This work should be shown to film students as an example of how not to direct a documentary.
Despite the Inferno having 87 pages, we see very few of them in detail. While the opportunity to view the manuscript magnified onto a movie screen is welcome, remarkably little time is spent showing it to us. Instead, we see lovely views of Florence, the Italian countryside, Scotland, opulent libraries, churches, and talking heads.
The talking heads have great credentials and offer wonderful insight. I did not pay to see their faces. Worse, two of them had painfully awkward mannerisms that distracted the viewer. The director repeatedly squandered the opportunity to illustrate the points the experts were making by showing the talking head instead of the manuscript.
The narrator asks how long it would have taken to complete the work. Instead of interviewing an illustrator who could estimate the time to do the work with the tools available to Botticelli (assuming no pause for the creative process), we see an illustrator using a software program to replicate the process on high end equipment in a fraction of the time for manual illustration using 15th century instruments.
A considerable portion of the film was filler. It was like watching the local news on a slow day when the announcers chatter to fill in the minutes. The most painful filler was the anonymous street interviews (general public? actors? actors recreating what the man on the street said?) which were inane.
To his credit, the director did present contradictory viewpoints.
Despite the Inferno having 87 pages, we see very few of them in detail. While the opportunity to view the manuscript magnified onto a movie screen is welcome, remarkably little time is spent showing it to us. Instead, we see lovely views of Florence, the Italian countryside, Scotland, opulent libraries, churches, and talking heads.
The talking heads have great credentials and offer wonderful insight. I did not pay to see their faces. Worse, two of them had painfully awkward mannerisms that distracted the viewer. The director repeatedly squandered the opportunity to illustrate the points the experts were making by showing the talking head instead of the manuscript.
The narrator asks how long it would have taken to complete the work. Instead of interviewing an illustrator who could estimate the time to do the work with the tools available to Botticelli (assuming no pause for the creative process), we see an illustrator using a software program to replicate the process on high end equipment in a fraction of the time for manual illustration using 15th century instruments.
A considerable portion of the film was filler. It was like watching the local news on a slow day when the announcers chatter to fill in the minutes. The most painful filler was the anonymous street interviews (general public? actors? actors recreating what the man on the street said?) which were inane.
To his credit, the director did present contradictory viewpoints.
