The body as a matrix: Matthew Barney's cremaster cycle
With the five-part Cremaster Cycle of films, multi-award-winning artist Matthew Barney invented a densely layered and interconnected sculptural world that surreally combines sports, biology, sexuality, history, and mythology as it organically evolve...
Surrealist Film
Surrealist cinema sought to break with the conventional linear narrative style in favor of chance events and a world of the subconscious. This penetrating program featuring Alan Williams, author of Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking,...
Portraits and snapshots
Since the Civil War, portrait and snapshot photography have provided a visual history of life - and transformed society. This program explores how professional and amateur photographers capture the essence of people while considering the intensely p...
Persuasion, propaganda, and photography
This program addresses the emotionally manipulative power of photography by illustrating how commercial advertising has created an obsession with youth and physical perfection and can exploit viewers' fascinations with celebrity, sexuality, and viol...
Sunflowers
To study the Sunflowers sequence is to chart van Gogh's meteoric rise from apprentice to master - and subsequent ruin. In telling the incredible story of how these 11 paintings came to be, this program follows the doomed trajectory of the relationsh...
Power of art: Bernini
Although rendered in stone, the sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini convey a sense of weightlessness perhaps unequalled in the history of Western art. This program illustrates Bernini's nearly miraculous ability to turn marble into a vessel of raptur...
The Baroque period
The 17th century was a time of religious conflicts, political struggles, and great scientific advances. This upheaval contributed to the Baroque period's relatively unrestrained, overtly emotional, and more energetic style that is reflected, to vary...
Manga world
Filmed in Japan, this program pushes beyond the stereotypes to objectively examine the history of manga, how manga are drawn, and manga's influence on Japanese life as illustrated by cosplay bars, where people dress up as their favorite characters; ...
Sex, censorship, and the silver screen: from the depression to WWII
In what many see as Hollywood's Golden Age, the offices of William Hays and Joseph Breen worked overtime to combat sexuality and subversion in American movies. This program examines the products of that era - films that danced around the standards o...
Power of art: Caravaggio
Backed by a Church struggling to connect with the faithful, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted images imbued with physical immediacy and in-your-face drama. As this program shows, there was a trade-off: Caravaggio's biblical scenes frequently...