Andy: Nead on Film, Painting, and Digital Culture

Andy King

Prof. Whaley’s questions: In what ways did the film Le Mystère Picasso exploit time or more precisely the spatial-temporal? (33-35) How did “digital culture” disrupt what Nead refers to as the “affair” between film and art? (37) 

In Nead’s characterization, Le Mystère Picasso attempts to navigate the discrepancies between the spatiality of painting and the temporality of film by finding ways to capture and reproduce the temporal processes involved in producing paintings. “Clouzot’s aim,” Nead writes, “was to portray the chronological development of artistic activity rather than the already finite expression of the finished object. The changes, the breaks, the choices, and the decisions of the artist were seen as a revelation of the artist’s mental process and thus the truest representation of the actual mechanisms of creativity” (30). One motivating idea here is that, as Nead puts it, “to observe the temporality of Picasso’s picture-making is to witness and perhaps to comprehend the time of genius” (33). In fact, there are moments of the film where, according to Nead, Clouzot and Picasso jointly facilitate the interaction of painting and film, leading to the instantiation of what sounds like a new, hybrid form where film and painting collaborate to produce an aesthetic experience that combines the properties of both. “The speed of his working process seems to complement the duration of the film—it is a method awaiting representation by the camera,” Nead writes, before describing a scene in which the film moves between showing Picasso working on a piece and the film gauge on the camera, which is running out (the director, Nead tells us, has warned Picasso that there is little time left on the film, and so Picasso works with this in mind) (32). Nead draws from the critic André Bazin, who, on her interpretation, argues that cinema can only adequately represent painting if it shows the process of creation rather than merely the result of that process (33). And the time--the essential temporality of film as a medium--transforms, Nead maintains, this process into narrative (32).

Nead’s comments on how the relationship--the “affair”--between art and film is disrupted by “digital culture” come towards the end of the article, and so invite some speculation on what exactly is meant by such a disruption. Nead appears to understand the dialectical relationship between film and painting as a relationship between two competing models of aesthetic production, both vying for cultural dominance. If (and Nead admits this is an oversimplification) we can see Edison’s film as an instance of “demythologizing” and Clouzot’s as one of “remystification,” we can likewise think of the relation between the two media as one, alternately, of “absorption and distance, repudiation and emulation” (37). What might Nead mean in entertaining the possibility that the emergence of digital culture could mark “the intrusion of a third party that will prove fatal to the dialogue between the two old lovers” (37)? 

Perhaps the suggestion is that digital culture in some sense obliterates the distinction between painting and cinema, reducing them both to instances of the image as such--and repurposing their particular aesthetic qualities as part of a larger, shared ecology of modes of representation that instances of the “digital” can appropriate and discard at will. But I would love to know what others in the class think. Does Nead perhaps mean something less extreme--maybe that painting and film will retain their recognizable forms (and perhaps their respective claims to cultural dominance, even?), but stand in a new, triadic relation to each other with the emergence of digital culture? What might the nature of that new relation be, supposing that more traditional versions of painting and film don’t simply disappear?