Two-Way Mirror: Francis Bacon and the Deformation of Film

Abstract

Although in the 1950s, when his reputation was first becoming internationally established, Francis Bacon was the subject of passionate disagreement and his work treated with suspicion by advocates of both realism and abstraction,1 there has—since some time in the 1960s, with the advent of Pop Art and other postmodern turns in the art world—come to be considerable critical and interpretive consensus around the importance of his work and recognition of the part played in it by photography and film. Bacon’s vivid experience of photographs and films is reflected in his conception and realization of a figurative oeuvre that is not illustration, that, stripped of narrative, yet registers the force of time and, rejecting sensationalism and explicit metaphoric content, conveys visceral sensation and psychosexual disturbances. As Sam Hunter noted in 1952, implicitly connecting Bacon’s use of photography to continental philosophical pre-occupations,2 “Bacon has a Bergsonian horror of the static. Consequently he has tried to quicken the nervous pulse of painting by moving it closer to the optical and psychological sources of movement and action in life.” (Hunter, 1952, 13) Yet the general understanding of Bacon’s engagement with photographic artifacts and the cinema is missing something: investigation of how Bacon’s apprehension of the cinematic and his figuration of time was not only inspired by photos and motion pictures, but also achieved a kind of paradoxically static cinema, or cinematic stasis, and has in turn since found an inheritance in motion pictures.