Session Convenors:
Mark Broughton, Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading, m.broughton@reading.ac.uk
Katerina Loukopoulou, School of Art History, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London, a.loukopoulou@hist-art.bbk.ac.uk

Speakers:
Oliver Asselin (Université de Montréal) Digital Cinema on the Museum’s Ruins
François Penz (University of Cambridge) Screening the Museum Space
John Wyver (University of Westminster) Out of Chaos and Art During Wartime
Erdmute Wenzel White (Purdue University, Indiana) Suspect Surrealism: Germaine Dulac’s film, The Shell and the Clergyman (1927)
Richard Suchenski (Yale University) Between Frame and Screen: Straub and Huillet’s Cezanne
Margriet Schavemaker (University of Amsterdam) Romanticism and Beyond: Van Gogh’s multimedia after-life
Ann-Sophie Lehmann (University of Utrecht) ‘Creative Hands’ – Showing, mystifying and deconstructing the act of art making in early and contemporary art documentaries
Pierre Saurisse (Université Rennes 2) Tricks for Fiction: Disappearance and reappearance of the artist in films on art

Session Abstract:
Since the early days of photography, one of its main applications has been the creative reproduction and dissemination of artworks. Film has similarly reproduced artworks on a representational level, but the mobile camera has enabled a more dynamic relationship with the spatial context and structure of the artwork: tracking shots, pans, tilts, rolls and zooms have been employed to move around the artwork in situ, as well as to enter its representational field; it is thus not only the artwork that has been reproduced and disseminated, but also the gaze of a mobile spectator.
This dynamism has also been utilised to extend art movements. For example, Le Ballet Mécanique (1924) adapted the fractured and multi-faceted images of cubism to the moving image. The reproducibility of celluloid and the internationalism of the medium of film meant that Léger’s film carried cubism beyond France some time before his artworks were exhibited abroad.
Film’s central role in the democratisation of the fine arts intensified in the decades after the Second World War, when films about art and artists proliferated across Europe, the USA, India, China and Japan. Caroline Jones has emphasised the significance of arts documentaries for the construction of the post-war American artist in Machine in the Studio (1996). In Britain, David Curtis (2007) has discussed the long history of artists’ films, while John Wyver (2007) has shown that films on art have often been in the vanguard of the documentary form. These writers have unearthed new material that can direct future research.
This panel aims to examine how the moving image has been used to extend artworks and art movements beyond their physical and geographical confines, from the emergence of cinema to the present. The groundbreaking role of the art film and the arts documentary in connecting museums and art historiography is an underlying thread which runs through the papers.