Tableaux Vivants

Since the end of the twentieth century, many filmmakers, critics, and historians have lamented the state of cinema, claiming that the medium and Hollywood are suffering a profound crisis. This crisis, which has supposedly left cinema on its deathbed, is commonly attributed to the rise of digital technology, which has led to the emergence of rivalling screens on new devices and the demise of celluloid filmmaking.

This research paper, which is based on a doctoral research project analysing contemporary metacinema as a response to the medium’s crisis, will deal with recent metafilms that offer a nostalgic look back at cinema’s past, at a time when the medium’s identity was still unharmed by the digital revolution. As digital technologies threaten to erase medium-specific qualities that used to define cinema, nostalgic metafilms such as Gods and Monsters (1998), The Majestic (2001), My Week with Marilyn (2011), and Hugo (2011) celebrate iconic subjects, objects, and spaces in the history of cinema, thus trying to carve the medium’s shaken identity in its historical specificities.

The analysis will look closely at how forms of cinematic expressions and museological practices are merged on screen to denote materiality, transmit the physical sense of the subjects, objects, and spaces represented on screen, and thus embody the history of cinema. By doing so, the paper will reflect on the significance of embodiment and physicality in contemporary metacinema and how such films act as museums, white cubes of cinema in which we are invited to contemplate the material legacy of a medium that is being robbed of its eponymous materiality.

Few painters have had as many films made about their lives as Vincent van Gogh. The interest in his story is due in part to the mystery surrounding his last days, in Arles, France. It is thus no coincidence that all the biopics about the Dutch painter focus on this stage of his life, including the recent works Loving Vincent (2017), an animated film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate (2018). A comparative study of these two feature films, representing two different aesthetic and dramatic approaches, is conducted in pursuit of the two objectives of this paper: to identify the conventions of the subgenre of the artist biopic; and consequently, to analyze how both films reflect on the artist's creative practice in order to determine whether the film camera is in fact capable of capturing the brushstroke and the mystique of the genius.

This is a study of the first cinematic appearances of the naked body. Nudity emerged in early cinema using a pictorial alibi. Models posing in the artist’s studio were a key topic, but tableaux vivants, namely films that imitate paintings, were a privileged site for nakedness. Such series as the Biograph Living Pictures (1899-1903), Pathé Scènes grivoises (1897-902), Gaumont Vieilles Estampes (1907) and Aktskulpturen – Studienfilm für bildende Künstler (Oskar Messter, 1903) constitute our main field of investigation. These films reflect a fascinating ambivalence between what Kenneth Clark distinctly termed “nakedness” (associated with the illicit and obscene exposure) and “nudity” (identified as an artistic category, addressing ideal beauty and legitimate contemplation). On one hand (the “naked” one), a pornographic quality characterized these films. Their exhibition of a naked body, in motion, transgressed the Victorian boundaries of modesty and reopened the censorship debate which had been raging in music-halls about staged tableaux vivants. An exalted voyeurism (using devices such as mirrors or revolving pedestals which allowed a complete vision of the bare body) directly linked this first cinematic nakedness with contemporary pornographic photography. On the other (“nude”!) hand, these films reproduced paintings, claiming (more or less sincerely) the artistic quality of the portrayed body. Various strategies were combined with this pictorial imitation in order to idealize the nude body, from the covering and smoothing flesh-colored leotard to the graceful posing and slow motion of the model. On the basis of the prolific ambiguity of Jonathan Auerbach’s concept of “early film body”, referring as much to the filmed body as to the “body” of film, this paper finally questions these naked “incarnations” as a way of asserting early cinema as a transgression of painting.

Made by British avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman about the life of the celebrated 17th-century Italian Baroque painter, Caravaggio (1986) makes use of tableaux vivants in order to create both a biopic and a thinly veiled semi-autobiographical movie. Jarman appropriates the events of the life of Caravaggio and presents them in a way that straddles the line between historical accuracy and artistic leeway. This prompts the question of why did Jarman choose to depict the tableaux in the way that he did? More importantly, how does intermediality affect the transformation of the paintings into tableaux vivants? The aim of this paper is to argue that Jarman’s choices were driven by his idiosyncratic ideas and to explore the web of connections between the tableaux vivants and the paintings.

This doctoral dissertation explores the function and effect of a particular form of parlor theatrical--the tableau vivant--in nineteenth-century US fiction and culture. It examines handbooks guiding amateurs in the performance of tableaux vivants, novels and short stories by Hawthorne, Alcott, Wharton and others.

In  The Uncanny, Freud undertook to determine the sources of this feeling by referring to Jentsch’s work, the conclusions of which he contradicts.  e feeling of the uncanny that arises from the short story  The Sandman by Ho mann would not be due to the object, which one endows with a soul, but rather to the set of choices made by the author, which would explain why the same object can appear, or not, to be uncanny depending on the context.  ough they are not as such a source of the uncanny, the representations that blur the distinction between the living and the inanimate appear to be a favoured vehicle to stimulate this feeling, as is borne out by several examples from literature and the visual arts. Horst Bredekamp describes these representations as “living images,” which he classi es into three groups. For this presentation, we will draw on the group of schematic images, and more speci cally the tableaux vivants that make it up. We will study a selection of performances carried out from the mid 1990s to today in which the performers’ immobility draws an operative force from the tableau vivant.  The use that is made of inaction and movement will be examined in order to envision how the indetermination that is thereby created fosters a feeling of the uncanny. In his study on the movement of statues, Kenneth Gross for his part suggests that the encounter between human life and the world of objects serves to go beyond systems of opposites and to ensure a survival of life in death. Following Gross, we could thus put forward that the performances under study, in which individuals remain inactive, make up a way of embodying opposites and death by picturing, at least a partial, deliverance from it.

