Thursday 24 September 2009

Walking around Santiago city


If you are a tourist and you are here, in Santiago, I'm going to tell you where you can go to know the past and the present of this city, walking quietly through the downtown, knowing the most typical and historical areas.
Founded in 1541, Santiago has a hill that was very important in that period. The Santa Lucía hill, named by the mapuche people as Huelén hill, was a strategic point in the Conquest War. In the end of XIX century, the superintendent Benjamín Vicuña, designed a beautiful public walking that you can tour through it stairs.
If you want to know the old splendour of the upper classes in the end of XIX century and begin of XX, you can visit the Republica neirborhood, starting by the Dieciocho street. There, you will see a lot of big houses of neoclassical style that shows the European taste of the epoch.
Now, if you want to know the cultural current movement, and you want to drink quietly a cup of coffee in the free air, you can go to walk through the Bellas Artes neirborhood and the Lastarria neirborhood. There, you'll find a lot of coffee houses and small and vanguard stores where buy design stuffs. Obviously, you have to visit the Fine Arts Museum to watch Chilean and foreign arts.
Then, you can go to the main square and know how the Chilean people really are. Like the rest of Hispanic colonial cities, Santiago has a main square surrounded by the Cathedral and administrative buildings, all of them from colonial period. There you can visit the National Historical Museum, the singular shop galleries Portal Fernández Concha and Bulnes.
Finally, you don't have to forget to visit the most important museums and galleries of colonial and modern art. Colonial and religious arts: San Francisco museum, La Merced museum and, a couple of minutes out of the centre by the subway, the Recoleta Dominica. Chilean art: the MAPA, Centro Cultural La Moneda, for examples.
Well, here you have a lot of good ideas to spend your time in Santiago. I hope you enjoy it!

Friday 4 September 2009

Express yourself, whatever you are...




When I watched the film "The cabinet of Dr Caligari" I felt in love with the Expressionism. I think, more than the paintings, the films was the most accurated piece of art in the expressionism movement. Beautiful and terrible.

From Germany, in the begins of XX century, the picture expressionism was carry out by to groups: Blaue Reiter (Blue rider/horseman) and Die Brücke (The bridge). Artists like Franz Marc or Edvard Munch worked with strong and impulsive colors, exaggerated and broken lines, trying to express, very literal, the anguish and desperation, against the french Impressionism, that only shows the appearence of the things.

The films presents that visual ideas, without color, but with movement and sound (piano music, of course, because was muted films). The most important film directors was Robert Weine and F. W Murnau. Weine directed "The cabinet of Dr Caligari", a strange and beautiful film about a sonambulist and muderer man. Filmed only in studios, was the oportunity to show all the visual aesthetics of expressionism in the sets.

One of the other famous expressionism films is Murnau's "Nosferatu". Boarding the vampire's myth, the film is a big piece of expressionism art. The dark and depressed feeling is reflected in the sets, in the make up, in the clothing, like a long scream of anguish and blood.

I can see hundred of times that films and every time I can feel it power again.