Visual Arts

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A still from the Philip Haas film, The Butcher Shop

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Malcolm Warner, acting director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, was sitting at his desk last September when an e-mail popped up on his screen. It came from film director Philip Haas (Angels and Insects , The Situation).

Mr. Haas was proposing an unusual idea: He hoped to pay his first visit to the Kimbell and create a feature film based on a painting in its collection.

"He sent what must have been a kind of shot in the dark," Mr. Warner says with a laugh.

That shot in the dark became a 7 ½-minute short subject based on Annibale Carracci's 1582 early baroque painting The Butcher Shop. Mr. Haas envisioned the project as an attempt to inhabit the world of the painting and the artist who conceived it.

"My idea was basically to take a work of art in a collection and to make a film out of it, not a documentary but a film that would in some way reflect on the work of art, make it kind of an emotional experience, make it visceral, make it exciting in a way that would appeal to a great variety of people that ordinarily might not go into a museum."

Mr. Haas says he was intrigued and moved by a profound sense of melancholy in the work of Carraci, which reminded him of Francis Bacon, one of his favorites, and even Rembrandt.

The idea was not so much "targeting the uninitiated," he says, but "to make that experience of looking at a painting, in this case The Butcher Shop, something that would match the equivalent of the excitement of a film. I think people who go to museums all the time have a sense of what a painting can do. With a film, we could get out of the art-historical reference and make it something that was immediate – that didn't feel like you were taking medicine."

The film will be shown for the first time April 17 at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York City. A date for a screening at the Kimbell has not been determined.

"I think Philip homed in on the Kimbell because he felt it had the right combination of great works of art that would lend themselves to what he wanted to do and a great building, because he would like to see his movie shown in the Kimbell as an installation," Mr. Warner says.

He has done nothing less, Mr. Warner says, than take the Carracci painting "as a starting point for an imaginative creation of his own that will encourage our visitors to use the same sort of imaginative approach when they look at that painting and maybe others in the collection, too."

Mr. Haas is a great admirer of the late architect Louis I. Kahn, who designed the Kimbell, and says "the combination of the building's architectural splendor, the collection and then Malcolm, who's been a real pleasure to work with," made it an endearing project.

Mr. Haas actually ended up with two movies, running simultaneously on a pair of screens, with the audience in the middle. He considered at least two other paintings in the collection but seized on The Butcher Shop because of its subject matter, which he called "pretty visceral, no pun intended. You've got this kind of fantastic tableau of hanging meat, of virile butchers. It struck me that I could write a little narrative around it.

"The audience is in the middle with the front screen referencing the butcher shop. The back is the other side of the butcher shop, where Carracci the artist is actually sitting and observing the scene, and then there's a certain amount of interactivity. Carracci will leave his screen and appear on the screen with the butchers."

He says it was "very exciting to invent a new grammar of cinema. It's like the proverbial snake swallowing its tail. The last shot is the first shot. There is no beginning and end, really. And because of the two screens, I'm imagining that an audience will actually watch the film for a number of cycles."

The scale of the painting, he says, is quite small (2 feet by 2 feet). "So, the piece could be installed in somebody's home with two flat-screen TVs. Or, you could show it in a piazza in Italy, 300 feet across. When it's installed in the museum, it'll be on two screens in a room," in one of the Kimbell's galleries.

Mr. Haas has been making feature films for a dozen years, working with actors such as Sean Penn, Kristin Scott Thomas and the late Anne Bancroft. He says he sought to employ the same production values with The Butcher Shop as with a full-length feature. He used the cinematographer who worked with him on The Situation, his 2006 film about the war in Iraq. He used the same production designers as on Angels and Insects and employed a musical score by Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent collaborator with both Mr. Haas and director David Lynch.

He shot the movie with a new Aeroflex digital camera, "so all the imagery is captured raw, on a file, projected with a high-def projector from a hard drive. It's all supermodern technology. The difference between film and digital doesn't exist anymore." It's a new way of moviemaking, but then the film about The Butcher Shop is a new kind of movie.

So, whether you're talking about the movie or how it was made, it is, he says with a laugh, "a brave new world."