Today being grey and damp, the National Gallery was the place to visit. My mother was interested in looking at some Inuit art so we descended to the basement level where the sculptures and drawings are normally exhibited, only to find that "independent Inuit video productions" are currently being shown in the exhibition rooms instead. The films (from the Isuma company) that we stopped to watch this afternoon were already half way through and, on closer inspection of the notes, turned out to have a very long running time, so we saw just a snippet of each to give us an idea of their content; very strong meat they were, too.
We came upon Atanarjuat The Fast Runner at its most violent point, where Amaqjuaq, the brother of the runner, is speared through his tent and killed; we preferred not to carry on watching this one. In another film on a different screen some animal (a seal?) was being very bloodily butchered on the snow (close up of a child's face smeared with its blood) so we gave that one a miss also (I may return to watch the Inuit films later without my mother!) and a third film seemed only to be getting into its stride with an Inuit elder explaining to a young girl, who had removed her furs, that she shouldn't be so interested in "having sex with dead people"... (?!) My mother then thought she might feel more at home on the top floor of the Gallery amongst the European art, so we transferred our attention by means of the glass elevator from the rawness of Nunavut into Renaissance Italy, thence walking through the Flemish and German "Masters" towards later centuries.
Come to think of it, the European artists often conveyed some fairly shocking scenes, too, perhaps with more detachment. Because we're more familiar the subject matter in this case, we aren't so upset by it. Is that a bad thing or a good thing?
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