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The Times (09/Sep/2004) - They've been framed

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They've been framed

A surprising number of directors dabble in other aspects of the visual arts, says John Russell Taylor

In the history of cinema there has always been a sense that art belongs in the gallery. Film is, after all, a visual medium, as a BBC Two executive once bizarrely said while explaining why films about painting and sculpture were not to be commissioned. Nevertheless, a number of well-known directors have started out with more links to the fine arts than they cared to admit. It was probably all right if you were one of those grand emigres to Hollywood, such as Fritz Lang, who set out in Germany with architectural ambitions and was no mean sculptor in his own right. Those continentals were meant to be arty, and brought in primarily to impart a little class.

Not that the rule applied to all Europeans. Though Alfred Hitchcock had trained as an engineering draughtsman, taken evening classes in illustrative art and served his cinematic apprenticeship designing first title cards and then whole settings for films, he was transplanted to Hollywood largely on his reputation as a fiercely practical technician who could make reliably profitable movies. He could always knock out a vividly sketchy storyboard if needed (as indeed does Martin Scorsese with an intense style to match his movies), and his self-caricature was familiar worldwide.

Though Karl French's new book Art by Film Directors parades most of the usual suspects, those whom we know to have embraced draughtsmanship as a profession rather than a hobby -Cocteau, Eisenstein, Fellini -he does manage to come up with some fairly unexpected names.

Did you know that Jean-Jacques Beineix, alongside such movies Diva and Betty Blue which show an obsessive regard for each shot, has also been an exhibited abstract painter? Or that Takeshi Kitano, the Japanese hard man of such films as Sonatine and Hana-bi, similarly has a parallel career as an artist?

The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai, Kagemusha) always dreamt of being an artist and was encouraged at a young age. Despite failing to get into art school, his enthusiasm for Western art was undiminished; his passion for Van Gogh was evident in his pen- ultimate film, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams.

In Britain both Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway have been as well known for their gallery art as for their movies. The main difference is that Greenaway's best work is to be found in the cinema. The main thing that Jarman's movies fail to do is move: they are, admittedly, a series of pretty pictures, but when a critic compares Caravaggio with a panic in a waxworks it is not difficult to see what he means.

French casts his net wide, to include not merely weekend sketchers such as Charlie Chaplin, but also film-makers such as Stanley Kubrick and Wim Wenders, who have published books of the photographs they have taken on the margins of their film-making.

At a young age, the Manhattanite Kubrick could be found travelling around the Bronx with a camera hidden in a customised paper bag so he could take candid shots of the people in his neighbourhood. He went on to become one of the youngest photographers for Look magazine, supplying meticulously composed shots.

The German film-maker Wenders had harboured ambitions to be a painter in the 1960s but found himself turned on to the movies while in Paris. Since the 1980s he's also used a stills camera, favouring wide-angled vistas bereft of people that characterised his 1984 film Paris, Texas.

Before he ever directed Shaft in 1971, Gordon Parks made his reputation as an artistic kind of photographer. His early work in the 1930s and 1940s was for the Farm Security Administration, a government-sponsored organisation set up to monitor the conditions of the poor in the Depression.

French makes much of Parks's interest in manipulated colour, but does not apparently know how it started. When Parks made his first famous trip to Brazil, he was shown around Rio by a friend of mine. One wet day they went to the zoo.

Parks fired off a whole reel of film, ending with a shot of a pigeon landing in a puddle, then asked his girlfriend, who was carrying the bag, for another reel.

When he saw what he was given he had a fit, as it was a Kodak specifically for shooting interiors. They rushed back to the hotel, phoned Kodak in New York, and were told the only problem was that everything exterior would take on a bluish tint.

A few months later my friend opened a photographic magazine to see the results of a competition, and found that Parks had won it, with a slate-blue image of a pigeon landing in a puddle. All specifications were given, except under "special techniques" it said "photographer's secret". Which only goes to show that in art, as in the movies, even an accident can have its uses.

Art by Film Directors is published on September 23 by Mitchell Beazley at Pounds 25

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