Projections and Reflections : MOCA’s ‘Hall of Mirrors’ looks at art’s impact on film, cinema’s influence on artists and the unpredictable results when the two worlds collide.

The relationship between fine art and movies has always been an uneasy one. Avant-garde films are invariably banished to the cult circuit, mainstream movies dismiss high art as pretentious mumbo-jumbo, and the hard-core art crowd sneers at big box-office films as strictly for boobs. (Mind you, we refer here primarily to the decades prior to ‘80s post-modernism, which made every manifestation of culture part of one big, happy family.)

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” a romantic thriller set in the psychoanalytic community, is a case in point. Released in 1945, the film was seen in its day as incredibly sophisticated because it featured a dream sequence with imagery designed by Salvador Dali. Of course, Dali’s fellow Surrealist, Man Ray, would’ve been a much hipper choice for this gig, particularly since Dali was a shameless careerist available to the highest bidder, and he’d pretty much been disowned by the art world by that point. To movie people, however, Dali was a real artist, and the curtain painted with giant eyeballs he made for Hitchcock was culture with a capital C.

“For evidence of how far behind the arts Hollywood always is, look no further than the dream sequence in ‘Spellbound,’ ” says experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, one of 100 artists and filmmakers featured in “Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945,” an exhibition opening today at MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary that explores the relationship between art and film. “It reduced what even Dali was capable of to a very crude level and was obviously a piece of junk, yet it’s regarded as a high moment in Hollywood movies.”

What constitutes a piece of junk is apparently debatable, however. Artist John Baldessari, who’s based much of his work on film stills and created an installation for “Hall of Mirrors,” says, “For me, the high point of this exhibition will be Dali’s backdrop from ‘Spellbound.’ ” (The backdrop, which measures 17 feet by 38 feet, is on loan to MOCA from Marius Olbrychowski, a local collector.)

This exchange gives some idea of the can of worms curator Kerry Brougher is opening with this show, which is organized in three roughly chronological sections.

The first section explores the cultural loss of innocence that followed World War II, which led to a self-consciousness in film, and the dismantling of the traditional relationship between film and viewer. The second section looks at reductivist strategies of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, which saw the production of a flurry of works examining the origins of optical devices involved with film (the projector, film strip and screen, etc.). This section also looks at themes of psychoanalysis and voyeurism, which Brougher feels have been key to much art and film created since 1945. The last section explores the current tendency for both filmmakers and artists whose work draws on film to relate to movies of the past with an ambivalent mixture of irony and nostalgia.

“Film is presented in the show in various ways,” Brougher explains during a meeting at MOCA. “There are installations incorporating film by Carolee Schneemann, John Baldessari, Michael Snow, Judith Barry, Douglas Gordon, Chris Marker and Raul Ruiz, among others. We’re also building a theater in the [museum] where we’ll screen Stan Brakhage’s ‘Text of Light,’ a film shot completely in an ashtray, John Whitney’s ‘Catalog’ and Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetee,’ which takes film into the realm of photography in that it’s made almost entirely from still images. And, of course, we’ll screen clips throughout the show.”

Central to Brougher’s interpretation of cultural history is the belief that “a generation of artists and filmmakers came of age in the ‘50s who’d grown up with movies. It wasn’t a novelty to them, and that enabled them to ask questions like: What is film? How has it affected our lives? Is it as glamorous as we thought it was?

“For instance, the photographer Weegee came to Hollywood in 1947 and shot irreverent pictures that were published in his book, ‘Naked Hollywood.’ We’ll show some of Weegee’s pictures next to images from the Billy Wilder film ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and assemblages by Bruce Conner that pay homage to movie stars. This part of the show explores the creepy quagmire of Hollywood, and it includes work by Mimmo Rotella, whose collages of the ‘50s were made from movie posters he tore off of walls, Ray Johnson’s images of movie stars from the ‘50s, and a clip from Kenneth Anger’s ‘Scorpio Rising,’ a film that approached the idea of the icon in a highly original way for its time.”

Continuing in this vein is artist Barbara Bloom’s “Homage to Jean Seberg,” a piece made in 1980 shortly after the actress died. “Seberg is best known for her performance in ‘Breathless,’ where she plays an innocent American girl in Paris who works selling the Herald Tribune on the street, then gets corrupted by a gangster,” Bloom says. “During the ‘70s, Seberg was tormented by the FBI [for her involvement with the Black Panther Party], and when I heard she’d committed suicide I thought, ‘My God--she’s gonna be on the cover of the Herald Tribune.’ I thought that was the saddest thing, the circle of her life closing that way, and the real world and the film world coming together so tragically, so I got a copy of the Tribune with her picture on the front page and reprinted it next to an image of her selling the paper in ‘Breathless.’ ”

The section of the show dealing with psychoanalysis and voyeurism includes artist Annette Messager’s “Chimeras” (Hitchcockian collages incorporating film stills), numerous movie clips (including several from films by Alfred Hitchcock, including “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” “Psycho” and “Spellbound”) and that controversial Dali backdrop.

But as would be expected, not all artists and filmmakers see psychoanalytic theory--and specifically, ideas associated with Freud--as a primary influence.

