From Venus to Marilyn

27 Minutes, 1971
Genre:
Documentary

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Directed by: Jacques Mory-Katmor
Production Company:Blue Wave Industries
Photographer: Amnon Salomon
Original Music: Noam Sheriff
Language: Hebrew
| Subtitles not available

An arthouse documentary about the pop art movement featuring artists Michael Eisemann, Joav BarEl, and Michael Druks. In the film, Eisemann explains how he weaves elements of his immediate surroundings into his works, whilst referencing the works of earlier artists. It is through this interweaving, he explains, that he seeks to create something altogether new.

BarEl portrays pop art as a movement based on mass culture, whose main preoccupation is with the present day. In his view, seeing as how the pop artist is very much immersed in contemporary life, their works serve as a direct extension of their socio-political views. Also, as pop directly relates to life itself, it too breaks out of the confines of the canvass and in doing so, illustrates how pop art did away with art’s traditional divides into different media, and introduced whole new dynamics between the art object and its consumers – the audience. This shift is also evident in the transition to environmental and conceptual art, as demonstrated in BarEl’s 1970 piece, Centre of the World, that is featured in the film.

Finally, Druks adds that the pop art movement grew out of the tangible world, seeing as the artists feature in their works slivers of their lived reality that has become faster-paced, denser, and more urban than ever before. Druks discusses the inspiration he finds in tangible materials, acts of chance and coincidence, and the collage technique, and posits that his art bespeaks a social trend made manifest via humour and irony.

From Venus to Marilyn was produced with the help of experimental artist and cultural figure Joav BarEl who served as a consultant on the film. Between 1971-1972, BarEl developed and created a series of films for Channel 1, along with filmmaker and avantgarde artist Jacques Katmor and cinematographer Amnon Solomon. Their films were steeped in the art and critical thinking of their time, focusing on a range of working artists (male and female) and their artistic oeuvre.

Related topics:
Mevo’ot - The Joav BarEl Ideas Foundation

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