making chris foss work for me
Sep. 3rd, 2014 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoelevenmr. foss was loncon 3's artist guest of honor. he was also one of the clever people alejandro "jodo" jodorowski hired to create concept art for his failed attempt to make a version of frank herbert's dune. thus, i get to make a single post do two things for me.
i went to one panel discussion on mr. foss's art, which featured three artists (john harris, rian hughes, maurizio manzieri), one fanboy (joe siclari), and no actual chris foss art. most of the audience, and a couple of the panelists ended up peering at their various gadgets to see the examples being discussed. it was odd.
foss is known for a bunch of things¹, one of which is brightly colored spaceships that manage to look exotic but plausible at the same time. for example, this ship, which was intended as a pirate ship for dune:
(from his web site)
the blue stuff spilling out of the ship's hull is spice. the fancy paint job is intended as camoflauge, at least if one's galaxy contains equally-trippy asteroids.
also this thing:
which i'll be damned if i know what it's supposed to do in dune, but it looks like it's constrained by plausible engineering for a bizarre purpose. spice harvester, maybe?
the rest of the art for jodo's dune is equally bizarre.
arriving ships are intended to fly into the mouth, to give the impression they're being swallowed by the baron himself.
jodo also rounded up other ground-breaking artists, some of whom had never done SF work before, and a number of whom were gems in the rough, like dan o'bannon, who was best(?) known(?) at the time for his models and SF/X for dark star. (giger, for that matter, was also basically unknown outside of the european art circuit.) and, what the hell, he recruited salavdor dalí and orson welles to star in his movie, too. because.
well, because jodo had escaped editorial control at that point. his previous surreal films, el topo and holy mountain had done well enough -- indeed, well enough that he'd been given a late-60s megabuck budget to make holy mountain, no small sum then -- that he was convinced that he could make art. which was great, but he seemed to be assuming some studio would cough up the huge piles of money it would take to make this movie. er, and he could have a running time as long as he wanted. i have little doubt that if somebody could have sat on jodorowski and caused him to see sense, he would have made another great movie. but that didn't happen.
i think the strangest decision he made was to dismiss doug trumbull as a "technician", who couldn't be a "spiritual warrior" to help jodo make his "vision". that was the first time i've actually had my jaw drop at a statement. jodo wanted to top 2001, which said "technician" did the SF/X for. y'know, the composite sequence of the bone turning into a spaceship, the orbital waltz, and some trippy ending nobody understands... that complete waste of celluloid. *boggles* the technician later went on to make another forgettable bit of tripe called blade runner, which would be forgotten in part because of its utterly pedestrian visual interpretation of the story's world. also some popular crap named close encounters of the third kind. when jodo was right, he was very right, but when he was wrong, he completely fucked up.
that said, dan o'bannon and the other clever artist types were brains behind the images behind alien. and curiously, a fair amount of the visual styling for dune ended up in flash gordon, though the connection is pretty tenuous.
the documentary included a bit with some jodorowski fanboys trying to explain how the concept art influenced other films beyond those two, but the similarities are dubious or trivial. the one piece they said was pioneered for jodo's dune was a robot's first-person view of a scene, with electronic imagery and augmented vision overlays (cross-hairs, information about images in the scene). which does look a whole lot like the concept art, but it's also in westworld, which was already in theaters when jodorowski started his project.
as a documentary, the movie isn't quite worth seeing, even at the nominal cost of getting it electronically. well, perhaps if you're very curious about an arrakis that never was. or you're really into the artists who were involved.
the pacing is off. when i was watching the beginning, i was becoming frustrated at how long it was taking to get to the actual subject of the film. it seemed like an eternity was being spent on jodorowski's previous work... and then i looked down at the timer, and saw that it had been only fifteen minutes. i'd say that's a pacing failure somehow. it does get better, though.
art in the documentary is worth seeing, i guess, and some of the interviews are interesting, but it all becomes much of a muchness. jodorowski was a visionary, but he developed a messiah complex, and departed what was possible. despite his bitterness about how movies are funded, 2001 was funded by the same system and alien later was... but kubrick and ridley scott figured out how to sell surreal images, not be seduced by them.
