ARTE Distribution

The art market had not yet experienced its digital revolution. Until that day of 2021, when NFTs, for Non fungible Token, appeared on your screens. Thanks to this new transaction technology, Beeple, an almost unknown digital artist, became the third most expensive living artist in the world.

NFTs promise to revolutionize the art market. More money for artists, fewer intermediaries, and fewer barriers for collectors. Will this digital revolution be virtuous, or will it meet the same fate as many others before it, emptied of their meaning and derived from their original goals?

The art market had not yet experienced its digital revolution. Until that day of 2021, when NFTs, short for Non Fungible Token, appeared on your screens. Thanks to this new transaction technology, Beeple, an almost unknown digital artist, became the third most expensive living artist in the world.

NFTs promise to revolutionize the art market. More money for artists, fewer intermediaries, and fewer barriers for collectors. Will this digital revolution be virtuous, or will it meet the same fate as many others before it, emptied of their meaning and twisted from their original goals?

Mathieu Amalric films Joann Sfar at work. A humorous insight into the world of the author of French comic strip "Le Chat du Rabbin".

Mathieu Amalric takes up a unique opportunity to accompany the prolific French cartoonist Joann Sfar to some of the places where he sketches his characters: in front of Nénette the Orangutan's cage at the Jardin des Plantes zoo in Paris, at the Rungis fish market, in a dissection lab at the Faculty of Medicine, in a restaurant, in a bar.
Sketching all the while, Sfar speaks about his work, about the need to draw from nature, and about the frustration he experiences at never being able to capture exactly what he really sees and the way in which this frustration spurs his imagination. The sequences are interspersed with the reading of (very appropriately) chosen extracts from the cartoonist's diary "Carnets", published by the Association.

2011 : Award for Creativity at FIFA - International Festival of Films on Art (Montreal, Canada).

In each episode, an artist creates his own documentary on someone he or she admires, or talks about art or something completely different.

The artist is in the driving seat!

This captivating film retraces the intellectual and human process that led Mondrian to geometric abstraction, the highly characteristic style that made him one of the major figures of the international artistic avant-guarde.

The work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) marked a turning point in the history of modern painting. Initially influenced by Cubism, Mondrian invented an original universal language of geometric shapes and primary colours in the early 1920s. Along with Kandinsky and Malevitch, he was one of the pioneers of pure abstraction, an innovative trend that strongly influenced 20th century art.

Filmed in the exact replica of his studio at 26 rue du Départ in Paris, this docu-fiction brings Mondrian back to life. It portrays the man who was passionate about dance and jazz and retraces his artistic path, from his first realist works to his mystical years, from the Stijl movement to his departure for New York, where he died in 1944.

The documentary is Jacques Monory's vision of the universe. It is a portrait of the artist, his thoughts and works.

For the past fifty years, Jacques Monory has been an integral part of the French artistic scene. He has been and is still today the great artist of the so-called "Narrative Figuration" movement which coincided with Pop Art in the United States and in Great Britain.
The works of Jacques Monory have mainly to do with American cinema. He uses the pictures of American cinema to describe the world as he sees it. Although he does have a pessimistic vision of the world, he nevertheless manages to distance himself from his work and from his personal life.

François Morellet is today recognised as one of the great artists of our time, and his works can be seen in the majority of the world's museums.

Close to the minimalists and the conceptualists, Serge Lemoine, president of the Musée d'Orsay, places François Morellet in the world of contemporary art.
For 30 years, one of the main aspects of Morellet's work has been the (over 100) pieces he has done in the public domain. We exhibit thirty of his works done in Europe, some of them spectacular, others extremely discreet.
But beyond his works is the man himself. François Morellet is an atypical character. He pursues his very rigorous and radical work with detachment and distance, is rather exceptionally modest and above all, has a biting sense of humour.

The general public still associate David Hockney, the legendary artist of the Seventies, with the blue of his Californian swimming pools, with Los Angeles boys, Andy Warhol or with the cult film "A Bigger Splash".

Filmed in Autumn 1998 in Los Angeles, in his house, this film sheds new light on David Hockney's current work and will be the chance to rediscover an artist who expresses his talents in spheres as diverse as painting, photography, etching and opera design, an artist whose fame has never stopped growing.

In his studio we are present with him during the production of the works which he considers to be the crowning achievement of his research into the connection between space and landscape : his representations of the Grand Canyon. Two monumental works consisting of 60 juxtaposed canvases.
By means of successive brush strockes, the film throws light on how an artist proceeds and is able to develop a work which is both intimate and spectacular, taking inspiration from his immediate environment : landscape, but also close friends, family and familiar objects, witnesses of passing time?

He allows us to share his concerns over the connection between painting and photography, time and memory. He tells us how his work on opera has influenced his comprehension of space, he takes us along with him on his "musical drives", cruising through the Californian landscape, which he enjoys doing whilst listening to Parsifal: in a car one is at the centre of things and when one moves through the landscape, one becomes a centre that moves.

Christian Boltanski started exhibiting in Germany in the early 1970s and has today gained worldwide recognition for his art.

He has been awarded the Goslar "Kaiserring" and the Japanese "Praemium Imperiale", often referred to as the Nobel Prize in Art.
The documentary plunges us into a sombre yet humorous universe, around the world in Paris, Berlin and Japan. It portrays works which are monumental yet little known, as often hidden in locked basements or far-away sites. The film also contains previously unaired archive footage, confronting the artist with his own past and future. Christian Boltanski talks of his true and possible lives, of humanism, religion and utopia, and explains his major project Archives of the Heart that will bring together tens of thousands of heartbeats in a remote place, somewhere between the island of Utopia and the beyond.

The interview was carried out at the artist's home in Paris on 21st May, 2000, regarding an exhibition at the "Espace de l'Art Concret" in Mouans-Sartoux, in the south of France.

Aurélie Nemours talks about her choice to exhibit alongside a sculptor, Jean Tinguely, whose work she situates at the opposite end of the spectrum to her own. Then, the artist speaks of her silence, abstraction, disappearance, infinity, and the void. On the day of the interview, Aurélie confided in us, revealing some secrets.

To commemorate the centenary of the sculptor's birth, on October 10, 2001, this documentary reveals for the first time the sublime singularity of the work and career of Alberto Giacometti, who died on January 11, 1966.

The enigma of Giacometti superbly unravelled.
An unending quest brought into relief by those who knew or discovered the artist (Sabine Weiss, Balthus, Jacques Dupin, Roger Montandon, Jean Starobinski, Ernest Scheidegger, Jean Laymarie and Ernest Pignon Ernest).
To understand the extraordinary universe of this 20th century visionary, director Michel Van Zele explores the various sources of Giacometti's inspiration and his unique conception of the head, be it sculpted, drawn or painted.

Program released on DVD by ARTE Video

In this episode, in order for us to understand the connection between the worlds of art and new technologies, we meet Thierry, the owner of the Demeure du Chaos, headquarters of the publicly listed company ArtPrice and a museum of contemporary art. Thierry talks about the dazzling developments in the art world in general, and especially the emergence of NFTs.