The Suspended Spectacle of History
This chapter examines both the history of the tableau vivant as an art form and its remarkable revival in the cinema of the late twentieth century. At once a quotation of an existing work of art and an always imperfect copy, the tableau vivant recognizes the persistent power of the original but transforms or parodies its source, creating something new even when it returns to old and familiar models. The chapter charts the development of a cinema of painters in the late twentieth century and identifies the tableau as one of its key strategies precisely because it exists at the threshold between citation and innovation. Focusing on the work of Jean-Luc Godard and especially Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio, it emphasizes the archaeological and social possibilities of this return to painting, as filmmakers confront both the aging of cinema and the necessity of radical historical models in a moment of political retrenchment.