Hand painted movie stills: a study of the aesthetics of the cinematographic space in painted scenography

Scenes as vivid in our cinematographic memory as Tara’s views in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), the oppressive sewers in the final sequence of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), the vistas of Rome in Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) or the famous final shot on the beach in Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), all place the viewer, without their awareness, in front of an image produced using the mechanism known as matte painting. It is a resource to which cinema has turned with considerable frequency over the course of its history, albeit one which has received little to no analytical attention from film studies. With a view to redressing this omission, this essay will aim to create a conceptual framework within which a rigorous analysis of this technique can be carried out in the context of film aesthetics. For this, it will be useful to start by reviewing the existing definitions of this term and proposing not one but two updated ones. This will then allow us to conceptualize this practice as a mechanism for assembling spaces, employing analytical tools used for editing in order to understand the way in which matte painting performs its unique construction of the cinematographic space.

那些铭刻于我们电影记忆中的经典场景——如《乱世佳人》（Gone with the Wind，维克多·弗莱明，1939）中塔拉庄园的景致、《第三人》（The Third Man，卡罗尔·里德，1949）结尾段落里压抑逼仄的下水道场景、《宾虚》（Ben-Hur，威廉·惠勒，1959）中罗马的壮阔全景，以及《人猿星球》（Planet of the Apes，富兰克林·J·夏夫纳，1968）片尾那处著名的海滩镜头——均在观众毫无察觉的情况下，将他们置于一幅运用遮罩绘画（matte painting）技术制作的影像之前。遮罩绘画是电影发展历程中被频繁采用的创作手法，但影视研究领域却极少甚至未曾对其展开系统性分析。为弥补这一研究空白，本文旨在搭建一套概念框架，以便在电影美学的语境下对该技术展开严谨的分析。为此，本文将首先梳理该术语的现有定义，并提出两套而非一套的修订版定义。在此基础上，我们可将这一创作实践视作空间搭建的机制，并借助剪辑领域的分析工具，探究遮罩绘画如何构建出独具特色的电影空间。