1: buried lede-ing footnote: chris foss also did the illustrations for the joy of sex.
i went to one panel discussion on mr. foss's art, which featured three artists (john harris, rian hughes, maurizio manzieri), one fanboy (joe siclari), and no actual chris foss art. most of the audience, and a couple of the panelists ended up peering at their various gadgets to see the examples being discussed. it was odd.
foss is known for a bunch of things¹, one of which is brightly colored spaceships that manage to look exotic but plausible at the same time. for example, this ship, which was intended as a pirate ship for dune:
(from his web site)
the blue stuff spilling out of the ship's hull is spice. the fancy paint job is intended as camoflauge, at least if one's galaxy contains equally-trippy asteroids.
also this thing:
which i'll be damned if i know what it's supposed to do in dune, but it looks like it's constrained by plausible engineering for a bizarre purpose. spice harvester, maybe?
the rest of the art for jodo's dune is equally bizarre.
arriving ships are intended to fly into the mouth, to give the impression they're being swallowed by the baron himself.
jodo also rounded up other ground-breaking artists, some of whom had never done SF work before, and a number of whom were gems in the rough, like dan o'bannon, who was best(?) known(?) at the time for his models and SF/X for dark star. (giger, for that matter, was also basically unknown outside of the european art circuit.) and, what the hell, he recruited salavdor dalí and orson welles to star in his movie, too. because.
well, because jodo had escaped editorial control at that point. his previous surreal films, el topo and holy mountain had done well enough -- indeed, well enough that he'd been given a late-60s megabuck budget to make holy mountain, no small sum then -- that he was convinced that he could make art. which was great, but he seemed to be assuming some studio would cough up the huge piles of money it would take to make this movie. er, and he could have a running time as long as he wanted. i have little doubt that if somebody could have sat on jodorowski and caused him to see sense, he would have made another great movie. but that didn't happen.
i think the strangest decision he made was to dismiss doug trumbull as a "technician", who couldn't be a "spiritual warrior" to help jodo make his "vision". that was the first time i've actually had my jaw drop at a statement. jodo wanted to top 2001, which said "technician" did the SF/X for. y'know, the composite sequence of the bone turning into a spaceship, the orbital waltz, and some trippy ending nobody understands... that complete waste of celluloid. *boggles* the technician later went on to make another forgettable bit of tripe called blade runner, which would be forgotten in part because of its utterly pedestrian visual interpretation of the story's world. also some popular crap named close encounters of the third kind. when jodo was right, he was very right, but when he was wrong, he completely fucked up.
that said, dan o'bannon and the other clever artist types were brains behind the images behind alien. and curiously, a fair amount of the visual styling for dune ended up in flash gordon, though the connection is pretty tenuous.
the documentary included a bit with some jodorowski fanboys trying to explain how the concept art influenced other films beyond those two, but the similarities are dubious or trivial. the one piece they said was pioneered for jodo's dune was a robot's first-person view of a scene, with electronic imagery and augmented vision overlays (cross-hairs, information about images in the scene). which does look a whole lot like the concept art, but it's also in westworld, which was already in theaters when jodorowski started his project.
as a documentary, the movie isn't quite worth seeing, even at the nominal cost of getting it electronically. well, perhaps if you're very curious about an arrakis that never was. or you're really into the artists who were involved.
the pacing is off. when i was watching the beginning, i was becoming frustrated at how long it was taking to get to the actual subject of the film. it seemed like an eternity was being spent on jodorowski's previous work... and then i looked down at the timer, and saw that it had been only fifteen minutes. i'd say that's a pacing failure somehow. it does get better, though.
art in the documentary is worth seeing, i guess, and some of the interviews are interesting, but it all becomes much of a muchness. jodorowski was a visionary, but he developed a messiah complex, and departed what was possible. despite his bitterness about how movies are funded, 2001 was funded by the same system and alien later was... but kubrick and ridley scott figured out how to sell surreal images, not be seduced by them.
1: buried lede-ing footnote: chris foss also did the illustrations for the joy of sex.