During these days someone keeps on asking, writing, posting the question: “what movie should I watch?”. This quarantine could be a good chance to refresh some past memories by watching old movies, series on Netflix or, and this is our case, something about art. Let’s choose that path then because art and movie have always been a good binomial.
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These two different sides of culture have always been connected. Lots of movie authors were moved on shooting films also by the love for art. We should just think about great masters as Stanley Kubrick, who was a contemporary art collector too and a photographer. Kubrick was also a lover of modern art. The Shining’s director represents the perfect example of a deep study into the arts fields, both in painting that more in contemporary styles as Pop art. He was a connoisseur of this field, that is why in his movies, from “Barry Lindon” to “Clockwork orange”, suggestions, quotations and inspirations from the art world are clear and direct.
This is tangible from the use of natural lights as a choice (that only Luchino Visconti did before in “The Leopard”/ “Il Gattopardo” 1963) to be as much pertinent as a painting from the 16th century. Also, works of Pop artists such as George Segal or Allen Jones were inserted directly in the “Clockwork”. Many of these masters used art as an inspiration: Hitchcock with his noir atmospheres and famous quotations as the one by Salvador Dalì in “Spellbound” (1945); Henry Ford; Carl Theodor Dreyer (those black and white! Those portraits of people taken from Rembrandt paintings!); Carlos Saura; Vincent Minnelli or Kim Ki Duk with the clear inspiration from Michelangelo’s “Pietà Rondanini” with the Venice Film Festival winner “Pieta” (2012), or a brilliant author as David Lynch, who is a painter himself too. And we should start writing about artists who made movies too: we will have another chapter for that. But it is enough to quote Andy Warhol in America and Mario Schifano in Italy to leave some curiosity, for next time...
