Simon Schama's Power of Art
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DVD details
Actor: Simon SchamaBrand: WARNER HOME VIDEO
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, 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
Product features:
- 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
DVD Reviews of Simon Schama's Power of Art
DVD Review: Captivating, enriching, enchanting
Summary: 5 Stars
Simon Schama is a very thorough and brilliant historian. I knew him from his very precise books 'Patriots and Liberators' and 'The Embarrassment of Riches'.
I suppose every art lover would have come up with a different list of the eight most noteworthy painters. However, he made a very interesting choice. The inclusion of Turner in the list may have pure British reasons, nevertheless the tension Schama has been able to build into the slave ship painting is brilliant.
Each of the programs is captivating, shows great insight and is very enriching. I started with Rembrandt, who is very familiar ground to Schama ('The Embarrassment of Richness', and 'Rembrandt's Eyes') and was enchanted. I allowed some slack of insight and information content for the other painters; that was not necessary.
Every program is a pearl and calls for reruns. The best way to spend USD 25, and even the USD 50 of the original price.
DVD Review: Movie-esque
Summary: 5 Stars
This documentary is very good--I LOVE the introduction with the red ink--Overall it is incredibly informative and the artists lives are reenacted in a very (what I perceive to be) accurate way. There are only a few spots where the acting becomes a bit silly and too dramatic but for the most part it's great. Sometimes the narrator can nod his head too much (yes this seems stupid but after a while you start to wonder if he's an arrogant man or has a bobble head problem.)
For a documentary, I completely would recommend watching this to get a better understanding of the time period the artists lived in and the lives they led from the artist and viewers perspectives.
Artists in this documentary are; Picasso, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Bernini, Turner, David, Rothko and Rembrandt.
DVD Review: Worth 3 College Credits
Summary: 5 Stars
I became acquainted with Simon Schama from his History of Britain series, which was absolutely fantastic. The Power of Art is every bit as good. Schama is a uniquely gifted narrator who seizes one's attention completely. Schama picks eight works of art to explore in depth from several different perspectives - the times, the artist, and the artwork. What one learns is that there is so much more to the artwork. There is an underlying powerful message; hence, the Power of Art. Blended into each narrative is beautiful music. Actually, my one complaint is that the music was not identified anywhere. There was one musical piece that I wanted to purchase separately, and after hours of googling, I eventually found it (Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus, Stabat Mater). Schama's Power of Art is a semester in college art appreciation. The Power of Art not disappoint. DVD Review: An Enjoyable Tour
Summary: 4 Stars
If learning the power of art is to travel the circles of an artist's life through his work and toward one of his most enduring pieces, then Schama is a worthy Virgil. With a mesmerizing presentation, a vivid narration, and a characteristic charm, Schama reminds us how art can enhance our reality, skew our perceptions, and conjure a past we would rather forget. DVD Review: Exquisite
Summary: 5 Stars
Schama presents biographies and anthologies of some of the world's greatest painters in a down to earth, entertaining manner. I wish there were ten discs and not just three.
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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