirror has been held up to
the beholder. The work of art en abyme (shown in-depth) reminds the viewer
that she is viewing. It is interesting, then, to consider what is at stake in such
potentially disruptive representations. For one, status: not only does the subject
of ‘‘art’’ confer a certain stature; the reflexive use of art en abyme is a hallmark
of modernist art, and therefore a nod (albeit an ambivalent one) to the ‘‘highbrow’’
viewer. Second, a claim: one knows that the film may have a (more or
less articulate) contribution to make to the ongoing, unwritten theory of the
art of cinema that the movies themselves are always telling, or to the ongoing,
unwritten debate about cinema’s sometimes uncomfortable and always shifting
position among the worlds of art, commerce, industry, and mass media.
Themeanings that arise fromthe heightened presence of painted portraits in
a number of Hollywood films of the 1940s, discussed in chapter 1, ‘‘TheMoving
Picture Gallery,’’ anticipate many of the closer readings that follow. Surveying
more than a dozen films of various genres—from Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) to
Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)—I observe not only the way in
which objects of art are objects of desire, and the existential and psychological
consequences of contemplating still images in relation to moving ones, but also
the underlying problematics of mimetic representation generally and portrayal
specifically. The painted portrait in these films often ‘‘represents’’ a dead person,
but even when it does not, I demonstrate, it always stands for death, as well
as art, two realities that the classical Hollywood film, it has been often argued,
represses or disavows.
Many of the same issues aroundmortality, mimetic representation, portrayal,
and desire are explored in greater depth in chapter 2, ‘‘A Form of Necrophilia
(TheMoving Picture Gallery Revisited).’’ Here, it is not merely the appearance
of portraits—in this case photographic and painted—that is meaningful, but
the narrative pattern in which they appear. In-depth analysis of five films that
share a poignant narrative trope—men meet and fall in love with women who
uncannily resemble their dead love objects in Corridor of Mirrors (1948), Pandora
and the Flying Dutchman (1951), Vertigo (1958), Obsession (1976), and The Last
Tycoon (1976)—demonstrates that the representation en abyme is a reification of
a component part of the cinematic apparatus itself. The poignant theme is, in
effect, allegorical.
Chapter 3, ‘‘The Birth, Death, and Apotheosis of a Hollywood Love Goddess,’’
considers the way that sculpture—as three-dimensional object of art—
fleshes out (as it were) problematics of corporeality, carnality, and embodiment,
adding to the morbid and aesthetic mix around the classical cinema. Analyzing
the intriguingly symmetrical relationship between two films starring Ava Gardner
and featuring statuary—One Touch of Venus (1948) and The Barefoot Contessa
(1954)—I describe the paradigmatic aspect of Gardner’s stardomin relationship
to an iconology that sheds light on inherently allegorical aspects of these films,
as well as problematics around eroticism and moviegoing.
Two of the films discussed in chapters 2 and 3, Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying
Dutchman and, especially, Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa, are meaningful
sources, I argue, for the two European art films that are explored in considerable
depth, both independently and in relation to each other, in chapter 4, ‘‘Survivors
of the Shipwreck ofModernity.’’ Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963)
and Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991), as ‘‘art’’ films and, moreover, as
adaptations of modern literary landmarks (Alberto Moravia’s Il Disprezzo and
Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, respectively), claim an artistic heritage
much more readily than even the most self-conscious of the more ‘‘hollywoodienne’’
films discussed previously. But the art film’s readiness to bare its
own devices comes to seem predicated on its insistence on baring the female
body, too, and preserving, indeed naturalizing, a sexist ideology of culture for
which the nude is emblematic. This chapter explores each film’s complex engagement
with its literary sources and with the other plastic arts, as well as with
the distinct architecture of its location, and uncovers a veritable archaeology of
the myth of the feminine in modernWestern culture.
It is not only veterans of amovement of arguably preconscious (or should that
be precocious?) sexism—Jacques Rivette and the New Wave—who perpetuate
retrograde myths in contemporary films, though. The mythology bodied forth
so elegantly in Rivette’s ‘‘masterful’’ contemplation of artists and models is uncannily
similar to that I uncover in two very different contemporary films from
the 1980s in chapter 5, ‘‘Out of Her Element.’’ In most respects, Splash (1984)
and Children of a Lesser God (1986) could not seem more different from La Belle
Noiseuse. Certainly, neither is an ‘‘art’’ film; these were two very commercial films
made in the very commercial climate of Hollywood in the mid-1980s. Indeed,
art is a mere diversion, or detail, in these movies, not a central theme. But art
objects emerge as symptomatic of the construction of a mythic femininity in
both films, which share an image of woman as elemental, immanent, fluid . . .
an image that psychoanalysis brings to the surface.
