Herzog's Fitzcarraldo Diaries

[zalena]

The NYTimes reviews Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog's journals about the making of his masterpiece Fitzcarraldo. I saw this movie for the first time about a month ago. It really is an amazing film:

http://zalena.livejournal.com/878480.html

Comments

[borbor-chan.livejournal.com]

do you want to see it again?

that might make a fun mid-day activity tomorrow, if it's not so long that we wouldn't get to chat.

John Singer Sargent

[zalena.livejournal.com]

It's 158 minutes, about 2.5 hours. I watched it in two parts.

I finished the most urgent half of my review and got pulled down the rabbit hole on part 2.

The book is a YA fantasy set in 19C Boston involving a servant girl who is actually a mermaid. :P But the part of the book that absolutely fascinated me is that the entire novel is centered around John Singer Sargent's painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit and the two vases that appear in the painting and flank the painting at the BMFA.

Of course, the author doesn't actually mention this. But somewhere in my browsing on Sargent (who is THE portrait painter of this era, you probably know him best for his controversial portrait Madame X) I discovered that he did the murals at the Boston Public Library.

How this escaped my attention, I have no idea. The murals were something that pulled me back repeatedly to the main library. The room was dark and the paintings were dirty and difficult to make out. I would squint up into that darkness and try to make out the painted figures behind the gold leaf. I recognized many of the biblical figures and some of the allegories, but I was totally mystified by the 'Pagan Gods' portion of mural. I decided the painting of 'Molloch' was actually an Ezekiel angel. (And Ezekiel, for the record, also describes a chamber of degraded imagery/idolatry, which the room seemed to ape.) I would stand there and crane my neck and try to understand this room, but nobody seemed to know what it was or what it meant. This would've been @ 1995.

It turns out they restored the room in 2003. And they have an interesting (if somewhat inadequate: ZOOM people we need to be able to rotate these paintings and see them in larger sizes to make out the details) website detailing the paintings (with some interesting occultish and anti-semitic undertones). I think what's most striking is the ability to see things that were obscured before, both because of the deterioration of the painting, and because of my limited world view. (I would've been about 19.)

I can never get over how tightly the artists and thinkers of this era are tied to our own, and how little the average person knows about them.

Anyway... I thought you might enjoy the website. I highly recommend going to see the murals yourself the next time you are in Boston; I think I've recommended them before, but now we both know more about what they are!

http://www.sargentmurals.bpl.org/site/index.html