M.C. Escher – Metamorphose (1998)

Instead of including several audio streams in a single documentary, the makers of this dvd decided to copy it, so that we have two identical vids here – one with a Dutch audio stream, and a second with an English one. Pretty weird, isn’t it?
Identical? Not quite. The Dutch movie has AR 16/9, the English one 4/3, and the first is some four minutes longer than the second. I haven’t detected the scenes yet where the two might differ from each other, but due to this difference it’s impossible to transfer the audio from one avi to the other. Personally, I would have preferred the 16/9 with the English spoken stream. It’s not to be.

Two – almost – identical movies. Somewhere they start to diverge slightly. Escher would have appreciated the joke, I think. His own works are frequently about creatures that change appearance in a hardly perceptible way.
Special about this documentary are the interviews with the man himself (hard-subbed in the English version). You don’t often get a chance to hear and see an artist who rose to such fame. And how did he get that fame…with woodcuts, among artistic mediums one of the most underestimated, but oh so difficult disciplines. We actually get to see him preparing a print of one of his works, see snapshot above.
Most woodcuts end up as illustrations in a bibliophile release of some kind, don’t they? But not Escher’s. His were good enough to make it on their own. This not for their evident technical perfection, but mainly – have a look at the works on display in this vid, you probably know most of them - for his abundance of brilliant ideas.

Choose one of the avis, you won’t need them both. Unless you insist on finding the tiny differences.