tegeus-Cromis
a better poet than swordsman
- Joined
- May 17, 2019
- Messages
- 1,343
I love stories about people entering the world of a painting. Probably the first such story I ever experienced was the part in Mary Poppins where they enter Bert's sidewalk chalk drawings. There's also Marguerite Yourcenar's "How Wang-Fo Was Saved" in Manguel's Black Water anthology of fantastic fiction; one of the stories in the pilot episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery (and the novella Serling wrote), in which a Nazi war criminal hiding in South America dreams of entering a beautiful landscape hanging in a museum; Clark Ashton Smith's short story, "The Willow Landscape"... And more:
-- Akira Kurosawa's movie Dreams, in which he enters a Van Gogh painting and gets to meet Van Gogh
-- What Dreams May Come, the movie, and presumably the book too (which I haven't read)
-- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which they go to Narnia via a painting. (Though there seems to be a difference between stories in which a painting is simply a portal, and stories in which you are, and stay, in the painting).
-- Looney Tunes: Back in Action, in which they chase each other (IIRC) through paintings in the Louvre
-- A poem by Stevie Smith in which an unhappy office worker goes to the National Gallery and gets sucked into a Turner
-- an episode of Charmed in which they get trapped in a painting
etc etc
Any other such stories you can think of? I'm interested primarily in prose fiction, but also in any other medium-- movies, TV, video games, what have you. I'd like to build some kind of comprehensive list and maybe put together an anthology.
(Interestingly, there's a parallel here with stories of statues coming to life, as in Don Giovanni, but that theme has been explored more thoroughly. There are at least two books on it that I know -- and I highly recommend Kenneth W. Gross's The Dream of the Living Statue.)
-- Akira Kurosawa's movie Dreams, in which he enters a Van Gogh painting and gets to meet Van Gogh
-- What Dreams May Come, the movie, and presumably the book too (which I haven't read)
-- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which they go to Narnia via a painting. (Though there seems to be a difference between stories in which a painting is simply a portal, and stories in which you are, and stay, in the painting).
-- Looney Tunes: Back in Action, in which they chase each other (IIRC) through paintings in the Louvre
-- A poem by Stevie Smith in which an unhappy office worker goes to the National Gallery and gets sucked into a Turner
-- an episode of Charmed in which they get trapped in a painting
etc etc
Any other such stories you can think of? I'm interested primarily in prose fiction, but also in any other medium-- movies, TV, video games, what have you. I'd like to build some kind of comprehensive list and maybe put together an anthology.
(Interestingly, there's a parallel here with stories of statues coming to life, as in Don Giovanni, but that theme has been explored more thoroughly. There are at least two books on it that I know -- and I highly recommend Kenneth W. Gross's The Dream of the Living Statue.)
