Great Art on Screen - Manet: Portraying Life at Cinema Nova

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Sat 27 Apr 2013 - Fri 03 May 2013

[ADVERT]The exhibition Manet: Portraying Life ended a successful three-month run at The Royal Academy of Arts in London in the middle of this month. Now you can see the exhibition for yourself, all the way across the world in the womb-like dark of the Cinema Nova in Carlton, beginning this Saturday and Sunday and running at various times right up until Mother's Day (check here for session times ).

This is the first in a series of armchair movie rides into art exhibitions - coming up are Munch in Oslo and Vermeer and Music in London, details of which can be found here .

Art historian Tim Marlow hosts the documentary and with a number of guests discusses several of the portraits Manet painted over his career in Paris, from the 1860's until his early death in 1883.



Driving across Melbourne to sit in a cinema in Carlton to watch a movie which was about an exhibition in London felt a little disconnected for me. I'm not entirely sure why, because we are used to time and space fragmenting in this way nowadays. I wondered if it was the fact that I was watching a documentary at the cinema, but I've done that before. But I suspected the reason for the disconnect after reading this review - ultimately, the exhibition itself feels a little redundant. Whether that says something about the exhibition itself I'm not sure, but the documentary would have been filmed the same if the exhibition had never happened. Despite that, this was still an interesting entry into Manet's work and his life.

Being someone who isn't overly familiar with Manet's work, I can't say how this doco will go down for lovers of the man's stuff, but I became absorbed in learning from those in the know (and who only a few times fell into the pit of the art expert, that of sounding like a pretentious prat) about why Edouard Manet was considered a radical in his time, both in his technique and in his choice of art subject. I also had the opportunity to get to know some of the pieces that were shown. There's a fine line between learning something that will add to the depth of your experience and of having all the joy drained out of you because something has been deconstructed to death. For me luckily, it was the former.

#april
#cinema
#carlton
#art
!date 27/04/2013 -- 03/05/2013
%wnmelbourne