After all, we have the paintings.
--Pilar Silva Muroto, curator at the Prado, Madrid.
Pieter van Huystee's film, Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil, is obviously meant as a promotion for the Dutch exhibit this year in Bosch's hometown in the Netherlands; Bosch's best paintings remained in the Prado for its own Bosch exhibit. Films about painters generally are not effective in showing the artist's work primarily, I think, because paintings exist in space and movies exist in time (see my comments on Michael Leigh's film about Turner on Jan 20,2015). So what we get in this film is mostly art historians arguing about which paintings Bosch painted with his own hand while the curators engage in political struggles about who will lend their paintings to whom. There is little discussion about the complex and mysterious iconography in Bosch's paintings and when they do show parts of the paintings they include an overbearing score by Paul M. van Brugge. I'm not sure I expected much more but I do appreciate that I won two tickets to Film Forum for my correct response to their weekly quiz: Peter Singer's Animal Liberation was the book that influenced Unlocking the Cage, a film by Chris Hedgeders and D.A. Pennebaker. I don't get out to the movies much, with a child just about to start kindergarten, but when I do it's most often to Film Forum, with its excellent repertory and new and off-beat programming, shown at times when my wife and I can go and still get home to pick up our daughter.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in Hieronymous Bosch I recommend Ingrid Rowland's piece about the painter -- "The Mystery of Hieronymous Bosch"-- in the August 18, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books; it includes reviews of a number of books about Bosch and some interesting comments about the film.
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