One of my ongoing projects that shall never be completed is the maintenance of my Visual Reference Folder. Because tagging pictures takes forever I generally create an endless variety of folders with as accurate and specific labels I can think of. Very frequently doing this reveals a lot of the shortcomings of the english language to me. Case in point, the biggest folder in my visual references is the pose folder where I try to have a reference of just about anything a human being is capable of doing (as I said this is an endless project) and frequently I find myself frustrated by the limitations of what to call these things.
Currently my pet peeve is the verb “sitting” mainly because it’s an act I have been having happen quite a bit in the strip and have the hardest time’s finding a reference for. Now you will say what are you talking about? There’s tons of pictures of people sitting!
Yes, I reply. But those are pictures of people sitting, as in the act of resting their buttocks, as their center of gravity, either on the ground or piece of furniture specifically for this purpose. What I was looking for are references of people slowly lowering their buttocks down onto the ground or that piece of furniture to achieve the former.
Try explaining the difference in a Google image search. It’s nitpicking I know but I still say their should be two separate words for two separate verbs.
I’m afraid I kind of botched this one. The title of my planned them was “Don Quixote will kill us all” The idea being film attempts at Don Quixote being complete disasters for the creators. Unfortunately that particular bit of karma seemed to rub off on me causing a mix up that left me not getting my center piece of this exercise, Lost in La Mancha, the tale of Terry Gilliam’s disastrous attempt.
Fortunately I did get the second film on my list, Orson Welles unfinished, Don Quixote.
This was an interesting mostly done at Welles’ level of skill. But otherwise lacking. For whatever reason be it experiment or technical difficulties, a lot of the images were extremely high contrast frequently obscuring peoples faces in other things… Frequently things seemed to be going wrong with the texture, leaving me to wonder if there was anything wrong with the film development.
The film itself was weird. For the most part it reminded me of The Gospel According to St Matthew where, for better of the worse, a lot of the original text sounds a lot different when spoken out loud.
The main conceit of this film is that Don Quixote and Sancho are existing in the modern spain as confused anachronisms. This mostly works with even more people thinking they’re crazy as they wander confused across the Spanish landscape.
The second half of the film seems to lose interest on Don Quixote himself and focuses on Sancho himself wandering though a town festival looking for his master all around the film of Don Quixote is being filmed in the background with Welles as a self referential character.
All in all while I don’t think this would have been a masterpiece if it had been successfully completed but an interesting experiment none the less.
One of the advantages of the house sitting I’ve been doing this month is the place is walking distance from the Seattle Asian Art Museum. This had given me the opportunity to catch up on my sketching. This has found me drawn back to the central room of the museum with their collection of Indian Sculpture. I’ve drawn most of this multiple times, but thats all right they all provide excellent challenges. Besides, I can keep things interesting by looking at them from different angles.
Today’s sketch is of the god of creation, Brahma with his consort, Brahmani. I’m always impressed by the tenderness in these statues. It makes them look like they’re a real loving couple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h23J5YC98FMTime Travel is alway one of the more fun sub genres of Scence fiction. (As a SciFi purist and a bit of a pedant, I’ll insist it’s actually part of fantasy but mostly out of tradition Science Fiction is stuck with it.) I always find it interesting when someone other than us are doing the traveling and just what they would make of our wonderfully strange era. So for this week’s theme we’re doing Medieval Time Travelers.
Our first film, The Navigator, A Medieval Odessy ,tells the story of the inhabitants of a tiny mountain village in northern England in the middle of the Black Death. Word of this terrible plague has been slowly reaching them and fear of their inevitable doom is upon them. In desperation they follow a boy’s prophecy through a mine tunnel to raise a cross on the steeple of the “biggest church in all of Christendom” to their surprise they come out in modern day New Zealand. I love how this film doe a great job of showing us the modern world through medieval eyes and turning it into a surreal hallucination. Everything mundane (like crossing a busy street) is a terror. Our perspective of this alien world we know so well is eventuated with the transition from the black and white of the past to the colorful present. To add even more spice our heroes speak in a thick archaic dialect sounding very much like middle english. Their inability to even communicate with the people they meet makes things even more fascinating and increases the vibe they are in an alien world.
In our next film Les VisiteursJean Reno plays a twelfth century knight, from the court of Charles the Fat, accidentally thrown to the present when a spell ,that was cast to prevent an accident that made the knight kill his betrothed’s father, backfires and Transports him and his squire to the present.
The approach the film takes to our medieval visitors is a bull in a china shop mentality. It gets a lot of it’s humor from the knight and his squire wreaking havoc in the suburban neighborhood they find themselves in, from attacking a car, smashing plates and using up all of the expensive bath supplies when they’re forced to take a bath (the fact that medieval hygiene is an oxymoron is a running gag)
On a slightly more serious note most of the real culture shock that goes through the film is the difference of values. In the first ten minutes it’s made clear that hitting a woman (with an armored gauntlet no less) is perfectly okay, It’s expected to treat peasants like dirt (and the peasant agrees (at least at first) and the knight is horrified when he finds out one of his descendants took the peoples side in the french revolution.
One interesting side note about this film is that to a certain extent the knight and his vassal are not the only visitors to the modern world. The knight’s descendent wonderfully played by Valérie Lemercier , is old money aristocrat who seems almost as clueless about the real world as her ancestor is, speaking in a ridiculously posh accent that is so over the top you don’t even have to speak french to notice it.
