Creative Non-fiction. What a wonderful phrase! Norman Mailer developed this technique of writing which applies fiction writing techniques to non-fiction. I haven't read any of Mailer's works, but heard this on a NPR radio "obituary" on Mailer who died late last year. His most famous work was The Naked and The Dead, and was married 6 times! He even stabbed his second wife; luckily she didn't die.
Yesterday evening I was watching Simon Schama's (the great art historian) The Power Of Art. I was amazed at the style and production quality of this work. It included features on seminal artists of the western world. The basic structure was to combine dramatized biographical episodes with Schama's commentary on specific works of the artist. At the end of each episode I came away with a wonderful general sense of the artist's life and work and how it changed the direction of art. Schama doesn't get technical and keeps a consistent birds-eye view of the artist's life, while following a carefully selected threads of events. This focus fits the medium of short documentary extremely well.
Caravaggio lived a tortured life, full of brawls, affairs, jail-terms, poverty and murder. He filters his painful life experiences through his paintings mixing amazing beauty with death, very often ruthless and without salvation. With each artist, Schama also comes to important conclusions about art in general. In the case of Caravaggio, Schama notes that realism of death without redemption was a ground-breaking "modern" concept, and in this sense, Caravaggio took western art in a new direction.
Schama also uses well-selected footage to make his points effectively. He connects Picasso's Guernica with footage from the Nazi bombing of this Spanish city that symbolized the Basque people's opposition to fascism. Throughout the documentary images from the war are presented as if in an avant-garde film, creating the world of a nightmare in our minds, which Guernica is.
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