Domani georges guetary biography
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Brushstrokes
The Art of Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris and Gigi
by Michael Koresky
What does it mean to call a filmmaker “painterly”? It’s an oft-used descriptor, and it seems to make a lot of intuitive sense, at least. Yet since the term, when applied to cinema, is essentially conjoining two art forms wildly disparate in fundamental, industrial ways, it’s perhaps worth investigating further. There is seemingly no shortage of directors we might call painterly, from Maurice Pialat to Terence Davies to Olivier Assayas, which doesn’t mean that their films necessarily have the look of paintings but rather that they compose each frame with an attention to light and color equal to that of narrative. There’s an aesthetic unity to their films that makes them feel like the products of single artistic—not merely auteurist—visions. Because of this, it’s rare for the term to be applied to a Hollywood studio director, who is not only subject to the whims of the system but also wedded to a studio’s entrenched style. Yet one can hardly read any paragraph about American studio workhorse Vincente Minnelli without coming across at least one reference to his painterly aesthetic.
Perhaps the term “painterly” has been overused, or too often employed as a critical crutch
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Music and the Moving Image
notes
1. Stacey Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10. Geoffrey Block, "Integration," in The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 101–103.
2. Elsa Marshall, "The Business, Collaborative Labour, and Techniques of Formal Integration in the Production of MGM's Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)" (PhD diss., University of Sheffield, 2022).
3. This is a modification of Donald Crafton's framework for analyzing slapstick as spectacle (the vertical) in contrast with "the horizontal, syntagmatic domain of the story," Donald Crafton, "Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy," in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 356. It also builds on Sergei Eisenstein, "Montage 1938" (originally subtitled "Horizontal Montage") and "Vertical Montage," in Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor and translated by Michael Glenny (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 296–326, 327–99.
4. James O'Leary, "Oklahoma!, 'Lousy Publicity,' and the Politics of Formal Integration in
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