Posts tagged dreams

7 August 2009

Whenever you hear a story about how the making of a film wound up eerily paralleling the onscreen action, you can pretty much be sure the film in question is not a romantic comedy. Unlike the more famous example of Francis Ford Coppala's Appocalypse Now, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, despite its even more harrowing circumstances of production, manages to impossibly push through to something approximating real bliss and beauty, if not quite sanity.

re: dreams, gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, movies, peru, south america

Nate:

from "Dream and Delirium," Mark Harris's review of Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of ‘Fitzcarraldo’, by Werner Herzog, New York Times Book Review, 29 July 2009 :: via 3quarksdaily

“Fitzcarraldo” — which Herzog did indeed finish — has endured long and well in the hearts not only of movie lovers but of connoisseurs of production disasters, partly because the film itself seems to mirror the story of its making. It’s a half masterpiece, half folly about a gesture both grand and grandiose — an attempt by a would-be impresario (Kinski) to build an opera house in the wilds of Peru, a venue he imagines might someday showcase Enrico Caruso. This desire necessitates the deployment of hundreds of Indians to haul an immense ship up a steep mountain ridge, a Sisyphean metaphor that’s no less effective for being so explicit.

The movie and its making are both fables of daft aspiration, investigations of the blurry border between having a dream and losing one’s mind. So it’s no surprise that in some ways, the back story has lingered longer than the story.

14 January 2009

Jacob's Dream (detail), by José de Ribera, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional del Prado, :: via The Guardian

Madrid's Museo del Prado has made ultra-zoomable "gigapixel" scans of fourteen of their masterpeaces, including Velazquez's Las Meninas, Goya's Third of May, and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, available through the Google Earth application. In truth it seems like a bit of clunky way to gain access (open Google Earth, zoom in on Madrid, find the museum), but once you're in you can zoom and pan across every crack and brushstroke. I loved this close-up of José de Ribera's surprisingly naturalistic 1639 depiction of Jacob's dream at Bethel, in which he saw the angels of God ascending and descending on what I always pictured as a sort of celestial shopping-mall escalator. But here we only see the face in repose.

re: bible, dreams, europe, genesis, painting, spain

Nate: