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
View online at AVOD
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
View online at AVOD
Summary: What do modern art, a symphony, and a documentary film have in common? They all require aesthetic considerations. This program presents the ideas of key figures in the shaping and understanding of aesthetics-from Plato, Francis Hutcheson, and Kant to Leon Battista Alberti, Stendhal, and Tolstoy-and addresses pivotal writings, including Aristotle's Poetics and Morris Weitz's "The Role of Theory...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Not so long ago it was fashionable to think of the arts and sciences as opposites, but recent developments are casting doubt on this point of view. Today's artists utilize a multitude of sophisticated technologies based on scientific principles. Cameras, for example, are much-simplified replicas of the human eye. Other artists make use of everyday, but nevertheless captivating, technology....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
View online at AVOD
Summary: Expressing a dead body, wrote Leon Baptista Alberti, in 1435, "is one of the most difficult things in the world." This program examines the portrayal of death in art, from ancient times to the post-World War II era. Sarcophagi, paintings, sculptures, funerary statuary, news photos, cinema, mixed media, and a living pieta reveal the intricacies and nuances of rendering incidents of natural,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: In this program, the audacious satirical puppet team of Roger Law and Peter Fluck take viewers on an intriguing tour of political and social satire through caricature. Ranging from James Gillray's lampooning of King George III to Ralph Steadman's savaging of Richard Nixon, the program illustrates how masters of caricature have shaped public opinion through the mediums of drawing, painting,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Since the Civil War, portrait and snapshot photography have provided a visual history of life-and transformed society. This program explores how professional and amateur photographers capture the essence of people while considering the intensely personal nature of portraits and snapshots, their use as means of self-exploration and cultural narrative, and concerns involving their commodification...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: As cuts in federal and state funding continue to erode support for public school fine arts programs and field trips, opportunities for children to experience the visual arts, music, dance, and theater are disappearing. In this documentary, Kerry Bennington, of the Krasl Art Center, and other concerned experts trace the evolution of the arts in America and enter into the debate over whether the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Movies, magazines, TV, billboards, the Web-the world is filled with captivating photographic images competing for viewers' attention. Not surprisingly, citizens of the Global Village are experiencing a growing need for visual literacy: the ability to read between the lines and extract meaning from that daily bombardment. This program takes a close look at the vital importance of visual language...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: One of you will betray me. In The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci broke with tradition and seated Judas amidst the other disciples, and in so doing added many layers of meaning and mystery to that masterpiece. In this captivating program, art historian Amelia Arenas uses a full-scale digital replica of the painting to stimulate discussion among a group of high school students. Together, they...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program offers a rare examination of the life and work of Mark Rothko. Rothko gave abstraction the emotional power of music and poetry. He painted ideas rather than objects and, in the process, created a deeply original pictorial language. One of the most important artists of his generation, Rothko is perhaps best known for his work in the style of the New York School and was a peer of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: What is it about slumber that has beguiled artists and viewers alike, down through the centuries? This program focuses mainly on depictions of sleeping women-clothed, partially bared, and totally nude-in paintings, sculptures, engravings, art photos, and film, from the medieval period to mid-20th century. Topics include the latent eroticism and voyeurism inherent in such subject matter,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: What do Piero della Francesca's Dream of Constantine and Edward Hopper's Summer Evening have in common with the films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Night of the Hunter? This program analyzes the lights that illuminate the night-from candles and street lights, to the moon, to Ingo Maurer's hologram of a neon-rendered light bulb-and the way artists make use of them to create revealing...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: What does it mean to be disabled and how does it shape an artist's work? This documentary explores what is known as the disability art movement, following five artists-including a painter, a writer, an actor, a theater director, and a filmmaker, all of whom happen to have physical disabilities-through their creative work. Intense group discussions of artistic and personal goals are also...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Thanks to the efforts of dedicated visionaries, there is an intergenerational learning experience spreading across the country. This fine arts forum invites the creators and supporters of outstanding school and community programs to take center stage. Together they share the positive impact the programs are having on students and the public at large, promoting art education and helping to...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: From the multiple perspectives in Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage to the multiple soup cans of Andy Warhol, Western art abounds with examples of "double vision." This program looks first at duplication within works of art via mirrors, naturally reflective surfaces, and shadows and then at stylized repetition, whether it be through patterns integral to a work or through patterns that in...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: How do photographic images evoke meaning and emotion? To understand that, viewers first need to understand how the eyes and brain process input from the visual world. After an overview of the biomechanics of vision, this program explains how proximity, similarity, and continuity affect perception; what light is and how lighting types and angles alter an image; and how color theory operates....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Why do we find comfort in some systems while rebelling against others? How can the artist use systems as a mean of expression? Systems explores these questions in the work of contemporary artists Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Kimsooja, and Allan McCollum—all motivated to explain and explore the infinite systems of life as they experiment with abstract composition, performance art, stenciling,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Can art antagonize? Seduce? Inspire transformation? And if so, how might desires and taboos shape our ability to imagine? Fantasy, featuring contemporary artists Jeff Koons, Mary Heilmann, Florian Maier-Achen, and Cao Fei, explores a defiant and unconventional world of sculpture, painting, video and photography-a techno-inspired collection that is at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: What happens when the artists becomes the art? In Transformation, three artists satirize society and reinvent icons of literature, art history, and pop culture by inhabiting the characters they create and capturing the sensibilities of our age. It is a personal portrait of Yinka Shonibare MBE, Cindy Sherman, and Paul McCarthy-three contemporary artists refashioning their identity by way of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Might a work of art move us to temper our more destructive impulses? In what ways do artists’ feelings of empathy contribute to works that tackle problematic subjects and address the human condition? Compassion, features three contemporary artists-William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems-whose unique works and experimental methods explore the conscience and the possibility of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009