This paper focuses on tableaux vivants, a distinct performative genre that stands between the theatre and the visual arts and has close affinities with cinema. More specifically, it examines in detail the ideology and the repertoire of the tableaux vivants featured in Greek public festive and benefit performances in the early decades of the 20th century, in the midst of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and before the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922). Produced in the context of amateurism (the performers and artists/scholars being members of the upper class) and enacting pieces of classical, byzantine and contemporary Greek painting, sculpture and architecture, tableaux vivants of the time offer a highly idealised image of the Greek past, present and future, and as such can be seen as a manifestation of the ruling classes' attempt to translate in a theatrical and visual language a continuous national narrative from antiquity to the present, as well as to boost the nation's morale in an extremely turbulent era in order to support further territorial claims. In that sense, these immovable pictures can be read as an 'invented tradition'.

Tableaux vivants, which invade contemporary art and cinema, as well as music videos, series, advertisements and social network posts in the 2000s-2010s, are to be considered beyond simple postmodernity. While they do not abandon subversion, these artworks reenactments reveal a desire for artistic “reenchantment” cultivating a fascination for the original images, the techn(olog)ical challenge of their reproduction, and the socio-cultural impact of their updating.

Following a previous international conference at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and the subsequent publication of a volume of studies with the title Film in the Post-Media Age (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), which insisted, citing the ideas of Jacques Rancière, that the ecosystem of contemporary moving images should be understood not as a unified digital environment, but as a highly diversified, “multisensory milieu,” another conference was organised, focusing this time directly on the “multisensory” nature of moving images. Pairing the keywords “cinema” and “sensation”, an invitation was extended for presentations offering a closer examination of the sensual aspects of moving images in order to identify and map out at least some of the possible new directions perceived as taking shape as “sensuous” film studies.The conference took place between the 25th and 27th of May 2012, with the title The Cinema of Sensations, and attracted researchers from all over the world for what turned out to be three days of presentations on extremely varied subjects and lively discussions conducted in a memorably cheerful atmosphere. The present volume having the same title as the conference is the palpable outcome of these debates, and publishes a selection of articles that have been written for this conference, alongside a few essays written afterwards within the framework of a subsequent research project focusing on questions of intermediality in the cinema of Eastern Europe, and which has also been premised on the sensuous nature of the complex medial experience of film.

Αντικείμενο του άρθρου είναι ένα corpus tableaux vivants (ή «πλαστικών εικόνων» στα ελληνικά) –ενός υβριδικού παραστασιακού είδους που βρίσκεται ανάμεσα στο θέατρο και τις εικαστικές τέχνες– το οποίο παρουσιάστηκε ως μέρος δημόσιων εορταστικών ή φιλανθρωπικών εκδηλώσεων της κοσμικής ερασιτεχνίας στην Αθήνα της δεκαετίας του 1910, σε στενή σχέση με τα γεγονότα της πολιτικής ιστορίας της περιόδου (από τους Βαλκανικούς Πολέμους του 1912-1913 μέχρι και τη Μικρασιατική Καταστροφή του 1922). Το άρθρο εξετάζει τόσο τη θεματολογία αυτών των πλαστικών εικόνων –αξιοποιώντας τόσο δημοσιεύματα του Τύπου όσο και ποικίλες σωζόμενες φωτογραφίες– όσο και την ιδεολογική τους λειτουργία στο πλαίσιο του επίσημου αλυτρωτισμού της εποχής. Τα εν λόγω tableaux vivants παρουσίαζαν μια ωραιοποιημένη εικόνα του παρελθόντος, του παρόντος και του μέλλοντος της Ελλάδας αντλώντας τη θεματολογία τους από την αρχαία, βυζαντινή ή νεότερη τέχνη και ζωή. Με τον τρόπο αυτό, οι διοργανωτές φιλοδοξούσαν να μεταφράσουν με όρους εικαστικούς και σκηνικούς το παπαρηγοπούλειο δόγμα της συνέχειας του ελληνικού έθνους από την αρχαιότητα μέχρι τη σύγχρονη εποχή, και να εκφράσουν –αν όχι να υποδαυλίσουν–, με τον τρόπο της τέχνης, τις εθνικές εδαφικές διεκδικήσεις και την αλυτρωτική πολιτική του επίσημου κράτους την κρίσιμη αυτή δεκαετία. Χωρίς αμφιβολία, πρόκειται για «σημαντική στιγμή στη διαμόρφωση της μαζικής εθνικής κουλτούρας» και των «επινοημένων παραδόσεων» του έθνους. //
The paper focuses on tableaux-vivants, a distinct performative genre that stands between the theatre and the visual arts. More specifically, it examines in detail the ideology and aesthetics of an interesting corpus of their long history that featured in Greek public benefit performances as late as the early decades of 20th century, in the midst of Balkan Wars and before the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Produced in the context of amateurism (the performers and scenographers being members of the upper class) and enacting pieces of classical, byzantine and contemporary Greek painting, sculpture and architecture, tableaux- vivants of 1910s Greece offer a highly idealised image of Greek past and present, and as such can be seen as a manifestation of the ruling classes’ attempt to translate in a theatrical and visual language a continuous national narrative from antiquity to the present as well as to boost the nation’s morale in an extremely turbulent age. In that sense, these immovable pictures can be read as what the historians call ‘invented traditions’ of a nation.

