Director Robin Lutz crafts a doc on spellbinding artist M.C. Escher

Who is M.C. Escher?

The M.C. Escher print above was my flyer to a party that took place when I managed a spot a few decades ago. I was hoping that the flyer would catch the people’s attention so that they would come to the event. After printing out thousands of copies of this flyer, I was disappointed that many people did not show up.

If the artist M.C. Escher would have been alive today and saw that I was using his flyer for these reasons, he would have a lot to say. It’s like when he was criticizing the hippies in San Francisco in the 1960s who were using his prints and adding colour to them. The hippies were using drugs and alcohol to look at M.C. Escher prints to take them to that next level of ecstasy and utopia.

Director Robin Lutz handcrafts this documentary biopic M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity which has been a long time coming for the director and the artist. At first, Lutz was able to get the full co-operation of the Escher Foundation who has all the rights to his prints. Afterwards, the Escher Museum in The Hague also chimed into the project to get it into full gear. The collection of M.C. Escher’s diaries, lectures, letters and catalogues became the voice of what he saw and experienced in his life and how these were influential in his art.

The voice of actor Stephen Fry narrates the film as M.C. Escher from the point he was creating his first prints in a secondary school in 1916 to the last chapters of his life like the hippie movement of the 1960s. Fry comes out sounding like a Gandolf-ish wizard as M.C. Escher but it is suitable to the nature of the M.C. Escher.

M.C. Escher’s Journey

The Leeuwarden born student studied architecture at The School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. This is where his art began to blossom through his drawings and printmaking. M.C. 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.

“I fear that there is only one person in the world who could make a really good movie about my prints: myself “.  Escher wrote this line in 1969 to an American collector of his work.

M.C. Escher’s work and fame

With the help of his sons, George and Jan who reminisce about their father’s legacy, the documentary M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity is a colourful portrait. The spellbinding artist who goes into sequential in-depth journeys of his famous prints such as Day and Night, Relativity, Snakes and Ascending and Descending is charming. Despite going through pain with his relationship with his wife, WWII and his own health, M.C. Escher was always looking up to the sky. Through his art, he was able to mask his own struggles of life with infinite possibilities.

The respectable characteristic of M.C. Escher is that he does not sell out. For example, he was asked by Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones if he can draw an album cover for an LP. Where many would have run to the opportunity, M.C. Escher passes on the offer. Furthermore, it’s not as if M.C. Escher was handing out his prints like flyers to hippies in San Francisco. Or even saying that he was an artist himself to Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash and being as great or even greater than Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

He tells Nash that he is a mathematician making Nash look and see things differently in his own life. M.C. Escher’s whole life and career were to observe and combine the two studies of art and math. The architecture was the common denominator and sub-genre to his studies and the foundation to it all.

M.C. Escher will never look at his own art as legendary because there was never that arrogance about him. There was rather a curiosity of exploring the unknown which he searched high and low for those answers all over the globe. This film by director Robin Lutz explains this journey of the artist who can’t explain the answers to his own art because he never had them himself. Maybe he didn’t need to sell out because he knew he made the first selfie with the Hand With the Reflecting Sphere.

https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/mcescherjourneytoinfinity