The Amsterdam Museum teamed up with the Dutch creative agency PlusOne to create a series of videos for the new Amsterdam DNA exhibition — an exhibition that offers a three-dimensional 45-minute journey through Amsterdam’s history. PlusOne created seven videos in total. The clip above comes from the second film called Revolt Against King and Church, and it obviously brings you back to Amsterdam in the 16th century. The clip below offers an aesthetic introduction to the exhibition itself. h/t The Atlantic
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Almost two years ago, Spanish filmmaker Cristóbal Vila shot an exquisite little film, Nature by Numbers, which captured the ways in which mathematical concepts (Fibonacci Sequence, Golden Number, etc.) reveal themselves in nature. And the short then clocked a good 2.1 million views on YouTube alone.
This week, Vila returns with a new film called Inspirations. In this case, the inspiration is M.C. Escher (1898–1972), the Dutch artist who explored a wide range of mathematical ideas with his woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Although Escher had no formal training in mathematics beyond secondary school, many mathematicians counted themselves as admirers of his work. (Visit this online gallery to get better acquainted with Escher’s art, and be sure to click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images). As Vila explains, Inspirations tries to imagine Escher’s workplace, “what things would surround an artist like him, so deeply interested in science in general and mathematics in particular.” It’s a three minutes of unbridled imagination.
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When did you first feel the rush of stealthily mannered grotesquerie that is Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X? If you’ve seen the painting in detail, even in reproduction, you’ll always remember that moment. By the same token, if you watch this Emmy Award-winning profile of Francis Bacon (above), you’ll always remember these 51 minutes. A production of London Weekend Television (now ITV London), The South Bank Show offered documentary portraits of well-known artists and performers from Douglas Adams to Steve Reich to Terry Gilliam to the Pet Shop Boys. Only natural, then, that it would turn its lens toward Bacon in 1985, when his canvasses of human figures, often in triptych, just abstracted enough to cause subconscious trouble, reached a peak on the art market. Roving from gallery to studio to café to bar, the program reveals an artist, one then held, in the words of host Melvyn Bragg, to be the greatest living painter in the world.
This episode ended up winning an International Emmy, and beyond the dose of vigor for the craft it can still shoot into the veins of documentarians both fresh-faced and world-weary, it attests to the sharpness of the minds London Weekend Television employed back then. Displaying a combination of casualness, spontaneity, rigor, and cinematic presentation rare even in theatrical films, the broadcast follows Bragg (now best known as the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time) and Bacon in a single long-form conversation. It begins, soberly enough, in the blue glow of a slide projector and ends, drunkenly enough, in the ruddiness of the painter’s favorite “drinking club,” carving out spaces in between for Bacon’s imagery as well as its visual inspirations and referents.
The program finds Bacon ready to discuss his life and work with utter frankness: his gambling; his homosexuality; his distaste for the academy; his famous paintings he’d rather see burned; his habit of not only painting without a sketch, but doing so on the “wrong” side of the canvas. And how often do you see an interview over a bottle of wine whose participants have actually been drinking? “Do you think anything exists apart from the moment?” Bragg asks Bacon before the latter staggers up to pour another round. “Are you real?” interviewee later demands of interviewer.
NOTE: If you are having problems viewing the video on our site, you can also watch it here.
With Valentine’s Day almost here, we thought it would be an opportune time to bring you the story of Auguste Rodin’s erotically charged masterpiece, The Kiss.
In this video from the Tate museums, Jane Burton explains how The Kiss was originally conceived as a detail in an early version of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, a monumental work that preoccupied the artist for the last 37 years of his life. The Kiss depicts the fateful embrace of Francesca and Paolo, adulterous lovers from Dante’s Inferno.
Rodin developed the theme of The Kiss in plaster and terracotta before creating a marble version for the French government in 1888. That piece is now on display at the Musée Rodin in Paris. The version featured in the video was commissioned in 1900 by an American art collector living in England, and is now part of the permanent collection of the Tate Modern in London. It’s currently on loan (through September 2) to the Turner Contemporary in Margate, Kent.
The nudity and frank sensuality of The Kiss drew scorn from many critics when the sculpture was first unveiled in 1889. The poet Paul Claudel, a religious conservative, wrote:
the man is so to speak attablé [sitting down to dine] at the woman. He is sitting down in order to make the most of his opportunity. He uses both his hands, and she does her best, as the Americans say, to “deliver the goods.”
Claudel’s contempt probably had something to do with the fact that his sister, the sculptor Camille Claudel, was Rodin’s lover at the time the work was completed. For a more in-depth exploration of the fascinating story behind The Kiss, be sure to watch the BBC series, Private Life of a Masterpiece. The episode featuring The Kiss can be seen online in four 12-minute segments here.
