Axis Company's "In Token of My Admiration" Film

During August of 1849 an explosive friendship began between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Although it only lasted a year and a half, it was during this time that Melville wrote one of the few American, true masterpieces which he dedicated to Hawthorne with "In token of my admiration for his genius." Hawthorne was at the height of his literary success, having just published The Scarlet Letter and then The House of the Seven Gables. He was thrilled by the renegade maverick who had sailed the seven seas and come back again to the summer mountains of western Massachusetts. They visited each other often. Only a few months after it began, their friendship and their separate lives took dangerous turns for the worse. Melville published his genius Moby-Dick to little notice except out and out derision in the press, an event that he never was able to understand. Hawthorne, afraid of the dark door he had opened in The Scarlet Letter, retreated into idyllic fairy tales that sold well but showed little of his inner life or dire, emotional struggles. Incredibly, after the disaster of Moby-Dick, Melville went to work for twenty years as an ordinary custom's inspector in downtown New York. For twenty years he published nothing but poems and then simply nothing. His son committed suicide and he began his terminal relationship with alcohol. Hawthorne took a patrician's job as consul to Liverpool, cutting himself off physically and mentally from the "blue room" he had entered in New England with Melville. He died a relatively young man that even he described as "another pallid phantom gliding noiselessly up and down the stairs"

AXIS figures out what may have happened to these men as they crashed into each other like a freight train wreck, and then spun away to lives of darkness, boredom and frustration. Using impressions, film, music, Hawthorne and Melville's brilliant, sad and funny writing and every possible means, AXIS unfolds the interiors of two of the greatest minds in the artistic world.

Director & Music, Randy Sharp; Filmed by Dan Hersey, with Brian Barnhart, Joe Fuer, Laurie Kilmartin, Valerie Hallier, David Crabb, Jim Sterling, Margo Passalaqua, Christopher Swift, Edgar Oliver

WWW.AXISCOMPANY.ORG

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• experimental
• theatre
• melville
• hawthorne
• axis
• new
• york

[timschriver]

haha