Hokusai at the British Museum Review
Photo from the film Hokusai at the British Museum.

Title: Hokusai at the British Museum
Genre: Documentary

Nexo Digital is a production company that has focused on bringing to audiences alternative content, regarding art forms that are not related to the cinematic realm but are shared on the silver screen. For the museum cycle, Next Digital presents “Hokusai at the British Museum,” the beautiful exhibition that celebrates the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Hartwig Fisher, Director of the British Museum, welcomes audiences to explore the extraordinary exhibition in London’s public institution dedicated to human history, art and culture, presented by art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon and artists Grayson Perry, Kate Malone, Maggi Hambling.

The film leads us through nature’s elemental force, seen by the artist who revolutionized the Western art world enchanting Impressionists such as Van Gogh. His painting, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa,’ is the epitome of the grandeur of Mother Nature inhabited by the Divine, imbrued with a gentle touch of humanity. His ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’ truly evoke “a passage to heaven with the milky way,” as defined in the documentary, “in the dark pool of the cosmos.”

The sense of the essentiality within the environmental setting of these poetic depictions, introduces the public to the birth of the ukiyo-e style, meaning the “pictures of the floating world.” In this exquisite documentary, the outstanding dedication of Katsushika Hokusai to his art is evocatively explored through the artist’s multiple facets.

Technical: B
Story: B
Overall: B
Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

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Hokusai at the British Museum
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By Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi, is a film critic, culture and foreign affairs reporter, screenwriter, film-maker and visual artist. She studied in a British school in Milan, graduated in Political Sciences, got her Masters in screenwriting and film production and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles. Chiara’s “Material Puns” use wordplay to weld the title of the painting with the materials placed on canvas, through an ironic reinterpretation of Pop-Art, Dadaism and Ready Made. She exhibited her artwork in Milan, Rome, Venice, London, Oxford, Paris and Manhattan. Chiara works as a reporter for online, print, radio and television and also as a film festival PR/publicist. As a bi-lingual journalist (English and Italian), who is also fluent in French and Spanish, she is a member of the Foreign Press Association in New York, the Women Film Critics Circle in New York, the Italian Association of Journalists in Milan and the Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean. Chiara is also a Professor of Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at IED University in Milan.

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