(Credits: Far Out / Paramount Pictures / Alamy / René Magritte / Sotheby’s / Warner Bros / Vincen…
Before movies and motion pictures, there were only paintings. No matter how captivating or dramatic, these static images within a frame can only capture a snapshot of a scene.
When you think about it, the history of cinema is relatively recent compared to paintings, which have existed for centuries. For most of human history, painting, in the conventional sense, as well as etchings and engravings, have embodied the prime mode of communication. Paintings have been used to document historical events like battlefield victories, coronations, and funerals, as well as portraits. They have also been used to convey to the viewer a particular emotion, and, in many cases, to enforce it onto the viewer in an agenda-setting way.
Today, with the evolution of technology, storytelling through painting has been replaced with film and photography, which operate in a similar manner. The artist can have full control over the tone and message they want to put across through the use of angles, light, and colour. However, because of the immense and powerful history of painting, these different media frequently intersect. That is, cinematographers or directors may choose to reference a painting in their film to emulate a specific effect.
Referencing a painting in a movie can be a poignant way for a director to evoke familiar emotions in the viewer, while giving a nod to their artistic intellectualism. Finding common themes that overlap between a film and a painting can be a way to enhance the universal human experience by drawing connections between the impact of events, even if they happened centuries apart. Such references allow the viewer to step out of the storyline for a split second and embrace cinema as a standalone art form.
Additionally, drawing from elements of a painting can help enhance the mise-en-scène, to call attention to it as a frame of art rather than just a moving image. In this way, the director breaks the fourth wall, reminding the viewer that what they see before them is a mix of art and reality.
One of my favourite examples of this is Stanley Kubrick’s recreation of Vincent Van Gogh’s Prisoners’ Round (1890) in A Clockwork Orange. Adopting the same composition and colour palette as Van Gogh’s painting reminds us how timeless art can be in evoking emotions, even centuries after it has been painted. In this case, Kubrick tries to highlight the dehumanisation of the prisoners in the film as they walk in circles in a dark, box-like courtyard.
However, unlike Van Gogh, he chose to show the sky, perhaps to demonstrate how freedom can simultaneously feel so tangible and close, and yet, impossible to reach for the prisoners, exacerbating their misery. By including this reference to Van Gogh, we experience the totality of art, immersing ourselves not just in the film but also a painting.
Another example, and perhaps the most famous, is in the closing scene of The Truman Show, which was directly inspired by surrealist artist René Magritte’s Architecture au clair de lune.
Director Peter Weir exquisitely uses the simplicity of the painting to summarise the essence of the film in those final minutes. Magritte is known for his uncanny, surrealist paintings that elicit the warmth of nostalgia mixed with a juxtaposing eeriness. Lit street lights on deserted pavements in broad daylight, obscure and illusionistic figures that inexplicably make sense, are but a few examples.
The stylistic choice to use this painting in the final scene is a perfect touch, as the basis of the film is Truman’s gradual and painful realisation that his life hasn’t been real; he has been living a constructed lie. Thus, the disorientation and discomfort Truman feels at the end echoes what Magritte aimed to provoke in a viewer standing in front of his paintings. If one is familiar with Magritte’s painting, they can then associate it with this scene and be doubly and more easily impacted by the director’s intent.
With little action and speech, Weir was able to convey exactly what he wanted by reproducing the painting as the closing frame, essentially telling us that a sinister reality lurks beneath the aesthetics of Truman’s life. Through the connection with Magritte’s painting, we leave the film with a bitter aftertaste. That the pleasing, seemingly perfect world in front of us was simply a make-believe one that could mimic reality unnervingly well.
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