The Making of Henry Moore on Film: A Cultural History

2017 | Film & TV

Art historians have recognised the relationship between photography and sculpture as a fertile ground for the study of sculpture's intermedial relations. In the case of Henry Moore, the role of photography (both as source material and form of documentation) has recently become a new terrain for researching and interpreting his work. Film, however, remains absent from Moore scholarship. Focusing on four films about Moore's sculpture in the 1940s and 1950s, The Making of Henry Moore on Film: A Cultural History considers how these films broke new ground in the specialised genre of the "film on art," which throve in these decades. Katerina Loukopoulou places the relationship between sculpture and film within the relevant historical and cultural contexts of post-war Britain (1945-1959), the period during which Moore's public identity was consolidated. The book draws on extensive archival research in the production files of these films and on detailed contextual research (press cuttings, periodicals, festival pamphlets) of contemporaneous writings about the remediation of works of art and about the reception of these films on Moore.

By revealing overlooked aspects of what these films stood for at this historical conjuncture, Loukopoulou examines the specific aesthetic and political meanings of Moore's sculpture as explored by each film.

Katerina Loukopoulou (Author)