Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

The story of one misguided art collector's attempts to save a Banksy painting from destruction and the auction block. Featuring some of the world's top street artists, this film poses the question 'What would you do if you owned a million dollar painting that the artist doesn't want sold?'

Waldemar Januszczak sets out to uncover the secret meanings hidden in four famous paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Seurat. Everyone knows the pictures. They are among the most celebrated masterpieces of art. And yet, hidden inside them are codes and puzzles that no one has been able to decipher.
Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear was painted soon after he cut off his ear with a razor. But how much do we really know about it? In a far-ranging investigation, Waldemar Januszczak delves into the clues hidden in the painting. The result is a tale of geishas, brothels, bullfights, love affairs, suffering and a fiery relationship with Gauguin. The work has a powerful secret message, if you know what to look for.

Hanging in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Seurat’s Les Poseuses is probably his least-known painting. It is also a picture brimming with codes and hidden meanings. It shows three nudes in the artist’s studio, but included in the background is Seurat’s famous masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Why is it there? What is it trying to say? Why two pictures at once? Waldemar Januszczak investigates.

The final part examines political revolution and how art was at the forefront of throwing out 1,000 years of royal rule, from its earliest revolutionary days of enthusiasm and optimism when painting died, the poster was king and the machine-made triumphed over the handmade to the dead hand of Socialist Realism. Andrew roots out great portraits of Stalin now hidden in museum storerooms and never on public view, looks at the transformation of the Moscow metro into a great public art gallery and visits the most stunning creation of post-war Communist rule, the Space Monument. Finally, he comes to the confusion and chaos of Russia today and how it is producing some of the world's strangest art - from heroic sculptures of Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the insides of a giant erotic apple; from the recreation of the Imperial royal family facing the firing squad to sculpture in liquid oil; from Russia's embrace of the commercial art market to a return to Socialist Realism. Russia seems to stand on another brink of revolution.

After the success of Florence and the Uffizi, a new film production by Sky 3D and the Vatican Television Centre, taking you on a journey through the four Papal Basilicas in Rome and their treasures: St. Peter’s (one of the 25 destinations most visited by travellers from all over the world), St. John in the Lateran, St. Mary Major and St. Paul Outside the Walls. Four majestic buildings – each with a precious papal altar, each a treasure trove of timeless works of art and a destination for millions of travellers and pilgrims over the centuries – play the leading role in a new film tour that has been recognized as a work of cultural interest by the film board of the Ministry of Culture, Heritage and Tourism.

Andrew Graham-Dixon begins his exploration of German art by looking at the rich and often neglected art of the German middle ages and Renaissance. He visits the towering cathedral of Cologne, a place which encapsulates the varied and often contradictory character of German art. In Munch he gets to grips with the earliest paintings of the Northern Renaissance, the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and the cosmic visions of the painter Albrecht Altdorfer. Andrew also embarks on a tour of the Bavarian countryside, discovering some of the little-known treasures of German limewood sculpture.