Introduction and detailed list (about 40 films) of the retrospective that Valentine Robert curated at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival 2017. The programme was shaped by the direct comparison, on the screen, between (most of the time forgotten) paintings and early films suddenly disclosed as their living reenactments.
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Introduzione ed elenco dettagliato (circa 40 filmati) della rettrospettiva curata da Valentine Robert alle Giornate del cinema muto 2017. Questo programma basato sul confronto diretto, sullo schermo, tra pitture (il più delle volte dimenticate) e filmati delle origini, di colpo divulgati come loro viventi rievocazioni.

[bilingual | bilingue]

Link to article: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/619352/pdf

This paper argues for the mediated and composite nature of representation and the impossibility of pinning it down by recourse to a single artistic or narrative mode. This becomes particularly evident in the tableaux vivants scene in Goethe’s "Elective Affinities."  I interrogate how Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries’ concepts of aesthetic representation such as mimesis, myth and image-making, theatricality, absorption were illustrated, explicated and represented through the female body.

The paper analyses the re-conceptualization of the intermedial trope of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of “the real into the image” (as Brigitte Peucker described), instead it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the “sex appeal of the inorganic” or “the Egyptian moment in art.” As such, the tableau becomes a powerful agent in generating metanarratives, offering a blueprint for a “big picture,” a comprehensive vision of the world (reinforced by recurring mythological themes like the genesis or the end of the world, the loss of Paradise, etc.). We may connect this feature of these tableaux vivants, therefore, to what Lyotard termed as the “figure of return,” and to the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art.

El artículo plantea los puntos de encuentro entre la Fotografía y los exvotos, analizando cómo este medio de reproducción mecánica viene a sustituir a la Pintura, y los fotógrafos (profesionales o aficionados) a los pintores casi siempre anónimos que se ocupaban de representar las escenas milagrosas y a sus protagonistas.
La Fotografía, con su carga de "espejo de la verdad", da cuerpo mejor que la Pintura al hecho que se quiere recordar, mientras la posibilidad de hacer fotomontajes permite colocar juntos a la divinidad y al fiel que ha disfrutado el milagro y ofrece el exvoto.

Selon Ray Harryhausen, maître des effets spéciaux cinématographiques, « Gustave Doré aurait été un grand chef opérateur […] il regardait les choses avec le point de vue de la caméra ». L’œuvre de Doré a marqué de manière indélébile l’imaginaire filmique depuis ses origines. Peu de films sur la Bible, depuis la Vie et Passion de Jésus Christ produit par Pathé en 1902, qui ne se réfèrent à ses illustrations, ni d’adaptation cinématographique de Dante ou encore de Don Quichotte qui ne l’aient pris comme modèle, de Georg Wilhelm Pabst et Orson Welles à Terry Gilliam. Il n’est pas de films sur la vie londonienne et victorienne qui n’empruntent leurs décors aux visions de Londres, un pèlerinage, qu’il s’agisse de David Lean, de Roman Polanski ou de Tim Burton. Nombre de scènes oniriques, fantastiques, fantasmagoriques ont puisé dans l’œuvre graphique de Doré, depuis le Voyage dans la lune de Georges Méliès en 1902. Si dans le domaine du dessin animé ou de l’animation, la dette de Walt Disney envers Doré est immense, ses forêts « primitives », notamment celles d’Atala, ont aussi servi aux différentes versions de King Kong, de l’original de 1933 au film de 2005 de Peter Jackson qui s’était déjà appuyé sur l’œuvre de Doré dans Le Seigneur des anneaux. Ce chapitre du catalogue de l’exposition "Gustave Doré : l’imaginaire au pouvoir" présentée au Musée d’Orsay à Paris et au Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada à Ottawa, qui prend corps dans un choix d'extraits de films "accrochés" à côté des gravures, montre comment, depuis la dette explicite de Jean Cocteau dans La Belle et la bête (1945) jusqu'aux réminiscences doréennes du personnage de Chewbacca dans la Guerre des Etoiles, le cinéma a « gravé » Doré dans l’imaginaire du XXe siècle.

Boucher, Mélanie, « Le tableau vivant de l’art contemporain et son immobilité », Stay Still, Translate : Performance, Présentation, Conservation du tableau vivant au Canada (organisé par Mélanie Boucher), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 17 février 2017.
Many contemporary artists describe their performances as being tableaux vivants. However, they do not necessarily reproduce speci c works and the performers that carry them out do not always remain immobile, which raises the question of what one understands by the tableau vivant in contemporary art is. The de nition of the historical tableau vivant is not appropriate, no more than it is in general for contemporary production that goes under the term of “tableau vivant.” While the question of its re-emergence and reiteration have recently been investigated in re-enactment studies, the notion of immobility has remained largely unexplored. After an overview of what the tableau vivant is in contemporary art, through re- ferences to Canadian works created from 1970 to today this presentation focuses on the main modes in which immobility is used in performance.

