Well-reasoned and elegant film

Michelangelo: Love and Death, a film directed by David Bickerstaff

The artist documentary film, once the province of awkward talking heads, banal background music and blurry sideways camera swipes across canvases, has raised its game considerably in the age of HD video. Some of the very best of the high definition films of this sort are from the Exhibition On Film series seen in cinemas and released on DVD by Seventh Art. Though the new Michelangelo release doesn't document a major event like the Bosch film, which presented virtually all of his paintings on the 500th anniversary of Bosch's birth, there's a compelling story behind Michelangelo's life and art that makes for an engaging as well as educational experience. The artist's life is full of incident; he's referred to in the film as the first celebrity artist. His greatness as a sculptor, painter, draftsman, poet and architect means there is no lack of masterpieces to look at; one moves quickly from the monumental David statue to the Vatican frescoes to a lovely poem set to music to an exquisite drawing that shows the artist's intimate knowledge of human anatomy. The experts, English and Italian, are fluent but keep their insights short and sweet. The establishing shots of landscape and buildings provide context, especially those taken in the quarries of Carrara, where Michelangelo found much of his marble. This is a well-reasoned and elegant presentation of the difficult but ultimately triumphant life of one of the most accomplished artists in history.

Filming Michelangelo: Love and Death

A stunningly beautiful presentation

Exhibition on Screen: I, Claude Monet

HD video and surround sound are proving to be a big boost for documentaries about painters; the latest Exhibition on Screen Blu-ray features Phil Grabsky's fine film about Claude Monet, and it looks and sounds stunning on the home screen. Grabsky pulls you in (no pun intended) to Monet's world through well chosen excerpts from Monet's own writings (beautifully narrated by Henry Goodman), combined with artful and originally presented montages of the stunningly beautiful paintings. 

One of the plusses in this disc is the soundtrack, improvisations by composer Stephen Baysted combined with period piano works by Satie, Poulenc, Ravel, Fauré and others. These are played with style and wit by pianist Susan Legg. Here's an interesting article about Baysted's compositional process; the soundtrack album on CD/MP3 is here.

A beautiful presentation of Bosch's eccentric art

The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch

To celebrate the 500th anniversary of the death of its famous home-town artist, the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, Netherlands put on what has been called "one of the most important exhibitions of our century," from February to May 2016.  Though they have no works of Bosch themselves, they were able to bring to Den Bosch 17 of Bosch’s 24 extant paintings and 19 of his 20 drawings, and the resulting gathering has given art experts opportunities for new insights of connoisseurship as well as a chance to use the new technologies of the local Bosch Research and Conservation Project to look beneath the surface of Hieronymus's gorgeous paint. Talk about a critical mass!

With such a small oeuvre this 90 minute film, shown in theatres around the world last year, can give us a pretty good overview of this eccentric art. It's done in beautiful HD video, with more complex camera pans than we're used to from Ken Burns' documentaries. I was impressed with the context that the film-makers provide: clear explanatory text (with subtitles in English, French, Spanish, German & Dutch), location shots and music from Bosch's time. The latter especially adds value, since music of the time in the low countries was as sophisticated and inspired as the visual arts. The only fly in the ointment was the Prado's reneging on sending their Bosch works after the de-attribution of two of their "Bosch's" by the Den Bosch experts.  That was a shame in terms of the physical exhibit, though for the purposes of our film we still had a chance to see the Prado's famous Garden of Earthly Delights in a very high definition digital file. 

The talking heads in the film provide some interesting insights into Bosch's paintings, most especially film-maker Peter Greenaway, whose own art owes a lot to Bosch and his contemporaries. The only caveat about these pronouncements is that Bosch's sense of humour was almost completely ignored, which I find quite scandalous. When it was finally mentioned, an hour in, I had lost some good humour of my own. But on the whole this is a successful project, most beautifully presented.

Here is the trailer from Seventh Art:

A treat for garden and art lovers

At the beginning of 2016 the Royal Academy of Arts presented a special exhibition of paintings from the 1860s to the 1920s, all about gardens. This splendid DVD provides excellent documentation for the project, as does the RA's website for the exhibition.  This 93 minute film was shown in theatres in early 2016; here is the trailer:

The star of the show is Claude Monet, whose garden at Giverny is a work of art in itself. The film travels there, and to other great gardens around the world. I was so taken with this concept, but I'm a big garden lover as well as a huge fan of these paintings. There may be too much about gardens for art lovers, and too much about the paintings for hard-core gardeners. Both sides, though, are treated with equal love and attention.

Insights into Beethoven from a great musician

This fine documentary film on DVD by Phil Grabsky presents Leif Ove Andsnes's epic Beethoven obsession, spread over four years and 150 performances in many cities. As he says: "a multi-season project that will make the composer’s music the centerpiece of my life as a performer and recording artist." It began like this:

I was on tour in Sao Paulo a few years ago, and when I checked into the hotel I realised that in the lifts they were playing a CD of Beethoven’s first and second piano concertos in a loop, the whole week. I thought that after two days this would make me absolutely mad. But the opposite happened, and I realized that listening to 37 seconds of these pieces each time I entered the life was quite wonderful, because I could just hear *that* bit. I thought ‘Oh, how beautiful, how original and how strange that is, how fresh and how different from any other music.’ And I thought, ‘Now is the time for me to tackle that, now is the time for me to do Beethoven.’

Watching Andsnes playing the piano and conducting the superb Mahler Chamber Orchestra in this sublime music is a great experience, though it does leave one wishing for the entire performances on video. I hope they'll be issued on DVD and Blu-ray soon. There are many times when Andsnes presents an idea in a very simple and straight-forward way, but the results are incredibly insightful and beautiful. One example is when he explains the significance of the cadenza near the end of Concerto no. 3, and moves to the ethereal transition from solo piano to piano and orchestra. I was transfixed! Here, and in his entire Beethoven Journey, Andsnes' hard work and commitment join with his amazing natural talent as a musician, with outstanding results.

The audio version of the five concertos plus the Choral Fantasy is available on three individual CD, or packaged together as a box set. I have one issue with the DVD, and I'm afraid it's a bit more than a quibble. Everything Andsnes says is so astute and penetrating, and you don't want to miss a thing. But he's very soft-spoken, and his voice is mixed at such a low level that when the piano and orchestra from the recording sequences come in the neighbours are apt to pound on the walls or ceiling. This film was made for theatrical release, and in a theatre with the right acoustics it might have been fine, but even trying different equalization settings on my system I was still straining to hear Andsnes while the orchestra was at the very high end of the comfortable listening range. Luckily there's the option to add subtitles (in English or Norwegian), so I didn't end up missing too much. This is an inconvenience, but not enough to cost this superb film a star; it still gets all five!