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Julian Schnabel on the set of The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Filmmakers long ago won the battle to have themselves recognized as “artists,” but even cinematic auteurs have been known to turn bashful in the company of painters, sculptors and visual artists of an older school who make their work on canvas or through the handmade fashioning of raw material. That said, a few great filmmakers (Bresson, Kurosawa) started out as painters, and retained an interest in the art-form. But there is perhaps a richer and more fascinating lineage of acclaimed visual artists who have taken up movie cameras in order to work in celluloid. James Mottram profiles and talks to an illustrious selection of leading contemporary artists who have turned in acclaimed debut features during 2008.

Ever since Salvador Dali teamed up with Luis Buñuel for the infamous Un Chien Andalou (1929), artists have frequently used celluloid as their canvas, and to striking effect. For a recent example, Julian Schnabel has seemed to become Hollywood’s unofficial artist-in-residence, the studios extending their patronage to him in return for the cachet that derives from working with such a luminary of the New York art world.

Brooklyn-born Schnabel, who began his directorial career with the 1996 biopic of his late contemporary Jean-Michel Basquiat, made a considerable leap as a filmmaker in 2007 with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This deeply affecting true-life story of stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric), primarily shot from Bauby’s viewpoint, provided a unique perspective into the character’s mind as he confronted the prospect of lifelong paralysis.

A shot from Douglas Gordon and Philippe
Parreno's film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

Schnabel’s direction of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was Oscar-nominated; and yet ordinarily, perhaps, one wouldn’t expect visual artists to make an entirely seamless crossover into mainstream cinema. We tend to look to an artist to lead us to a new “way of seeing”: while most moviemakers (and most movie audiences) tend to abide by very familiar time-based codes and conventions, we always slightly hope that the artist will explode these and astonish us outright, just as Buñuel and Dali assaulted their viewers by the application of a barber’s straight razor in the celebrated opening of Un Chien Andalou.

British cinema has lately seen quite a number of visual artists making their bold voices heard through film. Take Douglas Gordon’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, co-directed with Philippe Parreno. By training eighteen different cameras on one legendary footballer’s movements (and non-movements) during the 90 minutes of a Spanish La Liga game between Villareal and Zidane’s Real Madrid, Gordon and Parreno achieved an end result that was half sports portrait, half art installation – an impression cemented when the film, on top of its theatrical cinema release, was also exhibited in the Scottish National Gallery and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “I think one of the things Philippe and I shared immediately,” says Gordon, “was an intrigue about ways of looking at specific things, ways of looking at what seems to be familiar, by altering your viewpoint.”

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Steve McQueen directs Hunger

Working in film, visual artists as diverse as Gordon or Schnabel can offer us a sharply different perspective on subjects we imagine we can recognize at first sight. In the case of Steve McQueen’s newly released debut feature, Hunger, a stark depiction of the infamous IRA hunger strikes in Belfast’s Maze prison in 1981, the Turner Prize-winning artist does this by daring to break with cinematic grammar. “In art, what you are doing is trying to create form,” says McQueen. “In cinema, form already exists. [Your film is] a variation on the form and what you’re trying to do is subvert the form.” McQueen achieves this most notably by putting at the core of his film a 23-minute seated dialogue between IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a concerned, politicized priest (Liam Cunningham).

This scene features one staggering 17-minute continuous take, the camera staying static: for the audience member, as McQueen puts it, “you become the camera.” Allowing the audience to study the scene as if it were hanging on a gallery wall, this bold stroke is not the only occasion in the film where McQueen’s artistic instincts impact upon the narrative. Take the hypnotic shots of Republican prisoners’ excrement smeared on their cell walls – this the defining act of their “dirty protest” against the refusal of the prison authorities to treat them as “political prisoners.” As McQueen shoots them, these swirls of human ordure are patterned to look like crop circles. A sly comment on the validity of conceptual art? A fascination with the body and its gross primal functions? Whatever the artist’s intentions, this is not the sort of imagery to be found in the traditional Hollywood studio biopic.

Turner Prize-winning artist and
filmmaker Jeremy Deller

Just as exhilarating as Hunger, albeit in a very different way, is The Posters Came From The Walls, a documentary about the worldwide fan following of the British band Depeche Mode, co-directed by Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams. Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004, has never been too far away from film in his work. In 2001 he conceived The Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of one of the most violent confrontations between police and demonstrators during Britain’s 1984-85 miners’ strike, and the event was in turn documented on film by Mike Figgis. “I think everyone is interested is making film, like everyone wants to write a book,” says Deller. “And artists deal with video all the time, so it’s not too much of a leap. Film is a very good way of getting into a situation, and finding things and meeting people.”

Which is exactly what The Posters Came From The Walls is all about. Though commissioned by Depeche Mode’s label, Mute Records, with no direct contact made with the band during production, it emerges as something far more profound than a promotional tool. Rather than follow the traditional route of most music films – in what Deller calls “a selection of stories” – the film touches down in various locations where the band’s mythology has been built up. Yet despite visiting the Hansa Studios in Berlin (where their 1986 album Black Celebration was recorded) or the Rose Bowl in Pasadena (where the 1988 concert recorded and later released as the live album 101 took place) this is no potted history of a band that has sold 75 million albums worldwide.

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Depeche Mode fandom in Deller and
Nicholas Abrams' The Posters Came From
The Walls

Rather, it is a unique study of obsession and fandom stretching from Basildon, Essex, from whence the band hail, to Russia, the USA, and even Iran. On the subject of what Deller calls the “transformative power of music,” he and Abrahams tread a fine line by featuring fans whose faith and devotion might well be regarded by most as laughable. One German family – who proclaim, “Our hobby is Depeche Mode” – all regularly dress up like the band, a trait Deller sees as eccentric but endearing. “People who are obsessed with football, who follow their teams around Britain and dress their kids up in kit – no one bats an eyelid. But as soon as you get into a band with that level of obsession, you’re a weirdo. It’s just a different set of standards for people who are into music.”

As a prize-winning artist, Deller knows something of being hero-worshipped; but what makes Depeche Mode such a fascinating choice for a documentary of this kind is the irony of how the band has failed to generate such levels of obsession in their native country. “They’re still saddled with this ‘1980s band’ thing in Britain,” says Deller, “and they’re seen as a bit of a joke.” Yet in Eastern Europe, their following is fanatical, partly because the release of the band’s seminal 1990 album Violator came shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, providing a soundtrack of sorts for those released from Communist rule. Moreover it is a truism – according to one Russian lady whom the filmmakers encounter – that prophets are frequently alienated in their own country, which is why the English will never be able to understand Depeche Mode in the way Russians can…

Certainly the idea that a band so ardently admired elsewhere are shunned in their own land must appeal to an artist like Deller, who is arguably better known in Europe and America than in the UK. Likewise, it’s clear that Deller sees the fans as artists in their own right – whether it be Masha, the teenager whose sketchbook is full of imagined scenarios with her and the band, or the entrepreneurial East Berliners who created hand-painted button badges to sell because official merchandise was unavailable before the Wall came down. As Deller puts it, the film “might help to explain Depeche Mode’s importance to people in the UK – that they have this cultural significance around the world that not many bands have”. In other words - and like Schnabel, Gordon, McQueen and others before him – he’s asking us to look at the familiar with fresh eyes.

James Mottram is a London-based freelance film based in who has written for numerous outlets including The Independent, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Mirror and The Times. He has written six books, including two published by Faber & Faber, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood and The Making of Memento.