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When cinematographers talk about their craft, many are keen to reference paintings as a window into their work. Some of them cite specific artists: Rembrandt (Gordon Willis), Georges de la Tour (Nestor Almendros), Edward Hopper (Laszlo Kovacs), Vittore Carpaccio (Vittorio Storaro)—- of course, Vermeer for all of them. However, no painter has so universally been a lodestone for cinematographers as the early 17th century Italian, Michelangelo Merissi, born in Milan, but whose early childhood was spent in the Lombardy town that is the source of his name—Caravaggio.

Chalk portrait of Caravaggio, c. 1621 by Ottavio Leoni. Musee Jacquemart Andre

For art historians as well as for the general public, the dramatic details of Caravaggio’s life command center stage. Shakespeare himself could not have created a more compellingly complex character: part devil—prey to street fights and sordid sexual encounters; part angel—a master of deeply emotive characters and religious ecstasy captured in dramas on painted canvas.

Caravaggio apprenticed in and came out of a Lombardian tradition of naturalistic painting that was as distant in style as it was in geography from the Mannerist conceits that had prevailed in Roman and Vatican ecclesiastical painting since the Renaissance. The reforms of the Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563, offered a ready forum for artists who could paint in this newly realistic vein; the Counter Reformation of the Catholic Church sought art and music that was more accessible to the faithful. Caravaggio was the right man for the right time. He painted from life models, not idealized fantasies—often-street urchins, rent boys and prostitutes. Several times, he became mired in controversy when a model for a saint or the Madonna was recognized by sponsoring bishops or cardinals to be a known courtesan. Some commissions were initially rejected and changes were ordered because of his warts and all rendering of models, including martyrdoms of saints with filthy feet, scars and body blemishes. A Madonna was painted for a small altar in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It stayed there for only two days. A cardinal’s secretary (according to a Wikipedia entry) wrote:

In this painting there are but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust. . . One would say that it is a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who had been for a lot of time far from God, from His adoration, and from any good thought.

Continue reading ‘The Lost Painting: A Caravaggio Found’

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He took his middle name from the ninth century Patriarch of Constantinople. He and his brother, Claude, invented the world’s first combustion engine, receiving a patent from Napoleon Bonaparte in July of 1807. A lunar crater is named after him. He was an independently wealthy farmer who raised a plebian crop of sugar beets. He coined the term velocipede for a wheeled cycle he engineered.  But, most significantly, he made the world’s first photograph—in September of 1826, more than a decade before L.J. Daguerre presented his monotype, silver iodide coated, copper plate process to the public, and also before Henry Fox-Talbot’s paper negative process, the Calotype. Both Daguerre and Fox-Talbot are generally credited as co-inventors of photography. But it was theFrench ex-Army officer and civil administrator from Saône-et-Loire who photographed the first non-fugitive image from nature. It was a view from the second floor studio window of his family estate at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Le Gras. The highly reflective pewter plate made for challenging viewing.

The original bitumen coated pewter plate of “View from the Window at Le Gras.”

The imaging process is described on an “overview” page on the Harry Ransom Center website at the University of Texas, Austin.

Niépce set up a camera obscura, placed within it a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum), and uncapped the lens. After at least a day-long exposure of eight hours [you can track the sun’s movement on two opposed walls], the plate was removed and the latent image of the view from the window was rendered visible by washing it with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum [turpentine] which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen which had not been hardened by light. The result was the permanent direct positive picture—a one-of-a-kind photograph on pewter. It renders a view of the outbuildings, courtyard, trees and landscape as seen from that upstairs window.

Continue reading ‘Joseph Nicéphore Niépce: The World’s First Photograph’

“Defeater”

One admirer calls him “the bastard child of Philip Guston” (the maverick artist who see-sawed between figuration and abstraction, and whose late paintings featured R. Crumb style shoes and buffoon hooded KKK figures riding around in hot rods.) Martinez embraces a long tradition that uses pop images as cultural tropes; he is in an equally long tradition of artists who bathe their work in deep, richly textured paint: concisely put, “A Painter.”

There’s an art scene blogger who is moved by Martinez’ numerous portraits of paired siblings and other child innocents.

One critic “reads” Martinez’ work by digging into the very paint itself:

The artist uses the mutability of his medium to add and subtract layers of paint and to create constant movement across the canvas. His bold and sometimes aggressive approach to the imagery gives the work a fresh and raw quality. The longer the viewer studies the painting, the more recognizable the plethora of cultural references become.

And a friend of Martinez refers to his thick, wide-brush textures and riot of colors, calling him “an impasto painter extraordinaire.”

Martinez' studio floor.

Continue reading ‘Eddie Martinez: “A Painter”’

Bergman, photo by Irving Penn.

When Ingmar Bergman decided in 1967 to build a house on remote Fårö Island, he cast his fate with the nets of the local fishermen. Whether he was seeking a part-time refuge from the roiling world of cinema and the Royal Dramatic Theater, or whether he understood how much his own life soon would become intertwined with the local people, is still grist for speculation. What is clear in the two feature length documentaries that he made about the island’s residents is how deeply he admired their tenacious struggle to prosper in a challenging climate. In 1967, and again a decade later in 1979, he produced Fårö Documents, two closely observed feature length films about their work and lives. Much like Michael Apted’s ongoing Up series, Bergman planned to track the life journey of Fårö’s people every ten years—but a planned third film was never made.

Michael Koresky wrote of the stylistic simplicity and integrity of Bergman’s portraits by the filmmaker’s

surveying spaces with a lack of overt editorializing, letting the people speak for themselves or, more frequently, just go about their business, which Bergman captures with an intense focus—farmers slaughtering pigs in harrowing real time; neighbors working together to thatch a roof; and, in my favorite moment, a lonely fisherman cleaning, cooking, and eating his freshly caught dinner: simple, effortless, wordless.

Continue reading ‘Bergman on Fårö: A Testament—Part Two’

The rocky coast of Fårö, near the filming site for “Persona.”

A map of the island of Fårö looks as if it broke off from the tip of Gotland, itself an island in the Baltic Sea off the southeastern coast of Sweden. Getting to Fårö is a challenge; once there, most of the few roads are single lane, dirt ruts with grass growing between the tire tracks. When director Ingmar Bergman first visited while scouting locations for his 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly, he knew he had found the secluded yet enchanted place where he would spend much of the rest of his life. From the completion of his great valedictory film Sarabande (2003), he would remain on the island until his death four years later on July 30, 2007. In one of those quirks that defy logic yet seem after the fact almost poetic— fellow director Michelangelo Antonioni died the same day.

The short summers on Fårö are luxuriant, with native flowers, wild strawberries and mushrooms in profusion. This secluded island has become a Swedish tourist destination, an intoxicating getaway. There is no bank, post office, police or doctor. But Bergman built a small cinema from an old barn, where he screened dailies for the many films he shot there: Persona, Shame, The Passion of Anna, Scenes from a Marriage (appropriately shot in an ex-wife’s house.) Tarkovsky filmed his final Bergman-like film Sacrifice on the island as well.

Bergman directed over fifty films, but it is the rugged sea and landscapes of Fårö seen in his mature films that constitute a powerful visual correlative to his character’s existential crises. Bergman loved the gentle autumn light of Fårö but it is most often the unforgiving and deeply overcast winter light that attracted his and cinematographer Sven Nykvist’s eyes.

Continue reading ‘Bergman on Fårö: A Testament—Part One’