“All a Man Can Do is Look Upon it”: What’s With the Werckmeister Whale?

[See also How to Watch Werckmeister Harmonies]

And so continues a period of whale-watching at Spectacular Attractions. Having finally made the time to read Moby Dick over the summer, along with Philip Hoare’s Leviathan (a personal account of his fascination with whales, retracing the influences on Melville’s book), I got a bit interested in whales. I’m about to watch Lloyd Bacon’s mad, fast and loose adaptation from 1930, and then I’ll have a go at the other versions, some of which I’ve seen before, none of them recently. There are currently two (count them!) new adaptations of Moby Dick in production, the first a TV mini-series due for broadcast next year. It’s a German production with a British director, Mike Barker, and an American cast including William Hurt as Ahab and Ethan Hawke as Starbuck. The second is one of those “re-imaginings” that can bode so badly for all concerned, but it might just be crazy enough to work. It’s to be directed, alarmingly (but tellingly) by Timur Bekmambetov, director of gun-fetish gravity-mocking action movies like Wanted, and has no cast attached as yet. I’ll offer some updates as and when I can find them.

Whale-watching: Forthcoming Moby Dicks

[The image above (like the one at the bottom of this post) is from a design by Paul Lasaine for an abandoned version of Moby Dick developed by Dreamworks, directed by the Brizzi brothers. You can see several more images at his blog. The plan was to tell the story from the whale’s point of view; a fascinating idea that the studio didn’t want to follow up. My whale fixation continues in a post about Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies.]

I’m planning to post updates here on Spectacular Attractions about the two forthcoming adaptations of Moby Dick, along with notes about earlier versions. It’s something I’m distracted by at the moment, so this is an outlet. If anyone has further information than I can gather from the Web, please add comments below.