Artemisia [2004] [DVD]

This film is showing us how education in painting was organised for women in the baroque era. It is most interesting to see how perspectives were taught. Artemisia is a film about how hard it was for her to be recognized as an artist in her own right. The hardship she went through is hard to watch. She is the artist that all women should know about! Magnificent paintings.

I was disappointed that this film didn't follow Artemisia into her years of success as the first female member of the Academy of Art in Florence - but I think the director wanted to titillate as well as educate - maybe more of the former! The sequence where she is tortured for her refusal to confess her relationship with her lover is gruesome but did help me to understand exactly what they did to her and how nearly she lost her precious ability to paint - which certainly explains why she got kinda mad at men thereafter as so forcefully depicted in so many of her paintings!

I chose this item because of a project I'm currently working on dealing with art/paintings in film including the depiction of painters, and I'm glad to say that the standard here is worthy of the original painter herself!

Great!

Excellent

A great film, beautifully shot, and a wonderful story line. Compelling acting that even held a 13 year old boy's attention.

Bought for a friend.

This film looks ravishing but it actually flattens and simplifies a far more complex and disturbing story. Artemisia Gentileschi was a Renaissance painter, the first female to be admitted to the Academy in Florence, and the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a friend of Caravaggio.When still in her teens she is raped by her father's artist collaborator, Agostini Tasso, and when the case is brought to court (the first recorded rape case, complete with testimonies) she, the victim, is the one put on trial, tortured to try to force her to detract, which she refuses to do. Shamed as a 'dishonoured' woman, she is then married off and sent away to Florence, where she paints out some of her anguish and anger in some of the most vivid, disturbing, powerful Renaissance paintings we have.The film takes this factual basis, but twists it out of recognition: Artemisia here falls in love with Tasso and they become lovers; her father finds out and tries to stage a rape trial in order to force them to marry; and Artemisia is tortured in order to agree it was rape rather than that she was a willing lover. The pair are separated (a la Romeo and Juliet) and she leaves Rome voluntarily.This travesty turns a transgressive woman into something much tamer, and elides some of the power of her paintings: given the film's scenario, it makes no sense that in one of her first paintings (Judith and Holofernes), she paints herself as Judith cutting off the head of a Holofernes with the likeness of Tasso - it only comes clear if we accept that he was her rapist, not her lover.So a beautiful film visually, but it does a severe disservice to a great female artist. Read the Lapierre book alongside the film (Artemisia), or even the more populist novel (The Passion of Artemisia) by Susan Vreeland.