![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
From the Plane of the Spiral
I finished my film today - the sound is mixed, or as mixed as it's going to get before the screening.
In the last two months, despite writing forty nine entries, I have not talked much about the film. It's a collaboration with the National Gallery; I based it on the Tintoretto painting "The Origin of the Milky Way." In theory, the film will eventually be on the Gallery website, alongside the painting, but I don't know when this will happen. It's a color short film, 16mm, nearly four minutes long with titles and end credits. I had 200 feet to shoot it on, which is about five and a half minutes. I had twelve hours to do it in. It was all single takes.
The film is, I suppose, a documentary. It's about my first encounter with the painting, in a magazine, when I was in America and the painting was on loan to the Prado. When I got to London, the painting was still in Spain, and I found out that half of it has been missing for three hundred years. The painting in London shows only the creation of stars; the rest of the painting showed the creation of lilies. In my film, Ciro takes me to the airport. Neither of us play ourselves, although I am the voice of my own thoughts.
The person who proposed this project on the National Gallery's end is a woman named Lee Riley, who is involved in education and outreach. She gave me a large high-quality reproduction of the painting to use in my film while the real one was away; she let me film in the National Gallery itself. I wasn't able to give her a thank-you present until today. This gave me the opportunity to see the painting in person for the first time; it is finally back from Madrid.
It's not that much bigger than the reproduction I have. It's strange to see it hanging in the gallery, next to these other paintings which aren't mine. I wonder how Tintoretto would feel about it. The data on the wall card is wrong, unless there's been a new discovery about its comissioning. I know these things, just as I know where Tintoretto bought his red lake, and the sigil on his patron's medallion. I am inadvertently an authority because it is my painting.
On the way out, I crossed a subversive mosaic by Boris Anrep - "The Modern Virtues" (as of 1952): Compassion, Compromise, Curiosity, Defiance, Delectation, Folly, Humour, Lesure, Lucidity, Open Mind, Pursuit, Sixth Sense, Wonder. Outside, cyclists are preparing for le Tour de France.
In the last two months, despite writing forty nine entries, I have not talked much about the film. It's a collaboration with the National Gallery; I based it on the Tintoretto painting "The Origin of the Milky Way." In theory, the film will eventually be on the Gallery website, alongside the painting, but I don't know when this will happen. It's a color short film, 16mm, nearly four minutes long with titles and end credits. I had 200 feet to shoot it on, which is about five and a half minutes. I had twelve hours to do it in. It was all single takes.
The film is, I suppose, a documentary. It's about my first encounter with the painting, in a magazine, when I was in America and the painting was on loan to the Prado. When I got to London, the painting was still in Spain, and I found out that half of it has been missing for three hundred years. The painting in London shows only the creation of stars; the rest of the painting showed the creation of lilies. In my film, Ciro takes me to the airport. Neither of us play ourselves, although I am the voice of my own thoughts.
The person who proposed this project on the National Gallery's end is a woman named Lee Riley, who is involved in education and outreach. She gave me a large high-quality reproduction of the painting to use in my film while the real one was away; she let me film in the National Gallery itself. I wasn't able to give her a thank-you present until today. This gave me the opportunity to see the painting in person for the first time; it is finally back from Madrid.
It's not that much bigger than the reproduction I have. It's strange to see it hanging in the gallery, next to these other paintings which aren't mine. I wonder how Tintoretto would feel about it. The data on the wall card is wrong, unless there's been a new discovery about its comissioning. I know these things, just as I know where Tintoretto bought his red lake, and the sigil on his patron's medallion. I am inadvertently an authority because it is my painting.
On the way out, I crossed a subversive mosaic by Boris Anrep - "The Modern Virtues" (as of 1952): Compassion, Compromise, Curiosity, Defiance, Delectation, Folly, Humour, Lesure, Lucidity, Open Mind, Pursuit, Sixth Sense, Wonder. Outside, cyclists are preparing for le Tour de France.
no subject
Keep me posted on the film getting put up at the gallery's website, for I would love to see it.