Ken Russell's film Gothic (1986) dramatises one of the key foundational myths of nineteenth-century British literature: the night at the Villa Diodati when Mary Shelley allegedly had the initial idea for her novel Frankenstein (1818). While the film can be enjoyed as a costumed horror film, this article argues that it is in fact an intricate response to the heritage film genre and to heritage tourism within the cultural and political context of Britain in the 1980s. Russell's film subverts heritage film conventions and mobilises early film techniques and forms of entertainment from the late Victorian era to comment upon the recuperation of Victorian culture in the heritage industry of the 1980s. To make clear how the film achieves this, four key aspects are analysed: the parallels between the film's structure and a funhouse ride; the film's use of the tableau vivant; the film's engagement with nineteenth-century celebrity cults; and the film's representation of heritage tourism. Taken together, these elements introduce a complex reflexivity in the film that allows the attentive viewer to enjoy it on several levels at once, both as a heritage horror film and as a neo-Victorian critique of the cultural forces that seek to revive the Victorian in a contemporary context.

La presente investigación estudia un punto de encuentro entre el cine y la pintura mediante la representación del tableau vivant en el filme La ronda de noche (Nightwatching, 2007) de Peter Greenaway en relación con el óleo La ronda de noche (Nachwacht, 1642) de Rembrandt van Rijn con el objetivo de visualizar la configuración de una propuesta estética novedosa en el campo cinematográfico a partir del trasvase de una pieza pictórica hacia el cine a través de un proceso de cinematización; en este proceso, el cine adopta otro tipo de arte, en este caso, la pintura. Para abordar esta relación, se toman como referencia dos conceptos que intervienen directamente en la película La ronda de noche y que denotan el carácter pictórico incorporado en el espacio fílmico para hacer efectivo el tableau vivant; uno de ellos es la temporalidad pictórica y el otro término es el de efecto pintado, mediante los cuales, cinematografía y pintura, fundidas en un plano intermedial, logran un trabajo fílmico novedoso e interdisciplinario.
Palabras clave: tableau vivant, trasvase, cine, pintura, cinematización, temporalidad pictórica, efecto pintado

The paper analyses the re-conceptualization of the intermedial trope of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of “the real into the image” (as Brigitte Peucker described), instead it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the “sex appeal of the inorganic” or “the Egyptian moment in art.” As such, the tableau becomes a powerful agent in generating metanarratives, offering a blueprint for a “big picture,” a comprehensive vision of the world (reinforced by recurring mythological themes like the genesis or the end of the world, the loss of Paradise, etc.). We may connect this feature of these tableaux vivants, therefore, to what Lyotard termed as the “figure of return,” and to the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art.

Se estudian algunas representaciones fotográficas españolas y europeas del siglo XIX, basadas en la novela de Cervantes. Algunas hechas con motivo de bailes de disfraces o tableaux-vivants.
Lake Price, Alonso Martínez o Luis de Ocharan son algunos de los fotógrafos que se ocuparon de este tema

Die Porträtkunst wurde deshalb zur privilegierten darstellerischen Ausdrucksart der europäischen Kultur seit der Renaissance, weil sie Belege dafür aufbot, dass man das Individuum im Bild erfassen und dass das Subjekt von sich ein klares Bild herstellen könne. Diese Versicherung des Selbst, die zuerst von der Malerei freigesetzt wurde, konnte im Verlauf des 19. Jahrhunderts durch die Fotografie fortgeführt werden, erlaubte dieses neue Medium doch dem Selbst, sich so facettenreich zu betrachten, wie es wollte, sich zu erkennen, sich zu studieren oder sich von anderen zum Objekt solcher Erforschung machen zu lassen. Das Medium der Fotografie erlaubt der Künstlerin, die dieses nutzt, um eine schillernde Palette an Selbstbildnissen herzustellen, sich nahtlos von einer scheinbar objektiven Wiedergabe in eine schillernde Ansammlung fantasierter Projektionen zu verwandeln.

