Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Arts / Painting / All Films

Sama in the Forest

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 16:42:00 GMT

In a creative collaboration with local community members in Madhubani, India, this hybrid documentary highlights the tale of Sama, a young princess who wanders into the forest and befriends a young man, only to be slandered by a muckraking confidante of the king, and subsequently cursed and banished by her father, Lord Krisna.

The film combines footage of women telling different versions of the tale, the making of elaborate narrative paintings, a dramatization of the story, a yearly festival that celebrates Sama, and in-depth conversations about the morals and meanings of this and other traditional tales. The girls and women at the heart of the film are students and teachers at the Mithila Art Institute, a small school for young aspiring artists. Additional participants — community members of different genders, castes, and generations — help paint a complex picture of the social tensions evident in Mithila today.

The festival of Sama Chakeva is both unique to the Mithila region, and special in several of its qualities – notably, in its multi-caste, non-priestly, female-centric, playful and even bawdy nature. This festival is celebrated by groups of women and girls, who join together to enter the mythical world of Sama in song and ritual. They bond in teasing and torturing the muckraking character, to ensure the devotion of their brothers for years to come, and arguably to shine a critical light on some of the patriarchal aspects of their own culture.

The painters of the three paintings included in the film are all trained in the Mithila Art tradition that derives originally from a domestic, ceremonial form of expression and for which the region is renowned. Finally, another key element of the film, intricately interwoven with the others, is an enactment of the Sama story by the very same people who are also interviewed in the film. The workshopping in preparation for the enactment provided an opportunity for collaborative meaning making and personal reflection on the significance of the story in their lives today. And the filmed enactment itself enables the filmmakers to deliver these meanings to a wider audience.

Selected Screenings & Awards

Best Feature, Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, Canada, 2023

51st Annual Conference on South Asia, Ethnographic and Documentary Film Screenings, USA, 2023

South Asian Studies Speakers Series, Pennsylvania State University, USA, 2023

Contemporary Arts of Mithila Radford University Int'l Symposium, USA 2023

Signs Film and Video Festival, India, 2023

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Fully Awake

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Fully Awake
Buy Now: $320.00

Hidden in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Black Mountain College (1933 - 1957) was an influential experiment in education that inspired and shaped twentieth century American art. Fully Awake: Black Mountain College is a documentary film that explores the college's progressive pedagogy and radical approach to arts education. Highly democratic and faculty-owned, the school promoted practical responsibilities and the creative arts as equally important components to intellectual development.

During WWII, Black Mountain College was a haven for refugee European artists such as Josef and Anni Albers who arrived from the Bauhaus in Germany. In the socially conservative 1940s and 50s, the college also became a refuge for the American avant-garde, (Franz Kline, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Robert Creeley, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and M.C. Richards). Fully Awake explores how the confluence of this diverse community came together to create a unique educational model.

Through narration, archive photography, and interviews with students, teachers, historians, and current artists, Fully Awake investigates the development of this very special place - the site of Buckminster Fuller's first geodesic dome, John Cage's first 'happening', and the Black Mountain Review - and how its collaborative curriculum inspired innovations that would change the very definition of "art." Through probing the legacy of Black Mountain College, Fully Awake points to a progressive pedagogical model that can continue to inspire students today.

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Hyman Bloom: The Beauty of All Things

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Hyman Bloom: The Beauty of All Things
Buy Now: $320.00

Painter Hyman Bloom is one of the forefathers of abstract art in America. His career flourished in the 1940's and 50's garnering the highest praise in both art and popular press. His intense beliefs about composition and masterful command of color were breathtaking and are admired by artists to this day. But Hyman's decision to continue exploring figurative work when the art world was moving towards total abstraction and his habitual disdain for the public eye brought him from being one of the infamous "Bad Boys from Boston" to a man little known in the mainstream art scene. Weaving interviews, archival photos, never before seen sketchbooks from the 1930s to the present this film chronicles an artist blessed with longevity and creativity who continued to work hard at his craft even as he approached his 95th birthday.

Born in Brunaviski, Latvia, Bloom grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in the West End of Boston - a neighborhood since vanished. The film highlights a body of work that is a vibrant manifestation of Bloom's imagination and his dedication to envision what others didn't dare. He painted rabbis and Christmas trees, cadavers and autopsies, séances and the astral plane, the woods of Maine and the shimmer of opalescent pottery. Told with humor and irony Bloom's story is not a bitter one. It is a triumph of art and of the spirit.

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Gone To Pat

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:26:00 GMT

Gone To Pat
Buy Now: $295.00

The Patuas, or “Chitrakers,” are a nomadic people who live in the small village of Noya, Midnapore, in India. Though originally Muslim, they now consider themselves neither Muslim or Hindu. Instead, they are more clearly defined by their art.

They practice a form of painting called “pat” - richly colored storyboards on scrolls that reflect the ancient myths of their Indian culture. This art form is transmitted from generation to generation - the subjects and styles of the paintings simply changing over the years, encompassing what is culturally appealing at the time. Myths are now being replaced by news stories and social subjects, such as domestic abuse and environmental issues.

While keeping religious and folk myths alive, the pats have taken on a new purpose: to raise social awareness. They perform the musical narratives that accompany the pats for small neighborhood audiences or city folk. These performances and their sales of paintings to tourists allows them to earn a meager living and carry on their work.

Gone To Pat shows in detail the Patuas praciticing their art: mixing the paint colors, drawing outlines of the images, and filling the images with “vibrant, bold colors” that are made from only natural materials. As beautiful and colorful as the art it depicts, this film transports the viewer to a picturesque, idyllic region of India, which has an almost mythological quality in itself.

Of interest to Asian Studies, the Anthropology of Art, Cultural Change, Anthropology of Religion, Psychology.

