4th Feb 2012; Modern Masters - DALI

CONTEMPLATE AND KONANGAL

Documentaries on Art
MODERN MASTERS SERIES



DALI

4th Feb 2012; 5.45pm
Contemplate Art Gallery
Opp PSG Krishnammal, Avanashi Road

This is the second documentary on Dali and his art screened at Contemplate Art Gallery .

Salvador Dali was art's greatest clown, but was he also one of its great geniuses? This documentary traces the life and work of the popular surrealist artist, travelling throughout Europe and America. From his origins in turn-of-the-century Spain, to his high jinx in New York in the 1970s, it reveals this artist's fascinating life story and explains the thinking behind and impact of his most famous works.Salvador Dalí, (1904-89): Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax.In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and he moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.Apart from painting, Dalí's output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films---Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930)---and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. He is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century. There are museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

21st Jan 2012;Art Documentary Screening - Edvard Munch’s THE SCREAM

Documentaries on Art


Private Life Of A Masterpiece
Edvard Munch’s
THE SCREAM
A BBC documentary
21st Jan 2012 ; 5.45 pm
Contemplate Art Gallery

2 floor Rajshree Ford Bldg, Avanashi Rd ,
(opp) PSG Krishnammal College
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003180985905

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a turn-of-the-century Norwegian artist, best known for his extremely personal brand of Symbolism, which helped lay the foundations for and proved a lasting influence on the later Expressionist school of art.Munch began painting at the age of 17 in Kristiania . A state grant, awarded in 1885, enabled him to study briefly in Paris. For 20 years thereafter Munch worked chiefly in Paris and Berlin. At first influenced by impressionism and postimpressionism, he then turned to a highly personal style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death.n 1892, in Berlin, an exhibition of his paintings so shocked the authorities that the show was closed. Undeterred, Munch and his sympathizers worked throughout the 1890's toward the development of German expressionist art. Perhaps the best known of all Munch's work is The Scream (1893, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo). This, and the harrowing The Sick Child (1881-86, Nasjonalgalleriet), reflect Munch's childhood trauma, occasioned by the death of his mother and sister from tuberculosis.Melancholy suffuses paintings such as The Bridge —in limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over which loom the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses. Reflections of sexual anxieties are seen in his portrayals of women, alternately represented as frail, innocent sufferers or as lurid, life-devouring vampires.In 1908 Munch's anxiety became acute and he was hospitalized. He returned to Norway in 1909 and died in Oslo on January 23, 1944. The relative tranquility of the rest of his life is reflected in his murals for the University of Oslo (1910-16), and in his vigorous, brightly colored landscapes. Although his later paintings are not as tortured as his earlier work, a return to introspection marks his late self-portraits, notably Between Clock and Bed (1940, Munch Musset, Oslo).Munch's considerable body of etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts is now considered a significant force in modern graphic art; the work is simple, direct, and vigorous in style, and powerful in subject matter. Few of Munch's paintings are found outside Norway. His own collection is housed in the Munch Museet.

The Scream

Edvard Munch ‘s The Scream (1893) is his best-known painting of existential anguish. He created many versions of it. He appears to have drawn inspiration for it from one of the results of a volcano eruption far away. He writes on a diary page headed Nice 22.01.1892:
“ I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

The sky in the background of the painting may reflect the effects of the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The ash ejected from the volcano left the sky tinted red in most of Europe and Asia for several months and caused spectacular twilights with a magnificent, blood-red sky. Munch never forgot that sky, and why should he?

Munch explicitly mentioned that 1884 was the year of the original inspirations for three of the paintings in The Frieze of Life, where the most famous version of the Scream appears. The end result was an agonized figure against a blood red skyline. And who is screaming? Is it the depicted person, or is it nature? Or both? And is it Munch himself? Or a memory of a Peruvian mummy Munch had seen exhibited? It could be "a bit of this, a bit of that, and none can tell full well". In other words, the matter is open to interpretations.

The scene of the Scream includes a road overlooking Oslo, the Oslofjord and Hovedøya, on the slopes of a 140 m high hill called the Ekeberg. From this spot, Munch's direction of view in the drawing was toward the southwest, which is where the Krakatoa twilights appeared in the winter of 1883-1884.

15th Jan 2012; Francesco Rosi's Christ Stopped At Eboli

Christ Stopped At Eboli

Film by : Francesco Rosi
Country : Italy
Year: 1979
Runtime:145 minutes
Italian withEnglish sub titles
15th Jan 2012; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater

In 1935, the painter Carlo Levi was arrested in Turin for his anti-fascist activities – he was a founding member of the Mussolini-baiting Giustizia e Libertà group – and, as was the practice, sent to a remote area of rural Italy to muse upon his transgressions well away from the company of urban intellectuals. During his period of exile in the Lucania region he observed a way of life which was so remote from his experience as to be completely alien. He did a good deal of painting and opened a small surgery, making use of the skills which he had gained as a medical student at University. The time he spent in exile had a profound effect on his social conscience. This film is based on his 1945 book about the experience of exile.The title comes from the notion that Christ never got any further than Eboli, that rural Italy was too much even for God, yet the impression which Christ Stopped At Eboli creates is one of deep, abiding spirituality and a good deal of this comes out of Gian Maria Volonte’s performance. Volonte was always a great actor, capable of an uncomfortable intensity which makes it hard to take your eyes off him, but I think this is one of his best parts because he submerges his own powerful personality into a character who is required, for much of the film, to be very passive.Christ Stopped At Eboli exerts a quite remarkable emotional force, pulling us back into another time and place with a quiet, unobtrusive skill. The setting – rural Italy in the 1930s – is completely alien to us yet somehow, through the transcendent skill of director Francesco Rosi, the film makes us feel a nostalgic yearning for something we have never experienced. It’s as impressive a piece of work as the great Italian filmmaker ever produced and considering that he also made Salvatore Giuliano, Three Brothers, The Mattei Affair, Illustrious Corpses and Hands Over The City, that’s high praise indeed.

Francesco Rosi

Born in Naples in 1922, the year of Fascism’s ascent to power, Rosi grew up in a comfortable middle-class household. He was introduced to cinema quite early by his father. Widely-known and respected both in Italy and abroad, Francesco Rosi has continued for half a century to practise an intensely-charged, politically-engaged and socially-committed cinema which has quite justly earned him the title of Italy’s cinematic “poet of civic courage”.

Francesco Rosi Rosi was one of the central figures of the politicised post-neorealist 1960s and 70s of Italian cinema, along with Gillo Pontecorvo, early Pasolini, the Taviani brothers, Ettore Scola and Valerio Zurlini. Dealing with a corrupt postwar Italy, Rosi's movies take on controversial issues, such as Salvatore Giuliano, a film that won him won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962.The years 1972 to 1976 cemented Rosi's reputation internationally as a director who dealt with controversial subjects.

As he matured as a director his topics for films became less politically oriented and more angled toward literature. Despite the more traditional slant of his later work, Rosi continued to direct until 1997. The 58th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008 played tribute to Francesco Rosi by screening 13 films in its Homage section, the latter being reserved to filmmakers of outstanding quality and achievement. He received the Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement on 14 February 2008.