In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools unsuffered. We hope it’s a welcome break from the world of shit falling on our heads daily in the political sphere.
Tonight’s Topic: Art Inside of Art
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCs6Dk_n1vw
In this week’s Medium Cool, In this week’s MC let’s talk about one art inside another.
I finally watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2019), which is amazing. It’s on Hulu if you have it. Highly recommended. In it, as the title suggests, a woman is tasked with painting a portrait of an elusive subject. The film goes out of its way to focus on the act of portrait composition, and each of its stages is fascinating.
It got me thinking about art inside art (in this case, painting & drawing in a film). This is hard to pull off, and not too many films or novels do it well. Which ones do? What unusual examples of art (painting, music, dance, etc.) play an important role inside another art?
*****
We are moving back to Sundays! This is our last Wednesday Medium Cool on Wednesday, and Medium Cool with return on Sunday, 10/18.
Shana
I have always been partial to W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, a fictionalized telling of Paul Gauguin’s life and art. The description toward the end of his paintings in Tahiti left me gasping.
mad citizen
Can I really be first today? I’ve been trying to watch more interesting films this year, including international films. So I’ll throw in Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999) and his recent Pain and Glory (2019). Both have extensive flashbacks, at least one has a story within a story, the former has references to All About Eve and Tennessee Williams, etc. It’s hard to summarize his films, which I’m sure you all know if you have watched them
OK, re-reading the prompt, in one of these films (I think Pain and Glory as Penelope Cruz plays his mother in flashbacks; in the other one she is a pregnant nun) a drawing the young Pedro makes plays a key role later in the film.
ETA: Dang! I’m #2.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I think painting shows up as a central element in a lot of films. One I’ve seen recently: Sallie Hawkins in Maudie. A couple I didn’t see: Ed Harris in Pollock, Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner. I loved Loving Vincent but not sure it fits the category. It’s an animated film done entirely in oil painting, in the style of and featuring characters from Van Gogh’s paintings.
A really beautiful film where music is the central character is Tous les Matins du Monde with Gerard Depardieu (back when he had a career and hadn’t become a full-blown full-time idiot) playing viola da gamba composer Marin Marais. We went looking for Marais music after seeing that.
Another musical one that comes to mind is The Competition, with Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving in a piano concerto competition. It does a pretty accurate and amusing job of depicting the type of people who spend most of their lives interacting with pianos and not humans.
PJ
I can think of a lot of novels that address how art is made, and quite a few movies as well. Off the top of my head, in recent years, two movies that stick out are Topsy Turvy, by Mike Leigh, about how Gilbert & Sullivan make an operetta, and Love & Mercy, which has a focus on Brian Wilson making Pet Sounds. But maybe my favorite novel about the artistic mindset is Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, which was made into a good movie directed by Ronald Neame and starring Alec Guinness as the ornery painter, Gulley Jimson.
Sister Golden Bear
It’s an amazing film.
This behind-the-scenes article discusses the remarkable cinematography, in which the director sought to emulate the lighting uses in paintings of the period. Also, a great interview (minor spoilers) with the director about some her intents in the film about her thinking behind the film, including why consent is so sexy and why she’s sick of women smiling all the time on screen.
Spoilers in white:
As a queer woman, it’s also really thrilling to a see a “serious” well-written, well-done movie featuring “someone like me.” Having both a director and lead actress (portraying Héloïse) who are lesbian, they’re a former couple, means they don’t have to spend creative energy “playing gay,” they simply are gay and can devote more energy to exploring the character.
PJ
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Mr. Turner was another Mike Leigh movie that really got into the attitude of the painter.
Brachiator
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Great choice. It’s been a long time since I saw that film, but I recall it fondly.
Speaking of Van Gogh, I would throw in the Doctor Who Episode, “Vincent and the Doctor.”
ETA: Because I never paid attention to the lyrics, there was a time when I did not realize that the Don McLean song that everyone referred to as “Starry, Starry Night” was about Van Gogh. Another work in another medium about painting.
Gin & Tonic
Was this post mis-scheduled?
WaterGirl
oops! BG has to pick his pup up at the vet, so I moved it back to 19:00, only I hit a zero instead of the 9, so it published when I rescheduled.