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Mystic Vision, Sacred Art

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:50:00 GMT

Mystic Vision, Sacred Art
Buy Now: $295.00

This documentary provides an excellent introduction to the art of thangka, sacred Tibetan Buddhist painting, in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. Carefully filmed, it takes you through every step of the painting process of thangkas. It offers insight into the symbolic and religious meaning of thangkas and their importance for Tibetan Buddhist life.

Most of the artists in this documentary are Tibetan refugees who have devoted their lives to preserving this sacred tradition. Thangkas are the scrolled devotional paintings used in Tibetan Buddhist ritual practice. Their bright colors and flowing patterns may be familiar and appreciated by westerners. However, the opportunity to see where, how, and by whom they are made affects our perception and understanding of the place these works hold in the practice of Buddhism.

This documentary provides detailed descriptions of technique, from the stretching and preparation of the painting surface, to the grinding of the pigments, to the drawing of the image and realization in brilliant colors.

This program would be of interest to students of Buddhism, art, and Asian Studies.

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Mark Tobey

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:49:00 GMT

Mark Tobey
Buy Now: $295.00

Mark Tobey was made while the painter lived in Seattle, Washington early in the 1950s. It is only the second film made by Robert Gardner and tries to show in cinematic language how this man looked at the world; Tobey himself both performs and is observed.

A unique film in the Gardner ouvre, the film not only presents an experimental portrait of Tobey but serves as a window into the American art, avant garde film, and poetic movements of this period.

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Mark Tobey Abroad

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:49:00 GMT

Mark Tobey Abroad
Buy Now: $295.00

Robert Gardner visits the great American painter Mark Tobey in Basel, Switzerland, where he lived for the last years of his life. With remarkable candor and objectivity, Tobey discusses his work and that of fellow artists including Picasso. His keen wit lends humor and bite to his critiques, and his own vitality and spirit make an important statement on his work and on Art itself.

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Pintor Campesino

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:58:00 GMT

Pintor Campesino
Buy Now: $295.00

Cleto Rojas, a peasant painter in Venezuela, discusses his artwork. From movies and Roman mythology to his own dreams and scenes of rural life, Rojas takes inspiration from all sources and transforms the world around him into fantastic visions. He teaches village children his technique of using house-paint on canvas, as his wife goes about her own housework, singing slowly.

The painter is bemused by the attention of anthropologists and art critics, and he talks about the pitfalls of attention. He remembers traveling to Caracas as a young man to meet famous painters and being disappointed in them. His ambitions are more focused on the content of his work - Rojas wishes he could envision and paint one of Venezuela's heroes, Simon Boilvar, as he really was, as no accurate representations exist now. Without looking for fame, he continues painting all kinds of images as he sees them.

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Sean Scully at Work

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Sean Scully at Work
Buy Now: $295.00

In 1997, Robert Gardner visited friend and well-known American painter Sean Scully in his Barcelona studio. He documented the making of two paintings, Testigos and Passenger, and the opening of “Sean Scully 1987-1997” at Salas del Palacio Episcopal in Malaga.

This DVD, an important document of an influential modern artist, brings together the three short films made during that summer.

Testigos - (10 min, 1997)

Testigos is a small painting done when Gardner and Scully worked together in Barcelona. The title, which means 'witnesses,' is the name of a small island in the Caribbean. Testigos, and at least one other painting, was made on the days that the larger canvas Passenger was drying.

Passenger - (25 min, 1997)

In Passenger, Gardner made what he calls “an observation in four movements.” The intent of the piece is to impart an experience of the engagement by Scully with the work in question, an engagement which is both physical and emotional. The only sounds are those made by the artist as he works and, occasionally, musical passages from tapes Scully listens to while he is painting.

Scully in Malaga - (7 min, 1998)

A short film acknowledging the efforts of those responsible for installing the exhibition “Sean Scully 1987-1997” in Malaga. Equally important, the film captures Scully's parents dancing their beloved 'paso doble' in the midst of their son's work.

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Singing Pictures

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Singing Pictures
Buy Now: $295.00

For generations, Patua (Chitrakar) communities of West Bengal, India have been painters and singers of stories depicted in scrolls. The Patuas tell the stories of Muslim saints (pirs and fakirs) as well as Hindu Gods and Goddesses, and offer devotion to saints at Muslim shrines. In the past they used to wander from village to village, receiving rice, vegetables and coins for their recital. They would unroll a scroll, a frame at a time, and sing their own compositions. But competition from other media eroded this way of life and now the Patuas are trying to adapt to changing conditions.

In response to this cultural crisis and as a means to make extra money, recently a group of women from Naya village near Calcutta formed a scroll painters' collaborative. The film follows their daily lives as they paint, sing, cook, tend to their children and meet with the cooperative. They discuss the problems and rewards of practicing their art, and speak freely about the social, religious, and political changes in the village and the world beyond. Their wisdom, artistry, and good humor amidst many difficulties illuminate the lives around them.

Scrolls cover a variety of themes: mythological and religious, social and especially women's issues, contemporary local and world news. The more recent themes are communal (Hindu Muslim) harmony, Joy Bangla (the birth of Bangladesh as a country), the battle of Kargil (Kashmir conflict), and the September 11 events in New York. Women painters have also developed the figure of Satya Pir (revered by Muslim and Hindu alike) demonstrating how two communities can live in religious harmony despite mounting tensions in the rest of the country.

The women candidly discuss issues of Islam and birth control, victimization of women, female education, poverty and work, religious tolerance and intolerance, and depict some of these ideas in the scrolls themselves. Women painters want to tell their own stories in songs and pictures, illustrating their lives of hardship and endurance. These stories attest to what it means to be a woman in Bengal and India today, demonstrating how a small group of determined women can empower themselves by adapting an ancient art to new conditions.

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