Cubism and Expressionist art

The films that I chose were picked completely at random.

The first was on Cubism. Unlike the textbook that portrayed cubism as only having 2 artists, Picasso and Barque, this film added more!

As a French speaker, I learned that the narrator likes to over-accentuate his nasality when speaking French, in an effort to make himself sound more proficient than he is. I also learned that the narrator likes to use $50 words for absolutely no reason. While I have a very extensive vocabulary, and have published writings, I see no need to use $50 words in narrated videos, other than for pomp. The problem with pomp in an educational environment is that it’s not very conducive to education.

In the section of the film about the painting “And Englishman in Moscow,” the narrator assumes what the artist is thinking, and spends too much time analysis what might have been in his mind, instead of focusing on the art. Then, after making a ton of assumptions about the thought process of the artist, he asks: “What does it all mean?” It was as if the narrator forgot his own assumptions that he had just made.

The film was entitled “The Impact of Cubism.” Yet there was absolutely nothing in the film about the actual impact of Cubism upon anything! It’s clear that Cubism had an impact of Futurism and Expressionism, but instead, the film focused on “case studies” of specific artists. I learned absolutely nothing about the impact of Cubism on anything more than artists that lived in the shadows of Picasso.

The second film I watched was simply called “Expressionism.” While this film again focused on case studies of particular artists, it was informative in the sense that the artists were not “stock,” and that it explained the difference between Expressionist art and other art from the beginning. Expressionist art was about the human condition; portraying interactions between people and their social environment. Even in the darkest forms, there was interactions between people, revealing social processes in sex and gender, socialization, internal reflections of a social world, and interactions with natural environments. Art was truly more sociological in Expressionism.

I found little correlation between the films and the textbooks, other than a slight expansion of Cubism.