Homicidal and Suicidal Artist Figures in Film

AbstractThis chapter explores the historical origins of the homicidal and/or suicidal artist in film and discusses recent examples, including: Still Life: The Fine Art of Murder (1990) directed by Graeme Campbell, an extended satire of performance art as a homicidal practice; A Perfect Murder (1998) directed by Andrew Davis, a remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, with Viggo Mortenson as the artist; and The Dark Side of Genius (1994), directed by Phedon Papamichael, in which an artist killer who murdered his beautiful model/muse is paroled from prison and seeks out a new victim, a female reporter for an LA Arts weekly attempting to write about him.Keywords: Artists, Genius, Madness, Homicide, Suicide, Performance Art, Film StudiesIn the postscript to Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death (2009), I reflected upon two primary questions that have stimulated my work as an artist and academic for over two decades. The first: why are there so many representations of stereotypically mad artists, psychopathic killers, and suicidal artists in film when there are so few verifiable and clearly documented cases of such artists in the history of art? The second question, with two components: can a political meaning be assigned to the proliferation of these films and television programs in contemporary society, and what does this say about the producers of such material and the cinema viewing public's interest in consuming art, death, and crime? These two preliminary questions drew upon my previous work on graphic satires of art (cartoons and comics) and directed my research along several axes that I negotiated employing Derrida's “four times around” deconstructive process. Early on, I realized that Derrida's project was at once philosophical, historical, sociological, and therefore presented a formidable challenge to any contemporary researcher of popular culture. I was also initially skeptical that going four times around a topic would deliver the whole story and all that was needed to know, yet releasing Derrida's statement from its implicit juridical meaning – “the whole truth and nothing but the truth!” – permitted a less prescriptive and more fluid approach to be pursued in the negotiation of my primary research questions.