Somehow it’s both a surprise and not a surprise that Renaissance man Graham Nash, of Baby Boomer rock group favorite Crosby, Stills and Nash, turns up in the dazzling documentary M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. Among other things, Nash’s appearance serves as a reminder that Escher—a 20th-century Dutch draftsman and printmaker whose fantastic graphic work links geometrical and mathematical miracles to infinity—gained international renown after World War II. This made him especially popular to a generation of people who came of age seeking mind-expanding experiences in the 1960s, which Escher’s dazzling prints certainly provided.
Journey to Infinity not only provides scores of Escher’s prints to look at (many of those images likely new or unfamiliar to casual fans), the film tells us a lot about his life, his problematic marriage, and his influence on two sons who fondly recall hanging out with him in his studio, loving the magical smell of printer’s ink. We follow Escher’s movements throughout Europe from the 1920s through the 40s, evading the rise of fascism until the German occupation caught up with him and forced him to spend his days seeking food for his family instead of working.
The film’s narration, entirely derived from Escher’s letters and journals, and read aloud by Stephen Fry, adds a great deal to our understanding of how the artist’s thinking evolved about what was important for him to capture in his work. There were images inside him, he wrote, that needed to be explored, especially those now-famous, maze-like patterns suggesting beginnings and endings are the same things. “Endlessness within a confined plane” was his goal, as he so lyrically put it. So much about the world of his mind and the hard world in which he labored, finally finding international recognition late in his career, is here in this remarkable film. Strongly recommended. Aud: E, I, J, H, C, P, T.