Selon la tradition orientale, les représentations de Jésus trouveraient toutes leur origine dans les images acheiropoïètes, c'est-à-dire dans des figurations de la "Sainte Face" du Christ non faites de main d'homme, mais survenues par apparition divine -sur le voile de Véronique, le Saint Suaire, le mandylion d'Edesse, etc. Ces images qui, pour des théologiens de l'icône tels que Léonide Ouspensky, ne sont rien moins que "la manifestation du miracle fondamental : la venue du Créateur dans sa création" (in L'Image du Christ non faite de main d'homme, 1989), ont toujours été le ferment d'expérimentations multiples chez les peintres et les sculpteurs.Mais la réflexion artistique s'est cristallisée au moment où ces images sont devenues l'apanage de médiums issus de "l'ère de la reproductibilité technique" chère à Benjamin. En effet, les images "théographes" auraient pour spécificité d'être engendrées et de se multiplier par empreinte immédiate: une toile quelconque n'aurait qu'à être touchée par le visage du Christ pour devenir instantanément le support du divin portrait, et acquérir dès lors le "pouvoir reconnu aux acheiropoïètes de créer des doubles de même valeur, par simple contact" (François Boespflug, Dieu et ses images. Une histoire de l'Eternel dans l'art, 2008). Comment mieux faire écho aux principes mêmes de l'image (ciné)photographique, générée par indicialité et reproductibilité? André Bazin a eu l'intuition de cette parenté dans le cadre de sa théorisation sur le pouvoir "révélateur" de l'image (ciné)photographique qui selon lui procéderait "par sa genèse" de "l'ontologie du modèle" et "serait" le modèle; il a évoqué le Saint Suaire de Turin comme rejouant, voire emblématisant cette même "ontologie de l'image photographique" (dans l'article homonyme de 1945). Si Bazin ne développe pas plus avant ses considérations, la corrélation des dispositifs (ciné)photographique et acheiropoïète a connu un questionnement « en actes », au sein des films cherchant à représenter Jésus. L'auteur s'intéresse à ces expérimentations, à commencer par un projet de film d'Abel Gance de 1947, resté inachevé, où le suaire de Turin devait se transformer en écran de cinéma. Plusieurs autres productions seront abordées, telles que Civilization ou The Robe, qui explorent les effets visuels permis par la pellicule pour montrer le Christ en surimpression, dans une sorte d'"apparition technologique", ou telles que The Jesus Film ou The Passion of the Christ, dont la projection a été reçue par certains publics comme une apparition sacrée réactualisant l'Incarnation. Les modalités de la représentation des images acheiropoïètes et plus généralement de l'apparition de Jésus à l'écran seront enfin évoquées - de la tradition hollywoodiennes qui consistait à refuser l'accès de la "Sainte Face" à la pellicule et de la rejeter hors-champ jusqu'aux séquences d'Ecce Homo de Scorsese et Zeffirelli, en passant par la révélation visuelle inaugurant The King of Kings, qui pousse à son paroxysme la collusion entre apparition divine et apparition cinématographique.

According to Ray Harryhausen, a special effects expert in the film industry, “Gustave Doré would have made a great director of photography . . . He saw things from the point of view of the camera.” Doré’s work has had a permanent impact on the imaginative realm of film since its very early days. Almost every film about the Bible since The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ produced by Pathé in 1902 refers to his illustrations, and every film adaptation of Dante or Don Quixote has used him as a model, from Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Orson Welles to Terry Gilliam. All films dealing with life in London in the Victorian era by directors ranging from David Lean, to Roman Polanski and Tim Burton draw on the visions in London: a pilgrimage for their sets. A large number of dream fantastical or phantasmagorical scenes take their inspiration from Doré’s graphic world, beginning with Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon in 1902. In the realm of cartoons and animation, Walt Disney owes a huge debt to Doré. Doré primal forests, from Atala in particular, were also used in the various versions of King Kong from 1933 to the 2005 film by Peter Jackson, who had already drawn on Doré for The Lord of the Rings. Jean Cocteau was also indebted to the illustrations for Perrault’s Fairy Tales for his Beauty and the Beast (1945), as was George Lucas for the character Chewbacca in Star Wars (1977). This chapter of the exhibition catalogue “Gustave Doré: Master of Imagination” (Musée d’Orsay in Paris and National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa), which take shape in film excerpts “hanging” next to the works, shows how the silver screen has etched Doré into the 20th century imagination.

The article aims to analyse the tableau vivant in social media culture by emphasizing its intermedial relation to technical visual media, particularly digital photography and film. By focusing on the living picture’s specific mimetic qualities, the study traces back the tableau vivant’s history in a media archaeological perspective primarily regarding photography. It explores the current revival of the tableau vivant within social media. The article examines living pictures and the aspect of self-staging, relevant to contemporary digital culture. The tableau vivant develops between two polarities: a primarily analytical approach that allows a profound exploration of a particular artwork and the performative aspects of self-staging.

Kuramsal bağlamda fotoğraf üzerine yapılan tartışmaların öncelikli başlıklarından biri gerçeklik olgusudur. Kelime anlamı üzerinden fotoğrafta gerçek ve doğru bağlantısı kaygan hatta riskli bir zemine sahiptir. Sembolik miras ve birikmiş anlamı ile "gerçek" kavramı fotoğrafın kaygan zeminini temsil eder. İzleyen gerçek ve doğru çatışmasını algıladığı fotoğrafta, belirsiz bir ilk izlenim anında ortalama bir tavır ile imgeyi alımlar. Diğer yandan görsel olarak gerçeklik fotografik algının altyapısını oluşturmaktadır. "Gerçek, açık uçlu bir olgudur".1 Platon'un İdealar Mağarası kuramında olduğu gibi "gerçek görünenin ardındadır" yargısı fotoğrafta da benzer bir çıkarım getirir. Görülen ile gösterilen ya da göstermek istenileni çok yönlü sorgulamak gerekir, insanın gerçeklik algısı da devreye girdiğinde bir çelişki düzlemi oluşur. 19. yüzyıl keşiflerin ve yenikliklerin dönemidir. Görsel algıyı etkileyen sıra dışı bir icat da bu yüzyılda duyurulmuş ve insanların karşısına yaşamı kaydetmenin yeni bir yolu çıkmıştır. Yazmak ya da resmini yapmak dışında artık tarafsız kabul edilen bir belgeleme aracı vardır. Fakat bu tarafsız olma hali kısa sürede tartışılmaya ve fotoğraftaki gerçeklik-doğruluk payı sorgulanmaya başlanmıştır. O tarihlerden beri de felsefi bir platformda tartışılmaya devam etmektedir. 19. yüzyıl insanı birçok yenilik ile karşı karşıya gelmiştir. Fransız İhtilali ile başlayan politik değişimler devam ederken, sanayi devrimi ile birlikte teknolojik değişimler de hızla sürmüştür. Fotoğraf böyle bir algının yoğun olduğu bir dönemde duyurulmuş ve büyük toplumsal beklentilerle karşılanmıştır. Dönemin birçok düşünürü ve bilim adamı bu yeni keşfe dair söylemlerde bulunmuş, kimi yüceltirken kimi de bu teknik gelişmenin var oluş çabalarını eleştirmiştir. Fotoğrafın temsil ettiği gerçeklik tartışılırken bir yandan da gerçek bir sanat eseri olup olmadığı tartışma konusu olmuştur. Dönemin önemli eleştirmenleri ve entelektüelleri bir yargıya varmış olsalar da fotoğraf kendi gerçeklik temsili ile yol almaya devam etmiştir. Dönemin sanat akımlarına baktığımızda hala Natüralizm etkisi devam etmektedir. Geçmişten hatta antik dönemlerden beri var olan Natüralizm, Amerika kıtasında Realizm (Gerçekçilik)