I’ll be moving this back to 19:00 in a couple of minutes, just want to let folks know. It will be back up at 7pm tonight
You guys can come back at 7pm with all sorts of brilliant insights. :-)
Spanish Moss
I love “Artemisia”, a movie about the Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who defied many conventions of the day in her struggle to become a painter. It is a gorgeous period piece with beautiful scenery, costumes, and lighting. The creation of art was a central part of the movie and it was fascinating to see how it was studied and done in those days. And her story itself is very dramatic: a trial, torture with thumbscrews…
I suppose that cinematography is particularly important in movies about art. It has been a long time since I last saw it, but I remember how beautiful it was to watch.
narya
When I was in college, I took an “intro to fiction” class (the last English class I took, other than creative writing, because I didn’t want analysis of the writing to wreck my reading). One of the books was “The Warden” by Anthony Trollope. I would say that 98% of it passed me by completely–but the prof pointed out that the warden basically played air cello when he was anxious. That stuck with me, and years later I went back and re-read it, and then proceeded to read nearly everything Trollope ever wrote–all because a character was playing air cello. Not sure if this qualifies, though.
WaterGirl
When I was looking for a trailer for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the first trailer I found left me cold. I kept looking and found this one, and thought “wow, I’d really like to see this.”
debbie
I’ll never remember the name of the film, but I saw it back in the 1980s (I think) at the NY FIlm Festival. I believe it was French. It went really deep into every part of the artist’s process, which I enjoyed witnessing, at least up until the artist decided to destroy the painting and start all over again, repeating all of the process minutiae. That really could have been cut.
Not sure this fits the thread’s purpose, but Christopher Moore’s novel titled Sacre Bleu was very enjoyable (I’m not a fan of most of his stuff). Plot: A bunch of his artist friends are convinced Vincent van Gogh had been murdered rather than committing suicide, and they set out to find the truth. Aside from the story, the book itself is pretty impressive (at least it was when first published). The book prints a number of Impressionist paintings within the text (better than average four-color quality) and the text is printed in ultramarine blue rather than black (for a reason). I’m not a mystery fan like most of you guys, but I really enjoyed this.
Peale
Thinking here of fictional art within film.
Egon Schiele) from the Grand Budapest Hotel
Craig
I have a soft spot for Drumline. It gets into how and what it takes to put a marching band performance together.
Yutsano
Since we’re going that way: “Amadeus”. F. Murray Abraham as a snide court composer having to deal with this upstart young prodigy. Tom Hulce played Mozart to perfection. Yes it’s based on a stage play that isn’t historically accurate EXCEPT for how Salieri and Mozart treated each other. And (spoilers) they really treated Salieri’s deathbed confession with a grain of salt. The priest was a bit taken aback but it was treated as the rantings of an old man at the end of his life.
Roger Moore
The first example I thought of was Blow Up, but I think Amadeus is probably a better example. There are obviously lots of movies about musicians and even some about composers, but Mozart’s deathbed dictation to Salieri is a rare example of showing the act of composition in some kind of detail.
WaterGirl
BG is on the way and should be here in about 10-15 minutes.
debbie
@Yutsano:
I don’t care how inaccurate it was, Amadeus is one of my FAVORITE films!
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Sally Potter’s 1997 movie The Tango Lesson contains extensive dance scenes – some exquisite, some frustrating – and exploration of the philosophy of partnered dance, which sounds boring but is not. It also brings in elements of filmmaking, writing, and fashion. It’s gorgeous and sexy and moody.
Hmmm, need to watch again.
James E Powell
I liked Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat and Julie Taymor’s Frida, though there was a lot more about relationships than the painting.
There are no good dramatic films about rock and roll bands because the scripts are all cliched and the music is never as good as any actual rock and roll band. The only exception is Spinal Tap.
NotMax
Obvious choice is The Red Shoes (which I loathe) so instead shall go with Unfaithfully Yours and toss in Fame as an amuse -bouche..
Omnes Omnibus
Do musicals where everyone gets together to put on a show count?
If not, how about “Round Midnight?”
RSA
@PJ:
Great novel. I didn’t know there was a movie—I’ll have to look for it.
I’ll mention Robertson Davies, who’s written about painting (What’s Bred in the Bone) and singing (A Mixture of Frailties). I should say that there’s a lot more going on in his novels than the creative process, though.
I’ll also add a novel about artistic creation but maybe not art: Patrick Süskind’s Perfume.
NotMax
Le sigh. Italics fix.
