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The Documentary Surreal: Film and Painting in Luciano Emmer’s La Leggenda di Sant’Orsola (1948) and Henri Storck’s Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (1946)

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Abstract

This article deals with the aesthetics of the art documentary of the 1940s and 1950s, which can be considered as the Golden Age of the genre. Prior to the breakthrough of television in Europe, which would usurp and standardize the art documentary, cinematic reproductions of artworks resulted in experimental shorts that were highly self-reflexive. These films became visual laboratories to investigate the tensions between movement and stasis, the two- and three-dimensional, and the real and the artificial—a film on art was self-consciously presented as an art film. Focusing on La Leggenda di Sant’Orsola (1948) by Luciano Emmer and Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (1946) by Henri Storck, this article also investigates how the animation of the static image by the film medium relates to Surrealist practices.

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Notes

  1. Le Musée imaginaire was originally published in 1947 as the first volume of Psychologie de l’art (Genève: Skira) and was later adapted to become a part of Les Voix du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). In 1965, the text was republished as Le Musée imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard).

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Jacobs, S. The Documentary Surreal: Film and Painting in Luciano Emmer’s La Leggenda di Sant’Orsola (1948) and Henri Storck’s Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (1946). Found Sci 23, 207–215 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9514-7

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