Every media or even television programs teaches us that films are not only for entertainment, but it is also a medium in which all other arts are brought together. From acting, literature, visual arts, dance and music, depending on the implementation, components from these disciplines can be found in a every film. Anyone who works in the film industry, especially in the creative fields and in the directing, should therefore look around the arts to see how they have approached a topic, to which formal and creative solutions they have come to.
It is important to be inspired by photos, paintings, acting or music to find an exciting approach to a film theme that they are making. Especially when you are dealing with a film topic and thinking about your own implementation, it is not advisable to watch other films on the subject. This narrows one’s own creativity, entices you to plagiarism or to steal ideas. But if you look at how the subject has been dealt with in other arts, completely new dimensions are opening up.
Direct Influences
The concepts of many outstanding feature films for the dissolution, the image design or the sound level come from other areas of art – just as film, conversely, has strongly influenced art forms. Even the early silent film classics were influenced by the existing art forms. For example, theatre, historical and contemporary literature, as well as visual arts, had a major influence on many films.
Film history is still familiar with examples of films whose image design was directly oriented towards certain styles or even concrete painter personalities. You can also find Romanticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism or Surrealism in many of the films today.
The music knows various parameters, which also use the film dramaturgy. The dynamics, the structure and the combination of individual scenes determine the rhythm. And also the placement of the smaller highlights up to the big climax at the end finds its parallels in the music. Many interesting film works like a composition with suspense and relaxation.
Filmmakers In Other Arts
Many film directors also deal practically with other areas of art. There are cinematographers who take pictures, draw, or makes music for various films. There are film directors who partly record the music for their films themselves. Many directors are also gifted in the visual arts and have left their mark there, even if it is known to the few. Charles Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein were excellent draftsmen, Fritz Lang was very talented in sculpture. The Indian silent film director Baburao Painter was a stage painter before directing.
Jean Renoir, a great French director and the son of the impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir, grew up with painting and took over motifs of his father in his films. Herbert Achternbusch on the other hand, studied painting in Nuremberg before he became involved in film. Peter Patzak studied painting and art history, Andrzej Wajda and Wojciech Jerzy Has studied painting. Derek Jarman was a painter and Franz Seitz also began as an artist.
Alfred Hitchcock worked as a graphic designer and title designer. As a graphic designer, Terry Gilliam has produced, among other things, all the trick sequences in the legendary “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” episodes. Many film directors were gifted painters like Federico Fellini, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa. Especially with Kurosawa, his enthusiasm for Van Gogh has certainly been reflected in the films by a decidedly colour dramaturgy. Mike Figgis, Stanley Kubrik or Wim Wenders are or were also appreciated for their photography.
Even if filmmakers have no ambitions in the other arts – in the end, almost everyone is in some way required to express their own ideas even before the finished film. Be it in the script, be it in storyboards, scribbles, or layout music for the later film. Movies and arts have come a long way since the beginning. There are many social media platforms and applications like paint by numbers custom which is used for arts.
