The third episode, "Painting the People" shows how they looked beyond landscape for subjects—Degas' ballet dancers, Caillebotte's floor scrapers, Renoir's revelers. "The Final Flourish," Episode 4, deals with Pointillism and the work of Georges Seurat, some of the early work of Van Gogh, and Monet's Water Lilies.
All episodes are illustrated by a broad selection of the artists' work from collections all over the world, as well as an abundance of footage of the places where they lived and worked. We get to see many of the actual scenes that inspired their paintings, although in some cases what we see now is not much like what they saw then. This is especially true of the city scenes.
Bonus material in the three-disc set, besides an informative booklet on the Impressionists and a short biography of Januszcak, includes a full-length 90-minute feature on Edouard Manet. Although he didn't call himself an Impressionist and didn't exhibit with them, Manet is often associated with the movement, and was as much revolutionary in his own way. His famous Olympia caused as much a furor as anything the full-fledged Impressionists did, if not more so.
There is also a three-episode examination of the life and work of Vincent van Gogh, Vincent: The Full Story, which runs about two and a half hours. Both films follow the same pattern of the main series—equal amounts of Januszcak combined with the ostensible objects of the film.
A note about the Van Gogh bonus disc: the 2004 film was produced before the publication of the 2011 book Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, which made the case that Van Gogh's death might not have been suicide. It does however make very clear the fact that Van Gogh was impossible to get along with, presaging the psychological problems that dominated his final years. Both the Manet and Van Gogh films make excellent supplements to the main series, and if you find Waldemar entertaining, you get a whole lot more of him.
Article comments