In this essay, the author discovers an intriguing anomaly in Pathé’s early catalogs—the presence and yet absence of “tableaux vivants.” From 1897 until 1907, Pathé Frères produced no less than about fifty films consisting in realizations (Martin Meisel) of famous paintings. Although numerous and impressive, these living pictures set on screen and in motion are unspoken in the promotional documents of the period. In the Pathé catalogs, these “re-animated paintings” do not have their own category; instead, they are scattered throughout other “genres” of film. Pathé’s description of them also changes over time—the pictorial references seem to disappear. This growing silence may be a result of the legal climate of that time, shaken by the first copyright complaints in film and phonograph industry. Or it may be related to the way realistic and historical paintings of that time were taken for accurate documents and not for an artist’s vision. But it may also be the new “era of reproductive technology” that freed works (intended to be reinterpreted through all media) from any “original” identity. Anyway this “secret” seems to conceal the key of Pathé Frères’ early success: a cinema production conceived as a cinema of reproduction.

Este artículo reconstruye, a partir de los cartelones sobrevivientes y de los grabados y de las notas aparecidas en periódicos italianos, ingleses y norteamericanos, parte de la historia de la Compañía Keller y el aspecto de los tableaux vivants que componían el Caín y Abel que la compañía exhibió en noviembre de 1865 en el Teatro Municipal de Santiago. La elección de las referencias pictóricas y escultóricas de los cuadros vivientes, el entusiasmo y los silencios de la prensa, las suspicacias morales y artísticas que despertaron sus poses plásticas, nos permiten atisbar desde un lugar al mismo tiempo periférico y global, varios de los nudos que conformaron el epicentro de la discusión sobre las artes durante el siglo XIX. Arrojan luces, además, sobre los modos en que la cultura popular se apropió de la historia del arte y las formas poco convencionales de difusión del arte europeo en países sudamericanos.

Abstract: This article reconstructs, from surviving posters, engravings, and Italian, English and American press articles, the history of the Keller Troupe, its tableaux vivants’ shows, and the Cain y Abel piece they presented in November 1865 in Santiago’s Municipal Theater. The choice of the pictorial and sculptural references of the living pictures, the enthusiasm and silence of the press, and the moral and artistic suspicions that aroused their plastic poses, allow us to glimpse from a place at the same time peripheral and global, several of the knots that formed the epicenter of the discussion about the arts during the nineteenth century. They also shed light on the ways in which popular culture appropriated art history and the unconventional ways of disseminating European art in South American countries.

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Einleitung
1. Von „La lumière russe“ bis GOĖLRO
2. Kulturelle und mediale Kontexte des russischen „Licht-Schaffens“ (svetotvorčestvo)
3. Brüche und Kontinuitäten der russischen Filmgeschichte
4. Kino als ,Kirche’ in der frühen Sowjetzeit
5. Die „andere Ordnung des Lichts”
6. Film als Sprache
6.1. Zu den Filmschriften der russischen Formalisten
6.2. Zaum’ – Photogenie – „Schattenmalerei“ – Zufall – „ein Stück verfilmte Theorie”
7. Film als Schrift und denkendes Kino
8. Lichtordnungen – Sichtbares – Medium – Kino – Theorie
9. Filmische theoria zwischen Licht und Sprache
10. Zur Gesamtanlage der Arbeit

I. Präliminarien zur Mediengeschichte des russisch-sowjetischen Kinos
1. Kulturelle Bedingtheit von Medien und mediale Bedingtheit von Theorie
2. Mediengeschichte des Kinos in Russland
3. Schreiben über den Film in Russland 1896-1918
4. Filmzensur in der Zarenzeit
5. Das „wichtigste aller“ Medien (die frühe Sowjetzeit)
6. Aufwertung des Kinos in der UdSSR

