LOST 1, 2, 4, 5 |
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Almost abstract
images of a foliage, resembling chinese tousche paintings. |
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LOST 3 |
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Strange looking, foggy view of a wooden wall of a house, with a ladder leaned on it, on the left side branches of a fern tree, more trees in background. It looks as if snow was lying on the ground. |
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TECHNICAL DATA:
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SPECIAL (D)EFFECTS:Not a defect, actually: All the photographs are negatives of pictures shot in the night with a flash. Never have seen anybody using this technique before. FACTS & TIDBITS:
"Got lost one moonless night with a friend on the West Coast and tried in vain to use camera flash to find our way home through the forest. Made it back agter the sun came up. LOST and LOST 2 are part of the roll of film randomly shot in the process."
Q: When you were lost in the woods, what happened there? You took photographs? Viggo: One time I was in the rainforest on the west coast of the south island. It was during shooting, and I went down to a place that I'd been to before. I wanted to go into the woods and see something. It got dark and I hadn't brought a flashlight which was stupid, but I thought I know this trail so well. I got lost and there was no moon, it was overcast and completely pitch black, very dense and a lot of thorns. I alarmed the makeup people when I showed up like I'd been through a grinder. I had a camera with me that had a flash and a couple rolls of film, soo I used it, and for a second you see everything and I was trying to find this trail, but I never did find it. And then I ran out of film. At some point I was just getting tired and ending up in marshy areas and getting cut by thorns and falling down. And I thought, this is stupid. So I found a piece of relative high ground and laid down for a while until the moon came up, then I could get my bearings, and I figured out how to get back to where I had started. But when I developed the film which is black&white, there were some really interesting images. The edges of this foliage at night looked like negative images. There's four that i printed called Lost 1, 2, 3, 4. They looked like sort of japanese prints. I like things like that in acting or photography no matter how well you plan something accidents happen. I try to remember I don't always succeed to embrace it. And it's all of a sudden very, very human and unpredictable.
Faced with the prospect of just wandering around in circles, Mortensen decided that his best plan was to stop and find somewhere to settle down for the night. "At some point I was just getting really tired and ended up in a marshy area," he says. "I was falling down all the time, getting cut by thorns and I thought, 'This is stupid'. So, I found a piece of relatively high ground and lay down for a little while, until the moon came up. Luckily, when the moon arrived I managed to get my bearings and eventually I was able to figure out how to get back to where I started from. It was a huge relief, but when I showed up back on the set, I really alarmed everyone because it looked like I'd been through a grinder." After this sobering ordeal, Mortensen finally learnt his lesson and stopped disappearing on his own. But he will always have a reminder of those hours lost in the rainforest, courtesy of the roll of film he shot while trying to find his way out. "When I developed the film, which was black and white, there were some really interesting images," says Viggo. "The flash had lit up the ground, the foliage and these ferns which are typical of New Zealand. Some of them are almost like negatives because there was this fog and the flash was bouncing off them creating a really strange effect. It's quite unusual because there are these delicate ferns with their little tendrils and all this whiteness around them which makes them look like Japanese prints. I printed off four of them, which I've called Lost 1, 2, 3 and 4. You can see them on the internet." From: How the Lord Nearly Killed Me by Hilary Morgan, Mirror, Dec. 2003 LINKS:no entry COMMENTS:EOS: Stories told about Viggo lost in the woods vary from interview to interwiew. There is a moon or sun rising, there is a friend or there is none... anyway, the shooting blind in the night stays the same. Lost were my eyeopener. First time I saw the images in the net and instantly felt there is something strange about them. I thought about mist and snow being the source of the effect, until I saw the bigger print of Lost 3 in Signlanguage Book and noticed that the ladder is throwing a white shadow on the wall. Scanned it and inverted the image to be sure: the pictures are negatives -- that's why the strange impression. I was totally hooked -- mostly by the genius of the idea itself. I mean, how open minded you have to be to see the possibility in apparently ruined pictures? Most photographers wouldn't even try to develope this film(s). There is another, more personal aspect to this discovery. Years ago I had a film roll to finish and having no better idea, I shot two pictures of the trees outside of my window in the middle of the snowy night. In my diary note from about the same time I wrote after a night walk: "In the night the world turns into a negative of itself", meaning the black sky and sillouettes of trees bright from the streetlamps' light. I was so close and haven't seen the possibility... The only excuse for me is, that when I found this film recently, I had to admit that my night images weren't interesting at all (as probably most of Viggo's pictures from the night), whether as positives nor as negatives. Anyway, after discovering this, I knew there is more on this Viggo than meets the eye.
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From: A Living
Diary: The Art of Viggo Mortensen by Jon B. Snyder,
LOTR Fan Magazine:
