More than ever, questions of form and the constitution of cinema swirl, boundaries challenged or collapsing regularly in a present where visual media is dominated by streaming and consumption trends increasingly tend toward long-form series. Into one of the more niche corners of this larger conversation settles the question of “filmed art,” be in live streams of the Metropolitan Opera screened in movie theaters, composed documentation of theater productions (like Disney+’s Hamilton, for instance), or feature-length “episodes” of popular anime series that nonetheless play megaplexes nationwide. Of course, “cinema” has no true fixed definition — which renders all critique, positive or negative, of a work’s “cinematic” quality at best tunelessly semantic and at worst a purely ouroboros proposition — and so audience discernment in this matter is largely guided by intuition informed by historicity and contemporaneous cultural understanding. We first sense what is cinema, and then seek support for our position.
Of course, any attention paid too closely to such delineative arguments is largely fruitless and incidental, beneficial only to satiate our human instinct toward organization and classification. But more interesting than most case studies is that of the filmed art exhibition, the camera holding the potential to compose and curate spaces that are themselves already composed and curated, offering a distancing effect that moves beyond the function of mere access, and which has the opportunity to reconfigure and even deepen the experience of experiencing art. Whether this constitutes “cinema,” exactly, is a question left best to the dockets of pedants.
If that all seems a bit antagonistic to genuine inquiry, it’s only because such concerns are purely quantitative, and have little to no bearing on the quality of a given work, beyond the potential limitations of its formalism. Case in point: Seventh Art Productions’ Exhibition on Screen documentary series, entries into which make study of a famous artist or work or, in the case of their latest project, movement from the history of art. The series’ standard operating procedure is to offer contextual and historical information — courtesy of academics, critics, curators, and voiceover of primary source material — while also presenting the artwork on exhibition in high definition, the camera carefully caressing canvases and utilizing mostly pans and zooms to both guide the audience and simulate the experience of an in-person viewing.
Dawn of Impressionism: Paris 1874 (directed by one of Exhibition on Screen’s house filmmakers, Ali Ray) takes as its subject the Musée d’Orsay’s titular 2024 exhibition celebrating the sesquicentennial of the first Impressionist exhibition held outside of France’s official channels — specifically, The Salon. As the film opens, viewers unfamiliar with the Exhibition on Screen format may be briefly tricked into expecting something more experimental, even perhaps ethnographic in nature: set to voiceover of an art auctioneer, the opening couple minutes alternate a series of static and roving images of the gallery itself, with patrons milling about, a suggestion in the air that what’s to follow may be a “looking at people looking at art”-style study. Alas, no such luck for those who prefer their documentaries light on exposition, as the project opens up into expected territory wherein the usual players help set the scene via talking heads giving a quick precis of Impressionism’s early history, the effect of the Second French Empire’s collapse, and the initial and protracted failure that such abiding luminaries as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and numerous others faced.
But while this approach means that Dawn of Impressionism is at its core a narrative text, there’s no denying the appeal of being immersed in the art itself, the camera’s intimacy with the exhibited works lending an experiential quality that transcends the project’s baseline educational function. This style is admittedly fairly one-note, essentially cycling betweens displaying the works of art in close-up and archival print materials leveraged largely as interstitial visual texture, but it’s a note played well. Also elevating the material is the film’s healthy reliance on voiceover of recitations from the personal correspondences of the artists in questions, an approach which likewise lends an immediacy to and proximity with the people and period in question. In this way, and without ever explicitly teasing out themes, Dawn of Impressionism moves nicely between the specific — Monet’s thoughts regarding the subterfuge of color; contemporaneous regard for The Salon’s exhibitions as the “works of a jury” rather than the works of artists — and the universal; it’s tough not feel a twinge of fatalism from the vantage of this cinematic age of Marvel and Netflix when hearing 19th-century painters decry the preference for comfort and easy commodification in the day’s art du jour.
These strengths found in Dawn of Impressionism are also those of Exhibition on Screen at large, as are its weaknesses. Anyone catching more than one or two of the series’ entries are likely to eventually tire of its homogenous template, and for all its commitment to meticulously detailing the works of art in question, and thus at least managing to justify its existence as a visual text in its own right, there’s a clear Wiki quality to the film’s guiding “thesis,” as it were — it’s less an essay film than a synopsis film. Of course, any more exhaustive or interrogative project would require considerably more time and space, of the kind afforded to long-form series, leading right back into questions of cinema. Perhaps, then, one of the lessons to glean Dawn of Impressionism (and Exhibition on Screen) is the tedium of litigating such definitions to begin with. Ray’s film is imperfect, limited in scope and largely static in form, but is also a far more rewarding visual text than most documentaries hitting both streaming platforms and theaters, the assembly-lined and carefully composed alike. To turn one’s nose up at the film on purely terminological grounds, then, is to risk committing the same intellectual sin most “critics” of the day did with regard to Impressionism. Look at how well those hot takes aged.
DIRECTOR: Ali Ray; DISTRIBUTOR: Seventh Art Productions; IN THEATERS: March 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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