If our conference session is scheduled, I should like to do a talk on the uses of paintings, art-historical paintings of the sort that

museum-goers might recognize, as an element of narrative discourse in films. At one extreme, such paintings appear in many films as an minor element of set decoration, while at the other extreme, films like Peter Webber's Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching (2007) and Lech Majewski's The Mill and the Cross (2011) attempt, with different degrees of success, to create a narrative that enters the lifeworld of a masterpiece and explores the historical conditions, private or public, under which it was created. The difficulty of centering a narrative on the creation of a painting becomes evident when we consider the genres -- the female bildungsroman, the murder mystery, and the passion play, respectively -- that had to be drafted into service to give structure to these films. I would like to concentrate on about films that fall between those extremes, where the paintings are neither merely decorative nor the center of interest, films where paintings are used either to thematize the narrative, to clarify its significance, and perhaps also to hint at the direction the narrative will take. For example, in Eric Rohmer's adaptation of the Kleist novella Die Marquise von O (1976), the Marquise has just been heroically saved from being raped by Russian soldiers by one of their officers, the Count F---, who leads her to her parents' house and sees that she is deposited in bed. At this point, Rohmer poses Edith Clever, who portrays the Marquise, in a posture

that resembles the well-known romantic painting by Fuseli of "The Nightmare"

while Bruno Ganz, playing the Count F---, stares fixedly at the Marquise with an expression that reminds one of the imp in Fuseli's painting who sits on the young woman's chest as she dreams.

The relevance of these details becomes clear later, after the Marquise discovers that she is pregnant, she knows not how or by whom, when it is revealed that the devilish rapist was the officer who angelically had saved her from the Russian soldiers. (Or, as Kleist puts it in the final sentence of the novella, "er wrde ihr damals nicht wie ein Teufel erschienen sein, wenn er ihr nicht, bei seiner ersten Erscheinung, wie ein Engel vorgekommen wre" [He would not have appeared like a devil then, had he not, at his first appearance, seemed like an angel.]).

A similar combination of thematizing and foreshadowing occurs in the 1997 Iain Softley adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. Hossein Amini's screenplay telescopes two scenes in the novel, the chance meeting of Milly Theale with Kate Croy and Merton Densher in the National Gallery, where she becomes aware of their prior relationship, and Milly's recognition of her fate in the Bronzino portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi that Lord Mark shows her at Matcham: The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage--only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. "I shall never be better than this."

Agnolo Bronzino: Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi (1545), in the Uffizi.

These two scenes in the James novel are telescoped into one at a Klimt exhibition in the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, where the place of the Bronzino is taken by Gustav Klimt's "Danae" (1907, original in the Galerie Wrthle, Vienna).

Here's a better look at the Klimt, minus its frame:

The hair of Klimt's model is like that of Alison Elliott, playing Milly Theale in the film, and the Klimt functions symbolically on two levels: the legend of Dana, impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold, alludes to Milly's vast wealth, while the compressed posture of the woman in the painting, crammed as it were into the thick wooden box of the frame, suggests Milly's oncoming fate, to be enclosed in a coffin. But Softley does something else with the Danae image at the end of the film, when we see Kate (played by Helena Bonham Carter) knees drawn up into the same physically folded position as the Dana:

This image goes along with the sense we are given that the living Kate (whose need for the gold generated the plot) is now the encoffined Dana, while the dead Milly is more alive than Kate is, as far as Merton is concerned.... These are a couple of interesting examples. I hope to have more by the time of the conference.

David Richter Department of English, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center

[[[Other uses of paintings in films besides the ones mentioned here: (1) PAINTINGS AS INSTANT SYMBOLS. A painting with a well known real life context is used to "speak" to the fictional context of the film. Example: Picasso's "Guernica" in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, where the horrors of the Spanish Civil War give a real life context to the dystopian fantasy of the fiction film.... more later... (2) EMPLOTTED PAINTINGS. A painting, created expressly for the film is made a part of the plot, realistic or otherwise. One example is the 1943-44 Ivan Albright painting created to supernaturally register Dorian's sinful soul in The Picture of Dorian Gray (image next page). Another is the John Ferren portrait of "Carlotta Valdes" before which "Madeleine" sits, so that Scotty can be convinced that "Madeleine" is suicidally obsessed with the long-dead Carlotta. The spiral whorl of Carlotta's bun is echoed in Madeleine's hairdo; they are also carrying identical bouquets. The spiral operates in the title sequence as a symbol of Scotty's acrophobia, and echoes in the spiral staircase of the mission of San Juan Bautista from whose bell tower "Madeleine" throws herself. (image next page)]]]