Audience Member
A very informative film about early art.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/10/23
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Audience Member
Uno de los mejores documentales que he visto. Hoy ha tocado "Atraccion por el Mas Alla", bueno, una revisión, y es increible como al go tan sencillo como conservar una foto de un ser querido perdido, tiene su eco hace 9000 años atrás y cómo el arte y sus imagenes influyen en nuestra vida cotidiana sin apreciarlo nosotros en el dia a dia y como estas imagenes se aglutinan en nuestro subconsciente colectivo y nos determinan en nuestro actuar. Lo recomiendo!!! Como el Arte ha hecho, y hace, al Mundo...
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/07/23
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Audience Member
I'll gladly eat up anything served by David Attenborough and Nigel Spivey. This was very well done. I never thought pre-historic art could be so hip and relevant.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
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Audience Member
theoretically skewed, but visually rewarding.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/27/23
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Audience Member
Try Imagining a World Without It
The thing is, art is so fundamental to our world that I almost used the inadvertant pun "picture a world without it" as my title. The focus here, as it would be in most people's minds given the word "art," is on the visual. Sculpture, painting, and film. There's a tiny bit about music, and a very small amount about writing, but mostly, it's the images we make of our own world. So I guess "imagine" is a bit of a pun, too. It does, after all, mean "to make images." I'm looking around my room right now, and it's amazing. Oh, sure, there are a lot of words--not least because of my bookshelf--but even the books have pictures on the covers. The rack of DVDs, of course, is all about images. My prescription bottles have the store logo on the caps and the labels. The one that doesn't instead has the manufacturer's logo on the side and picture directions on the lid as to how to open the bottle. Yes, the soda can next to me says in words that it's cherry 7-Up, but it also has a picture of a cherry. Heck, there's Graham's little wooden artists' model posed on top of the DVD player, itself an image designed to help people draw images.
And yet, oddly, we can only track art back some 35,000 years, a far shorter time than [i]Homo sapiens[/i] as a species has existed. Personally, I'd suggest that early art has just been destroyed by the inevitability of time, and I'll also point out that we are just looking at visual art here; I suspect storytelling goes back much farther, since the beginning of language. Music, probably, too. But presenter Dr. Nigel Spivey is here to talk to us about the visual arts, which start with the prehistoric "Venus figurines." (The oldest of these, the Venus of Hohle Fels, was carbon dated recently at 35,000 years ago. It is carved from mammoth tusk and is 6 centimeters high.) Though less well-known, they predate cave drawings substantially. Though, of course, we move on to them next. What's more, the program does not give a eurocentric view of art--Australian aboriginal art is talked about at length, as is various art from Mesoamerica. True, it's [i]mostly[/i] European, but something is better than nothing.
The series is an interesting combination of history and experiment. In several places, they take a break from showing us, oh, the images of Aztec ceremonial skull-masks in order to instead show us how discussion of death changes perspective on people we consider Other. Even more oddly, essentially the only art we see created is aboriginal, and that in context of petroglyphs. The miniseries is very much interested in past tense. Film as an entire medium is only used in a [i]Connections[/i] sort of way--the culmination of a chain of events stretching from the Babylonian court and its story-murals through Trajan's Column, intended to show how we use art to tell stories. Leaving aside the aboriginal painting, which, again, is only shown due to its resemblance to the ancestors' work, we don't get much more modern than Goya. Except for the experiments.
It is, admittedly, interesting to see the building of modern art's foundations. The first segment shows us sculpture. The rise of realism. (Which, admittedly, has gone rather astray of late, but that's a different discussion.) The Venus figurines, of course, don't really look like women. Oh, they have certain feminine features--the breasts are unmistakable--but those features are greatly exaggerated. Others--feet, hands, faces--are instead almost nonexistant. Art changed over thousands of years until it gave us the Greek statues that really looked human, that showed humans as they mostly were instead of how they appear symbolically. There's discussion of how Egyptian art wanted to show each individual part of the body idealized, for example--the torso turned front for the best view of it, the face in profile, both hands with palms to the viewer. It's possible to stand that way, but it does really start to hurt after a few seconds.
Am I suggesting you devote five hours to this? Well, now, that all depends. Do you really care about art history? Sociology? The odd quirks that make up later things we cannot imagine living without? Yeah, I'd go for it. In some places, as I said, it's like [i]Connections[/i], only with art and without James Burke. Not everywhere, of course. And it does have that specific focus on visual art. Then again, that's what most people think of when they think of art, I suspect. When I was in high school, lo, these many years ago, the California state school system did require a year of fine arts and a year of applied arts, making the distinction clear but at the same time acknowledging that art was more than painting. (I don't think typing is an art, but take that up with the state of California, I guess.) On the other hand, when you went to take "art appreciation," everyone knew you weren't going to be talking about Shakespeare except inasmuch as painting images from his plays has been awfully popular these last couple of centuries.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
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