Michael Mann's "The Last of the Mohicans" is essentially an invocation of American Romantic paintings popular around the time Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans (1830 or so) – It often suggests an action movie as it would have been imagined then. The Romantic sensibility isn’t apparent only in the landscape shots—redolent of Thomas Cole—but in the interior scenes as well, which are equally suggestive of a divine presence in worldly affairs. One scene around the middle of the film, when the Mohicans recount an earlier massacre of the British troops, is a marvel of composition: an empty space in the center of the frame is lit as if by halo, and the Mohicans stand in shadow on the right, their tan skin and clothing blended with the muted light. This could well be the recreation of a forgotten Romantic painting titled The Meeting of the British and Mohicans—just as many paintings of the Romantic era seem to anticipate the grandeur of Hollywood epics. (The touring exhibition of major Romantic paintings, such as Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, also anticipates the way Hollywood epics were distributed from Birth of a Nation through roughly the early 60s.)