II. Nicht-sprachliche Medien der theoria: Vision, Bild, technische Vorrichtung
1. Antike theoria
2. Christliche theoria und die „ikonische Wendung“
2.1. Orthodoxe theoria als „Schau Gottes“
2.2. Bildertheologie und Emanation (izlučenie)
2.3. Mysterienkulte und Tabor-Licht im Hesychasmus
2.4. Von der simplex visio mentis zum orbis pictus
3. Neuzeitliche Theorie und die Ikone als theologischer Traktat
4. Poiesis, Praxis und Theorie im Kinematographen
5. Optische Techniken als Medien von theoria
5.1. Sehen als Abbilden
5.2. Sehen und theoria
5.3. Technische Medien des Sehens und Theoriefähigkeit von Film
6. Mediale Philosophie, visuelles Denken und Lichtemanation 137
6.1. Kino als Epiphanie
6.2. „Cine-Thinking“ und erkenntnistheoretisches Kino
6.3. "Bilder-Ontologie“ und filmische Emanation

III. Die Ikone als Medium des Sehens
1. Einführende Bemerkungen zur Ikone als Bild aus Licht
2. Privilegierung des Sehens bei Florenskij
2.1. Lichtordnungen in Kirche und Kino
2.2. Die „optischen Systeme“ der Ikone
3. Die Optik in der russischen Ikone (Licht, Farbe und Bewegung) – Trubeckoj und Florenskij
3.1. svet (,Licht’) – svjat (,heilig’) und der Spiegel als Medium
3.2. Der metaphysische Staub der Sophia als Medium (sreda) des göttlichen Lichts
3.3. Visuelle Theologie der Ikone: Taborlicht, Sophienpurpur und Maria als Prisma
3.4. „Wir sehen jetzt durch einen Spiegel in einem tunckeln Wort“
3.5. Die Ikone als Tür, aus der die Heiligen treten
3.6. Bewegungsillusion durch das Flimmern des Mosaiks und das Eigenlicht der Ikone
4. Acheiropoieta aus medientheoretischer Sicht
5. Florenskij zu den Kameramedien
6. Die Ikone als Bild-Wiederholung
7. Das Licht der Ikone in der sowjetischen Avantgarde
7.1. 1913: Der lučizm / Rayonismus (N. Gončarova und M. Larionov)
7.2. K. Red’kos „Ikone der Revolution“
7.3. „Verchom na luče“ - „Rittlings auf dem Strahl“ (Leo Mur 1926)

IV. Kulturen des svetotvorčestvo 1890-1920 in Russland
1. Vom prosveščenie zur Lichtmotivik im Symbolismus und zum Licht im Kino
2. Der russische Symbolismus und das Kino
2.1. Symbol-Begriff: realia und realiora, stumme "Sprache der Dinge" (Blok)
2.2. Symbolistische Rezeption des Kinos
2.3. Religiöses und säkulares Licht („Religionskunst“ und „Kunstreligion“)
2.4. Gor’kij 1896 im Kino: die Schrecken eines symbolistischen Schattenreichs
2.5. Symbolismus ↔ Kino
2.6. Das frühe Kino von und mit Andrej Belyj
2.6.1. Das Kino als Ort der neuen sobornost’
2.6.2. Die elektrifizierte Stadt, astrale Reisen und das Motiv der Laterne (fonar’)
2.6.3. Sophiologie im Kino: Herabgestiegene Sterne und filmische Spitzenschleier
2.6.4. Sinema macht sinjaki: Groteske Explosionen im Kino und in Peterburg
3. Das svetotvorčestvo von E. Bauėr
3.1. Die Wiederentdeckung des Evgenij Francevič Bauėr (1867-1913)
3.2. Von der elektrifizierten Operette zum Film
3.2.1. Jabločkovs „Russisches Licht“
3.2.2. Elektrische Mysterien
3.2.3. Funktionen des elektrischen Licht auf der Bühne und im Film
3.3. Bauėrs „Lichtschaffen“ in der Filmkritik und -theorie (Turkin, Achramovič, Kulešov)
3.4. Bauėrs filmischer Symbolismus: Zwielicht, illuminatio und Panerotizismus
3.4.1. Sumerki ženskoj duši: Lichtschöpfen im Zwielicht der weiblichen Seele
3.4.2. Posle smerti: Die Liebe des Photographen beginnt „nach dem Tode“
3.4.3. Präsentation von Traum, Erinnerung und Halluzination im Film
3.4.4. Irr-Lichter und erotisierendes Licht aus dem Jenseits
3.5. Bauėrs Licht-Malerei
3.5.1. Zum „russischen Stil“ des Kinos der 1910er Jahre
3.5.2. Statischer Schauspielstil, „Epoche der Einstellung“ und die mise-en-scène
3.5.3. Einsatz der Grossaufnahme in Bauėrs Nach dem Tode
3.5.4. Der deep focus der europäischen Barock-Malerei in Bauėrs Filmen
3.5.5. Übersehene Vorgängermedien: Tableaux vivants und Piktorialismus im Film

Epilog: Zwei konkurrierende Lichtordnungen von den 1890ern bis zu den 1920ern"

Reviewed by Christian Zehnder in: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 71 (2013), 389-402.

Few painters have had as many films made about their lives as Vincent van Gogh. The interest in his story is due in part to the mystery surrounding his last days, in Arles, France. It is thus no coincidence that all the biopics about the Dutch painter focus on this stage of his life, including the recent works Loving Vincent (2017), an animated film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018). A comparative study of these two feature films, representing two different aesthetic and dramatic approaches, is conducted in pursuit of the two objectives of this paper: to identify the conventions of the subgenre of the artist biopic; and consequently, to analyze how both films reflect on the artist’s creative practice in order to determine whether the film camera is in fact capable of capturing the brushstroke and the mystique of the genius.