Obvious choice is The Red Shoes (which I loathe) so instead shall go with Unfaithfully Yours and toss in Fame as an amuse -bouche.
prostratedragon
Just three of many:
Scarlet Street is full of allusions to painters and their works, with the character Christopher Cross (Edward G.), cashier at J.J. Hogarth, modelled in part on Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau. The real-life painter fortunately for him skipped out on the main thread of the plot.
The Conformist [Il Conformista] seems to take its production design from the argument between fascist esthetics and “degenerate art.”
Are those Josephine and Edward Hopper (Midge and Scotty) in Vertigo? Neither more nor less than in the sense that they are depicted in Nighthawks, that is.
Twin Peaks has a lot of painting and allusions to painting, sometimes surreal, e.g. The Ambassadors, I do believe. This quality is one reason I can watch it rather frequently, since in part it engages in whatever way it is that painting engages.
narya
@James E Powell: I liked Almost Famous, too
ETA: Waiting for Guffman and Mighty Wind might qualify in this thread as well.
dexwood
Monuments Men. Entertaining, enlightening WW II movie about art, U.S. soldiers, deception, and Nazis. Based on a true story the short would point out.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
I immediately thought of Pollock with Ed Harris. The film shows him creating several paintings. Also The Girl With The Pearl Earring about Vermeer. It shows him using the camera obscura and her mixing colors as well as him painting.
gkoutnik
@debbie:
“… too many notes. Cut a few and it will be perfect.”
“Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?”
JanieM
There’s the novel How to be both, by Ali Smith. To save myself some time, I’ll steal some of the Amazon blurb:
Too glib by half, and they left out gender-bending. Wonderful book, though its twists and turns make it not an easy/quick read. But I find that Ali Smith almost always repays the effort.
I don’t know enough about painting to judge that side of it, but one of the two main characters is modeled on a real-life painter named Francesco del Cossa. On top of everything else, it made me want to go study Renaissance painting. In fact, I’m talking myself into rereading it right at this very moment.
prostratedragon
@narya: Sometimes it’s the little things, isn’t it?
NotMax
Oh, also too. Although dunno if it as a peg would readily fit in the topical hole, Greenfingers.
gkoutnik
For pure chaotic delightful nonsense, “The Goes Wrong Show” (Masterpiece, through Amazon) is a brilliant send-up of a community theatre trying to produce a series of trite plays.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Absolutely!
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Um, I asked two questions.
debbie
@gkoutnik:
Exactly! “Teeheeheeheeheehee!”
Gin & Tonic
William Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions, is entirely about art forgery. It is a masterful work, but forbidding because of its length and density.
BGinCHI
@PJ: Sorry all to be so late to the thread. Dog at the vet…pick up…etc.
I LOVED Topsy Turvy. Great film by the great Mike Leigh. The rehearsal scenes are particularly excellent.
Gin & Tonic
For music movies, I can’t recall its name, but there was a very good movie about the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, which I watched on a trans-Atlantic flight one time. Good way to while away a few hours.
BGinCHI
@Spanish Moss: I need to see that!! Thanks.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Fuck you. You were more than 15 minutes late, so we are turning this into an open thread.
BGinCHI
@Gin & Tonic: Let’s Get Lost?
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Sorry about that. I ignored the second question because I didn’t understand where you were going with that.
“Can we…? If not, then…”
You didn’t say anything about “If so…”
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Too many WI assholes on the 55, so took forever to get home.
NotMax
@gkoutnik
Can nearly guarantee you’ll enjoy the 3-episode series Empty Space, available on Prime. Not to be confused with the movie of the same title. Darling little indie effort.
Omnes Omnibus
Sweet and Lowdown.
BGinCHI
@Roger Moore: Ah, film inside film is a particular interest of mine, and especially sound as it appears in that great film. In one of Albert Brooks’s films he’s an editor, which is the only one I can think of.
TheOtherHank
If we can accept cooking as an art form (and it’s definitely presented that way in the movie), Tampopo is a great example of this. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the story of a woman who owns a ramen shop learning how to make the perfect bowl of ramen.
scribbler
Not sure if this fits the definition but I’ll throw out the 1945 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Definitely deals with the intersection of art and life. Won the Oscar for best cinematography. Cast included Donna Reed, Angela Lansbury, and George Sanders, who was in the previously mentioned and also great in The Moon and Sixpence.
