Ligeia Issue Explores 20th-Century Painter-Filmmakers

The journal Ligeia dedicates its double issue n°97-98-99-100 to painter-filmmakers, edited by Patricia-Laure Thivat. It follows a 2007 dossier on painting and cinema. The issue examines how 20th-century painters transformed film stock into canvas, starting with 1920s avant-garde formal experiments: Man Ray's rayograms in Le Retour à la raison (1923), Léger's prismatic lenses in Ballet mécanique (1924), Man Ray's granular lenses in L'Étoile de mer, Cocteau's spatial inversions in Le Sang d'un poète (1930), and Richter's frame-by-frame animations in Rhythmus. Moholy-Nagy's light-prop (1922-1930) generated Light Play Black White Gray (1930). The quest continued with abstract cinema by Robert Breer and Len Lye. Techniques include superimpositions, color/black-and-white combinations, screen multiplications by Robert Frank, and Warhol's radical single-shot in Eat (1963), his off-screen in Beauty (1965), and his faux-castings in Letter to Man Ray (1976). Greenaway is criticized for overuse bordering on kitsch, while Hartley and Jarman use color and composition subtly. Lynch embodies the painterly desire for 'transcendence of pictoriality' in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2008), with topological cinema and recurring themes lending his films the quality of artworks. The dossier includes contributions by Louis-José Lestocart.