The spooky, wonderful image above, Duel After A Masked Ball, was painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the great masters of Victorian academic art. To me, his work aspires to the condition of cinema and can be studied in that regard with great profit. I think one finds in it, both formally and in terms of subject matter, the reflection of many concerns that would help shape the emerging art of movies.
Gérôme used a photo-authoritative style to make his
visions of Oriental scenes and his recreations of historical periods
alive and true to viewers who were beginning to process the visual
world more and more through the medium of photography. He was
concerned with narrative images and used the illusion of depth to draw
the viewer into those images -- the drama of space obsessed him. He
was so concerned with stereometric forms that he also worked regularly
as a sculptor.
Though he died in 1904, before movies came into their
own as a plastic and narrative medium, he would have thrilled, I think,
at their capacity to carry his aesthetic methods into new realms and elaborate them
fantastically.
Gérôme's Technicolor über-photographs can seem like
frame-grabs from imaginary movies. You can see the compositional style
of Lawrence Of Arabia (and John Ford) in his desert scenes . . .
. . . foreshadowings of Intolerance in his
18th-Century tableaux . . .
. . . the epic visions of De Mille in his
Biblical scenes . . .
Griffith, De Mille and Ford would have been familiar with Gérôme
directly -- his work was wildly popular and widely reproduced in
the time of their youth. Lean may have echoed Gérôme simply by
sharing his formal concerns, though it wouldn't surprise me at all if
Lean knew and admired his paintings. In any case, the profound
connection
between Victorian academic art and the cinema is nowhere more evident
than in the work of this great painter.
