ARTE France
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16th century Antwerp was rather like 1950s New York. The city of craftsmen and fishermen at the entrance to the North Sea became a leading finance hub, facilitated by European exploration and new trade routes. This work by Quentin Metsys is a subtle criticism of that world and its era, warning about the flow of money when it is detached from all forms of religious and moral considerations. This film examines the influences of Jan Van Eyck and Leonardo...
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Austrian architect Margarete Schütte Lihotzky's 6.5 square meter kitchen rationalized domestic space. Designed in 1926 for the New Frankfurt social housing project and inspired by American and German efficiency studies, this layout pioneered new standards, promoted hygiene, and championed Viennese modernist aesthetics. 10, 000 units were installed, which makes the Frankfurter Kitchen the first industrially produced "fitted kitchen".
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Bellerophon, the grandson of Sisyphus, one of the Greek world's worst criminals, dreamt of becoming a hero, of being equal to the Gods. But his plans got off to a bad start with the accidental murder of his brother. Forced into exile, he took refuge in Tyrins. But there too, nothing went according to plan: accused of rape by Queen Stheneboea, he left to visit the King of Lycia, who in a bid to get rid of him, imposed fearsome challenges on him. Bellerephon...
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The Leica is unique in the history of twentieth-century design - in terms of longevity, if nothing else. Designed in 1914 by an engineer named Bernack, it went into mass production in 1925. The ten-year interval between design and production reflects the uncertainty of a period in which war was followed by a series of political and economic crises. As the first camera that allowed the photographer to take snapshots, the Leica ushered in the photo-journalism...
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From the Danish "Leg godt" meaning "play well," the name Lego has become synonymous with facility, imagination, functional design, longevity, success, and limitless creativity. In 2009, Lego will celebrate its 50th anniversary and the 320 billions of blocks sold since the toy first debuted in1949. The Danish creator, Ole Kirk Christiansen, set forth a revolutionary concept that would make his invention last for generations to come: plastic modular...
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With a tiny and delicate paintbrush, Jean Fouquet adds the golden threads of a tentative humanism to "The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia" (circa 1450) and unveils a glimmer of the modern era, crouching behind the horizon of the Middle Ages. This film analyzes the illumination for clues of what Fouquet sought to convey to viewers. Completed for a book of hours commissioned by one of Charles VIII's financial advisors, it portrays Apollonia's martyrdom...
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Having become organizer of the world, Zeus entrusted the world of the sea to his brother Poseidon, and the underworld, or the kingdom of the dead, to Hades. Alone, in a place he had not chosen himself, Hades reigned over the people of the shadows and over the grimacing creatures that surrounded him. One day, having left his kingdom to breathe a little air on the surface, he crossed paths with the beautiful Persephone, with whom he fell in love - and...
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No mortal endured more terrible a tragedy than Oedipus. He was the son of King Laius, King of Thebes, who, as a young man, having abused King Pelops' son, caused his death. The Gods forbade him to have offspring, and decreed that if Laius gave birth to a son, that son would kill him. However, his wife Jocasta did give birth to a son, Oedipus. Laius removed Oedipus from Thebes, and he grew up far away from the city, without knowing his true identity...
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Adalberto Libera was a pioneer of architectural modernity and a die-hard fascist.Unlike the Nazis, Mussolini made an alliance with the modern movement, which became for architecture, the official style of fascism. In 1937, the regime launched one of its most ambitious projects - the E 42. The idea was to create a new monumental city embodying the new Imperial Rome, for the International Exhibition of 1942. Libera won the competition for the Reception...
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Rem Koolhaas's Villa dall'Ava, built between 1985-1991, became a fantastical imaginative enterprise in the bourgeois Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud. The narrow sloping site contains two glass and aluminum buildings united by a rooftop pool. Despite the anti-modern site surrounded by traditional stone homes, the architect managed to meet the clients' requirements for privacy and independence while opening the house to the garden.
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What object covers a multitude of everyday needs and is used by explorers, housewives, campers and astronauts? It also saves lives, opens bottles, can be held in the palm of one's hand, is on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art, and is produced at a daily rate of 34,000 units? It's the Swiss Army Knife.
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Ettore Sottsass designed the red plastic Valentine typewriter in 1969 for the modernist Italian firm Olivetti. Since 1958, Ettore Sottsass worked regularly with Olivetti, in exchange for total creative freedom. The Valentine was described by Olivetti as "a real pop object designed to blend into the private space." The typewriter had always been associated with the emancipation of women, but now the object itself was feminized. At once provocative...
13) Appollon
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Although they were the son and daughter of Zeus, Apollo and his twin sister Artemis were born under threats from the goddess Hera. Zeus' wife Hera never forgave the twins' mother - the nymph Leto - for her union with the King of Mount Olympus, and she forced Leto into exile. As a result, Apollo was a wandering god, who did not grow up on Olympus. He was a musician and an excellent archer, and was both gentle and cruel. He was also very handsome, but...
14) Hotel Royal Sas
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The SAS Royal Hotel tower marked Denmark's entry into post-war modernity. It is a major work that combines functionalism, simplicity and elegance, and in which everything, from the ashtrays to the building's volumes, were created and designed by Arne Jacobsen.The SAS terminal adjoined to the hotel has since been converted to other uses, and the communal areas of the hotel now attract a convention clientele, but Jacobsen's original meticulous design...
15) Nemausus I
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Jean Nouvel's 1986 block of public housing apartments in Nîmes recalls an ocean liner - and turns social housing clichés on their heads. Nouvel used prefabricated industrial materials and concrete to keep costs down and allow him to build multilevel, spacious apartments, open to light and air. Despite the architect's requirement that the buildings remain examples of 1980s non-decorated, industrial architecture, the tenants have creatively individualized...
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In 1995, the city of Luxembourg decided to have a large concert hall built on the Kirchberg plateau. The challenge for the architect was to associate three major public performance areas in the same complex, a large philharmonic hall, a chamber music auditorium and a space for discovery. The architect, Christian de Portzamparc made this hall into a great musical instrument. Elliptic in shape, the Philharmonie with its filter of white columns and colored...
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As the French Revolution approached, Louise Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted the queen's portrait in an attempt to win back public opinion. This documentary examines the historical and social context in which Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France and Her Children was painted. It analyzes the work's composition and symbolism in terms of motherhood and political legitimacy, and attempts to counter the queen's reputation for debauchery....
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Designed by the architects Jan Brickman and Leendert Van der Vlugt, supervised by Kees Van der Leuw, the boss of Van Nelle, the factory is the most important and the most accomplished example of industrial architecture in the modern movement. The result of a cross between Taylorism and Bauhaus, the Van Nelle factory at Rotterdam, built between 1926 and 1931, is a gigantic factory in which, up to the 80s, they processed tobacco, coffee and tea. Rather...
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Perseus was not meant to come into the world. Fearing the fulfilment of the prediction according to which his grandson would kill him, King Acrisius shut his daughter Danaë away in a fortified tower. But Zeus fell in love with Danaë, and in order to conquer her, metamorphosed into a golden shower. Perseus was born from this union. Once he had become a man, Perseus was given the challenge of bringing the head of the Gorgon to the tyrant King Polydectes,...