Palette Productions

A fast-paced documentary about a second generation of punk rockers living in Toronto. It offers insight into this segment of culture by videotaping in the streets, bars, and homes of punks. Conversations are intercut with the music of the punk bands at the core of the scene.

At the time Wassily Kandinsky painted Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), he was a professor at the Bauhaus. In this work, the painter applies the principles of color and analytical drawing that he also taught to his students and developed in several theoretical writings. The paintings of this period are highly colorful and highly geometric. The three primary colors and the artist’s favored shapes—triangle, square, circle—become true epic characters. “Form is the outward expression of inner content,” Kandinsky said.

The description of the Greek world that Homer gave in the 8th century B.C. was long considered as a purely mythological account. However, in the 19th century, Schliemann's archeological finds at Mycenae and Troy changed the picture : it seems that the places described by Homer really did exist. In the early 20th century, Victor Bérard (educated at École normale supérieure, member of the French school of Athens and translater of the Odyssey) undertook to travel round the Mediterranean with the Genevan photographer Boissonnas. His aim : to show that the literary countries of the cyclopes, Aeolus, Circe, Charybdis and Scylla have a geographical reality. His hypothesis : the epic poem about Ulysses must be a sort of "manual" of information for settlers who emigrated to the East in vast numbers at the time of Homer. An invitation to travel? Jean Baronnet could not resist and put his film into the double wake : of Ulysses and of Victor Bérard...

Is the painting by Giorgiorne or by Titien ? It is difficult to distinguish the work of Giorgione (who died in 1510 at the age of 33) from the early works of Titien (who, for his part died in 1576 at a great age). The Rural Concert which for a long time was attributed to the former is now more willingly attributed to the latter. Analysis of the style, scientific analyses may allow for the hand of one or the other. The mysteries of the scene have done more for the fame of the painting than its uncertain authorship. Why these two naked women beside the two clothed men ? What is the meaning of their gestures ? What music are they playing ? Why that landscape and that flock of sheep ? In order to understand the story and its allusions one must penetrate the learned culture of Venice at the beginning of the 16th century. And also perhaps to compare it with the somewhat contradictory interpretations which modern painters have given such as Manet with his Partie de campagne.

La Goulue, the famous cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge and queen of Belle Époque Paris nightlife, had somewhat fallen from grace. She was now performing at the Foire du Trône. She commissioned her friend Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) to create two panels to decorate her booth. These two works, the largest paintings produced by the artist (1895), would have a dramatic fate. Resold and cut into pieces by a dishonest dealer, they were reassembled in 1929, shortly after La Goulue’s death. Like Manet and Degas, the painter used the technique of painting with essence: the pigments, deprived of oil, are very matte but also much more fragile. The canvases have lost some of their original brilliance, yet they still depict a cast of characters who, like the gods of Olympus and of classical painting, have become truly legendary figures.

The silhouette of a giant wave about to engulf fragile boats: this image of suspended fate has traveled the world in the form of postcards, posters, and advertisements. Why such success? How did an image so deeply rooted in a specific culture—that of Japanese prints—come to achieve such universality?

Composed in Nice, at the Hôtel Régina where the painter had been living since 1949, The Sadness of the King, a 1952 painting nearly four meters by three, is one of the last great works of Matisse. It was created using the cut-paper technique: the painter, immobilized by illness, cuts shapes from sheets of paper previously coated with gouache. He directs an assistant who pins them and moves them on the wall until the desired balance is achieved. Scissors, handled with dexterity, thus henceforth replace pencils and brushes. The pure tones used in the composition eliminate all shading and allow the painter to play solely on the relationships between colors and, above all, on contrasts: black and white (considered by Matisse as colors in their own right), red and blue, green and yellow...

A study of Veronese’s painting The Feast in the House of Levi (1573), originally conceived as a representation of the Last Supper. By transforming the traditional space and spirit of the subject into a grand Venetian banquet, the painter was accused of heresy by the Inquisition (reconstructed here through a voice-over of his dialogue with the judges). Ordered to correct the work, Veronese changed only its title.

Using a funerary portrait from the Fayum preserved at the Louvre Museum, this documentary explores the art of portrait painting in Roman Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. These strikingly realistic faces, painted on wooden panels and placed on mummies, reveal a multicultural society shaped by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions. Through this single portrait, the film reflects on identity, memory, and the human relationship to death.

It was a French prelate who commissioned the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of Saint Louis of the French in Rome, dedicated to his patron saint, Matthew. But he died long before he could know that the result would be three paintings, executed with astonishing speed around 1600 by a young Lombard painter known as Caravaggio, who was thereby creating his first religious cycle. The faithful enter between two large canvases facing one another: The Calling and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. On the high altar is a third, smaller work: Saint Matthew and the Angel. Three episodes intended to edify the Catholic conscience of the French pilgrim and to inspire emulation through the power of the image, in accordance with the principles of the Counter-Reformation during this era of religious wars.

