Painting on the Silver Screen

It's always the same. There's an interesting film on tv, but I only notice after it has started and miss the first ten or twenty minutes. Last night it was Derek Jarman's Caravaggio.

The film is shot beautifully and uses lots of Caravaggio's famous paintings. The audience is shown Jarman's version of how the paintings were created. Events in Caravaggio's life become paintings and vice versa. Visually stunning.

There's a very sexy and very young Sean Bean in it. Tilda Swinton is amazing. There is much passion and tragedy in the love triangle completed by Nigel Terry as Caravaggio. The acting is intense, very theatrical actually which fits Caravaggio's paintings.

For once I didn't mind too much that I didn't see the original version as dialogue is kept at a minimum - and not missed. There are some poetic deathbed ramblings by Caravaggio off-camera, but I was so taken in by the visuals that I didn't pay much attention to the words. The narrative structure is quite fragmented and the film contains idiosyncracies like typewriters and pocket calculators as well as a narrative strand that seems to be set in 1950s Sicily. Very strange and probably worthy of deeper analysis, but I just enjoyed the photography - and that's what cinema is about.

Anyway, the film has made me appreciate art all over again - now I want to see these paintings for real.

On Thursday The Draughtman's Contract is shown - this is all part of a series of films about painting and let's hope I don't miss that one.