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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Cinematographic space
• trucage
• trickery
• illusionism
• matte painting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2024.2355715

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dario Lanza

Dario Lanza is a PhD in Information and Communication Technologies and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. His main research line focuses on the pictorial simulation techniques in the cinematographic medium. His artistic production, in which he explores the role of new technologies as a vehicle for artistic creation and researches the aesthetic potential of digital culture, has been displayed in individual and collective exhibitions in New York, London, Hong Kong, Athens and Cardiff.