Art of the Cinema

 Reposted from Weekends in Paradelle

Art imitates life and sometimes life imitates art and sometimes films imitate art.

Filmmaker Vugar Efendi put together a compilation of shots from films along with the paintings that inspired them.

You may have seen filmmakers pay homage to older films by imitating shots - the original Star Wars film has shots that echo a number of other films including John Ford's The Searchers and the Stranger Things series on Netflix has lots of tributes to films from the 1980s that the filmmakers watch and loved.

Paintings may be less obvious. Not everyone would pick up on Jean-Luc Godard filming a shot based on a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It is an old tradition. One referenced in Efendi's supercut is from the 1927 silent film Metropolis.

L'empire des lumières influenced William Friedkin's The Exorcist, and La Robe du soir is alluded to in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight while Architecture au clair de Lune slips into Peter Weir's The Truman Show. Some instances are unexpected: Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy used in in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Sometimes the reference is not exact but a scene feels like it is "in the style of"a painter - such as the look of the Bates's home in Hitchcock's Psycho looking like a house from an Edward Hopper painting - but without the color or sunlight. (Wim Wenders used a much more literal recreation of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks in his film The End of Violence.)

I first saw these videos mentioned on the Slate website, but the three-part video has been posted in other places too.

Here are the pairings so that you can check you "art of the cinema" knowledge.