Framing Forces: Models of Cinema Expressed by Films that Frame Painting

This essay looks at ways in which a number of films have employed painting in order to substantiate the aesthetics of cinema that they envisage. The focus of the essay specifically concerns the differences between centrifugal and centripetal forces at the edges of paintings and the limits of the film frame. Beginning with examples from narrative cinema, the essay turns to look at crossovers between the aesthetics of painting and cinema in the context of experimental film, from early exponents of abstract cinema in the 1920s through to more recent examples.