TRANSLATED ARTICLES Javier Moral · Eme nº 4 · 2016 ISSN 2253-6337 PhD in Audiovisual Communication, BA in Fine Arts FROM PAINTING TO CINEMA, FROM CINEMA TO PAINTING: HISTORIES OF A MAGNETISATION Javier Moral History of representation is parceled into provinces that study image under its deposition on diferent means of expression. However, audiovisual heterogeneity of our time, show how easily images pass from one medium to another. It is necessary to build another visual history that claims the mixture instead of the essence, a history that tracks the circulation of images. In that his story certainly should occupy a special place the relationship that have maintained cinema and painting for over a century. Key words: Cinema, painting, post-cinema, post- painting, expanded cinema. Histories of what is visible The history of visual representation is a frac- tioned history, divided in diferent provinces that attend to their particular object of study according to their material substantiation, their sedimenta- tion in expressive media that allow understanding their essence and which legitimate, therefore, their diference with respect of other images (preserving their purity). Thus, the history of Painting could be clearly diferentiated from the history of Sculpture. These two, by virtue of a fnal technologic media- tion could never be mistaken for the histories of Photography or Cinema, both also separated by the particular way they are interwoven in time. However, the immense heterogeneity of audio- visual production which defnes our time seems to proclaim quite the opposite: there are no images welded to a particular expressive media, there are no representations that do not travel from one medium to another, that do not seek their refection, their dop- pelgänger in other representations that surround it. Therefore, it would be necessary to change the perspective on that history of representation, turn it around and reconsider it from the opposite angle. Which is the same, it would be necessary to con- struct a visual history reclaiming the mixture as op- posed to the essence, that would trace the transitions and circulation of images, their comings and goings within the audiovisual universe. And in this history, yet to be written, the relationship that cinema and painting started over a century ago should, indubita- bly, have a the special place. Painting legitimates cinema Understanding the relationship cinema/painting from the perspective of surface analysis that gives priority to recurring themes and visual approaches between the two media (from mere allusion, to the perfect translation of painting into frame, the tableau vivant) brings us almost to the origin of the cinema- tographer. Specifcally, to that early flm typology that was religious cinema. Quickly it became eager to transpose on the screen the composition and icono- graphic codes of a long-standing pictorial tradition. From the early La vie et la passion de Jesús-Christ by the Lumière Brothers (1898), to From the manger to the Cross (1912, reproduction of the gouache and wa- tercolours of the popular Bible illustrated by French artist James Tissot in 1894), to mid-century big Bib- lical productions (as it was the case of The Ten Com- mandements, 1956, or King of Kings, 1961), pictorial re- ligious references were have been constant in cinema. In the same way, as historic cinema established itself at the beginning of the twentieth century (largely due to the need of the new expressive medium to grasp the attention of the bourgeois public, which would be regularly attending theatre shows, but were alien 1 AUMONT, JACQUES: El ojo interminable. Cine y pintura, Barcelona, Paidós, 1997, p. 188. [All images and fgures mentioned in the text that do not appear here for space and design reasons, are available on the Spanish edition: http://polipapers.upv.es/index.php/eme. You can also buy the magazine here: www.lalibreria.upv.es - pedidos@upv.es]