By Arthur Admyrrah Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film
The Phillips Collection - Washington, D.C. 46 flat-screen monitors showing 60 of the earliest films juxtapose the earliest of moving images against 85 paintings, illustrations, photographs, posters and flipbooks to reveal how popular subjects among artists and audiences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Niagara Falls, Venetian canals, boxing bouts and the famous Serpentine dances) captured the imagination of pioneering filmmakers. The Moving Pictures exhibition explores how filmmakers and visual artists motivated one another, worked together and related to each other's works, and further shows how that earliest of moving image influenced the succeeding generation of American artists. When Thomas Edison first presented projected commercial films to New York audiences in 1896, they were shown in theatrical venues and music halls on canvas screens nearly 50 feet high, surrounded by painted gold frames. Films of men, women and horses in motion were popular, but viewers' greatest enthusiasm was reserved for animated landscape scenes - especially waterfalls and waves breaking on the shore, which seemed so realistic that audiences initially feared being splashed by the water on screen. The press dubbed these first projected films "moving pictures," a literal reference to their pictorial associations. The exhibition is presented in four sections that trace the historical interplay between early film and the visual arts: Art & Film: Interactions illustrates the mutual fascination between these two media in paintings, prints, posters and illustrations that were made to promote and record critical reactions to the films of the day. Some of Edison's first films on view include May Irwin Kiss (1896), which period artist John Sloan declared "offensive" when he first saw it projected 50-feet high. Early Film & American Artistic Traditions examines how late-19th-century cameramen drew on pre-existing artistic traditions for their subject matter, especially the popular panoramic scenes of nature such as William Morris Hunt's Niagara Falls (1878) and the Lumière Brothers' Niagara, Horseshoe Falls (1878). The Body in Motion looks at how photographs explored the movement of animals and humans in the 1890s and how movement on film was influenced by Muybridge's stop-motion photographs of horses galloping, people running, boxing and dancing. The City in Motion examines the dramatically different points of view between impressionist cityscapes and early-20th-century urban scenes in films and works of art representing an array of New York locales. Sloan's major work Six O'Clock, Winter (1912) is paired with Edison's New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge (1899) and the Lumière Brothers' Fulton Street Under El (1897). A companion interactive DVD of the paintings and films is included in the catalogue so that the experience of the exhibition can be rewound and re-examined. Along with other intuitive methods for audience involvement, teaching programs at the Collection recognize (and reward by way of an online student film contest replete with prizes) that in the advent of camera phones, webcams and videoblogs, society's technologies currently embrace parallel concepts to the exhibition's explorations. As Peter Conrad poignantly points out within his article ("Cinematographic Values") in the Collection's quarterly publication, from Otto Preminger's nourish Laura to Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window and projects from Antonioni and Hitchcock through to Jane Campion, "Movies have always enjoyed boasting about their capacity to make paintings move." "Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film" proposes (convincingly and with conviction) that perhaps inspiration from the mounted works to the movies manifested itself in equal measure. (Exhibition is on display through May 20, 2007) | 
