서울아트가이드 Seoul Art Guide

역병을 피해 방콕하면서 볼 만한 미술관련 영화 10선

정준모

THE TOP TEN STREAMING FILMS ABOUT ARTISTS

The ten films discussed below—all streaming online—are decidedly not boring. They are also, by the same token, not really about the act of making art: for the most part they are more interested in the raw materials of the artists’ lives. They’re not afraid to mimic their subjects’ visual styles, or parody them, or ignore them completely, or work in equal but opposite styles. Some are works of fiction, some are ostensibly nonfiction, but all ten, without preciousness or corniness, present artistry as a kind of unsolvable riddle. They like their subjects too much to give away all their secrets.

Utamaro and His Five Women, 1946

SHOCHIKU EIGA/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)/일본의 화가 우타마로와 다섯여인

There’s an element of self-portraiture in the way most directors treat the lives of artists, and usually it’s a little self-congratulatory. In Utamaro and His Five Women, the artist-director comparison seems apt for once: like the Edo period woodblock artist Kitagawa Utamaro, Mizoguchi was an exceptional image-maker who worked in a medium that was widely seen as “low” and drew inspiration from the lives of working-class women, often prostitutes. The film, a favorite of Susan Sontag’s, contains one of the most succinct expressions of artistic integrity in any film: “I would not make prints if I feared death.”

Agnes Varda: Uncle Yanco, 1967

COURTESY CRITERION COLLECTION

Uncle Yanco (Agnès Varda, 1967)/ 얀코삼촌, 미국 다큐멘터리 /

I first heard about Jean Varda from a Phillip Lopate essay in which he calls the artist “the man who gave joie de vivre a bad name.” While Varda’s twinkling mosaic-paintings aren’t to everyone’s taste, his distant cousin Agnès Varda’s short documentary on his life and work is all but irresistible. In the opening minutes, she wisely casts a shadow over the proceedings by noting that America is at war with Vietnam and her cousin’s native Greece “is in the hands of bastards. It’s a military junta.” The rest of the film pulls off the trick of being whimsical but not naive. You have the sense that Jean’s manner, and Agnès’s, is a clearheaded response to tyranny—what Jean calls “a revolution without bloodshed.”

Camille Claudel 1915, 2013

ARTE FRANCE CINEMA/C R R A V NOR

Camille Claudel 1915 (Bruno Dumont, 2013) 로뎅의 여자-카미유 클로델

Sculptor Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, where she had no way of practicing her art. Her brother Paul, who’d committed her there against her will, said that confinement would help her rediscover God. From this ghoulish bit of history, Dumont made a film that—much like the famous passage about Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own—asks what happens when a great female artist is denied her freedom, dignity, and materials. It’s a disturbing premise, but Dumont gives the film a redemptive, spiritual tone that beggars Paul’s pompous religiosity. Even when you take into account Dumont’s bizarre recent Joan of Arc films, this is the closest he’s come to evoking the life of a saint.

Edvard Munch, 1974

PETER WATKINS

Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)/ 뭉크, 다큐드라

Watkins’s docudrama combines techniques that don’t usually go together: intense, full-bodied acting and jarringly calm narration, exactingly choreographed historical reenactments and improvised, fourth-wall-breaking asides. Miraculously, these approaches don’t cancel each other out. Instead, they add up to one of cinema’s sturdiest, most nuanced studies of a real-life artist. Consider the short scene in which Munch sketches Melancholy (1891). We can hear every scratch of charcoal; each brushstroke fills the screen with color. Then the narrator butts in: “He allows the preliminary drawings in pencil and pastel, including the corrections made to them, to remain in the final work to show its spontaneity.” It’s a sudden breath of fresh air in what so far has been a claustrophobic scene, and a fine example of Watkins’s nimble movement between first- and third-person storytelling.

Jill Magid: The Proposal, 2019.

COURTESY OSCILLOSCOPE LABORATORIES

The Proposal (Jill Magid, 2019)/ 제안-멕시코 건축가 바라간과 개념미술가 질과 그리고 여자

Since 1994, the Luís Barragán archives have been locked in a bunker in Switzerland. Since 2013, conceptual artist Jill Magid has been trying to put them back in the public’s hands. To this end, she’s tried a number of tactics: online activism, suing the archives’ owner, lobbying the Swiss government, and—the obvious next step—using a state-of-the-art pressure oven to convert Barragán’s ashes into a diamond ring that she could offer in exchange for the archives. The Proposal, Magid’s documentary about the last of these, is the rare work that can’t not be fascinating—the story is so gripping that even Ed Wood could have made a great movie out of it. On top of its intrinsic entertainment, Magid’s film is full of wit and graceful invention—as Barragán’s artistry recedes from the film, her own very different artistry quickly replaces it.