Filmmaker Brakhage insists, for example, that “Freud had a huge impact on the arts--the Surrealist movement, for instance, is almost entirely based on his ideas, and his theories still hold water for me.”

“Everybody was into Freud in the ‘50s,” agrees Baldessari, who nevertheless adds “but those ideas had no meaning for me then.”

British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, best known for his 1989 film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (he’s represented in another section of the show with a clip from his 1991 film “Prospero’s Books”), observes, “Freud got all the hares running, but his ideas have been reconsidered in recent years and found to be faulty in many areas.”

Cindy Sherman declares that “none of that was important to me because my work has never been generated by any kind of theory,” while British Pop artist Richard Hamilton says he deplores “analyzing art in psychoanalytic terms.”

If there’s a sinister edge to the work in the show with voyeuristic and psychoanalytic themes, it is tempered here by more lyrical works such as Robert Frank’s ‘50s photographs of drive-ins, Edward Hopper’s haunting painting of “New York Movie” (1939) and the late Diane Arbus’ recently published photographs of ‘50s movie house interiors.

Also in a gentler vein is the area of the show dealing with the cinematic use of the tableau vivant, which slowed film down and intensified its relationship to painting. Clips here include a scene from Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which re-creates a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” which has a sequence based on a painting by William Hogarth.

Brougher says that “Andy Warhol also turns up here because his films slowed movies down to the point that it became an unchanging still image. We’re screening Warhol’s ‘Empire’--all eight hours of it, every day--surrounded by several of his paintings.”

On the subject of time and film, Greenaway points out that “Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ is one of the most intelligent films ever made in the way it deals with the confusion of chronology and a confabulation of tenses, but few people picked up on that when it was first released, because cinema has a poverty-stricken understanding of notions of simultaneity. It’s always been locked into the idea that only one image can be presented at a time.”

By contrast, narrative line and chronology aren’t terribly important parts of the moviegoing experience for an artist like Edward Ruscha, who’s represented here by an early painting of the back of the Hollywood sign, as well as several recent works based on film stills. “Not every movie has something for me in terms of story, but they all interest me in purely physical terms, and I tend to experience movies as celluloid light projections. I like the scratches on the film and when a hair gets in the projector, and in 1975 I made a painting titled ‘Scratches on the Film.’ I also did some panoramic landscapes that were vaguely inspired by panoramic screens. I’d walk into theaters and think, ‘Wow, what an idea!’ Even if the movie’s no good, that screen is worth the price of admission.”

Inarguably, film has an element of spectacle most visual art can’t begin to approach, and Greenaway predicts “film will take over this exhibition because the moving image has so much more going for it than the still image. At the same time, cinema has always been woefully behind the arts in other ways. If you look at what happened in literature and art during the last hundred years, you see enormous jumps in attitude and language that simply aren’t there in cinema--Martin Scorsese is making basically the same film D.W. Griffith made.

“Painting has always been the first to get to new terrain because it’s a one-to-one experience between one man and his canvas,” Greenaway adds. “Compare that with movie making, where even the most modestly budgeted film is a huge collaboration--inevitably it’s gonna go in a different direction and travel much slower.”

Painters may be the first to arrive at the new frontier, but for Richard Hamilton--who launched his career in the ‘60s with raucous collages of Pop imagery--it was film that provided the signposts along the way. “Film played a huge role in shaping my sensibility as a visual artist,” he recalls. “I came of age as an artist at a point when art was dominated by abstraction. I felt abstraction threw the baby out with the bathwater, however, and that something that had always been crucial to art--the idea of myth and the figurative imagination--was still important. Christian imagery kept artists going for centuries, and the Greeks had their mythology, both of which resulted in great art. Every society needs a visual language that takes human relationships to a mythical level, and that’s why I turned to film. I was searching for the myths that had been drained from art by Abstract Expressionism.”

Photographer Cindy Sherman--who’s represented in the show with a series of self portraits impersonating various actresses--had a similar experience. “As an art student I was disillusioned with what was going on in the art world so I began looking to film for inspiration. Hitchcock was important for me then, as were Michelangelo Antonioni, lots of Italian and French films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller.

“Fuller I liked because his heroines were always bizarre, and Sirk’s films were so melodramatic and overblown they were like caricatures of themselves. My involvement with those kinds of films probably led indirectly to the film stills,” says Sherman, who’s preparing to direct her first movie, a low-budget horror film that shoots this fall in New York.

Artist Bloom has no plans to make a film, but she says that “film permeates everything I do in the most complex ways, and the biggest influences on my work have been people like Antonioni, Godard and Warhol. In the early ‘80s, I worked on several scripts and planned to make a film because I loved the fact that film takes place in time. But I abandoned the attempt to make a film around 1985 because the pleasure of being able to make something without having to convince lots of other people of its greatness before it’s even been made was just too tempting. Still, I continue to carry hundreds of films in my head.

“Last year the New York Times invited me to participate in a project where they invited artists to redesign U.S. currency,” she adds. “What I made looked like real money, but I’d actually slipped images of scenes involving money from several films into the background. That seemed the logical thing to do because in asking myself the question, what is our culture, I immediately knew the answer. It is film.”

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“Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays to Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Closed Mondays. Ends July 28.