One of the more remarkable aspects of Hannah Wilke’s performance art was her citation of poses, ranging from stereotyped gestures of pin-ups and high fashion supermodels, to Hollywood starlets and kitschy soft-core centerfolds. Wilke enacted the live model – the mannequin vivant – as an integral aspect of her oeuvre, which included animate performances, staged photographs, and videotaped encounters. In essence, she employed the mechanisms of posing as a means to blur the lines between avant-garde and kitsch, highbrow and lowbrow. Wilke reinforced the performative and quite malleable nature of the pose, notably in Super-t-Art, performed at The Kitchen in New York City in 1974, and in a window performance at Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) in Washington, D.C. in 1979, thereby undermining the stability of both subjectivity and objectification. In both performances, Wilke posed fully or partially nude; in Super-t-Art she code-switched from ancient goddess to crucified martyr, variously wrapping herself with a white sheet, while in the WPA window she donned only a pair of heels. Such quotation of the display of the body, and specifically the female body, bears striking resemblance to the history of eroticized tableaux vivants as staged in the 19th and early 20th century. Notably, two of Wilke’s favorite novels – Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Thackery’s Vanity Fair – feature intricate tableaux vivants as integral plot motivators, which resonates in regards to Wilke’s performances: her mannequin vivant posing functions as a plot motivator to her art. Much of Wilke’s performance art features her nude or semi-nude body teased through a series of poses; she is both exposed and in motion. Yet, in the early 20th century tableaux vivants featuring topless women were only permitted by law so long as each body remained perfectly frozen in place. Thus, with the introduction of a topless moving dancer the tableau vivant shifts from acceptable to unlawful; that is to say, the tableau vivant becomes burlesque. Wilke’s posing while stripping, as seen in Hannah Wilke Through The Large Glass (1976) connects her artistic practice to the history of American burlesque, and particularly to the infamous burlesque venues run by the Minsky brothers in New York City in the early 20th century.

Wilke, through her mannequin vivant posing, presses us to consider the symbolic parameters projected onto the displayed female body, including the ways in which censorship of viewing practices determines what is acceptable versus obscene, and how the female body becomes marked as de-subjected spectacle. Wilke, by enacting her own poses and employing the visual language of both tableaux vivants and burlesque, challenges the history of eroticizing female bodies at the expense of their being. Wilke broke down the fourth wall and splintered the glass window in order to force confrontation between herself and the viewer, denying any easy and solely pleasurable viewing of her form. This, I argue, is Wilke’s feminist gesture, her riotous mannequin vivant.

Maeterlinck’s short one act drama Les Sept Princesses has generally been qualified as consisting entirely in “suggestion, stylisation, dematerialisation.” It has usually been considered as the emblem of the “symbolist day-dreams” of which Maeterlinck is often held as the perfect executioner. Nonetheless, an analytical reading of the play shows the tension between the expenditure given over to showing and the sobriety of what is said. In other words, to bring to light the staging required by the drama and the description of the bodies given over to the gaze requires replacing the play within the expectations of the 1892 public. And from that point of view it is the material culture of that period and more precisely the neurophysiological sciences which give the mise-en-scène of this “live tableau” its meaning, whereby the forms of mental illness refer back to their historicity.
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Tout entier « suggestion, stylisation, dématérialisation », le petit drame en un acte Les Sept Princesses a généralement été considéré comme l’emblème des « rêveries symbolistes » dont Maeterlinck est souvent tenu comme le parfait représentant. Pourtant, l’analyse dramaturgique de la pièce fait sentir la tension entre la dépense du montré et la sobriété du dit. En d’autres termes, mettre en valeur la matérialité du dispositif scénique et la description des corps offerts au regard exige de replacer le drame à l’horizon des spectateurs de 1892. Or, de ce point de vue, ce sont la culture matérielle de l’époque et plus précisément les sciences neurophysiologistes qui donnent sens à la mise en scène de ce « tableau vivant » où les formes de la maladie mentale renvoient à leur historicité propre.

The paper proposes to focus on the multiple affordances and intermedial aesthetic of the cinematic tableau seen as a performative space resulting in the impression of watching a painting, a theatre stage, a shop window, a diorama, or a photo-filmic installation in which the play between stillness and motion is accompanied by a reflexive emphasis on media and the senses. Such images, described extensively by David Bordwell in his writings on the evolution of film style, are being re-evaluated through debates on the “tableau form,” “absorption and theatricality” in modern art and photography (e.g. Jean-François Chevrier, Michael Fried). In particular, the aim of this paper is to examine inflections of the cinematic tableau in the films of three contemporary European authors, Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania), Roy Andersson (Sweden) and Joanna Hogg (UK), and relate them to the paradigm of the Dutch interior established in seventeenth-century painting.
Keywords: intermedial aesthetic of the tableau shot, Dutch interior in cinema, Corneliu Porumboiu, Roy Andersson, Joanna Hogg.

In this paper I examine how early twentieth-century film adopted the form of the tableau vivant from eighteenth-century painting, stage, and vernacular performance practices to secure its status as a vibrant new medium. I argue that by incorporating moments of tableau throughout their narratives, early French films ultimately mourned for the loss of stillness, pointing to the gap between desire and fulfillment, and explored what happens when grief is turned into motion.