Claude Monet at Work in His Garden, 1915

http://www.openculture.com/2012/07/rare_film_claude_monet_at_work_in_his_famous_garden_at_giverny_1915.html

by gruseom • 14 years ago

74 12 14 years ago

sethbannon• 14 years ago

It's fascinating how much he looks at the subject (the water lilies). One would have thought an impressionist such as Monet would be freed from this.

Gring• 14 years ago

It's possible that this is not his normal work style, but that the director asked him to move the head a lot to add some action or to conform to some preconception of "what painters normally do".

joystick• 14 years ago

really? half of the effort in painting is the actual 'seeing', not putting the paint to the canvas. In fact in art school we would do exercises where we drew from life without ever looking at the paper at all

sp3322• 14 years ago

Impressionist doesn't mean abstract. Have you ever stood ~30 feet away from a Monet? It looks just like looking at a regular painting, or better because he really tried to paint to the way your eyes and brain see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism#Impressionist_te...

bluekeybox• 14 years ago

That would be expressionism you have in mind, or perhaps surrealism aka Dali. Impressionism is about one's "first" or "direct" impression of things as you look at them, not about how you imagine/idealize them later on. Impressionists took this "first impression" business pretty seriously. Your painting most likely would not be called impressionistic if you painted it your studio, from a photograph, or from memory -- you had to do it en plein air (out in the open, from real life).

The idea prevailing at the time (which partly came from the physiology of vision actually) was that, on one's first impression of something, the brain only perceives patches of color (a 2D image), that are only processed after a split second into something more resembling a 3D representation. Impressionists tried to capture that supposedly "pure" first image. Everyone tried to do it in his/her own way. Seurat, for example developed pointillism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seurat-La_Parade_detail.jp...).

dhughes• 14 years ago

I wonder how many frames per second the film is running at it always seems old films don't quite get motion quite right.

Look at him walking and the dog too they're walking way too fast very unnatural but really it's not much of a difference I guess.

abruzzi• 14 years ago

Most silent films from the era were supposed to run at 18fps (that's why we have a preconception of everything moving fast in silent films--years later they were threaded into sound projectors which sped them up to 24 fps.) BUT many cameras of the day were not motor or spring driven, but run by a hand crank. The cameraman would hum a popular tune at the right tempo and try to turn the crank in time with the beats of the music. This meant that there are subtle faster and slower moments. Also, I noticed a couple of tiny jump cuts where a frame or two may have been lost in the original, also munching with the motion. Finally, not motion related, but the old cameras were not great at exposing every frame exactly, causing a flickering that is very noticeable, and may impact your sense of motion.

ondrae• 14 years ago

He had style and swagger. All white suit, pocket kerchief, and a cocked hat.

pgrote• 14 years ago

How is the film under copyright still?

sp3322• 14 years ago

It seems this video has music added, that EMI claims copyright over.

Claude Monet at Work in His Garden, 1915

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