New York Times: Art and Silent Film's Mixed Relations
Bruce Calvert
Art and Silent Film's Mixed Relations
By GRACE GLUECK
The first movie kiss, it is generally agreed, occurred in 1896 between May
Irwin and John C. Rice. Not a very sexy smooch, it took up 50 feet of film
and 19 seconds. It was shot by the Edison Manufacturing Company on the
occasion of the 200th performance of "The Widow Jones," the stage musical in
which the kiss took place. "May Irwin's Kiss," as it came to be known, was
added to Thomas Edison's program at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York,
where his Vitascope machine made its debut.
The film was not met with total acclaim. No less a critic than the painter
John Sloan wrote, in the short-lived arts journal The Chap-Book, of "the
spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other's lips."
He added: "When only life-size it was pronounced beastly. But that was
nothing to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and
repeated three times over, it is absolutely disgusting." Whew!
You can check out "May Irwin's Kiss" and many other fascinating items in a
learned but wonderfully engrossing show at New York University's Grey Art
Gallery, "Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910."
Organized by Nancy Mowll Mathews of the Williams College Museum of Art, and
packed with 100 artworks and 50 short films on flat-screen monitors, the
show deals with the complex relationship between film and fine art at the
turn of the 20th century, and the effects each had on the other. Not the
least of the show's attractions is its five-star catalog, with 14 separate
essays.
The show begins with early motifs common to artists and filmmakers: land and
seascapes, rural genre pictures, scenes of everyday life. Depictions of
moving water, particularly waterfalls, were popular with both. "Niagara
Falls" (1878), a large oil by William Morris Hunt, and "Coast and Rocks"
(1890), a watercolor of a boiling sea by William Trost Richards, are
juxtaposed with films like "Waterfall in the Catskills" (1897), a 50-foot
exposure by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and "Rough Sea at Dover"
(1895), another 50-footer, by the British filmmaker Birt Acres.
Even more more attractive to painters and filmmakers was the expressive
potential of the human body. The show's second part, devoted to the body in
motion, emphasizes the crucial role played by the motion studies of Eadweard
Muybridge (1830-1904), the English-born, California-based photographer.
Shown here are some of Muybridge's studies - still photographs projected in
rapid succession by his 1871 invention the zoopraxiscope - of the way horses
and humans moved, which led artists like Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington
and Ernest Meissonnier to change their depictions of horses' gaits.
Muybridge was critical of the work of the popular French painter Rosa
Bonheur. He found the rendering of horses' leg movements in her huge canvas
"The Horse Fair" (1853-5) erroneous (almost movie-screen size in the
original, it is shown here in a color lithograph). His very public attacks
accounted in some measure for the decline of the painting's popularity;
Bonheur's defenders pointed out that the picture had been painted before the
advent of Muybridge's studies, and said the artistic truth of her work was
more important than its scientific accuracy.
By the 1890's, inventors like Edison and the Lumière family had built on
Muybridge's technology to develop more sophisticated equipment. The Lumières'
Cinématographe, patented in 1895, was the first mechanism to project moving
pictures onto a screen where they could be viewed by an audience; Edison's
Vitascope arrived the next year.
More carefully wrought and projected than Edison's offerings, Cinématographe
productions were often in tune with the subjects of Impressionist art, such
as the bourgeois family, seen in examples like "Feeding the Baby" (1895), a
very domestic scene of a couple fondly attending their infant. This
50-footer is paired with a Mary Cassatt print, "The Barefooted Child"(1896-7),
depicting a baby comfortably ensconced in its mother's lap. A nearby Edison
film, "Merry-Go-Round" (1898), is inferior in clarity to the French
offering, a fault pointed up by the lively painting accompanying it, Maurice
Prendergast's "The Flying Horses" (1902-6).
Bodily motion is emphatically conveyed by paintings and films about dancing,
particularly "serpentine dancing," introduced to New York by Loie Fuller in
1892, in which luminous costumes made swirling designs. Notable are shots of
Fuller practicing at her home in Passy, France, around 1910, and a Lumière
film, "Danse Serpentine" (1897), in which a Fuller imitator performs, her
costume hand-tinted to suggest the effect of the moving colored lights
projected onstage.
The rhythmic, abstract motions of the dance were echoed by artists, among
them Will H. Bradley, whose two strong illustrations for The Chap-Book - one
a black-and-white abstraction from 1894, the other an 1895 Thanksgiving
cover in color of two women in billowing costumes serving holiday fare -
refer to this seductive entertainment.
The rise of the great industrial cities in Europe and America provided
painters, and later filmmakers, with endless subject matter, touched on in
the show's third section, "The City in Motion." The American painter Joseph
Oppenheimer's bustling panorama "Madison Square" (1900) is complemented here
by "Madison Square, New York" (1903) and "Panorama of Flatiron Building"
(1902), both by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. And "A Windy
Day on the Roof" (1904), a humorous short by the same company, in which a
woman hanging her wash douses an oaf trying to look up her skirt, finds a
tamer echo in John Sloan's "Sun and Wind on the Roof" (1915), a piquant
vignette of a woman hanging laundry without intrusion.
The show ends with a lively section of posters, paintings, cartoons and
films in which artists and filmmakers react to one another's achievements
with verve and humor. One example: a pair of Edison movies, "An Artist's
Dream" (1899) and "The Artist's Dilemma" (1901), attribute to artists an
unconscious desire to make their work move; in each the feat is accomplished
by magical means while the artist sleeps.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archive
http://home.comcast.net/~silentfilm/home.htm
Jason Liller
Bruce Calvert wrote:
> Not the
> least of the show's attractions is its five-star catalog, with 14 separate
> essays.
The exhibition catalogue is entitled "Moving Pictures: The Un-Easy
Relationship Between American Art and Early Film" (ISBN: 1555952283)
and includes a DVD.
--Jason Liller