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Hand painted movie stills: a study of the aesthetics of the cinematographic space in painted scenography

2024; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400309.2024.2355715

1740-7923

Darío Lanza Vidal,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Scenes as vivid in our cinematographic memory as Tara's views in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), the oppressive sewers in the final sequence of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), the vistas of Rome in Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) or the famous final shot on the beach in Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), all place the viewer, without their awareness, in front of an image produced using the mechanism known as matte painting. It is a resource to which cinema has turned with considerable frequency over the course of its history, albeit one which has received little to no analytical attention from film studies. With a view to redressing this omission, this essay will aim to create a conceptual framework within which a rigorous analysis of this technique can be carried out in the context of film aesthetics. For this, it will be useful to start by reviewing the existing definitions of this term and proposing not one but two updated ones. This will then allow us to conceptualize this practice as a mechanism for assembling spaces, employing analytical tools used for editing in order to understand the way in which matte painting performs its unique construction of the cinematographic space.