Project: Paul Haesaerts and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti: A Comparative Study of Experimental Art Documentaries in Belgium and Italy (1940-1965)

2018-10-01 – 2022-12-31

Abstract

Focusing on European art documentaries made in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, this research
project aims at investigating two of its key figures, who were both leading art historians, critics,
and filmmakers: Paul Haesaerts and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Both Haesaerts and Ragghianti
attempted to translate the disciplines of art history and art criticism into film, using various
cinematic devices to analyse the formal aspects of artworks. Strikingly, in spite of their important
role in the field of the post-war art documentary in Europe and their great impact on the
development of the art documentary as an independent genre, the works and writings by
Haesaerts and Ragghianti are understudied.
As a comparative study of the art documentaries by Paul Haesaerts and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti,
this research project has two main ambitions: (1) it investigates how Haesaerts and Ragghianti,
with their concepts of “cinéma critique” and “critofilm” respectively, can be situated in the
evolution of the experimental art documentary, and (2) it aims to demonstrate how both scholarscum-
filmmakers developed new models of art historical scholarship by using cinema. Given this
perspective, this project also investigates the contributions of Haesaerts and Ragghianti to the
developments of the critical discipline of art history and art historiography.