It All Started With Vermeer : MOVING PICTURES <i> by Anne Hollander (Alfred A. Knopf: $29.95; 295 pp.) </i>

With great erudition and intellectual facility, Anne Hollander argues in “Moving Pictures” that motion pictures are rooted in the visual art of the Dutch and Flemish genre painters of the 17th Century and their impact, in turn, upon artists as diverse as Tiepolo, Piranesi, Canaletto, Hogarth, Goya, Turner, Whistler, and others. For Hollander, movies have less to do with the history of photography--with its presentation of reality “congealed in an aspic of perfect details”--than with the properties of light and motion inherent in the Dutch paintings. Hollander posits the idea that the images of a Vermeer, a Rembrandt, a Van Eyck, in their ambiguous drama of everyday life served directly and indirectly (through graphic reproductions of these paintings) as sources for 20th-Century film directors and cinematographers.

The important distinction for Hollander is that these painters--unlike the great artists of the Italian Renaissance who created more painterly works of art and focused their viewers’ attentions upon “the interplay of color, the accord of shapes and volumes, the poetry of line, or . . . the dazzling array of visible strokes dealt by a masterly wrist”--created an engulfing art, an art that “comes to claim the viewer, acknowledging no barrier between the action and his inner life.”

The one is theatrical, while the Dutch paintings and their tradition are essentially dramatic; and so, too, according to Hollander, are films innately dramatic, being works of art based on a sequence of light that ask the viewer not to “read” them, but to become immersed in them, sustaining “a drama of imminent disclosure and incipient revelation.”

Movies, accordingly--that is, “good” movies, good in the way that the Dutch interiors are good--engage the viewer in a seemingly endless drama of visual messages that function just as “real” experience, a series of subjective images and actions that weave themselves into the individual consciousness. We cannot “read” a film any more than we can “read” the meaning of life.

For anyone who has seen Vermeer’s “The Girl With a Red Hat” at the National Gallery of Art of Washington, or George de la Tour’s “Magdalen With the Smoking Flame,” at the County Museum of Art, and has observed how like a movie still these paintings are, Hollander’s argument seems to make sense. And one immediately recognizes the relation of such paintings to particular films by directors as diverse as Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman and David Lean.

On the other hand, for anyone who has seen more than a dozen movies, the comparisons immediately begin to disintegrate. For one quickly recalls that one of the central structural elements of cinema--particularly of American cinema--is the “play within the film.” From the Marx Brothers’ comedies to “An American in Paris,” from Melies’ early films straight through to the hundreds of Hollywood studio musicals and comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, one of the major elements of motion pictures has been staged productions, theatrical tableaux that break the continuous action of psychological immersion and display instead their own formal and narrative meanings.

Whether or not such “interruptions” are “inconsistent” with the medium (as Siegfried Kracauer argues in “Theory of Film”) or not, they are a dominant aspect of film making and one of its major structural devices. And no matter how one finally judges the “accord of shapes and volumes, the poetry of line,” and the dazzling formal displays of a Busby Berkeley chorus, one must admit that it has helped to define and to shape much of today’s cinema.

Perhaps these are simply examples of “bad” film making, films that the art world cannot take seriously. However, we find similar devices in the films of a great director such as Orson Welles. In all of his films, but particularly in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” Welles stops the dramatic action he so brilliantly projects elsewhere with montage and cross-cutting by creating staged tableaux.

Within the many scenes of the Amberson staircase, with the characters listening and whispering. Welles purposely distorts the dramatic reality; through strange camera angles, theatrical lighting and melodramatic acting techniques. Welles calls the viewers’ attention to the scene. Suspending the so-called dramatic action, Welles reminds his audience that they are, after all, witnessing a film, a kind of staged event.

Welles’ roots, one recalls, were in theater. And so, too, have been those of many other directors, who, when they filmed theatrical plays, brought many of the stage’s techniques with them. Even Elia Kazan, a realist at heart, whose body of work might easily be placed in Hollander’s tradition, is overcome by the theatrical in a film such as “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Despite the intense method acting of Marlon Brando, the film turns into an expressionist (and mannerist) frieze when Vivien Leigh takes on Tennessee Williams’ poeticized dialogue: Furniture and set disappear and we are left with a frozen image of romanticized madness as powerful and as painterly as Munch’s “The Scream.”

This “theatrical” tradition has been perpetuated by some of today’s most talented film directors. Francis Ford Coppola’s unsung “musical,” “One From the Heart,” Herbert Ross’ dubbed musical “Pennies From Heaven,” and Alan Rudolph’s “Choose Me” all present the viewer with a more theatrical cinematic art, an art that distances both character and audience from the continuous flow of narrative and permits them to “read” or interpret the preceding action.

Indeed, one might question the whole issue of film being divorced, as it often is by theorists, from literary readings. Certainly, there is a danger--one that Hollander recognizes--when literary types, such as your reviewer, attempt to apply the same critical stratagems of fiction and poetry to film. I well remember when I taught film as a graduate assistant how we were forbidden by the lecturer to discuss the story or dialogue in our sections; everything was camera angles and light. Those, of course, are the functional devices of film; but cinema has always--even in its silent days--been interwoven with language, visual and linguistic. Sitting at the dining table across from Melvyn Douglas, Garbo may remind us, visually, of Vermeer’s red-hatted lady; but for Lubistch and his viewer, hers is not just any hat but the hat, a hat of particular ideological significance; for this hat represents for the Soviet Ninotchka the triviality and corruption of the West. This hat is not simply an accouterment of a young, innocent girl, but is an emblem of Ninotchka’s conversion to capitalist values; the hat atop her head is funny because it represents a moment so joyful--yet so sad.

One of the most exciting aspects of film is its mongrel breeding, encompassing as it does visual art (including photography), theater, literature, dance and music. Hollander’s attempt to place film in the visual art tradition, accordingly, is useful if it is seen as part of the larger story. It is one thing, in short, to say that some film makers have been influenced--consciously or unconsciously--by the Dutch tradition of art and have drawn images and even methodology from these works of art.

But it is quite another thing to claim, as does Hollander, that such art forms both background and foundation for moving pictures. Both visual art (in the guise of Clement Greenberg) and fiction (in the critical statements of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks) have been delimited by notions of their proper lineage. Let film--the young, eccentric genius--stay clear of such claims for its paternity.