There is an elemental aspect to the representation of women, too, in three
other American movies of the 1980s, those I discuss in chapter 6, ‘‘Playing with
Fire.’’ After Hours (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), and Backtrack (1989) all manufacture
an incendiary mix of women, art, money, and danger in stories set in and
around the contemporary art world. Perplexity and suspicion swirl around art,
particularly around the new, conceptual, and performative forms that proliferated
in the art world of the 1980s and that are here associated with women. I
explore the ways in which these three films frame this association, and expose
the symptomatic ways in which their scorn and suspicion of both (seemingly)
nonremunerative, noncrafted art forms and women artists reflect upon their own
sense of viability (never mind virility).
Craft, gender, and virility are all themes, too, in chapter 7, ‘‘Dirty Pictures,
Mud Lust, and Abject Desire: Myths of Origin and the Cinematic Object,’’
which focuses on three other contemporary films—Artemisia (1997), Camille
Claudel (1988), and Life Lessons (1989). In these films, the theme of the heterosexual
artist couple is employed to embody a myth of the origins of art—as the
outcome of the art act’s inherently erotic aspect—and at the same time to perpetuate
a gendered view of art in which what is great and virile in the male artist
is pathological in the female.
The films considered in these chapters range fromones in which statues, figurines,
photographs, or portraits are metonymic images of larger thematic preoccupations
(Suspicion, Splash, or Children of a Lesser God ); to ones with structurally
significant art objects, artist characters, or settings related to the art world
(One Touch of Venus, Legal Eagles, or After Hours); to others entirely pervaded
by art and artiness (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman or Contempt); to those
wholly concerned with art, the lives of artists, and art making (La Belle Noiseuse,
Artemisia, or Life Lessons).
This is not an encyclopedic endeavor, though: I make no claim to considering
every film in which art is a theme; that would be an unwieldy and probably
boring undertaking, even if limited by country or period.Neither is my selection
arbitrary. I attempt to cover a range of Anglo-American and European narrative
films from the postwar period to the present and to discuss films’ representation
and incorporation of a wide range of art forms and media: painting, sculpture,
photography, and architecture, as well as performance, installation, and
conceptual art. I had originally intended a final chapter on the contemporary
artist biopic, focusing on a number of recent films about twentieth-century artists:
Carrington (Hampton, 1995); Basquiat (Schnabel, 1996); Love Is the Devil:
Study for a Portrait ( John Maybury’s 1998 film about Francis Bacon), Pollock
(Harris, 2000); and Frida (Taymor, 2002). But I have decided that this is really
the subject for another book, perhaps my next, especially since more biopics are
in the offing, including a soon-to-be-released movie starring Andy Garcia as
modernist painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani.
To a greater or lesser extent, the films that I am considering are exceptional.
That is, to the degree that they make art part of their explicit subject matter,
they tend to skew toward the self-conscious end of the narrative cinematic spectrum.
Most of them have received at least a modicum of critical attention and
praise. A few of them are controversial, a few obscure. Some were successful at
the box office, some not (Splash was the tenth highest grossing film of 1984, for
instance,3 while Backtrack was never released theatrically). They are all, in some
way—and perhaps this goes without saying—fascinating tome. It is my conviction
that films such as those examined here offer a privileged view into a complex
of overlapping and interlocking cultural and industrial problems, assumptions,
and attitudes, in which issues of sex, gender, identity, and psychology generally—
group and individual—entwine with those of art, commerce, class, and
power. Some of these complex relationships might be fruitfully introduced by
means of a particularly suggestive case study.
Artists and Models
All you very lovely ladies in your very fancy frocks,
And you fellows with the palettes, in your most artistic smocks,
Use your thumb to get perspective of a world that’s drab and gray,
Add a lot of color and frame it just that way . . .4
Among the many weirdly revealing images in the musical comedy Artists and
Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955)—in which Jerry Lewis plays Eugene Fullstack, a
gifted dreamer whose nightmares (he talks in his sleep) are converted into lurid,
rather surrealist comics by his painter roommate, Rick (Dean Martin)—is one
found in the title production number, staged for an on-screen audience at the
‘‘Artists and Models Ball.’’ In it Martin and Lewis sing a song of artists and
their models as women (showgirls) emerge from heaps of colored chiffon fabric
representing daubs of paint on an oversized painter’s palette.
