The National Gallery Programmes
 
This section on Series on Art and Architecture gives summary information about the series offered by the Roland Collection: twenty-nine series on art and architecture, and four on Modern Literature and Philosophy

It also includes profiles of three key producers, which give fascinating insights into how their films are made and the thinking behind their work.

English Heritage
The National Gallery
Open University

Series on Art and Architecture

The National Gallery

Video, an increasingly important educational medium both in the home and in the classroom, is particularly useful in the study of paintings. The National Gallery is unique among British national museums and galleries in having its own video production unit, which, with its unlimited access to original paintings from every period, is able to film details unnoticed even to gallery visitors. The unit draws ion the art-historical and technical expertise of National Gallery staff, and thus can present the latest results of scholarship or the scientific examination of important pictures, and illustrate a variety of Old Master techniques.

Since the late 1980s, the Audio Visual Unit has been making videos related to the permanent collection or to temporary exhibitions. However, all the National Gallery videos stand alone as introductions to their subjects. The unit does not wait until an exhibition is in place before beginning to film: they begin work months or even years ahead of its arrival. First a script is commissioned, perhaps from the National Gallery's curator of the exhibition or from the outside consultant who is selecting works for the exhibition and preparing its catalog. The unit and author work on this draft script before setting off on location. With Manet: The Heroism of Modern Life, for example, the footage shot on location documents Manet's visit to Spain, complementing the exhibition by giving a new angle on its theme and resulting in a film which can be shown alongside it and have an independent life after the exhibition ends. In An Eye for Detail, buildings that are still standing today are compared with their portrayal in Early Netherlandish paintings. The Queen's Pictures includes location shots at Hampton Court Palace, Windsor Castle, Osbourne House, Kensington Palace and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London.

When examining a painting in detail, as Joan Lane, head of the unit, explains, it is necessary to film the painting itself, not a transparency. Texture, depth and surface cannot be examined properly at one remove, and to make a precise art-historical point, a study of a tiny detail like the hands or nose in a portrait might be vital. So if the painting is not in the gallery, the unit visits it 'at home'. On discovering that the technical and creative processes of painting were not a subject much explored by other film-makers, the Unit went ahead with the Art in the Marking series, which investigates pre-1400 paintings, Old Masters and Impressionist works using X-rays, infra-red photography and other techniques pioneered in the gallery's scientific and conservation departments.

The questions of who should present films like these is a thorny one. Joan Lane believes that curators or other experts on the subject of the film usually do the job best, even though they are not front-of-camera professionals. 'Actors can't always get the right inflection or convey real authority', she says. 'A lot of glossy productions are based around celebrity presenters. Ours are based around the works of art. We find voice-overs are less distracting.'

The production staff of the unit, at present four people, are able to work with enormous flexibility and unique experience of art gallery requirements to cover a range of projects from unstructured filming for archival purposes to full broadcast-quality programs.

One of the National Gallery videos, Art in the Making: Italian Painting before 1400, received the Small Unit Award from the British Educational Television Association in 1991. Two others, Constable: The Changing Face of Nature (in collaboration with the Tate Gallery) and The Queen's Pictures, were selected for showing at the Montreal Film Festival in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Through the Roland Collection, the videos are seen frequently at international exhibitions, for instance in Munich in July 1993. And they are highly praised by critics - the Video Rating Guide for Libraries described The Queen's Pictures, to take one example, as 'glorious and authoritative'.