Summary: Throughout history, one type of individual has instinctively grasped art's power to persuade and manipulate-and indeed, images have become at least as deadly as swords or guns in the hands of political and military leaders. This program revolves around a basic question: when did art mutate from a vehicle of the imagination into a tool of the ruler? Beginning in Britain, the program looks at the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Although rendered in stone, the sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini convey a sense of weightlessness perhaps unequalled in the history of Western art. This program illustrates Bernini's nearly miraculous ability to turn marble into a vessel of rapture, both spiritual and sexual. With The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa as his principal focus, presenter Simon Schama examines numerous works by the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: If the French Revolution had an official painter, it was Jacques-Louis David-although "official propagandist" is a much more accurate term. This program follows David's career from his early ambitions as a Prix de Rome scholar to the actions that defined him, morally and artistically, during the reigns of Robespierre and Napoleon. With The Death of Marat as its centerpiece, the program studies...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Life, death, heroism, tragedy-subjects that, until the latter half of the 20th century, propelled the canon of Western art. How do the abstractions of Mark Rothko figure in that tradition? Are they, in a sense, its swan song? This program depicts Rothko's engagement with timeless themes that dominated his thinking long after the mythic grandeur of Abstract Expressionism had yielded to the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Backed by a Church struggling to connect with the faithful, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted images imbued with physical immediacy and in-your-face drama. As this program shows, there was a trade-off: Caravaggio's biblical scenes frequently eschew, in the words of presenter Simon Schama, "any vision of consolation or redemption." Exploring the artist's humble origins, penchant for...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: What do modern art, a symphony, and a documentary film have in common? They all require aesthetic considerations. This program presents the ideas of key figures in the shaping and understanding of aesthetics-from Plato, Francis Hutcheson, and Kant to Leon Battista Alberti, Stendhal, and Tolstoy-and addresses pivotal writings, including Aristotle's Poetics and Morris Weitz's "The Role of Theory...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Abstract Expressionism was born from a joining of attitudes in American art and European avant-garde art, but was later rejected for its nonfigurative and seemingly egocentric character in favor of the ultra-objective phenomenon known as Pop Art. This program examines: Franz Kline's C & O
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: For thousands of years, artists were anonymous, yet today they are frequently honored as celebrities. How did this change in perspective come about? This program tracks the cultural evolution of art-from the ancient Greeks to the modern world, where art is big business-and addresses the technological changes that have fueled various artistic revolutions down through the centuries. Featured...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This program focuses on Berlin, where Hannah Hoch, George Grosz, and John Heartfield politicized the anarchist Dada movement, uniting it with the extreme Left. Nearby, the newly formed Bauhaus School, led by founder Walter Gropius and other influential architects and artists, encouraged students to reject history and embrace new techniques, materials, and styles. The film also features Gerhard...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Byzantium: spanning eleven centuries and a major portion of the Old World's landscape, its name stands for power and affluence. In this program, noted journalist Paul Solman discusses a magnificent display of Byzantine art garnered from 117 collections with Harvard professor and art expert Loli Kalavrezou. Paintings, mosaics, carvings, and ceramics facilitate an exploration of Byzantine...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: From the executive producers of Super Size Me and Director Sara Sackner, this program examines the deplorable atrophy of arts education in America's classrooms by contrasting the crisis with the story of one very dedicated, inspiring high school drama teacher: Jay W. Jensen, who over a 50-year career touched the lives of many with the transformational power of the arts. Renowned pupils-actor...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: To many, worrying about constitutional rights seemed like an archaic luxury while Ground Zero was still smoking. The need for tighter homeland security made civil liberties take a back seat to urgent measures such as the USA PATRIOT Act designed to defend America from terrorists. But two years later, that piece of legislation came under fire from both the left and the right. In this ABC News...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: This film explores the plight of artists from around the world who have come to America, drawn to the possibilities of a free society. The film profiles Taiwanese dancer Fang-Yi Sheu, now the star of the Martha Graham Dance Company; Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, who fled the oppression of the Soviet Union; and examines an array of struggling artists and intellectuals who fled fascism...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon continues his travels from southern to northern Spain, revealing a stunning and informative array of artworks. In this program, he journeys to the provinces surrounding Madrid-where, during the 16th and 17th centuries, many of the world's great artists flourished against a backdrop of imperialism and fervent Catholicism. In Toledo, El Greco's mystical style is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: In many ways, including artistic ones, Russia appears forever on the brink of revolution. This program examines Russian visual art as it progressed-or regressed, depending on one's opinion-during the 20th century. Host Andrew Graham-Dixon roots out portraits of Stalin stashed in museum storerooms, notes the transformation of the Moscow Metro into a public art gallery, and visits a stunning...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Northern Spain has produced some of the world's most celebrated artists, including Picasso, Miro, Dali-and Goya, who foreshadowed modern painting with his dark political consciousness. This program studies the artistic and social turmoil that engulfed Spain as the 20th century loomed, dawned, and rolled forward. Recounting Franco's tyranny against free expression, the program looks at Spanish...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
View online at AVOD
Summary: It was in the Bavarian mountains that much of Germany's sense of nationhood and identity was forged. Caspar David Friedrich became the Romantic movement's first great painter, creating perhaps its defining image in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. More explicitly nationalistic was the Nazarene Brotherhood, a group of young artists, including Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Philipp Veit, who lived...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: In this Peabody Award-winning program, CNBC's David Faber scrutinizes Wal-Mart as he seeks to understand how the company has ascended to the heights of power it has come to occupy-and whether this juggernaut can continue to succeed in the face of increased opposition. Given unprecedented access, Faber takes viewers from an annual managers' meeting that resembles an evangelical revival to the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: The Rhine valley-a treasury of medieval art, and, as this program shows, the cradle of what we now think of as distinctly German imagery. Foremost among Cologne's late-Gothic painters was Stefan Lochner, who injected drama and excitement into familiar biblical scenes. At about the same time, Johannes Gutenberg pioneered a printing revolution in the Rhine town of Mainz, leading to one of the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Henry Moore's work is so representative of mid-20th-century modernist concerns that a generation of art viewers may be unfamiliar with it. This program facilitates a rediscovery of the brilliant sculptor and draftsman by freshly examining many of his drawings, graphics, and monuments. From his most iconic pieces to his lesser-known works, including the amazingly relevant WWII-era tube shelter...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Under Muslim rule, Spain became the most advanced, wealthy, and populous country in Europe, with great leaps forward in art, architecture, and many other fields. In this program, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon travels from Cordoba to Seville and on to Granada as he tells the story of art in Islamic and medieval Spain. Richly designed and decorated buildings such as the Great Mosque in...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
View online at AVOD
Summary: How do three talented individuals translate their unique artistic sensibilities into action? This program explains. Section one focuses attention on Jacques d'Amboise, one of the world's finest classical dancers and founder of the National Dance Institute, which exposes thousands of inner-city school children to the magic and discipline of dance. Section two introduces viewers to Andre Andreev...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: As life among the aristocracy in Damascus and Baghdad attained its zenith of refinement, another important cultural center was developing in Islamic Cordoba. This program focuses on the remarkable cultural contributions of Ziryab, a talented young musician who fled the East for Andalusia and became the era's preeminent arbiter of style and taste. After creating a popular new form of music and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: In this program, artist, filmmaker, and dramatist William Kentridge demonstrates his remarkable filmmaking technique-stop-action animation using photos of charcoal drawings in which he has erased and redrawn scenes in different arrangements-as he works on Stereoscope. Footage from that piece as well as from History of the Main Complaint; Felix in Exile; Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old; Mine;...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005