Documenting the visual arts

Henri Storck's Le monde de Paul Delvaux and pygmalionist cinema / Steven Jacobs -- A sculptor's life on screen : John Read's film portraits of Henry Moore for BBC Television / Katerina Loukopoulou -- A portrait of the artist as automaton : creativity, labor, and technology in Tim's Vermeer / Stephan Boman -- Flesh and vision : Jia Zhangke's Still life and Dong / Amy Villarejo -- Globalizing Ai Weiwei / Luke Robinson -- Film and the performance of Marina Abramovic : documentary as documentation / Chanda Laine Carey -- Gained in translation : site-specificity in recent documentaries / Vera Brunner-Sung -- The wages of !W.A.R. : Activist historiography and the feminist art movement / Theresa L. Geller -- When art exhibition met cinema exhibition : live documentary and the remediation of the museum experience / Annabelle Honess Roe -- Museum movies, documentary space, and the transmedial / Asbjørn Grønstad -- "Seeing too much is seeing nothing" : the place of fashion within the documentary frame / Matthew J. Fee -- Challenging the hierarchies of photographic history / Trisha Ziff, interviewed by Roger Hallas -- On the history (and future) of art documentaries and the film program at the National Gallery of Art / Margaret Parsons, interviewed by Marsha Gordon.

"Since their emergence in the late 1940s as a distinct genre, documentaries about the visual arts have made significant contributions to art education, public television, and documentary filmmaking, yet they have received little scholarly attention from either art history or film studies. Bringing together an international range of scholars, as well as filmmakers and curators, Documenting the Visual Arts explores the rich variety in form and content of the contemporary art documentary. Whether considering documentaries about painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, site-specific installation, or fashion, the chapters of the book engage with the key question of intermediality: how film can reframe other visual arts through its specific audio-visual qualities, in order to generate new ways of understanding those arts. The essays illuminate furthermore how art documentaries raise some of the most critical issues of the contemporary global art world, specifically, the discourse of the artist, the dynamics of documentation, and the visuality of the museum. Contributors discuss documentaries by filmmakers such as Frederick Wiseman, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jia Zhangke, and Trisha Ziff, and about artists such as Michael Heizer, Ai Weiwei, Do Ho Suh, and Marina Abramović"--