Exhibition on Screen – Rembrandt

 February 2015 – Fathom Events which specializes in bringing live events to local audiences through viewings at local movie theaters presented a new format. The content was not live action; rather it was a museum centric documentary feature on the Rembrandt exhibit that is on display at the national Gallery in the UK. The feature focused on the life and work of the artist, primarily through the oil paintings that are the core of the exhibit.

Exhibition on Screen – Rembrandt

There are several technical challenges in bringing this to the big screen. Rembrandt’s color palate featured many dark backgrounds and details in his work. The ability to capture the color and textures in the paintings on video is a major lighting challenge. This is further challenged by the reduced screen brightness that appears in some digital theaters. The lighting challenge of the artwork is a major issue, as most of the pieces are almost 400yrs old (mid 1600’s) and can be damaged by high intensity lighting.

With these constraints and challenges in mind, the museums and the film maker were able to capture not only the color palate of the works, but also the textural and depth aspects of the work. The digital cinema projection was also very bright on screen so the images were very clear. Another issue with in-theater productions is the sound volume gets out of balance with the contents on-screen. As the audio system is optimized as a multi-speaker layout for action and suspense films, it sometimes has issues with documentary style heavy dialog content. This issue was also addressed in the production, and the single night screening did not encounter any voice dropout into the soundtrack or dialog screaming over the soundtrack.

The film covered the artist from his start, education, his rise to prominence followed by the personal loss and financial hardship towards the end of his life. A major part of the feature focused on not only the pieces created and displayed in the film, but the background on the subjects and his techniques that were used on the artwork. The story covered the changes and experimentation in his technique and its evolution through the late works in his life.

One of the more compelling aspects of his work was the large number of self-portraits he created. These images show experimentation and development of his style over his career, in addition to capturing his moods and inner thought through the composition of the paintings.

The film had a short interlude into the artist’s work in other mediums such as sketches, etchings and dry point. These were more technical on the details of how he created in these mediums and not as much on the creative motivation behind the experimentation in the alternate mediums and materials. The film did, however, give some explanations of the techniques and textures used in the work were used to convey the emotion of the people in the artwork and the overall feeling of the image. This was unique at the time, as most artist were focusing on either historical recreation images or landscapes.

Fathom Events – Exposition on Screen – series

As an alternative to travelling to Europe to see these masters’ works in person, it is a very intimate and close look at both the artwork and the artist. The format of the digital projection in a theater environment brings a close connection to the artwork that is close to being in the presence of the actual work, and in some cases, is providing detailed looks at the artwork at a level that is not possible in the public display of the artwork.