DIRECTOR Sam Mendes made a bold display of artistic priorities by presenting much of  ‘Skyfall’ as a mind-expanding work of visual art inspired by the best 20th century constructivist /geometric painting, and its extension into vibrant kinetic art.

This is subtly contrasted with actual European streets and cityscapes based on antique classical Latin architecture. Such contrasting cinematic post-modernism is far more original and valid than mere quotations of past art-styles, since the film’s Janus-faced focus on both Classical and Modern architecture acknowledges the true origin of the Post-Modern style, which originates with architecture, as first asserted by Paolo Portoghesi, the perceptive contemporary Italian architect/writer, long before the style was shifted and mostly trivialized by much recent literature and painting.

Indeed, the film first stuns us with its visual art as optical surface beauty by showing us a cityscape of glittering modern architecture in contemporary Shanghai, not in Europe or America. Then it slides deeper into creative cinematography, inspired not secondarily by commonplace hi-tech art, but by serious, high quality stationary painting and kinetic constructions, which emerged in Modernism’s solid heyday from the mid-20th century towards its exclusive anti-trend following survival today.

Cinematography’s mentor
What ‘Skyfall’ achieves more than any other recent cinematic thriller is a shift, where film-making, instead of striving to assert its value as a self-created new technical art-form, evokes what seems to be creative film’s forgotten formal visual mentor, which is primarily painting and architecture.
‘Skyfall’ establishes its entertainment on two levels of pleasure: one based on the average viewer’s love of outward suspense, excitement or thrills and an easy-to-follow story, and the second on another deeper level built on references to visual and intellectual culture (including avant-garde set designs influenced by Antonioni’s artistic films) of an imaginative and contemplative nature.
This film opts for offering us the pleasure of modern, structural or abstract art as a purely visual alternative to its other apocalyptic and adventurous content. For commercial reasons, both qualities fluctuate in ‘Skyfall’, as has long been prescribed by serious cinematic writers such as Penelope Houston, a founding editor of Britain’s leading film magazine, ‘Sight & Sound’.
Houston glimpsed the progressive survival of future film as possibly a combination of the so-called intellectual ‘art film’ and the typical thriller/drama that is easily understood entertainment.

Bond as art lover
Bond introduces us to this shift towards the pleasure of visual references when, early into the film, he sits in a British art gallery contemplating an exhibition of small semi-realist paintings. He is actually awaiting his incognito technical advisor, who provides him with clever weapons and gadgets; but in keeping with the successive barrage of surprises and paradigmatic references this film delivers, Bond’s new advisor is no longer the familiar elderly science expert of his former adventures, but a young technician of the present generation, who, sitting beside him, begins to complement the atmospheric content of the semi-realist painting before them, to which Bond coolly offers as his response that all he sees is a ship, then gets up and walks off.
This scene demonstrates a coy critical response to over-familiar traditional realistic painting, which, in-keeping with the film’s sudden avant-garde visual changes, soon leads us to the stunning structural displays of visual abstraction, as though in a beautiful new environmental civic art gallery. For example, the hard-edge Antonioni-like colour forms of London’s subway cars and China’s most spectacularly developed city, Shanghai.

Film as structural art
The prolonged scene in Shanghai where Bond stakes out a girl held in sado-masochistic bondage evolves into a mesmerizing display of cinematography, which actually puts into motion-picture format the structural lessons of some of the best geometric/abstract paintings by the likes of France’s Georges Braque, the unforgettable California painter Richard Diebenkorn, the innovative Spatialism of Italian-born Argentine painter/sculpture Lucio Fontana, and perhaps most of all the brilliant kinetic painting and constructivist sculptures of three of Venezuela’s greatest 20th century artists, Jesus Soto, Alejandro Otero, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Clearly, director Sam Mendes’s Latin roots influenced the inspirational use of such structural art’s international identity as a practical aesthetic of universal value embedded in the human mind, which has been proven by its ability to structurally beautify modern nation-states across the globe today.
Yet ‘Skyfall’ refuses to encourage any prejudice of the present over the past, or the past over the future, in its utilization of art influences. Past, present, and perhaps futuristic influences exist side by side.
Even its apocalyptic infernal scenes are structured like mobile versions of minimal monochromatic paintings of an American abstract-expressionist painter like Adolph Gottlieb, or the printed figurative canvasses of the Swiss painter Yves Klein.
Modern painting on canvas is not seen as a static past trend, but a fertile living tradition far from obsolete.

‘Skyfall’ & characters
‘Skyfall’ tries to grasp a plurality of negatives and positives competing for the upper hand over the present stability of contemporary civilization. One major negative, suggested by Bond’s superior M (Judi Dench) affecting the world’s history is the irrational and psychologically imbalanced individual, especially when also power-hungry, who, like a germ, can seemingly infect or contaminate the mentality of entire nations. History is filled with such influential individuals and groups, and the film’s leading example is played diplomatically by Javier Bardem, who, once a top spy under M, develops a sado-masochistic love/hate with her fallible power, which disappoints his fixation-ideal of the sensitive mother figure he had fashioned her to be. The whole plot of the film is steeped in Bardem’s oedipal mother complex, while his intellectual brilliance disguises his growing underlying monstrosity.
Naomie Harris, on the other hand, is an example of the millions of non-white post-colonials who are not defined by their race’s past horrific subjection to the imperial West, but convert this negative past into a present and future positive life linked to Western civilization’s progressive global values based on achievements in science, rule of law, medicine, religious tolerance, the work ethic, and the pleasure of consumer societies to which they adhere not as ‘ethnic’ subjects, but equal participants.

Pleasure & Bond’s future
What is this film’s ultimate value? The return of an engaging, creative and intellectual depth to new, somewhat difficult or serious literary, visual and cinematic art! Those baffled by the film’s jump-cut narrative and imagistic structures may be stimulated to turn more of their attention to the rewarding difficulty which such modern works increasingly project by their self-critical, open-ended, flexible, anti-dogmatic contingencies.
Roland Barthes, in his indispensable critical little book on modern aesthetics, ‘The Pleasure of the Text’, wrote: “Classics. Culture (the more culture, the greater, more diverse the pleasure will be): Intelligence. Irony.  Delicacy. Euphoria.  Mastery. Security: art of living.” This pleasurable ‘art of living’ is echoed by Bond at the calm end of ‘Skyfall’ when, upon accepting his new assignment, he says: “With pleasure, with pleasure.”  It is an acceptance, in the face of complications, that we all need to share in our contemporary civilization.