The Water lilies by Monet

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The Water lilies by Monet (Le Ninfee di Monet)

The Water lilies by Monet (Le Ninfee di Monet)

original title:

Le Ninfee di Monet

directed by:

cast:

Elisa Lasowski, Sanne De Wilde, Claire Hélène Marron

cinematography:

Jean Delille

editing:

Antonello Pierleoni

producer:

Mario Paloschi, Claudio Montefusco

country:

Italy

year:

2018

film run:

80'

format:

colour

release date:

26/11/2018

A journey through the masterpieces and obsessions of the Genius of the Impressionism. With the invaluable contribution of Ross King, author of the best seller Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies. From Giverny, Musée D’Orsay, Orangerie and Marmottan.
When former French Prime Minister George Clemenceau went to Giverny, he found several canvases stacked in the cellar of the rich house in which he was a guest. Many of them are of exotic flowers, presented for the first time at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The garden, the pond and the canvases that made that house unique are works of art by the father of Impressionism himself: Claude Monet. And those flowers with the fleshy petals, floating on the surface of the water and extending their roots down into the marshy waters, are nénuphar, but for Monet they will, always and only, be Nymphéas, Water Lilies.
The film let us discover what happened to make Claude Monet re-emerge from the depression that led him to abandon painting, and see how he decided to devote himself body and soul to his most colossal undertaking: the Grand Décoration. Huge panels depicting his water lily pond, so all-enveloping that the viewer's gaze is lost in an atmosphere of serenity and peace.
Clemenceau was later going to become Minister of war and to lead France to the victory of the Fist World War. From this meeting, as in a long flashback, the story of the artistic genius of Claude Monet begins, through the observation of his paintings, hosted in the most important museums of France: the Marmottan Museum - Claude Monet, the Musée D’Orsay, the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Impressionism Museum.
Following the course of the River Seine, starting from Le Havre, where Monet spent the first part of his artistic life, we will go upstream towards the other towns and villages he lived in, to show how innovative, radical and modern his approach to art was and how spasmodic his search for water: Poissy, Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Giverny. Here, in the isolation of his garden, while First World War bombs were falling, Monet obsessively pursued his dream of eternal glory, and relentlessly painted his work of resistance and peace.
In Paris, at the Musée de L'Orangerie, his hopes were finally realized in the magnificent oval rooms he designed himself. There, in May 1927, his friend George Clemenceau finally inaugurated the museum dedicated to the Grand Décoration.

Claude Monet, however, died just five months earlier. He would never see his work completed, nor would he know the impact it has had on the public. But Monet's most daring work, on which he spent the last twelve years of his life and the last resources of his energy, was received with contempt by the French. Only thirty years later, Monet's Water Lilies would cross a larger pond, the Atlantic Ocean, and invade the United States, along with his entire works, and so it was that the success of an extraordinary genius was finally achieved – this time for always.