Art in the Cinema: The Mid-century Art Documentary

In the years immediately following the Second World War, art documentaries played an important part in an emerging cinephile culture favoring experimental shorts. In the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of art documentaries were produced, many of them being highly personal, poetic, reflexive and experimental films that offer a thrilling cinematic experience.
With the exception of Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (1956) and a few others, most of them fell into oblivion and they have received only scant scholarly attention. This book aims to rectify this situation by discussing the most innovative, experimental and influential postwar art documentaries, connecting them to contemporaneous museological developments and Euro-American cultural and political relationships. With an international team of contributors with expertise across art history and film studies, Art in the Cinema draws attention to film projects by André Bazin, Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Haesaerts, Carlo Ragghianti, John Read, Dudley Shaw Aston, Henri Storck and Willard Van Dyke among others.