April 15, 2010

making false hopes rhyme


Robert Bechtle, Alameda Gran Torino, 1974, oil on canvas

* Werner Herzog is working on a 3-D film that will take audiences inside a French cave containing drawings that are more than 30,000 years old:

It's a film that I'd like to make because I'm so fascinated about cave art," says Herzog in a series of filmed interviews on the blog, which we've reposted here. "It's still tough to bring equipment down. You are not allowed to touch the wall or the floor or anything. I can have only three people with me, and I can use only lights which must not create temperature. For each shot, because the technology is not really advanced, we had to build own camera from zero using a specific configuration of lenses and mirrors. We are doing something nobody has done with 3D."

Herzog will narrate the film himself, which comes as welcome news. His familiar Teutonic brogue adds so much enthusiastic flavoursome fervour to his documentary films, and the interviews suggest that we're in for another uniquely skewiff vision.

"What is also strange," Herzog reveals, "is that somebody [in the cave] started a painting and then they left. And it's known that 3,500 years later somebody continued the painting. And then a bear that hibernated over it left scratch marks. And over the scratch marks there was man, bear, man, bear, man, bear, man [over time]. It's like time does not occur – it's completely fantastic."

Despite his adoption of 3D for the project, Herzog is not an out-and-out convert to the new technology.

"I do it [3D] very reduced and as if it was the most natural way to do it," he says. "3D will always have one major problem, and that is when you look as a human being, normally only one eye looks dominantly at things. The other eye is mostly ignored. And only in specific cases – if somebody approaches you – all of a sudden the brain starts to use both eyes for establishing depth of field and understanding space.

"But it tires you when you are a spectator at a 3D movie, because you are forced to see with two eyes and two images superimposed. So 3D, in my opinion, will only work, in my opinion, for the big firework events like Avatar."

* Another graphic depicting how little money is made by most musicians.

* " The only one who knows this ounce of words is just a token is he who has a tongue to tell, but must remain unspoken." -- Moondog

1 Comments:

Blogger sqrl said...

rad painting. same model (minus the faux-wood siding) responsible for LGT's name

6:01 PM  

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