Filming: Courtauld Trip with the Film Students

On Monday, 9th April 2012, we travelled up to London with the Film students to visit a gallery for their project, The Courtauld gallery, the Strand. I was very much looking forward to visiting this gallery as it contains a few of my favourite pieces of Art from the impressionist and post-Impressionist periods, with work from Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Gauguin
The two key pieces for me were:

E, Manet, The Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882)

and

Renoir, La Loge (1874)

I spent a great deal of time studying these two pieces in particular and it is always so exciting to see them on a wall in front of you rather than in a book or on screen. Both images put special emphasis on costume and  I feel that they would both make great starting points for a short film.

The Bar at the Folies-Bergere for instance is one of Edouard Manet's most famous pieces. Manet was known to have said that 'colour was sensual' and this is evidently practised in his work. He was a  painter of modern life, a flaneur, who hunted out prostitutes to depict as he believed they had a far more interesting story to tell. The Bar... uses a muse of Manet's, 'Suzon'. She stares straight out of the picture plane into the eyes of the viewer, an element that becomes far more interesting when one notices the male standing in the reflections (which aren't optically accurate). We know the man is Gaston La Touche, a post impressionist painter friend of Manet's, and the way the painting is composed the viewer is led to believe that what we see is through the eyes of Gaston. Other interesting elements of this image is that the bar appears to float up high in the Folies-Bergere, the reflections are incorrect (bottle appear to be on different edges of the bar in the reflection) and, in the highly gestural background (suggesting the importance of the foreground), we see electric light, Manet's acceptance and encouragement of modernity and enlightenment. This painting won Manet a medal from the Salon in Paris and is considered to be his last masterpiece.
I feel that in terms of making this a short film, there is already such an interesting beginning of a story in the image that it could be exciting to see where one could take it further.

Secondly is La Loge by Auguste-Pierre Renoir, I particularly like this image due to the dark undertone which is not at first noticeable to a viewer until further research is made. Renoir, like most Impressionists, was a flaneur, a student of modern life. He found the lower class society very interesting and how one could pretend to be of a higher class through clothing and connections. This is relevant to La Loge as on first inspection it is a couple in a theatre box (trans. La Loge) However, upon knowing Renoir's interests it can be argued that the woman is in fact a courtesan/ prostitute/Mistress to the man, she has red lips, flower decoration and a voluptuous figure emphasised by her revealing clothing, and also more subtly by her melancholic expression. It is a rather misogynistic portrayal of a woman as she is trapped between the edge of the box and the man. The man appears to be looking away from the stage, up high suggesting he is looking at another woman in a box, is it a symbolic reflection of us, the viewer, with the woman in the painting? The importance of this image lies with the idea of Scopophilia, the power of the gaze. So much is said by this woman just by her eyes and in terms, again, of this being made into a short film, such a great story could be created around this woman as her character is already so beautifully created by Renoir.