Wikimania starts Wednesday. Friday after work I went to the airport with intent to sleep on the way to London so that I could wake up and start some days touring. My flight left at 9am and I woke up in London in the morning. On the flight I watched Jodorowsky’s Dune and Tim’s Vermeer.
I like Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Holy Mountain and always wondered why he never made more movies. This documentary explained that Dune could have been his third, but it could not raise funding, and consequently Jodorowsky did not make more major films. El Topo and Holy Mountain are both epic movies, visually beautiful, easy to understand to the extent that they could be understood, and movies which I wanted to translate and distribute when I was thinking of translating popular media rather than medical information. I have never been a fan of reading science fiction, but because of its cultural position and because it has major themes of colonization and international trade, I did read the first Dune book and enjoyed it enough. It seemed strange to me to think that there could be a market for a documentary in 2014 on a movie never made by a director in the 1970s. I had never seen Jodorowsky speak on camera but when I did, he struck me as being like a lot of the people who have coached me in my past, including Sarahjane the spirtualist, Jeff Fairhall who founded Theo Chocolate, George Freeman the Universal Life Church director, and any others of the religious radicals with whom I have spent so much time. Jodorowsky talked about making the Dune movie as if it were a divine mandate and once I heard him speak then for the rest of the movie I felt like everything else he said was familiar to me and comforting. I know the Dune storyline well enough and when I saw his take on the characters it made me think of the immense opportunity for interpretation of the work. Jodorowsky is in his 80s now and I wish he could direct the movie these days, although his vision is now dated especially by him wanting to cast actors dead or out of contemporary relevance. I hope that as he says in the documentary that someone makes his film, and beyond that, I wish that more films like his own original films would be produced. I like spiritual stories which encourage interpretation.
Tim’s Vermeer is about an engineer who has a wild theory that the painter Vermeer used technology of his time rather than painting aptitude to create his paintings. I think everyone knows that Vermeer’s paintings are unusual for having a photographic quality to them, and for perfect technical execution. The documentary opens by giving some information which I did not know – most painters of the time were associated with schools and workshops, but there is no record of Vermeer ever having gone to art school or being associated with a master. Also paintings of the time typically sought to be architecturally designed in an articifical way, but Vermeer’s paintings were unusual for being more like depictions of what a person saw than a staged composition. I know nothing about those points but if they are true, then that does make Vermeer painings unusual. The protagonist of the documentary, Tim, theorizes that Vermeer used a camera obscura and a mirror to paint his works, and to prove it, he assembles technology contemporary to Vermeer and rebuilds a Vermeer scene in his studio. Then, using his camera obscura, the real-life stage, and no prior painting practice, he proceeds to paint a Vermeer. In the end he makes a perfect photographic oil paining equal in execution to that of any master. What struck me as interesting in this was that if Vermeer really did use this technique, then the further implication is that Vermeer both hid the fact and other artistics failed to either use or document this technique until now. The documentary explains the technology well enough – a camera obscura is positioned to reflect onto a mirror which the painter has positioned above the canvas, and which the painter views. The painter paints to color-match whatever is on the edge of the mirror without even needing to know or care about the rest of the picture. In this way, anyone who is willing to move the mirror around the campus and paint the colors they see on the edge can get a photo-like painting of anything viewable with a camera. I found a review by an art critique which insults the movie, but strangely, does this while admitting that Vermeer could have made the painting in the way the movie describes. I could not readily find online anyone who refutes the idea that Vermeer painted in this way so I do not know what to think of the theory.