Following a rough chronology from 1884 to 1894, when Norwegian artist Edvard Munch began expressionism and established himself as northern Europe's most maligned and controversial artist, ... See full summary »
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An extravagant, exotic and moving look at Rembrandt's romantic and professional life, and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting THE NIGHT WATCH
Director:
Peter Greenaway
Stars:
Martin Freeman,
Emily Holmes,
Eva Birthistle
A Victorian surgeon rescues a heavily disfigured man who is mistreated while scraping a living as a side-show freak. Behind his monstrous facade, there is revealed a person of intelligence and sensitivity.
Herzog's film is based upon the true and mysterious story of Kaspar Hauser, a young man who suddenly appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, barely able to speak or walk, and bearing a strange note;... See full summary »
A retelling of the life of the celebrated 17th-century painter through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his flirtations with the underworld.
After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in a port town in North Africa.
A 19th century French aristocrat, notorious for his scathing memoirs about life in Russia, travels through the Russian State Hermitage Museum and encounters historical figures from the last 200+ years.
Director:
Aleksandr Sokurov
Stars:
Sergey Dreyden,
Mariya Kuznetsova,
Leonid Mozgovoy
The life of Jesus Christ according to the Gospel of Matthew. Pasolini shows Christ as a marxist avant-la-lettre and therefore uses half of the text of Matthew.
Following a rough chronology from 1884 to 1894, when Norwegian artist Edvard Munch began expressionism and established himself as northern Europe's most maligned and controversial artist, the film also flashes back to the death from consumption of his mother, when he was five, his sister's death, and his near death at 13 from pulmonary disease. The film finds enduring significance in Munch's brief affair with "Mrs. Heiberg" and his participation in the café society of anarchist Hans Jaeger in Christiania and later in Berlin with Strindberg. Through it all comes Munch's melancholy and his desire to render on canvas, cardboard, paper, stone, and wood his innermost feelings. Written by
<jhailey@hotmail.com>
Narrator:
I felt as if there were invisible threads between us. I felt as if invisible threads from her hair still twisted themselves around me. And, when she completely disappeared there, over the ocean, then I felt still how it hurt, where my heart bled, because the threads could not be broken.
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The color and composition of the film -- with its grays, asymmetries, elongated figures -- seem to be modeled on Picasso's blue period rather than on Edward Munch's own work. But Picasso goes oddly unmentioned, perhaps because an allusion to Picasso might somehow qualify Munch's own artistic radicalism. This investigation of the painter as creative genius who destroys himself with drink and tobacco in an urban garret deploys all the familiar stereotypes about originality, over and over again. The director presents Munch as haunted by the image of the death by consumption of his sister and by his only partially fulfilled sexual desires. The film is beautifully self-indulgent and rather too long.
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The color and composition of the film -- with its grays, asymmetries, elongated figures -- seem to be modeled on Picasso's blue period rather than on Edward Munch's own work. But Picasso goes oddly unmentioned, perhaps because an allusion to Picasso might somehow qualify Munch's own artistic radicalism. This investigation of the painter as creative genius who destroys himself with drink and tobacco in an urban garret deploys all the familiar stereotypes about originality, over and over again. The director presents Munch as haunted by the image of the death by consumption of his sister and by his only partially fulfilled sexual desires. The film is beautifully self-indulgent and rather too long.