The production and the song’s lyrics (see the first verse, above) graphically
define artists as male and models as female (a profoundly typical formula in
Western culture—see the discussion of La Belle Noiseuse in chapter 4), despite
the film’s strong homoerotic overtones and artist-characters of both sexes:
Dorothy Malone plays Abigail Parker, a successful comic book artist who uses
Bessie Sparrowbrush (Shirley MacLaine) as a model (!) for her successful ‘‘Bat
Lady’’ character. The title number also echoes the dichotomy between male
Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955; photo courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie
Material Store).
sexual confidence and insecurity usually displayed in the dynamics of the popular
comedy team of Martin and Lewis: while the daubs toward which the suave
Rick (Martin) gestures as he sings—red, blue, green, and yellow—magically
produce women who fawn over and embrace him, those that the puerile Eugene
(Lewis) selects—violet, lime, gold—contain mere material. This part of the
number ends as Eugene sings, ‘‘you will never hear me knocking any pink that’s
really shocking,’’ as fromthe last daub of paint emerges a woman who just keeps
on emerging, even after reaching normal height (amechanical pedestal and prodigious
lengths of pink fabric permit her to achieve monumental stature); ‘‘I
think we’re going color blind,’’ the two ‘‘artists’’ exclaim finally in unison.
In the second, instrumental, part of the number, Eugene and Rick leave the
stage and take their brushes into the audience, where they use the skin of scantily
clad models (showgirls) as canvas, sketching amusing figures (and love letters)
on exposed flesh, sometimes transforming it into the support for what are rather
like animatedmotion pictures, as when—rather uncannily—one blonde’s supple
knees are turned into cartoonish heads for dolls dressed just like herself (although
it might be more accurate to say that she is dressed like the dolls, in a
farcical, short blue gingham frock and petticoat).5
In the first part of the number, the female body (gob of paint) was the painter’s
medium, or vehicle; now she is the ground, or support. So, represented as
the very stuff of which art is made, in this one colorful musical scene the female
body is an ambivalent medium—simultaneously figure and ground, object of
desire and ridicule, and source of inspiration and anxiety.
This spectacular equivocation in which women are elevated as materialmuses
and also reduced tomere material is powerfully suggestive. In Artists and Models,
through the use of comedy, travesty, and pop cultural forms—elements of the
‘‘bricolage’’ Paul Willemen says is most characteristic of Tashlin’s method of
‘‘assembly and disassembly (dismantling)’’ 6—various aspects of the relationship
between cinema and other visual media are vividly exemplified, embodied, and,
along with other cultural problems, satirized. As some of the complexities of
this relationship—generally more obscure or subtle, indeed often repressed in
movies—are the subject of my study, perhaps this unsubtle film can be used to
expose and introduce the problem of figures and themes relating to art and artists
in the classical narrative film and the always gendered scenarios in which
these are framed.
It is for reasons having to do with history, genre, and perhaps even authorship
that Artists and Models lays bare such complexities more nakedly, as it were,
than most movies. Made in the very middle of the 1950s, in the waning days
of the studio system, it revels in flaunting possibilities that had been typically
denied or suppressed by the classical Hollywood film. As Henry Jenkins and
Kristine Brunovska Karnick have noted in the context of this kind of postwar
‘‘formalized’’ comedian comedy—a genre already characterized by a high degree
of reflexivity—this was a period that spawned some other rather ‘‘baroque’’
subgenres (i.e., the adultWestern, the self-reflexivemusical, the excessivemelodrama,
and film noir), ‘‘marked by a blurring of previous genre distinctions,
increasingly flamboyant visual and performance styles, self-conscious acknowl
edgement of their own construction and destabilized identities.’’ 7 And although
most American auteurists (with the notable exception of Peter Bogdanovich)
have been reluctant to treat the sublimely silly Tashlin as a major figure, certainly
there are those who would attribute any such notably self-conscious and constructed
qualities to this director’s singular sensibility(among them the French
in the 1950s—e.g., Jean-Luc Godard and the critics of the French postsurrealist
journal Positif—and some associated with the British journal Screen in the
1970s).
Contrary to the image conjured by its title, Artists and Models takes sex, violence,
popular art, mass culture, and their psychosocial intricacies as its basic
subjects, not high art, which is marginalized and to some extent lampooned.
This is all vividly summed up in the opening scene of the film: Rick and Eugene
are working on (and in) a huge animated billboard advertising Trim Maid cigarettes.
