Art in the Cinema

Steven Jacobs is Associate Professor at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is an art historian specializing in the relations between film and the visual arts – a topic on which he published widely. Dimitrios Latsis is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the School of Image Arts of Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. He has published widely in the fields of American visual culture, historiography and theory and cinema and archival studies.Birgit Cleppe is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Art History, Ghent University, Belgium. She also teaches history of architecture at KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent, Belgium.

This remarkable book charts the development, as well as the public and critical acceptance, of the art film documentary at the mid-point of the 20th century. In a series of elegantly written and deeply perceptive essays by some of the most respected authorities in the field, such classic films as The Mystery of Picasso (1956), Henry Moore (1951), and the experimental feature film Pictura (1951) are brought back to public attention in a volume that is an essential text for both cinema historians and art lovers as well. A dazzling volume in every respect – bravo!

• Preface and AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Mid-Century Celluloid Museum, Steven Jacobs (Ghent University & Antwerp University, Belgium) & Dimitrios Latsis (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada)1. The Institutional Breeding Grounds of the Postwar Film on Art, Birgit Cleppe (Ghent University, Belgium)2. American Art Comes of Age: Documentaries and the Nation at the Dawn of the Cold War, Dimitrios Latsis (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada)3. Art History with a Camera: Rubens (1948) and Paul Haesaerts’s Concept of Cinéma Critique, Steven Jacobs (Ghent University & Antwerp University, Belgium) & Joséphine-Charlotte Vandekerckhove (Ghent University, Belgium & Verona University, Italy)4. Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s Critolfims and Beyond: From Cinema to Information Technology, Emanuele Pellegrini (IMT School for Advanced Studies, Italy)5. André Bazin’s Art Documentary in Saintonge, Angela Dalle Vacche (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)6. Projecting Cultural Diplomacy: Cold War Politics, Films on Art, and Willard Van Dyke’s The Photographer, Natasha Ritsma (Loyola University Museum of Art, USA)7. Henry Moore and A Sculptor’s Landscape: Modernity, the Land and the Bomb in Two Television Films by John Read, John Wyver (University of Westminster, UK)8. Creative Process, Material Inscription and Dudley Shaw Ashton’s Figures in a Landscape (1953), Lucy Reynolds (University of Westminster, UK)9. Neoplasticism and Cinema: Ilya Bolotowsky’s Experimental Films on Art, Henning Engelke (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)Mid-Twentieth-Century Art Documentaries: A Selected BibliographyAbout the AuthorsIndex