Wednesday, April 9, 2008

12 Monkeys - Universal Studios and Lebbeus Woods

In 1987, artist Lebbeus Woods took a graphite pencil and created his vision of a chair. The chair is shown inside a large chamber with a high ceiling, mounted on a wall in front of a suspended sphere, and with a visibly jointed grid forming the floor and wall. Hence the self-descriptive title "Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber".

Universal Studios released the artful film 12 Monkeys in December of 1995. Bruce Willis plays the distraught time traveler, Joe. In the beginning of the movie, Joe is brought into the interrogation room and told to sit in a chair which is attached to a vertical rail on the wall. As Joe sits in the chair, it slides up the rail, suspending Joe helplessly several yards above the floor. A sphere supported by a metal armature is suspended directly in front of Joe, probing for weaknesses as the inquisitors interrogate him. Joe is unlucky enough to return to the chair three more times throughout the movie.


The chairs are pretty much exactly the same, the copy is a dead give away. I think that they should have modified the chair or used a little more of their own creative abililties to change it if the chair was so important to the storyline of the film.

No comments: