PBS - Paris - The Luminous Years (2010)

A storm of Modernism swept through the art worlds of the West in the early decades of the twentieth century, uprooting centuries of tradition in the visual arts, music, literature, dance, theater and beyond. The epicenter of this storm was Paris, France. For an incandescent moment from 1905 to 1930, Paris was the magnetic center for radical innovation and experiment, the Mecca for creative talents from Michigan to Moscow, from Brooklyn to Barcelona, who would change the course of art throughout the Western world. On-camera, dramatic and historic moments are recalled by participants in these legendary events e.g. Marc Chagall, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Aaron Copland, Marcel Duchamp, Sylvia Beach and Janet Flanner.

Why Paris? “Paris - The Luminous Years” tells the epic story of Paris from an unprecedented point of view, not as the familiar, glamorous backdrop for the revolutions that exploded there but as active protagonist, catalyst and midwife to modernity. The film spotlights now-famous key figures in the art world's first international avant-garde, tracing who came to Paris and why, whom they met, what they made there and how being in Paris transformed them and their work.

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