Simon Schama's Power of Art
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DVD details
Actor: Simon SchamaBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 400 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-06-19
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: BBC Warner
DVD Reviews of Simon Schama's Power of Art
DVD Review: Simon Schama's Power of Art
Summary: 5 Stars
It's so interesting - it revived an interest in art in me, and ignited one in my 11 year old daughter. The dramatisation brings it to life, the artwork is sublime. I had already seen a couple of episodes on televison and I wanted to see the rest and keep it to watch over and to share with friends, who are now also huge fans. I think it is a real classic which I will watch many times. DVD Review: Fascinating and illuminating
Summary: 5 Stars
Simon Schama is never less than illuminating and penetrating in these eight hour-long explorations of famous artists and great art. The first section on Caravaggio, for example, expertly weaves the artist's tumultuous life with his painting. I've never much liked his work but Schama made me look at it in new ways -- the dirty fingernails of one of the characters for example, the cold-blooded murder of John the Baptists in another, looking like a scene from The Sopranos.
The episode on the scultor Bernini was also fascinating. Schama shows one bust of a pope with a button on his tunic half-undone, suggesting his hefty weight. He looks in detail at the famous sculture of the Ecstasy of St. Theresa, caught in a moment of orgasmic bliss, and suggests her flowing, disordered robes, so wonderfully wrought, suggest what is happening to her inside.
Schama has a particularly British manner -- witty and sardonic -- that keeps us interested. For anyone seeking new insight into great art, I recommend this BBC series.
DVD Review: Not good at all
Summary: 2 Stars
It's astounding the high rating this gets. I watched it on n-flix and sent it back half-watched. It's an overproduced mess, with Schama not saying much about the art but very gossipy about the artists. There are giant close-ups, with warts and spittle and twitching and portentous music, the tiresome template for every artist Schama covers, presumably to give us an idea about what the artist was "really" like. And there's lots of Schama, tramping around scenic locations which may or may not have anything to do with the narrative.
I guess if you're into fashionable camera jerk and shake and little slice-of-life melodramas, with heavy breathing and colorful costumes, then you'll go for this shallow survey. But if you're into the art, Sister Wendy is far, far more illuminating.
I loved Schama's History of Britain, loved his quirky, irreverent delivery. I give two-stars because I love to watch Schama, but frankly, I think he's consciously trying to imitate Kenneth Clark, whose Civilization, a Personal View, was a cultural history of the West through its art and remains the benchmark against which other culture documentaries are measured. Despite the 40 years of slick technology the deconstructed Schama has over the elegantly attired and debonair Clark, this effort doesn't measure up at all.
DVD Review: Smashing!
Summary: 5 Stars
This series is an amazing, highly personalized overview of western art by one of the art world's primary critics, Simon Schama. Schama is a noted historian in addition to an art critic. He situates each artist and featured piece in his historical era and explains the emotional context as well. This series will make an art lover out of every viewer! I've already given this series as a gift to 3 people, and I recommend it to everyone.DVD Review: needs to be on bluray
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Schama is a witty, insightful and thoroughly entertaining host, and the series has excellent production values. Each segment is like a little film, composed around a central drama in the artist's life. It is a novel way to look at art, quite contrary to our normal view of art as a rather sedate, passive experience involving staring quietly in sterile galleries. Schama really gets across the passion and force of these artists and how powerful their works were in their original context. To some degree, he chose artists with interesting lives rather than interesting work so we dont get velazquez, hals, rubens, or sargent, but we do get david, picasso, and rothko. Even if you dont particularly like the artist in question, Schama's commentary still makes it worthwhile.
If this series is ever released on bluray I will definately purchase it. (really art this spectacular (thinking mainly of rembrandt here) needs to be on bluray.) Also, I would love to see a sequel with 8 more artists!
Description of Simon Schama's Power of Art
Beautiful. Fascinating. Emotional. Art is all of the above. But only a few are powerful. These are the works that not only lift you off your feet in their sheer artistry, they forever alter the human psyche. Focusing on eight iconic works of art, Power of Art reveals the history of visual imagination through the ages, from the murderous world of baroque Rome to paranoid, revolutionary Paris; from the carnage of civil-war Spain to the paradox of 1950s New York, caught between Cold War jitters and Manhattan glitter. A combination of dramatic reconstruction, spectacular photography and Simon Schama's unique, personal style of storytelling transport the viewer back to the intense moments that great works were conceived and born. The eight works of art profiled in this series are: Caravaggio's David and Goliath; Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Theresa, Rembrandt's The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis; David's Death of Marat; Turner's The Slave Ship; Van Gogh's Self-Portrait; Picasso's Guernica and Rothko's Seagram Building Murals.Watching Simon Schama's Power of Art is like taking an Ivy League course in art appreciation, with the folksy but knowledgeable Schama as guide and interpreter. A collection of hour-long films on eight seminal artists and their groundbreaking works, which originally aired on British television, this boxed set is as entertaining as it is enlightening, with Schama doing for Western art what, say, Steve Irwin did for Australian natural history. Eight artists are featured--Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko--and each portrait of the artist weaves biography and historical context to help explain the true power of his works.
The segment on Van Gogh is, as expected, emotional, yet Schama convincingly portrays Van Gogh as not consumed by madness, but fighting off the episodes with painting. Van Gogh painted one of his most evocative works, Wheat Field With Crows, which even his brother, Theo, recognized was about to put his brother on the artistic map. Yet, as Schama points out, within weeks, Van Gogh had killed himself. "Now why would he want to do that?" Schama muses--and then proceeds to narrate the tormented tale of the answer. Along the way, the viewer gains new appreciation for Van Gogh's signature works, including his famous sunflowers. "Technically, these are still lives," Schama says, "but there's nothing still about them... the sunflowers [seem to be] organisms landing violently from a burning sun." If the reenactments of the artists' lives are a bit overdone, it's forgivable, since the cumulative effect, in an hour, is a new appreciation of the work and the man.
Extras include frank and very funny commentaries by Schama and his co-producer, and lots of behind-the-scenes dish on how certain scenes were achieved. The teeming French opera scene in the "David" episode, for instance, was cast using just 20 French extras and then the rest created by CGI--"the scene works better, really, than [the film] King Kong," Schama says with delight. --A.T. Hurley
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