The Scream paintings of Francis Bacon during the 1950's serves as an excellent intersection of face, motion dynamics, and expression found in this week's readings, particularly Study After Velasquez . The film frame of the bespectacled nurse shot in the eye from Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin 1925 (possibly the most famous close-up in cinema history) and Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1644 were appropriated image parts implemented into the painting's whole.
In Dynamics, Arnheim had differentiated between the inhibited image and the mobile image. This was one of Arnheim's most thought-provoking moments for me. In this endeavour he seems to abolish the notion of the atemporal visual image. It is clear that all paintings contain time and refers to movement for their very construction is through a multiplicity of convergent and divergent forces (visual, formal--the force of inflicting paint on canvas itself) which is quite literally movement while the image often implies a specific kind of movement--even frozen movement is movement a result of what he termed as "directed tension."
The claim made by Lessing in the first utterances about medium specificity that the image is in lack of time unlike literature and music is made irrelevant. The claim was founded on the misguided idea that the emotional effect of a painting can only be taken in as a whole rather than as a build up to a climax available in other "time" mediums. Well, I think this is something we've all proved as an incorrect discredit to the multivalent emotional capacities possible in the visual image through the class's heavy study on gestalt theory. And Bacon's Study After Velasquez is a visualization of painting's unlimited time elements--merging history in his aggressive brush stroke and color application that take in Velasquez's pope and a prominent piece of Soviet visual culture and most definitely merging both frozen time and mobile time in one full sweep. The result is a discordantly harmonious image--a visual fugue that elicits guttural physiognomic responses in the spectator.
The injured nurse is a frame taken from a moving picture. The pope is a frozen composition of inhibited movement, comparable to El Greco 's St. Jerome, a painting which Arnheim studies briefly in the reading. Arnheim called attention to the counterbalance of forces in the composition that resulted in the cancellation of immobility. Bacons turn the mobile immobile by slapping Eisenstein's expressive face onto the pope's bodice and thrusting the throne into a state of ambiguous ascension and descension. I had called the response to the painting as gutteral for it elicits not only visual but also physiological cues, culminating in a haptic sense. The painting acts as a function of both sight, sound, and touch. He first institutes a juxtaposition of unblended paints. The yellow is strong and true in this painting and is particulary potent in contrast to the dark space of the paiting. the interaction between the bckground of starkness with the bold yellow produces this effect of light and explosion creating an unlimited activity of engagement through color. the yellow sparks are rising out of the painting to extend the interior space of the painting into the spectator's outside world. The pope's robe of purples which emerge from the dark smokey streaks also aids in the effect. What this does is allow Bacon to introduce into the pictorial plane imperceptible effects of sensation on the body. While the face of an open-mouthed scream generates the audible noise--just as Arnheim had noted that seeing a painted boat can suggest movment--the screaming face and the painting's mode of tension channels a collective empathy in the sound and feeling of a violent force that is overtaking the painting.
Like what Arnheim had noted about St. Jerome, in Velasquez's portrait, there are clear visible forces that direct the tension and stabilize the dynamism inherent in the painting. In Bacon's the invisible are made visible and are turned against one another. In Study the forces of effect that weigh in through oblique angles in and around the body-spaces (both within the painting and outside the painting) are manipulated to obscure and implicate deformation and expression. Perhaps what's most important in this amalgam is the commentary that could be drawn out on religion and political ideology with the Pope/Soviet Prole seemingly strapped into an electric chair. For context, the nurse was shot in the film along with the baby she was taking care of--in the film it implies that the Tsarist regime is killing the future of Russia. The woman dies as a martyr to the Bolshevik movement. Are we imprisoned and punished by our own restrictive dogmatic beliefs? I think so. The implantations of Soviet visual culture and Catholic visual culture is important here for symbolic effect. I leave everyone with this question, what exactly is Bacon trying to say?
What Winnie says about Lessing's claim is true. Time is indelibly connected to existence. All art is creation. It exists and therefore couldn't lack time. I do think, however, that art can depict a lack of time. Arnheim points out that to show a moment of motion the artist must render something that "exists outside the dimension of time." This means that the artist must include several elements of the motion being depicted that do not occur concurrently in reality. The artist is rendering something that does not exist.
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