Andrei Rublev, 1966

COURTESY CRITERION COLLECTION

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)/러시아 화가 안드레이 류블로프의 이야기

Look hard enough and you can find almost any definition of art in Tarkovsky’s rich, elusive film: art is gestural and conceptual, tactile and spiritual, selfless and selfish. The Middle Ages were supposed to be a time of collective art—cathedrals, for instance. How appropriate, then, that Andrei Rublev, the greatest Russian icon painter of the Middle Ages, is never shown painting an icon in the film that bears his name. For much of the running time, he’s renounced art altogether. But the montage of paintings that brings the film to a close—a burst of color after three hours of black-and-white—leaves no doubt that Rublev returns to art, translating his harrowing life into a monument to God’s glory. Not for nothing was the film initially called The Passion According to Andrei.

The Mystery of Picasso, 1956

HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT

The Mystery of Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956) 파카소의 비밀-다큐

It’s a rare artist documentary that makes the act of painting look riveting, and, very tellingly, Clouzot had to cheat to succeed in The Mystery of Picasso. Over the course of the shoot, Picasso completed a series of paintings on glass. After each brushstroke, no matter how long it took, Clouzot photographed the artist’s progress; later, he edited the photographs into a kind of stop-motion animation, so that each frame brings us a little closer to a finished work. The effect is to make Picasso’s artistry seem brisk, steady, intuitive, attainable—which, to put it gently, it wasn’t. (I’m reminded of how Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby just to feel what it felt like to write a great book.) At the film’s heart is a frustrating, and fascinating, paradox: by offering such a literal definition of a Picasso painting, it makes Picasso even more mysterious.

F for Fake, 1973

COURTESY CRITERION COLLECTION

F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) 거짓의 F, 가짜를 그리는 화가와 그의 가짜 전기를 쓰는 작가이야기

In which Welles takes Picasso’s line about how artists lie to tell the truth to its giddiest conclusions. His initial subject, the art forger Elmyr de Hory, becomes a symbol for everything: the joy of creation, the masks we all wear, creativity as libido, etc. (though Welles, playing the narrator, insists this isn’t the kind of movie with lots of symbols). F for Fake has been called the first essay-film. It’s also the sharpest critique of the art world I’m aware of, directed by a brilliant artist-provocateur who, like Jeff Koons or Richard Prince, raised interesting questions about originality and institutional hypocrisy and who, unlike Koons or Prince, actually had the bravery and the talent to thrive outside of his industry’s major institutions.

Lust for Life, 1956

MGM/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)/ 한국어로 열정의 랩소다로 번역된 고흐의 영화

Minnelli’s Van Gogh biopic, based on Irving Stone’s Book of the Month Club staple, is remembered as the definitive middlebrow artist film, laden with clichés about hot-blooded bohemians and tormented geniuses. A closer look reveals an expressionistic, sometimes avant-garde experiment disguised as Oscar bait. The true protagonist, with all due respect to the late Kirk Douglas, is Technicolor, the adventures and misadventures of which are the true plot. We begin in the womblike, reddish-brown interiors of the church and end with hot, self-annihilating yellows of the French countryside. Death, per Norman Corwin’s screenplay, “happens in a bright daylight, the sun flooding everything and in a light of pure gold.”

Van Gogh, 1991

MARIE-LAURE DE DECKER/ERATO/CANAL PLUS/LIVRADOIS/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991) 모리스 피알라 감독이 그린 고흐의 말년 오베르 쉬즈와르에서의 이야기

It starts with a joke: the paintbrush whooshes across the canvas like a fist in a kung fu movie. Van Gogh, we are led to believe, will depict the act of painting in its full, heart-pounding vitality. Over the next two and a half hours, Pialat does nothing of the kind, showing only a handful of paintings, most of them strewn unceremoniously in a corner of the frame. This is Lust for Life’s opposite: Van Gogh, volatile and brilliant but mundane, made of the same stuff as everyone around him. When he dies, the film refuses to end: the villagers of Auvers-sur-Oise go on pumping water and feeding their hens.

유틸정보

메뉴 목록

역병을 피해 방콕하면서 볼 만한 미술관련 영화 10선

하단 정보