Apotheosis

This is Apotheosis, the official podcast of the Production Designers Collective.

Today, our host Alex Wittenberg sits down with production designer Anne Seibel, whose credits include Midnight in Paris, The New Look, and Emily in Paris.

If you've been enjoying Apotheosis, please take a moment to rate the podcast and share with those who might also enjoy the show.

And now, here's our conversation with Anne Seibel.

I know you're in the studio right now.

He who dies to self lives in God, and Fana, the consummation of this death, marks the attainment of Bahá, or union with the divine life.

Deification, in short, is the Muslim mystic's ultima thule.

In the early part of the 10th century, Hussein ibn Mansur, known to fame as Al-Hallaj, the wool carder, was barbarously done to death at Baghdad.

His execution seems to have been dictated by political motives, but with these we are not concerned.

And I was fascinated particularly with what Gregory was saying about that because it was quite complicated and there were many different facets to what he was doing and saying about it.

So when I first started working on that, I was looking at deification.

and theosis.

I started out as a classicist as an undergraduate, and so I was familiar with some of the ancient ideas of deification that we would see in Plato and others, and I was curious to see how early Christians were thinking about it in conversation with Genesis 1 and other texts in Scripture.

So that was how I was sort of approaching that particular question and thinking about it.

And because Gregory of Nazianzus is one author who, I mean, he's written a lot, but it's not so much that you can't read it all if you're doing something like a PhD.

Now I know that the devil isn't God.

And so what's going on there? I mean, it's pretty grim because he's basically describing, if you think about becoming divine and becoming godlike, you're going to become truly human.

18.

Apotheosis.

Come slowly, Eden.

Lips unused to thee bashful sip thy jasmines as the fainting bee, reaching late his flower, round her chamber hums, counts his nectars, enters, and is lost in balms.

But soon after, "'God, it's awful!' I muttered.

"'I wish I were dead!' Apotheosis but oh those heavenly moments when i feel this trivial universe too small to contain my attributes when a sense of the divine ipsiety invades me when i know that my voice is the voice of truth and my umbrella god's umbrella the spring in london London seemed last winter like an underground city, as if its low sky were the roof of a cave and its murky day a light such as one reads of in countries beneath the earth.

And yet the natural sunlight sometimes shone there, white clouds voyaged in the blue sky, the interminable multitudes of roofs were washed with silver by the moon or cloaked with a mantle of new-fallen snow.

and the coming of spring to london was to me not unlike the descent of the maiden goddess into death's kingdoms when pink almond blossoms blew about her in the gloom and those shadowy people were stirred with faint longings for meadows and the shepherd's life nor was there anything more virginal and fresh in wood or orchard than the shimmer of young foliage which in may dimmed with delicate green all the smoke blackened london trees fashion plates i like loitering in the bookstalls looking in at the windows of print shops and romancing over the pictures i see of shepherdesses and old-fashioned beauties tall and slim and crowned with plumes in one period in another these ladies become as wide-winged as butterflies or float large balloon-like visions down summer streets and yet in all shapes they have always i tell myself created thrilling effects of beauty and waked in the breasts of modish young men ever the same charming emotion but then i have questioned this is the emotion always precisely the same is it true to say that the human heart remains quite unchanged beneath all the changing fashions of frills and ruffles in this elegant and cruel sentiment i rather fancy that colour and shape do make a difference i have a notion that about eighteen forty was the zenith the meridian hour the golden age of the passion those tight-waisted whiskered bows those crinoline beauties adored one another i believe with a leisure a refinement and dismay not quite attainable at other dates mental vice there are certain hackneyed thoughts that will force themselves on me i find my mind especially in hot weather infested and buzzed about by moral platitudes that shows i say to myself or how true it is or i really ought to have known the sight of a large clock sets me off into musings on the flight of time a steamer on the thames or lines of telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of civilization man's triumph over nature the heroism of inventors the courage amid ridicule and poverty of stevenson and watt like faint rather unpleasant smells these thoughts lurk about railway stations i can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence and accuracy of the postal system then the pride in the british constitution and british freedom which comes over me when i see even in the distance the towers of westminster palace that mother of parliaments it is not much comfort that this should be chastened as i walk down the embankment by the sight of cleopatra's needle and the thought that it will no doubt witness the fall of the british as it has that of other empires remaining to point its moral as old as egypt to antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges i am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for everything that the whole great frame of the universe has a key like a box has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning but humdrum eighteenth-century creator it would be a kind of hell surely a world in which everything could be at once explained shown to be obvious and useful i am sated with lesson and allegory weary of monitory ants industrious bees and preaching animals the benefits of civilization cloy me i have seen enough shining of the didactic sun so gazing up on hot summer nights at the london stars i cool my thoughts with a vision of the giddy infinite meaningless waste of creation the blazing suns the planets and frozen moons all crashing blindly forever across the void of space the organ of life almost always in london in the congregated uproar of streets or in the noise that drifts through walls and windows you can hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music a music which sounds like the actual voice of the human heart singing the lost joys the regrets the loveless lives of the people who blacken the pavements or jolt along on the buses speak to me kindly the hand-organ implores i'm all alone it screams amid the throng thy vows are all broken it laments in dingy court-yards and light is thy fame and of hot summer afternoons the cry for courage to remember or calmness to forget floats in with the smell of paint and asphalt faint and sad through open office windows humiliation My own view is, I began, but no one listened.