Summary: Throughout history, one type of individual has instinctively grasped art's power to persuade and manipulate-and indeed, images have become at least as deadly as swords or guns in the hands of political and military leaders. This program revolves around a basic question: when did art mutate from a vehicle of the imagination into a tool of the ruler? Beginning in Britain, the program looks at the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: How did modernist ideas reshape the presentation of art in museums and galleries? And how did that approach evolve in the postmodern era? This program examines intellectual and aesthetic issues associated with the display of art, using rooms in the Tate Modern as case studies. Overviewing the exhibition style Alfred Barr established during his transformation of MOMA in the 1930s, the video...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Thirty years after the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, one of its principal champions sat down with historian T. J. Clark to discuss the evolution of art criticism and issues surrounding modernist painting. This program documents their conversation, spotlighting Clement Greenberg's reflections on his career and its place in the wider arenas of art theory, art journalism, and the philosophy of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Ten thousand years ago, Magdalenian artists carved expressive faces into slabs of limestone, creating a Paleolithic portrait gallery that required sophisticated drawing skills. This program shows how the art of portraiture has been refined and expanded through the ages. Examples of Egyptian sarcophagi portraits segue into discussions of paintings by Titian, Rafael, Durer, and other...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Beginning with the classical and biblical subjects of Diana, Susannah, and Bathsheba, this program discusses female nudity as it relates to the act of bathing. Depicted as a chaste ritual, a sensual invitation, and a terrifying opportunity for violence, the act of bathing is deconstructed and scrutinized from an artistic point of view. Topics include the inherent dramatic tension of nudity; the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: At Concordia University's Centre for the Arts in Human Development, developmentally disabled participants work together to create great theater. This film documents the creation of the Centre's most ambitious production to date: a musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, complete with choreography and elaborate props and costumes, mounted on a fully operational proscenium...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: In its strictest sense, the term art brut refers to art created outside the boundaries of official culture and often focuses on the work of people who live in mental institutions. This program focuses on the art of Josef "Pepi" Hofer and several other artists with mental retardation and similar disabilities as it captures them in workshops and at a showing and award ceremony at The House of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: From the executive producers of Super Size Me and Director Sara Sackner, this program examines the deplorable atrophy of arts education in America's classrooms by contrasting the crisis with the story of one very dedicated, inspiring high school drama teacher: Jay W. Jensen, who over a 50-year career touched the lives of many with the transformational power of the arts. Renowned pupils-actor...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: The idea of using art to explore the human condition rather than the divine was a significant departure from the predominantly religious artwork that preceded this secular revelation. In this program, Matthew Collings seeks the first glimmerings of humanist art in the Italian Renaissance-particularly in the works of Giotto and Leonardo da Vinci. He also contrasts two 18th-century artists who,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program examines how photographers work with images to communicate stories and ideas and how viewers interpret those images. Message manipulation deriving from point of view, context, editing, superimposing, cropping, recoloring, and captioning are discussed. In addition, selective perception-seeing pictures through the filters of values and prejudices-is studied. Commentary is provided by...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Throughout the history of painting and sculpture no muse has exerted more influence than the artist's model. This program studies the role of the human form in art, focusing on complex relationships between famous male artists and their female subjects. Works featuring the male figure are also examined. Discussing numerous artistic milestones-including classical Greek statuary, Masaccio's...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Everyone has the desire to arrange things in a way that is most pleasing to the eye. In painting, composition involves arranging every ingredient-shape, color, texture, and light-so that working together, they create artistic balance. In this program, artist Ray Richardson deliberately chooses a long, slim canvas to challenge his compositional abilities. As he confronts his quest to create a...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: A quarter-century following the death of Abstract Expressionist firebrand Jackson Pollock, renowned critic Clement Greenberg and art historian T. J. Clark sat down to discuss the legendary painter's career, working methods, and legacy. This program documents their talk, focusing on Pollock's work from the mid-1940s onward and highlighting Greenberg's firsthand observations of the artist in his...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Physical metamorphosis as a theme in painting, sculpture, photography, and cinema reveals an ongoing fascination with all manner of transformations and distortions of the human form. Ranging from classical to modern times, this program presents zoomorphism; hybrids from mythology, the hells of Hieronymus Bosch, and the caricatures of Granville; "botanomorphism," people as plants; treatments of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: No storytelling medium is more powerful than the modern movie-but the ability to inspire and entertain by combining words and pictures is hardly a recent phenomenon. This program reveals the age-old roots of the cinematic narrative form and their evolution over the centuries. Beginning in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nineveh, the film points to the Epic of Gilgamesh as one of the earliest...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Described as "the artful dodger meets Einstein meets an explosion in a sequin factory," public artist Martin Firrell specializes in large-scale digital projections onto iconic architecture-text messages that raise questions about faith, human rights, cultural diversity, and other subjects. Marking the first time that Firrell has allowed cameras into his creative process, this program follows...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: When artists worked in the service of the state, they glorified their cities and gave them imposing facades. But as the place of artists in society has matured over the centuries, artistic expression has became increasingly more penetrating. Beginning with the Renaissance, this program describes how visual artists have represented, deconstructed, and reconstructed the cityscape as they dealt...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Color is perhaps the most powerful artistic element, but it is also the most difficult to control. In this program, artist June Redfern goes to Venice to see one of her favorite paintings-Titian's Assumption of the Virgin. Analyzing Titian's innovative use of color, Redfern traces other color innovations pioneered by artists like Monet, Van Gogh, and Mark Rothko.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Concerned primarily with the sociopolitical history of art, scholar T. J. Clark has, in the past, come into conflict with critic Michael Fried, a proponent of aesthetically based views of painting and sculpture. This program documents a discussion of two Jackson Pollock works in which Clark and Fried strive for common ground. Studying Lavender Mist, both commentators remark on the compressed...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Segment one of this program offers Marcel Duchamp's urinal-cum-readymade Fountain, Michael Craig-Martin's glass of water entitled Oak Tree, and Rebecca Horn's Concert for Anarchy, a grand piano suspended upside-down, as an invitation to look at everyday things in a new way. Segment two introduces minimalism through Carl Andre's brick pile Equivalent VIII and Cornelia Parker's Thirty Pieces of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: The rebellious artist, the attraction to the dark side, love and death, and the primacy of nature-all of these are themes that suffused the artistic and ideological revolution known as Romanticism. This program vividly conveys how new ways of thinking and seeing reshaped the humanities in the 18th and 19th centuries. The writings of Holderlin, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Byron, Wordsworth, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Can a painting be read the way a play or movie is watched? What stories do the shapes and colors of the world's great pictures tell? This program encourages viewers to analyze the narratives in painted images, illustrating possible interpretations for a long procession of famous works. Piero della Francesca's The Flagellation, Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes, Rubens' Medici Cycle,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Art may represent a quest for beauty and perfection, but throughout history it has also explored a terrifying realm of doom, decay, and darkness. This program delves into the age-old human compulsion to surround ourselves with images of death. Starting with the Neolithic relics known as the Jericho Skulls, the film identifies a pattern of morbidity and death fetishism covering a broad swathe of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: If, since the beginning of the Renaissance, art has never stopped inventing new figurative scenarios based on the window, it is because the window is so closely associated with two fundamental elements of painting itself: light and the frame. This program contemplates the use of the window as a passage between the indoor and outdoor worlds. Topics include landscape, in the form of a veduta, or...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006