FILM 11: Manet/Monet/Marlow

I chose Manet and Monet because aside from Van Gogh, they were the only two that I have heard of before. They are both very big impressionist artists and have a lot of similarities in their artwork. I did not watch one by Schama or Collings but these two artists were treated a lot differently compared to them. Rather than going into major details of their lives, the films went into details about many paintings that they had done. However, I don’t think Marlow treated them differently at all. Both films were very similar and went about explaining the paintings in the same way. As for past films, he went into much more detail about Michelangelo and even included the histories of the locations they were at.

The Spanish Singer.  I thought this was interesting because he looks as if he is falling off the bench. It seems impossible for him to be playing that guitar. In the film, they point out that he’s playing with the opposite hand that is supposed to be and that it is a fusion of realism and theatrical. It is a combination of a man who has had too much to drink and realism of Spanish subject matter. This painting is attacking the typical views of Italian domination in the South.  

The Women in the Garden. The first thing I noticed with this painting was the woman on the right. Her back is to the viewer and the other women’s faces are kind of hidden. I like the brush strokes with this painting. I thought it was really soft and pretty. These two paintings are different in that The Spanish Singer was focused on a single man and this one was on 4 different women. There was a lot of hidden messages in the Spanish Singer, where the Women in the Garden was very straight forward. They controlled my eye differently as well. I first looked at the woman on the right in the second painting, while I was focused on the man in the Spanish Singer. Their construction was similar, ye the colors in the Women in the Garden were brighter and lighter. More dark shades were used in the Spanish Singer. 

The storytelling approaches were very different with this week. Instead of reenactments, theatre, and history, these films were more to the point. They displayed a painting and then went into detail about them. It was a very dry method, but got the job of explaining the artists done. Schama, Greenaway, and Hockney all have very similar storytelling methods. They include theater and dramatic elements to draw attention. However, Marlow was more simple and to the point.

What two artists did you find most interesting this week?