On the significance in the landscape representation on the cinematographic matte painting. Proposal for a classification

Abstract

Matte painting, a technique for elaborating cinematographic scenarios by pictorial means, houses one of the most active and sophisticated relationships of all those established between cinema and painting. However, paradoxically, a phenomenon such as singular and complex as this, halfway between the genuinely pictorial and the purely cinematographic, has not received enough treatment by theoretical or academic research so far. In the present article we leave aside its status as effect, as a logistic resource for the film production, and we intend to contemplate the way in which it is capable of supporting an analysis as a pictorial artwork in its own right. A vindication that confronts us to the suggestive perspective of placing the study of these cinematographic shots in relation to the significance of the pictorial text they carry. This way, contemplating matte painting as a pictorial text, as a landscape painting submerged inside the film medium, will allow us to propose an analysis about the intentionality and attitude of the author in this communication process and how this meaning is transmitted to the viewer, supporting our study in the existing tools from the landscape photography analysis.