In his 1955 classic, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov described the facial features of his scandalous protagonist, Humbert Humbert, in small bits. When taken together, here’s what you get:
Gloomy good looks… Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice… broad shoulders … I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case… But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows… A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile… aging ape eyes… Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.
In a rather brilliant move, Brian Joseph Davis has run these descriptions through law enforcement composite sketch software and brought Humbert Humbert almost to life. (See above.) And he has done the same for a cast of other literary characters on his Tumblr, called The Composites. Other characters getting the perp treatment include Emma Bovary (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), Edward Rochester (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), and Keith Talent (Martin Amis’ London Fields), among others. Find them all here. h/t Metafilter
Last night, Philip Glass celebrated his 75th birthday at Carnegie Hall, attending the US premiere of his Ninth Symphony. His long and illustrious career continues. But today we’re bringing you back to 1979, when Glass wrote a composition to accompany “Geometry of Circles,” a four-part series of animations that aired on the beloved children’s show Sesame Street. A strange detour for an influential composer? Not really. Not when you consider that Glass came out of a 1960s tradition that made modern music more playful and approachable.
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Along the Costa Brava in northern Spain, in the little seaside village of Portlligat, sits the house that became Salvador Dalí’s main residence in 1930. It started off as a small fisherman’s hut. Then Dalí went to work on the structure, renovating it little by little over the next 40 years, creating a living, breathing, labyrinthine home that reflects the artist’s one-of-a-kind aesthetic. Writing about the house, the author Joseph Pla once said:
The decoration of the house is surprising, extraordinary. Perhaps the most exact adjective would be: never-before-seen. I do not believe that there is anything like it, in this country or in any other.… Dalí’s house is completely unexpected.… It contains nothing more than memories, obsessions. The fixed ideas of its owners. There is nothing traditional, nor inherited, nor repeated, nor copied here. All is indecipherable personal mythology.… There are art works (by the painter), Russian things (of Mrs. Gala), stuffed animals, staircases of geological walls going up and down, books (strange for such people), the commonplace and the refined, etc.
For many, it’s a long trip to Portlligat, and only eight people can visit the house at a time. So today we’re featuring a video tour of Dalí’s Spanish home. The interior shots begin around the 1:30 mark. If you love taxidermy, you won’t be wasting your time.
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Editor’s note: The text below discusses the ending of the film. We recommend that you watch “The Monk and the Fish” before reading.
In this charming and visually elegant film from 1994, the Dutch-born animator Michael Dudok de Wit tells the story of a single-minded monk and a very elusive fish. While the setting and symbols are Christian, the story progression is essentially Buddhist.
“The Monk and the Fish is not a story about the solution of a conflict,” Dudok de Wit explained to Sarah Molinoff in a 2009 interview for the Oxonian Review. “It’s more about the rise above the conflict, the rise above duality.” The monk doesn’t catch the fish; he and the fish are united. Dudok de Wit took his inspiration from the Ten Ox Herding Pictures, a series of Zen poems and images from 12th Century China, which illustrate the journey to enlightenment through the story of an oxherd’s struggle with a wayward bull. He said:
The genesis of the film was the ending. It was that sequence I wanted to create, where there is a serene union between the monk and the fish. The ending by itself would be flat, too abstract, to pull the audience in, so I clearly needed to have a build-up, to establish and feel empathy with the character. In contrast to the ending, in the beginning the monk is obsessed, obsessed, obsessed, but in the ending he arrives at a resolution. In a quiet way, not with a big act.
The London-based artist hand-painted each frame in ink and watercolor. Like the story, the visual style was inspired by the Far East. “The Japanese in particular, and also the Chinese and Koreans,” said Dudok de Wit, “have a way of using negative space, of not filling the picture, which is very typical of the Far East and very untypical of the West. We can be inspired by it, but it’s profoundly in their culture–in their genes maybe, and not so much in ours. It’s not just about the brush line, it’s also the space around the line that is inspiring.”
For the music, Dudok de Wit chose a classic from the Western canon, La Folia, a traditional theme that was often adapted or quoted by composers like Bach, Vivaldi, Corelli, Handel and Liszt. The filmmaker selected a few of his favorite variations–mainly from Corelli and Vivaldi–and asked composer Serge Besset to listen to them and create a new version to fit the film.
The Monk and the Fish took six months to create, and was nominated for Best Short Animated Film at both the Academy Awards and the British Academy Film Awards. You will find it listed in our collection of 450 Free Movies Online, along with another moving short by Dudock de Wit, Father and Daughter. They appear in the Animation Section.
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