In its earliest years of existence, cinema seems to have been fascinated by stasis and stillness. As if emphasizing its capacity to represent movement, early cinema comprises many scenes in which moving people interact with static paintings and sculptures. Moreover, films made shortly before and after 1900 often make explicit the contrast between the new medium of film and the traditional arts by means of the motif of the statue or the painting coming to life. In so doing, early film continued a form of popular entertainment that combined the art of the theater with those of painting and sculpture, namely the tableau vivant, or living picture. Focusing on the trick films of Georges Méliès and the early erotic films by the Viennese Saturn Company, this chapter reveals the importance and continuity of nineteenth-century motifs and traditions with regard to tableaux vivants as they were presented on the legitimate stage, in magic, in vaudeville, and in burlesque.

Living Statues in Moving Pictures

Tableaux vivants were certainly not always reproductions of famous paint¬ings, and they could be labeled with a variety of terms when billed, even if this meant a change in medium (from painting to sculpture), such as: living pictures, living statues, attitudes, poses plastiques, statues vivants, Venetian statues, Grecian statues, living statuary, tableaux, or marbres vivants. Many of these terms were, and still are, used synonymously. “Tableau vivant” is most commonly and generally used to denote the freezing of movement in a scene or on itself, be it on a stage or on a screen, to create an image that possesses the static qualities of a painting, whether symbolically, metaphorically, narra¬tively, aesthetically, or all of the above. Despite its variety, McCullough iden¬tified a few established conventions. Classic statuary and familiar paintings were top subjects, but these were complemented by recreations of literary and historical scenes.

There's poetry in wax. From Pygmalion's ivory Galatea turning waxen to the touch, to the anatomical Venuses strewn erotically across the halls of La Specola in Florence, or wax mannequins melting slowly on celluloid, the haptic nature of the medium is intrinsically uncanny. Lifelike statues have been haunting our visual history for centuries, and as Kenneth Gross has aptly remarked, the idea of a statue coming to life could be bound to the opposing thought: that the statue was once something living. It is precisely this tension that lies at the heart of a number of films inspired by the wax museum and its mostly static inhabitants. This cultural phenomenon was made most famous by Madame Tussaud, who by the end of the eighteenth century had risen to fame crafting wax counterparts of notorious individuals. The wax creations’ semblance of life has unnerved visitors ever since, and cinema was quick to pick up on the mysteries of the wax museum, trying its best to transfer the magic of the medium to celluloid.

This chapter deals with the adaptation of the wax museum and its wax models to cinema, analyzing how the specificity of the medium and its visceral tropes have enjoyed a popular second life on the silver screen, in films such as Maurice Tourneur's eerie 1914 Figures de Cire, Michael Curtiz's canonical 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum and Sergio Stivaletti's gore-filled giallo, M.D.C. – Maschera di cera (The Wax Mask, 1997). Featuring the recurrent character of the mad artist, these films play with the tensions between flesh and wax and turn death and sexuality into an inherent part of the sculptural process.

Shaping the Museum

The visceral qualities that wax possesses were not first ascribed to it by its incorporation in the horror genre, nor are they indebted solely to the efforts of Madame Tussaud; rather, they can be found in the organic material itself since it is secreted by plants and insects – most notably bees. Wax modeling was an ancient practice dating back as far as 3000 bc, but it only started to take on a more figurative shape in Florence between the thirteenth and sev¬enteenth centuries, when a true cult of votive offerings created an industry in wax.

Vito Adriaensens

As sculpture is the classical art par excellence, statues abound in films set in Greek or Roman antiquity. Moreover, many of the mythological tropes involving sculptures that have persisted on the silver screen have their origins in classical antiquity: the Ovidian account of a Cypriot sculp¬tor named Pygmalion who falls in love with his ivory creation and sees it bestowed with life by Venus, Hephaistos's deadly automatons, the petrifying gaze of the Medusa, and divine sculptural manifestation, or agalmatophany, for instance. This chapter investigates the myths of the living statue as they originated in Greek and Roman literary art histories and found their way to the screen. It will do so by tracing the art-historical form and func¬tion of classical statuary to the cinematic representation of living statues in a broad conception of antiquity. The cinematic genre in which mythic sculptures thrive is that of the sword-and-sandal or peplum film, where a Greco-Roman or ersatz classical context provides the perfect backdrop for spectacular special effects, muscular heroes, and fantastic mythologi¬cal creatures. The 1960s and 1970s proved a fruitful breeding ground, with stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen contributing heavily to the success¬ful animation of mythical statues in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1973), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (Sam Wanamaker, 1977), and Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davis, 1981); and after a second wave in the 1980s with sword-and-sorcery films such as Conan the Destroyer (Richard Fleischer, 1984), the trend surfaced once again in the 2010s with the action-packed Perseus chronicle Clash of the Titans (Louis Leterrier, 2010) and Wrath of the Titans (Jonathan Liebesman, 2012), and the teen updates Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (Chris Columbus, 2010) and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (Thor Freudenthal, 2013).

Dust to Marble

Lynda Nead has pointed out that the dream of motion has haunted visual arts from the classical period to the present, and the same can be said of the literature that spawned many of these visual representations. The fascination for breathing life into the lifeless is, of course, as old as time itself.

Vito Adriaensens and Lisa Colpaert

The following pages make up a sculpture gallery featuring a selection of 150 sculptures that play noteworthy parts in the plots or mise-en-scène of films. This selection of works and films represents the major themes and tropes that frame the encounter of sculpture and cinema. The gallery is not an exhaustive one, but rather a personal selection of works and films that we find especially interesting, chosen from a considerably longer list and focused on European and American cinema. These entries resonate with the first part of the book and also complement it, including some cin¬ematic statues found in film genres and periods that were not the focus of previous chapters, thereby providing a historical overview of key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculptures. The gallery primarily includes many fic¬tional sculptures that were made especially for films, but it also showcases a number of existing works. Some of these are the main subjects of canonical art documentaries and experimental films, including Les Statues meurent aussi (Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953), L‘Enfer de Rodin (Henri Alekan, 1957), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (Maya Deren, 1946). Animating static artworks by means of camera movement, lighting, editing, and music, these films suggest that cinema is the perfect medium for the exploration and visualization of sculptural volumes, which can be perceived from various or shifting viewpoints.

This gallery also includes some “real” sculptures that play an impor¬tant role in fiction films. Often, these are iconic statues, such as: Frédéric Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel's 1886 Statue of Liberty, which is scaled in the epic closing scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) and taken for a spin around Manhattan in Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman, 1989); Gutzon and Lincoln Borglum's Mount Rushmore National Memorial (1927–41), the location of another suspenseful altercation in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959); and the Vorontsov Palace marble lions (c.1830) – modeled in part after the Medici lions – that were immortalized and animated by Sergei Eisenstein's montage in Battleship Potemkin (1925). Such “real” statues retain their real world connotations but are also somewhat fictionalized when integrated into cinematic narrative.