VOD film review: Escher: Journey into Infinity
Review Overview
Escher's life
7Escher's work
8Fry's narration
6Matthew Turner | On 24, Oct 2021
Director: Robin Lutz
Cast: Stephen Fry, Graham Nash, George Escher, Jan Escher
Certificate: PG
Directed by Dutch filmmaker Robin Lutz, this engaging and informative documentary explores the life and work of MC Escher – that’s Maurits Cornelis, if you’re wondering – the graphic artist known for his detailed, mathematically inspired prints that achieve bizarre optical effects. His wide-ranging influence can be seen as recently as in Netflix’s Squid Game, which had a multiple staircase set that was clearly modelled on Escher’s work.
Lutz structures the film as a chronological journey through Escher’s life, using the artist’s own words, drawn from letters and diaries and narrated by Stephen Fry. Occasionally, Lutz throws in one of three talking heads – relatives George and Jan Escher and, somewhat randomly, musician and Escher fan Graham Nash – but they’re used so infrequently that they prove distracting, interrupting the film’s rhythm.
As detailed by his letters, Escher’s life is consistently fascinating, beginning with his early training at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in the Netherlands. Then followed a move to Tuscany, where he was inspired by the beautiful landscapes and then his courtship of – and marriage to – Jetta, a young Swiss woman who shared his fascination with Italy. The pair subsequently settled in Rome, but travelled widely, including a fateful visit to the the fourteenth century Alhambra palace in Spain, which inspired Escher’s lifelong obsession with tessellation.
Occasionally, the film skimps a little on the detail, such as when we learn Escher and his family left fascist Italy because his youngest son was becoming a little too attached to the wrong sort of people at school. The son is still alive and sheepishly admits as much on camera, but you’re left wanting more.
Needless to say, the film is packed with examples of Escher’s work and it’s frequently extraordinary, from his famous pieces, such as the impossible staircase pictures and the tessellated birds and fish, to weirder material, such as the creature he created called “the Curl-up”, because, he noted, God had forgotten to create anything resembling the wheel in nature.
Escher didn’t think of himself as an artist, describing himself instead as a mathematician. Indeed, as the film points out, it took several years for Escher’s work to be recognised and celebrated, and he was 70 years old before the first retrospective of his work was held. He was also amusingly perplexed by the way the counter-culture embraced his work in the 1960s, commenting, “The hippies in San Francisco continue to print my work clandestinely… I cannot understand why the out-of-control youths of today appreciate my work so much.”
Perhaps the best anecdote in the film involves Mick Jagger, who once wrote to Escher asking him to design a cover for a new Rolling Stones album. Escher curtly refused, taking offence that Jagger had presumed to address him by his first name (“Dear Maurits”) in the letter.
The film’s only real problem is that Fry is regrettably miscast. His narration is too exaggerated, to the point where you’re constantly aware that it’s Stephen Fry doing his usual thing. At any rate, it doesn’t seem right for the film and it borders on annoying.