I worry a bit that the best character in “Game of Thrones” is about to be killed. Not only the best character but one of the better actors, Peter Dinklage (brilliant in “Find me Guilty”). The immediate reason for this post, however, is the work of Photis Varthis which can be found here (http://www.lifo.gr/team/u13557/48270). Not only is there an icon of Tyrion but just below it, is a Greek icon of Gollum and then Saruman, Eddard Stark and less successfully maybe, Walter White from “Breaking Bad”. Tremendous stuff. What is exciting is that this approach to the traditional icon is quite within the scope of Photis Kontoglou who revived the tradition of Icon painting in Orthodoxy in the 1950s. One of Kontoglou’s projects was the decoration of the Athens Town hall which meant pictures of Socrates and Euripides as well as Alexander the Great.
The icon style lends itself to historical images, abstracting the characters and imbuing them with still dignity.
Now, there is another reason that I admire the actor who plays Tyrion. At an acceptance speech for an award in the US, Peter Dinklage drew attention to the fate of Martin Henderson who had been picked up and thrown around in Somerset. He was severely injured. Anyway, I wonder where this actor can go next. Certainly there are a number of theatre roles that should be considered- Hamlet is one. I would look forward to such a performance and the star billing would pack the houses as much as Dr Who’s Hamlet did a few years’ ago! While on the subject of “Game of thrones” it is well worth praising the animation of the dragons. It sets the bar very high indeed for cinematic dragons like Smaug. We have come along way from “Dragonheart” which was tremendous as well but the criteria have changed – our standards are simply dealing with the illusion of reality. This is along way from what Disney was doing in the 1930s and a long way from what the great special effects people like Harryhausen did in the 50s and 60’s. The Disney bible of animation is “the Illusion of Life” by Thomas and Johnson and is about believability rather than reality (though it is called “the illusion of life”, that is probably the point: we all recognise it is an “illusion” when we see a 2d Mickey Mouse walking and talking and we know it is not real. Richard Williams said that the beauty of animation and the beauty of art lies in the errors. Computers do not make such errors so with Smaug and all the special effects stuff as well as modern 3d computer-generated animation, we are dealing with something new – we are in the realm of quite an elaborate deceit- it is an art too, but not so obviously I think. I will post something soon about “automatonophobia”, it is very much the stuff of ETA Hoffmann so we are on familiar territory.) – when we see the dragon in “the Hobbit”, we do not need to “willingly suspend our disbelief”, the dragon looks real. In fact, we do not have to do any work at all. We are the passive watchers of a spectacle. I admire it alot but I would prefer to do a bit of work myself at the same time: and back to Game of Thrones- one of the few programmes on TV that I can generally watch without going to sleep, mostly because I never quite know what to expect. I was surprised by the gory end of Oberyn Martell, another excellent character.
animate-tim.com 