the person with the bad English accent you can hear in the video. Me that is.
I don't know how generally known is the connection between the "look" of the Twists' living room and the paintings of the 19th century Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershoi. In case it's not generally known, I thought I'd post a section of an interview that Rodrigo Prieto, the director of photography, gave to the magazine, American Cinematography, in the January of 2006:Their farmhouse is "very stark, with grayish-white walls," says Prieto. "I tried to do something very simple but with a powerful contrast, which is difficult to achieve in a white room, so I blew out the windows and made them bright spots while keeping dark shadows on the faces. For this scene, we were inspired by the work of Vilhelm Hammershoi, whose paintings are very moody but devoid of color. We used an 18K HMI as the main source, lighting from a large window next to the table where Jack's father talks with Ennis. The light was diffused with a 12-by-12 full grid that was as close to the window as the framing allowed in each shot. We had two 6K Pars over the smaller windows coming in as direct sunlight through the sheer curtains, and a 4K Par through the small window in the door. For close-ups, I added an Image 80 on the ground to give a sense of light bouncing off the floor, plus a single 2-foot Kino tube wrapped in 216 under the lens for a very slight glint in the eyes. The goal was to suggest that Ennis feels uncomfortable in the stale, monochromatic atmosphere."I came across this in a review of an exhibition of his paintings put on in London a little while back. It may help to explain his appeal:Hammershoi understands the power of negatives, the unsaid, the unshown. His art is full of refusals. The back-turned woman, revealing nothing of her mind; the unmotivated presence of these figures, haunting the rooms like ghosts; the doors closed or ajar, implying something hidden beyond; the apartments' unexplained emptiness, occupied only by light, or with a few isolated signs of life, like the Mary Celeste.Everything conspires to create a mood of absence, loss, denial. Somebody is dead. Somebody is abandoned. Somebody is fatally repressed. Life is on hold, proceeding in a reduced, trance-like manner. Behind the scenes, on everyone's mind, there's a secret.And Hammershoi embodies the unending and the unknown with his walls – those blank, flickering expanses, stretches of nothing that face out, flat-on to the picture surface. The paintings' viewers, like the figures in them, do a lot of staring at walls.It is an intensely narrow art. You might think of Jane Austen's phrase – "the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush" – but compared with Hammershoi's, her world is a herdof elephants. And it's not just within the pictures that so little happens, but between them.The second paragraph seems strangely apposite for the Twist household.
My random reading for today. We said lots of things, all of them interesting to me.
Looking forward to watching this tonight! Thanks, John!