BGinCHI
@prostratedragon: Wow, these are great catches.
eddie blake
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
loving vincent was SO good.
vincent and the doctor– SOOOO goood.
music in film? amadeus. sooooooooo good
basquiat always made me wanna paint.
i also REALLY enjoyed the freddie mercury movie, bohemian rhapsody, even though their handling of his sexuality was heavy-handed and disturbing.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: My first question was facetious. Round Midnight is fantastic.
@BGinCHI: Hmmm… Usually we don’t stray too far from 90, 94 and their variants.
BGinCHI
@JanieM: I love Ali Smith. She has so many great novels.
TheOtherHank
Oh, and I’ll second Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu. Basically every impressionist painter you’ve heard of is a character in the novel. And the novel revolves around the main character’s struggle to paint a portrait of his sweetheart.
BGinCHI
@TheOtherHank: Giro Loves Sushi too. Tampopo is so great!
Now I need to rewatch that as well as A Taxing Woman.
Gin & Tonic
@BGinCHI: Born to be Blue.
NotMax
Belatedly occurred inside the head that Mozart in the Jungle would fit in here as well. Veered into the weeds as it progressed into later seasons, though.
BGinCHI
@Gin & Tonic: Ahh.
So has anyone else scene Portrait of a Lady on Fire?
I thought it was really, really amazing.
Benw
Music in movies:
I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow in O Brother Where Art Thou?
The band’s final show in Sing Street
Movies in music:
“Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like STAR WARS!!”
Craig
Ken Perenyi’s book Caveat Emptor, about his life as an art forger in NY, and London is so full of details of how to recreate the materials, and techniques to paint like the old masters, and the flip side- what are experts at auction houses looking for to tip them to the fakes.
MomSense
The first one that came to mind is the scene in The Devil’s Advocate with the wall sculpture that starts writhing. The second one I thought of was the scene with Kingpin a/k/a Wilson Fisk and the white painting in the gallery.
gkoutnik
@NotMax: Thanks! Will cue it up. Was actually looking for something to watch tonight instead of Dense.
Denali
Yes, I have seen Portrait. The photography alone is amazing.
MomSense
@NotMax:
I loved the first season. My mom was principal second violin for most of my childhood. Spent a lot of time backstage and at rehearsals.
eddie blake
@Omnes Omnibus:
sweet and lowdown…damn fine film.
totally LESS serious?
that thing you do.
MomSense
For music, I adore The Commitments.
eddie blake
@eddie blake:
film showed his drug and alcohol use as nothingburgers but his sex life was red-light alert!!! and ‘danger, will robinson!’
eddie blake
@MomSense:
that’s a great movie.
lots of fun. great music.
tons of heart.
prostratedragon
@BGinCHI: There’s also a sequel, A Taxing Woman Returns, maybe not as great as the original, but still quite good, especially when our sturdy inspector tracks the tax evaders into a phony Buddhist temple. Hilarity ensues.
To the subject, Tampopo is very much about the art of food, and even its spirituality, but in a nice, playful way.
dexwood
@MomSense: A÷!
MomSense
@eddie blake:
And the bathtub interview scenes melted me.
MomSense
@TheOtherHank:
If we include cooking we have to include The Big Night.
MomSense
For music there is also Almost Famous.
prostratedragon
@MomSense: The battle of art and commerce.
Anotherlurker
@Brachiator: Vincent and the Doctor was a wonderful episode! I noted that every time I rated it, someone must have been slicing onions.
A 1990’s series, “Young Indiana Jones” features an episode where Young Indy explores the Impressionist scene in the company of art student Norman Rockwell. They meet Degas, Picasso, Braque and others of the movement.
James E Powell
@MomSense:
The Commitments! How could I forget that one. It is the closest to what it’s like to be in a band. So close, I almost consider it a documentary.
BGinCHI
@prostratedragon: It’s been too long since I’ve seen those, and I want to show Tampopo to the kid.
Miss Bianca
The Red Violin – not just for its depiction of violinists and violin music, but the peculiar madnesses of the luthier and the violin market, where artistic appreciation and avarice combine to make obsessives of aficionados.
Which it is due for a rewatch.
MomSense
@Miss Bianca:
I loved that movie. Samuel Jackson’s best.
eddie blake
@MomSense:
“i am a golden god!”
MomSense
@eddie blake:
HA!
