Our Doc Days Film Series continues with the new film M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity
Directed by Robin Lutz and narrated by Stephen Fry
(2019, Dutch/English/Italian/German, w/English subtitles, 81 Min.)
Tickets: $12 for 5 day viewing pass
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M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity is the story of world famous Dutch graphic artist M.C Escher (1898-1972). Equal parts history, psychology, and psychedelia, Robin Lutz’s entertaining, eye-opening portrait gives us the man through his own words and images: diary musings, excerpts from lectures, correspondence and more are voiced by British actor Stephen Fry, while Escher’s woodcuts, lithographs, and other print works appear in both original and playfully altered form.
Two of his sons, George (92) and Jan (80), reminisce about their parents while musician Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash) talks about Escher’s rediscovery in the 1970s. The film looks at Escher’s legacy: one can see tributes to his work in movies, in fiction, on posters, on tattoos, and elsewhere throughout our culture; indeed, few fine artists of the 20th century can lay claim to such popular appeal.
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“As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses.”
Day and Night by M.C. Escher © theM.C. Escher Company B.V.-Baarn –the Netherlands
ABOUT M.C. ESCHER:
Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), better known as M. C. Escher, was a Dutch draftsman and printmaker born in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands.
Escher created his first prints in 1916 while a secondary school student in Arnhem. From 1919 to 1922, he attended the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem, during which time his studies turned from architecture to drawing and printmaking. In 1921, Escher began to travel extensively in Italy, settling in Rome in 1923. Escher married in 1924 and lived in Rome with his growing family until moving to Switzerland in 1935, to Belgium in 1937, and back to The Netherlands in 1941 during the first years of World War II.
Escher’s frequent trips exploring the Italian countryside between 1921 and 1935 strongly influenced the subjects of his early prints, which included portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. During this period, he also created woodcut illustrations for three publications: the bookletFlor de Pascua (1921), an emblem bookXXIV Emblemata (1932), andDe vreeselijke avonturen van Scholastica (1933).
Traveling to Spain in 1936, Escher visited the Alhambra for the second time and visited the mosque in Córdoba. The renewed exposure to Arabic design occasioned an important change in his work--he became fascinated with geometry and symmetry and how those abstract design elements could be incorporated into his representations of the natural world. The images in his later prints are created from within his mind rather than representations of the physical world. He explored how to represent people, animals, and objects rising from the flat page and then returning, as well as how to represent the endlessness of infinity. As a result, Escher’s work has been recognized both in the art world and in the scientific community, including at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam during the International Mathematical Conference in 1954.
Escher worked in a number of printmaking techniques, including lithography, drypoint, and mezzotint. However his preferred print techniques were woodcut, wood engraving, and linoleum cut.
–Boston Public Library
