Lecture date: 2002-01-25
Lecture accompanying the AA exhibition of the painter Jean-Baptiste Marots work titled Tableaux for the Cinema. In 1998 the filmmaker Eric Rohmer asked Marot to create a set of views of Paris at the time of the Revolution for his film L’ Anglaise et le Duc.
Marot produced 36 oil paintings, each measuring no more than one metre across, for use as ‘scenery’. The actors were digitally superimposed, while parts of the tableaux were animated and the fabrics of clothes were matched to the paintings. To recreate as faithfully as possible the city of the late eighteenth-century, essentially Paris before Haussmann’s interventions, Marot made a careful study of surviving drawings, topographical plans, maps, and the photographs of Marville. By recreating forgotten parts of Paris, Marot was able to make visual what he calls the gap between the painted image – ‘the memory of subjective feelings towards a place’ – and reality.
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