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Two-Way Mirror: Francis Bacon

and the Deformation of Film
Susan Felleman

“I would have been a film director if I hadn’t been a

painter.”
—Francis Bacon (Archimbaud, 1993, 16)

Although in the 1950s, when his reputation was first becoming inter-
nationally 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 sen-
sationalism 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: inves-
tigation 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.
Although the parallels, echoes, reflections, and citations of Bacon’s
work to be seen in motion pictures have been occasionally noted,
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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2012
222 Two-Way Mirror

and sometimes explored with great sensitivity, this afterlife has been
insufficiently connected to the photographic and cinematic ancestry of
that work itself and its inherently cinematic ambitions: its visceral and
psychological force, violence, and eroticism. Not only did the paintings
themselves aspire to these conditions of cinema, but their presentation
also assured it. Bacon insisted that his paintings be exhibited glazed.
When one sees one of his typically monumental canvases in a museum
or gallery display, one sees a ghostly moving picture at the same time:
the reflection of oneself and others moving about the space of the gal-
lery. This reflection may be a familiar attribute of the experience of
old master paintings in museums, but the theatrical spaces of Bacon’s
pictures—in which the figures are often isolated against passages of
solid ground—assures that the corporeal incorporation of the viewer
and reflections of movement are palpable.
This phenomenological, embodied experience of moving images falls
beyond the purview of most art historical discourse, while the material
properties (scale, texture, framing, glazing, etc.) and experience of the
paintings are comparably irrelevant for most film scholars. So Bacon
is the meeting point of a sort of mutual disciplinary incomprehen-
sion, or an interdisciplinary schizophrenia. Art history has attended
exhaustively to the cine- and photographic sources of Bacon’s oeuvre,
but has almost nothing to say about his impact on moving pictures.
Ironically, some film studies have themselves regarded Bacon as little
more than a source, noting the citations of and iconographic, atmos-
pheric, compositional, or chromatic borrowings from his paintings,
but not connecting these with the cinematic intentions that inhere in
them. The discipline—lately in the grip of widespread enthusiasm for
the theories of Gilles Deleuze—may sense the potential film theoretical
implications of his philosophical tract on Bacon but does not generally
attend to the work or, more importantly, to the continuity between it
and the cinemas that informed and followed from it.
Entire essays and books have concerned Bacon’s relationship to
the camera. Dawn Ades, a foremost scholar of Dada and surrealism—
movements for which photography was central, was among the first
to explore this relationship in an exhibition catalogue essay, “Web of
Images” (1985). “Photographs are a different kind of visual source,” she
wrote, “and this is because of their status as record, as fact, or history.
Bacon was intrigued by the ‘candid camera’ snaps of famous people in
unguarded moments that became a source of popular amusement in the
1930s, and has also ‘used’ news photographs, photographs from wild-life
studies, from medical books, polyphotos of himself [that is, photobooth