![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
From the Plane of the Spiral
Jul. 5th, 2007 05:38 pmI 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.