The first shot is an extreme close-up of what, when the camera zooms
out, turns out to be the hand of Rick, on a scaffold several stories above the
New York City sidewalk, painting the red upper lip of a colossal woman’s open
mouth. As the client and his employer look on from below, the artist is putting
the finishing touches on the visage of a sexy, oversized, female smoker. Rick tells
Eugene, who is inside the mechanical billboard, to turn on the smoke machine,
but Eugene is too passionately wrapped up reading comics to attend properly
to his job (‘‘Wait,’’ he insists, ‘‘I’m on the third murder. It looks like the Bat
Lady’s gonna blow one of the RatMan’s heads off!’’). He then neglects to connect
the smoke tube to the aperture of the open mouth and absently flips the
switch the wrong way. The big tube starts sucking instead of blowing. First it
sucks up all Eugene’s comic books, putting him into a panic, and then, when he
scrambles after them, it sucks him in (in a cutaway shot, we see him struggling
in what is a virtual birth canal). When Rick finally sets things straight—rescuing
Eugene, reconnecting the tube, and flipping the switch—tattered comic
books spew out of the open mouth of the Trim Maid girl. ‘‘She’s not smoking;
she’s spitting!’’ complains the dismayed client. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst
to grasp the sexual innuendo of material like this.
Tacitly homoerotic relationships are another nonnormative feature of Artists
and Models’ plot that stands out in high relief, as one Internet Movie Database
‘‘user’s’’ comments underscore:
Lewis and Dean Martin play ‘‘roommates’’ who met each other way back when
they were Boy Scouts, sleep in separate twin beds in the same room, take baths
with the door open, and at one point talk about getting a divorce. At one point
the semi-retarded Lewis (and he admits as much himself ) says to Martin: ‘‘I
can’t keep my dickie down, Ricky.’’ Um, he’s putting on a tuxedo I think. Similarly,
Dorothy Malone lives in the apartment directly above them, unmarried
with thick, black glasses and earning a good living on her own. She spends her
time dressing the barely adult Shirley MacLaine, who has a cute little butch
cut, up as the Bat Lady. The homosexual content seems to me almost too obvious
to be meant. It’s usually much subtler in Hollywood movies of the era.
Then again, it’s impossible to miss it, even if you’re a 1950s housewife. Eventually,
the two gay couples meet and change partners, Martin getting Malone
and Lewis MacLaine.8
As Frank Krutnik notes regarding an almost identical plot pattern in another
Martin-Lewis vehicle, Sailor Beware (1951), ‘‘The two female partners . . . mirror
the terms of difference inscribed in the Martin-Lewis partnership . . . Like is
paired with like, and this serves to minimize the importance of heterosexual differences
whenmeasured against the familiar differences between the twomen.’’9
Thus the essentially homoerotic terms of the relationship are not genuinely disrupted.
As Krutnik additionally notes, the entire genre of comedian comedy
is characterized by a strong undercurrent of misogyny and sexual hostility, as
it ‘‘repeatedly offers controlled assaults upon, or inversions of, the conformist
options of male identity, sexuality and responsibility.’’ 10 The misogyny in the
genre is typically enhanced in the work of the male comedy duo, asMolly Haskell
has noted, which ‘‘from Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello, is almost
by definition, or by metaphor, latently homosexual: a union of opposites
(tall/short, thin/fat, straight/comic) who, like husband and wife, combine to
make a whole.’’ 11
But there’s nothing latent about the marital qualities of the relationship between
Rick and Eugene in Artists and Models. The first scene set in their apartment—
they’ve come home after being fired for the billboard debacle, we learn—
begins with Eugene, a dishrag tied around his waist, asking Rick how he’d like
his dinner prepared. As the ludicrous dinner scene continues, Eugene sets up a
virtual (there’s virtually no food) romantic dinner for the two of them, complete
with candlelight (real) and wine (imaginary). After dinner, he plays an imaginary
piano and serenades Rick, singing to him (‘‘When You Pretend’’), even
sitting in his lap briefly. Before the scene is over, Rick has spoken to Eugene
of divorce. This explicit travesty of marriage is a kind of cover for the underlying
reasons for the homosocial bond between the two males, though. Its raison
d’etre is to maintain the partnership and ward off the potential disruption
of women: ‘‘within the genre, women tend to signify the demands of integration
and responsibility for the male.’’ 12 The relationship between two men only
mimics marriage, while it in fact protects the men against economic and sexual
maturity. Rick may castigate Eugene for his inability to hold down a job and
Eugene may play at the dutiful and loyal ‘‘wife’’ to his philandering ladies’ man
roommate, but they really stick together out of amutual commitment to warding
off the financial and conjugal obligations of marriage and family.
