Artemisia Gentileschi: Warrior Painter: It was worth it to me to watch this after reading the novel, "The Passion of Artemisia" by Susan Vreeland. That novel is loose on facts and rich with interpreting the emotions behind Artemisia's artworks. I was very pleased to have this documentary fill in some facts. It DOES help if you have spent time studying the paintings by Artemisia. Wikipedia offers many of Artemisia's paintings to be viewed at high resolution, with a directory at the bottom of each page, of all that are on that service. I had studied most of those plus looked at others on other websites before watching this documentary. If you have done that, you will be able to sort out what you are seeing in this film. It is a pity that the paintings shown are often not labeled. If you do not know Artemisia's work, you might miss that they show her father's work, Caravaggio's, and paintings of street scenes, towns, landscapes done by other artists, when describing where she lived and worked. The close-ups are mostly hers, but once again, it helps if you have seen the entire piece before being shown close-ups. Having already looked at her paintings online, I REALLY appreciated the close-ups, because I was able to see detail which was invisible at the scale of the searchable online images of her works. I loved seeing Artemisia's handwriting, listening to her personal letters and letters asking for payment or patronage. The film makers were misguided to use swirling "mist" or smoke over paintings they were showing in close-up. Really...we are watching to see the paintings, not the "art of the video". The multiple video images layered on top of each other were also poor and obscured what we were trying to see. However, don't let a few misguided choices by the video team stop you from seeing this, but DO look at Artemesia Gentileschi's paintings online first, so you really recognize her works. Some of her artworks featured are: "Allegory of Inclination"1615-1617, "Susanna and the Elders" 1610, "Virgin and Child with a Rosary" (which to me does NOT look like it is correctly attributed to Artemisia), "David and Goliath" (LOVE this one!). The works BY Artemisia are on the screen longer than those by others, so you can also sort what's what by screen time.

I love Artemisia Gentileschi's work, but dang the videography is realllly annoying and poor quality. The camera sweeps over portions of paintings (I suppose in an effort to zoom in on details), but then never zooms out to show the works in full, and keeps overlaying and fading other images over them (speakers, letters, etc.), and repetitively sweeps the camera over the same elements again. Speakers are interpreted rather than subtitled. The visual effects often detract from the narrative. Why is there an odd smoke-effect when the conservator is talking about the David painting??? So weird. While a well-intentioned film, it was really disappointing.