In Beauty, director Tagliafierro takes classical paintings and makes them move through computer graphics and 3D modeling. He starts slow, with landscapes–moving through them, bringing lakes to life, maybe hinting a tree is moving. Then he moves on to people.
Some of how Beauty works is by taking a very familiar painting, something the viewer presumably knows and recognizes and has thought about–and brings it to “life.” A realized life. It’s stunning right off, but then Tagliafierro slow has the moving parts interact. Two independent things come together–and the unreality of it slowly fades away. These paintings have never “moved”; they aren’t like photographs. It’s very eerie at times.
By the time Tagliafierro gets to the second half of short, he has full narratives in paintings with multiple moving parts, and then a gradual overarching narrative towards death.
It’s an amazing piece of work. Beauty is breathtaking.
Highly Recommended
CREDITS
Directed by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro.
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Is Tagliafierro’s “Beauty” video inspired by an R.E.M. one?
Tagliafierro’s idea of animating paintings in the “Beauty” video ( http://www.rinostefanotagliafierro.com/beauty_video.html ) isn’t very original, since in 1991 James Herbert realized the amazing video of “Low” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqVI_CHlFAI ) for R.E.M.. Both videos are very similar, not only for same idea of moving paintings, but also for their style. In fact, if in the “Low” video the main painting is Elizabeth Jane Gardner’s “La Confidence”, in the Tagliafierro’s one the same painter appears as the author of “Too Imprudent” and portrayed in the “Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Gardner” by her husband/teacher William Adolphe Bouguereau. Then Bouguereau himself is the most shown artist (together with Caravaggio) in “Beauty”, giving a stylistic mark to the whole video. It’s curious how Caravaggio’s pictures are represented in the “Losing My Religion” video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwtdhWltSIg ), since both R.E.M. songs belong to the same album and video collection (despite “Low” remains unknown for never being published as a single).
In my opinion, since in 1991 there weren’t actual technologies, the “Low” video appears even more amazing, innovative and noteworthy.
Valentina.