PJ
Not so ironically, the one thing that it is hard to make interesting in writing or film or any medium, really, is writing itself. How to express the tedium, the hours of scribbling what amounts to nothing, and the flashes of capturing something close to life?
Miss Bianca
OK, two of my favorite books, although they are really, really different from each other, are favorites precisely because I love the way they try to describe the feeling of art as really magic, and a means of communicating with the gods (or faeries):
War for the Oaks by Emma Bull (chick singer and guitar player in Minneapolis gets drafted into a Faerie war and puts together a kick-ass band along the way), and The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault (Ancient Greek tragedian gets involved in political upheavals and intrigues while developing his acting career).
Sab
@Miss Bianca: I loved “War for the Oaks.” Whole different take on Minneapolis.
Barbara
I thought Hillary and Jackie was a great movie that revolved around the world of classical music.
One of my favorite scenes using music as inspiration is in Breaking Away, where the protagonist pretends to be an Italian cyclist and serenades a college girl with opera — but the funny becomes sublime when the scene cuts to his dad using the same music to seduce his own wife.
Martin
Made me think of this.
Not that the embedded art is particularly good, but it does point the gaming industry in an interesting direction.
Not all art is high art. :P
BGinCHI
@Barbara: YES!
It’s like you just wrapped up the last 3 Medium Cools in one post.
frosty
Art forgery and fakery is at the heart of Jennifer Cruisie’s Faking It. In which she also brings in the con-man (and woman) Dempsey clan.
Perhaps Cruisie’s novels aren’t what you’d call art, but I enjoyed them
Miss Bianca
@Sab: I’ve always wanted to put together a War for the Oaks mix tape…or CD, or podcast, I guess…of all the obscure 80s bands and tunes in that book!
Spanish Moss
@prostratedragon: I loved Tampopo! Didn’t know there was a sequel, thanks.
Some other great movies about the art of food:
Big Picture Pathologist
If memory serves me well the flick “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman has a scene where the viewer is watching a puppet show OF a Shakespeare play within a movie that takes place WITHIN a Shakespeare play — very Meta!
NotMax
@Big Picture Pathologist
That Tom Stoppard is such a scamp.
:)
(The original play is better than the film, IMHO.)
prostratedragon
@Craig:
Thumbs up on Drumline, which is also a good young adult story.
hotshoe
This is a bit of a stretch for the theme:
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
The entire film centers on a high-end art heist and a con job featuring two famous impressionist paintings San Giorgio Maggiore at Twilight by Claude Monet, and (a forged copy) The Artist’s Garden at Eragny by Camille Pissarro.
There isn’t any moment where we see someone actually making art — so I am not sure it counts for this thread — but the film is entirely about how money, boredom, and the desperate need to possess beauty, intersect with a genuine love of art.
The official trailer is horrible. Don’t bother.
This 7-minute long dramatic passage is soundtracked by Nina Simone’s Sinnerman and features yet another famous painting The Son of Man by René Magritte.
Rangdo
Painting: La Belle Noiseuse is a very male-gazey predecessor to Portrait…, and so I think makes the best comparison piece.
Theatre (or, more specifically, Shakespeare): I’ve heard great things about the Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows, a comedy about a Shakespeare festival, with some Kids in the Hall pedigree, but I’ve not seen it. In the same putting-on-Shakespeare genre, Kenneth Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter is a fun watch. And come to think of it, Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard is worth seeing too, although I’m not sure it qualifies here since it’s not a fiction in itself.
Film: The Winterbottom/Coogan/Brydon movie A Cock and Bull Story is an absolutely fantastic adaptation of Tristram Shandy about the filmmakers trying and failing to adapt the novel which famously tries and fails to tell the author’s story. And there’s a tiny indie German film called Kohlhaas oder die Verhältnismäßigkeit der Mittel about a filmmaker who gets his funding pulled a day into his adaptation of the Kleist story and decides to carry on anyway. I don’t think it got an English-language release, unfortunately, and is not to be confused with the Mads Mikkelson vehicle.
Empress of the Known Lute World
@Brachiator: I must beg to differ. “Tous les matins” was a film about two men who walked all over the women in their lives for the sake of their own glory and advancement.
I think no one has mentioned the novels of Robertson Davies, whose novels revolve around theater history and performance (The Deptford Trilogy) and art and opera history–and art forgery (The Cornish Trilogy).