Categories
Art Documentary Exhibitions Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen:
Vermeer
the Greatest Exhibition

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2023 – UK – Cert. PG – 90m

****

A tour around the Rijksmuseum’s current, sold out Closer to Johannes Vermeer exhibition, with comments from museum staff members and an art critic – out in cinemas both in the UK and around the world from Tuesday, April 18th

The latest instalment in producer Phil Grabsky’s excellent Exhibition On Screen series about art might be seen as something of a blockbuster: its subject is at once a famous artist and the current unprecedented, likely never to be repeated, comprehensive exhibition of that artist’s work. This allows the film to navigate the painter’s entire career in a chronological journey both through his images and, in a secondary, incidental journey, through the gallery itself. The latter journey is just there, visible but never described. Visitors tends to go to an art gallery to see its contents, or as in this case, a particular exhibition, not the gallery itself.

The blockbuster is the current exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, entitled Closer To Johannes Vermeer, which runs from Friday, February 10th to Sunday, June 4th 2023 and is completely sold out. Vermeer (1632-1675) lived in the Dutch town of Delft, and in his active years as an artist painted only two or three pictures a year.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The End

Director – Wiebe Bonnema – 2019 – Netherlands – 4m 36s

*****

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

I had to blink while I was watching this. Its opening two minutes play out like the animated title sequence of a spaghetti Western, and if you’ve seen a few of those you’ll know that a number sport superb 2D animation titles which this little short so brilliantly pastiches. This goes further in a way, simultaneously playing with genre clichés while depicting a gunfighter saving a town from despots. As he passes through, white squares standing for people’s windows wipe onto the screen.

This opening cleverly gets around one of the inherent problems with the short animated (or for that matter non-animated) film, the necessity for credits. Usually, these are boringly placed at the end as white titles creeping up the screen over a black background. But having got all that out of the way in his opening, which incidentally functions as the perfect calling card for selling himself as a maker of amazing titles sequences, Wiebe has space to explore what happens after the generic story is over. What happens after the hero rides off into the sunset?

The graphic genius already exhibited continues in what follows: a long, slow, single shot horse ride away from camera into the distance.… Read the rest