Around 1515, Master Mathis added painted panels arranged as double wings to a sculpted altarpiece created twenty years earlier for the convent-hospital of Isenheim in Alsace. Dedicated to Saint Anthony the Abbot, the work was intended for patients afflicted by ergotism—the “St. Anthony’s fire”—a scourge of poorly nourished Europe that the Order of the Antonines sought to combat under the spiritual protection of their healing patron saint.

From his very first paintings, Rembrandt stages himself. Thereafter, at least a hundred times, he would take his own face as the sole subject of an engraving, drawing, or painting. Such persistence, unique in the history of art, has been interpreted in many different ways. Some of Rembrandt’s self-portraits might appear to express an extravagant man. Yet the objects depicted in them can often be deciphered in quite another way. Through canvases and panels, one can indeed follow the entire history of Rembrandt’s face, but also read the full symbolism of a humanist Europe undergoing profound transformation.

The Pilgrimage to Cythera's island is one of the glories of the Louvre Museum. Praised by Baudelaire, Nerval and Proust, copied by countless painters, continually analysed, it is both legend and utopia. What are those dancing couples doing ? Are they leaving for or coming back from the island of love ?

The Crucifixion is a rather surprising painting of Picasso's. The painter has in fact very rarely painted religious subjects. And, in the place of a convertional representation of Calvary it shows very strange figures. The sacrifice becomes a sort of initiation ceremony or one of exorcism. Picasso uses, for him, unusual colours, reds, yellows, raw greens which combine in mingled shapes with violent contrasts of colours. Once again the graphic palette and special effects used in the film help to interpret the painting. The work is made up like a puzzle full of allusions and references to the profound personal crisis Picasso was living through at the time. His private and intimate life is joined to the universal drama.

Blue period, blue traces, blue sponges... Yves Klein deserved his nickname of "Yves the monochrome". Even though he used many other colours, it is the colour of the sky that he chose above all, used over and over again and that he made into not just a mode of expression but a sort of spiritual energy. Klein had the idea of using directly the naked bodies of his models as "living paintbrushes", inventing by his strange sessions, between ritual and striptease, a whole catalogue of new forms. At the same time, intuitively, almost naively, he went through both the history of legendary pictures, the history of the peculiarities of nature and the noble history of nudes in painting. The Anthropométries are both a meditation on imprint, trace, disappearance and coloured variations on the theme of incarnation.

Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne returns to settle there after some journeys elsewhere. He takes as his motif the Sainte-Victoire mountain close by and paints it more than sixty times in different ways and at every time of year. A strange kind of obstination which it was necessary to examine again.

This is certainly the most mysterious painting of all the history of painting. Thirty different attempts of finding out the hidden meaning of it have been made without success. The Flagellation is not only the masterpiece of a great artist telling an enigmatic story, it is also the expression of Renaissance's new ideas and art. Piero had a great reputation as a painter and as a mathematician. A few of his paintings show his vast knowledge of perspective. The architecture, the paving, the ceiling, the whole setting of The Flagellation - up to its smallest details - is governed by the laws of perspective. By computing all these datas, it was possible to recreate in three dimensions the exact space that Piero had imagined.

In october 1888 Vincent Van Gogh who has been living for eight months in Arles, paints his room. A year later, when he is at the Saint-Paul de Mausole Hospice near Saint-Rémy, he feels compelled to paint two copies of this picture which he is especially fond of. It is deliberately simple and yet seems very strange. Vincent wanted to see it as a symbol of rest but the objects in it seem to retreat and space seems to become deformed. Detailed researchs, as in the series "Palettes" has made it possible to reconstitute exactly the room in Arles. Vincent painted it in fact with the detail which fascinated him in the work of the old Dutch Masters. But he brought to it the extraordinary gift of his brush stroke and his new range of colours. That autumn, between the sunflowers, the harvest and the room in Arles Vincent reached the "higt note in yellow".

Ten similar faces are printed in black, in two rows, on a big canvas measuring 5,65 meters long by 2 high. Similar, these faces ? Not quite : the viewer can distinguish many little differences, like the variations that might come from a same mould. He can also recognise the face of a famous actress, Elizabeth Taylor, "Liz". Andy Warhol composed this picture in 1963 from a photo of the star and by repeating it ten times thanks to a screen-printing screen. Why this face ? Why this repetition ? Warhol does not reveal the keys to his work easily. He became a painter by chance and seems to choose his motifs arbitrarily. Working in New York in the 1960s, at the heart of the "pop art" movement, could he be a sort of negative reflection of consumer society ? A picture like this, which seems to break with traditional portrait art, can however be deciphered just as well as a more ancient painting...

A century later, Alain Jaubert rediscovered the exact location where Seurat prepared his painting, as well as the studio where he completed it. In March 1886, the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition took place. A 26-year-old unknown artist, Georges Seurat, exhibited a very large canvas there, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. A striking light—born of a long reflection on the origins of color perception—a multitude of tiny dots, a landscape treated in a classical manner yet populated with caricature-like figures: the painting caused a scandal. It would give rise to the Neo-Impressionists, or more commonly, “pointillists.” Above all, it would leave a lasting mark on later generations—Fauves, Cubists, and Futurists. Van Gogh himself was deeply influenced by the discovery of Seurat.