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Edo Avant Garde
Apr. 10th, 2020 01:41 pmI'm behind on my movie reviews, but I wanted to toss up a quick review of Linda Hoaglund's Edo Avant Garde, because it's only available for free for one more day, so you should catch it now if it sounds interesting.
It's a documentary about screen paintings (mainly) during the Edo period in Japan (and also a little bit about how these paintings affected western art, mainly impressionists, and also later Japanese artists), and I really enjoyed its meditative and yet still absorbing pacing, the way that it lingers on the paintings and also the natural world that inspired them, and discusses the way that the screens were originally experienced - the fact that people lived with them, that they sat down on the floor and would feel themselves surrounded by the scene in the painting, the elegant cranes (I love the beautiful precise feathers on these painted cranes - similarly, the scales on fish) or the tall grasses.
I can see the intrinsic appeal of a crane painting, but I never really understood the grass paintings before (I mean... it's just grass), but the fact that the viewers would have been sitting down among the grasses made me get the point for the first time.
There's also a magical moment where we get to see one of these screens by candlelight, as they often would have been seen in Edo times, and the gold leaf background looks totally different and utterly bewitching in the flickering flame.
It's a documentary about screen paintings (mainly) during the Edo period in Japan (and also a little bit about how these paintings affected western art, mainly impressionists, and also later Japanese artists), and I really enjoyed its meditative and yet still absorbing pacing, the way that it lingers on the paintings and also the natural world that inspired them, and discusses the way that the screens were originally experienced - the fact that people lived with them, that they sat down on the floor and would feel themselves surrounded by the scene in the painting, the elegant cranes (I love the beautiful precise feathers on these painted cranes - similarly, the scales on fish) or the tall grasses.
I can see the intrinsic appeal of a crane painting, but I never really understood the grass paintings before (I mean... it's just grass), but the fact that the viewers would have been sitting down among the grasses made me get the point for the first time.
There's also a magical moment where we get to see one of these screens by candlelight, as they often would have been seen in Edo times, and the gold leaf background looks totally different and utterly bewitching in the flickering flame.