Here, then, what might appear a wholly transgressive attribute is really more
of a generic one, along with most of the film’s other ‘‘inversions,’’ including the
very amusing image of female sexual initiative offered through Shirley Mac-
Laine’s performance. Again, it is the dynamic of the comedian-couple that
necessitates this. If Martin’s character is dominant, sexually confident, suave,
and seductive, then Lewis’s must be passive, sexually insecure, klutzy, and coy,
which he is, in uproarious contradistinction to the aggressive MacLaine. The
delightful inversion of her characterization notwithstanding, most of the many
female parts in Artists and Models seem to be the products of a very misogynist
imagination, comprising a range of carping and castrating types—emasculating
wife, scolding mother, nagging landlady, mannish masseuse—and more
than the usual array of seductively clothed, seemingly dimwitted, nubile beauties
(‘‘models’’), along with a campy dose of femme fatale (Eva Gabor as Sonia,
an Eastern bloc agent—this is the height of the cold war, after all—and the
comic book vamp, the Bat Lady). The credit sequence alone features—in twelve
shots—twenty different eye-popping ‘‘models’’ (these lookmuchmore like fashion
models or, again, showgirls, than artists’ models), although six of them are
only shown from the hips down, as a row of six sexy pairs of bare leg.
One of Artists and Models’ silliest and most symptomatic conceits is that a
comic book artist would require live models.What at first looks like a gag turns
out to be a more motivated device, though. It is the source of one major thread
of themovie’s romantic farce: because Abby draws fromlife, Eugene encounters
Bessie dressed as the Bat Lady and is smitten—in a paralytic, abject sort of way.
But Eugene—despite opportunities and hints—refuses to recognize Bessie out
of costume as the same alluring, fatal creature of his fantasies (and Bessie wants
to be desired for herself, not for her two-dimensional associations, so doesn’t
pull her trump card to secure his interest). The ‘‘gag’’ actually instantiates, then,
not only the relationship between two- and three-dimensional representations,
and between still and moving images, two formal conundrums of pictorial arts
generally, but also the relationship between model and image, or performer and
role—that is: the intriguing puzzle of portrayal and portrayed. Eugene, in this
respect, is a mere exaggeration of the prototypical moviegoer: caught in the web
of illusion, he cannot or will not extract himself, even enough to see what Bessie
continually throws under his nose—that she and the Bat Lady are one and the
same. So, in fact, Tashlin’s Artists and Models peppers with laughs the very same
cinematic trope that is bathed in melancholy in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the
other films I discuss in chapter 2.
Indeed, although wholly lacking in seriousness, Artists and Models manifests
many if not most of the traits that I find meaningful and analyze in the coming
chapters. In addition to giving form to the seemingly magical propensity of representations
to seduce and perplex viewers—a propensity I analyze throughout,
especially with regard to the use of portraits and statues en abyme—Tashlin’s
film, like those discussed in chapters 3 and 4, also regards the female body—
excessively—as simultaneous object of desire, source of anxiety, and cipher of
cultural meaning. (Frank Tashlin himself was co-author of the screen adaptation
of One Touch of Venus, the first in a ‘‘trilogy’’ of Ava Gardner films discussed
in chapter 3). And, as with two deceptively different films, La Belle Noiseuse
and Splash, femininity is associated with animality in Artists and Models. Bessie
Sparrowbrush is both Bat Lady and, by virtue of her name, bird woman.Women
are treated as predatory and carnal.
The comic book and nightmare themes of Tashlin’s film permit bold expression
of the obscure but powerful connection between women, art, and violence
that I observe in chapter 6. Most symptomatically, Artists and Models, like the
films I discuss in the final chapter, assumes that the practice of art—at any and
every level, from comic books to high art—is infused with psychosexual energies.
A scene in which Abby substitutes herself for a female model with whom
she is posing Rick in a clinch, and is then aroused, seems a mere comical variant
of the scene in AgnèsMerlet’s Artemisia in which the lustful young painter puts
down her brushes and inserts herself (sexually) into the scene in which she has
posed her fellow painter Tassi as Holofernes. Of course, one ought not forget
that one of the meanings of ‘‘art’’ to American moviegoers of 1955 was precisely
‘‘sex,’’ since this was the period when themore mature fare produced abroad was
increasingly being seen in the United States, usually in ‘‘art houses’’ under the
rubric of ‘‘art film.’’
Thus sexuality constitutes a source of slippage between the terms of art and
film, at least in the (English) language of movie going in the postwar period.
But this is obviously no vernacular accident. Although maybe ‘‘foreign’’ to the
movies in America (in a somewhat naïve, simplistic reading of the classical
Hollywood film), sex is always already a component of all art, along with death
and other basic human preoccupations. This study explores the ways in which
art, when taken up by cinema, becomes its speculum, revealing at many levels
the psychic, social, and cultural components of the apparatus . . . returning the
repressed . . . baring the device.
