The damn scene goes on forever. Someone yell, “Cut!” please. The Italian painter Carvaggio flails around in slow-motion, his sword all a blur as he lets out the cheesiest scream since Hayden Christensen became Darth Vader in Star Wars III: “Noooooooooo!” Boris Karloff would have made a great Carvaggio. Pity the BBC Documentary Simon Schama’s Power of Art couldn’t get him. The series shows eight artist, their works, their lives and their horror-show quirks.
In fact, they showed everything short of Rembrandt in a hockey mask, prowling the mean streets of Amsterdam after dark. Rembrandt could have gotten even with all the patrons that abandon him. It would have been in keeping with the tone of the series. Schama’s stated aim is not a bad one. He wishes to strip away the solemn reverence we have for great artist, but were they all really psychopaths.
Let’s review his monsters on parade: Scarface Jacques-Louis David is Monsieur Guillotine, Bernini is a girlfriend-slashing, brother-beating thug, Vincent Van Gogh slowly eats a tube of yellow oil paint -- the actor mistakenly thinking he’s up for the role of Renfield in a West End version of Dracula (and I had no idea Van Gogh was a Cockney lad), dirty-old-man William Turner fights his personal sea monsters, Picasso is a has-been Commie-stooge -- and the twitchy, chain-smoking way Schama shows Rothko? Simon smugly judges: “I knew this kind of kid -- grew up with him. Went to Hebrew school. Reads ever kind of book he could get his hands on. Played not just the violin, but the mandolin. Wow! Grownups called him a chochom, a know-it-all... He wanted to please his mother. He was just your super-educated, ungainly, sentimental Jew, in the grip of mighty ideas and desperate to tell you all about them. Fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms around, a big heart and a BIG mouth to match. You know the type?”
Type? All the artists in this series are types -- cartoon villains from a James Bond film. They should be stroking a white cat and giggling. Actor portrayals in documentaries tend to go horribly wrong, but none worse than these. They are so earnest and heavy handed. Listen to actors like Tom Hanks, Garrison Keillor or Morgan Freedman tossing off the lines in any Ken Burn’s documentary. They make me cry by underplaying. I cried for a different reason here. All the slick glibness to make it entertaining, but no attempt is made to understand the artists’ problems (including mental illness that is shown as a freak show for the viewers titillation). They are never are they shown as real humans.
The title sequence for the series is a drop of blood billowing out in a tank of water while Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata plays. The creepier theme for “Swan Lake” had already been taken by Universal’s 1931 Dracula, so the producer had to settle. These aren’t documentaries -- they’re splatter films.
I view other artist not as perfect geniuses but as people like myself struggling to connect with the world -- maybe they have to be a little broken to put all their energy into saying, “This is what it is like.” If they were normal they wouldn’t spend a life time trying to say that. Yet as I watched each episode, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be the subject of one of these horror shows. I’ve made enough stupid mistakes that the tough part would be figuring out which of my screw ups to highlight and which hack actor to play me badly. Mariah Carey in a beard and balding would be cool. But I hope a portrait of any of us isn’t merely a smart ass parade of our mistakes -- entertaining though that may be.
In fact, they showed everything short of Rembrandt in a hockey mask, prowling the mean streets of Amsterdam after dark. Rembrandt could have gotten even with all the patrons that abandon him. It would have been in keeping with the tone of the series. Schama’s stated aim is not a bad one. He wishes to strip away the solemn reverence we have for great artist, but were they all really psychopaths.
Let’s review his monsters on parade: Scarface Jacques-Louis David is Monsieur Guillotine, Bernini is a girlfriend-slashing, brother-beating thug, Vincent Van Gogh slowly eats a tube of yellow oil paint -- the actor mistakenly thinking he’s up for the role of Renfield in a West End version of Dracula (and I had no idea Van Gogh was a Cockney lad), dirty-old-man William Turner fights his personal sea monsters, Picasso is a has-been Commie-stooge -- and the twitchy, chain-smoking way Schama shows Rothko? Simon smugly judges: “I knew this kind of kid -- grew up with him. Went to Hebrew school. Reads ever kind of book he could get his hands on. Played not just the violin, but the mandolin. Wow! Grownups called him a chochom, a know-it-all... He wanted to please his mother. He was just your super-educated, ungainly, sentimental Jew, in the grip of mighty ideas and desperate to tell you all about them. Fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms around, a big heart and a BIG mouth to match. You know the type?”
Type? All the artists in this series are types -- cartoon villains from a James Bond film. They should be stroking a white cat and giggling. Actor portrayals in documentaries tend to go horribly wrong, but none worse than these. They are so earnest and heavy handed. Listen to actors like Tom Hanks, Garrison Keillor or Morgan Freedman tossing off the lines in any Ken Burn’s documentary. They make me cry by underplaying. I cried for a different reason here. All the slick glibness to make it entertaining, but no attempt is made to understand the artists’ problems (including mental illness that is shown as a freak show for the viewers titillation). They are never are they shown as real humans.
The title sequence for the series is a drop of blood billowing out in a tank of water while Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata plays. The creepier theme for “Swan Lake” had already been taken by Universal’s 1931 Dracula, so the producer had to settle. These aren’t documentaries -- they’re splatter films.
I view other artist not as perfect geniuses but as people like myself struggling to connect with the world -- maybe they have to be a little broken to put all their energy into saying, “This is what it is like.” If they were normal they wouldn’t spend a life time trying to say that. Yet as I watched each episode, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be the subject of one of these horror shows. I’ve made enough stupid mistakes that the tough part would be figuring out which of my screw ups to highlight and which hack actor to play me badly. Mariah Carey in a beard and balding would be cool. But I hope a portrait of any of us isn’t merely a smart ass parade of our mistakes -- entertaining though that may be.
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