Word: dorrington
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nobody has dreamed of building a better airship since the Hindenburg exploded in 1937, but aeronautics engineer Graham Dorrington has just that obsession. That makes him an ideal subject for one of director Werner Herzog's luminous studies of the peril that attends man's quest to tame nature--the peril but also the ecstasy. When Dorrington finally gets the airship to fly, it's one of the most spiritually buoyant scenes in recent cinema...
...active Guadaloupe volcano from which all others were fleeing). Recently he found two other suitable subjects, made two extraordinary films. One is Timothy Treadwell, the very engaging, and borderline bonkers, ?star? of Grizzly Man, who lived among kodiak bears each fall in southern Alaska. The other is Graham Dorrington, a London University aeronautical engineer, who wants to build and fly a hot air balloon - not a behemoth like the Hindenburg, but a small airship called The White Diamond. ?We can realize our dreams!? says this excitable scientist, who often seems near laughter or tears...
...Darkly handsome, like the hero of a Bront? novel, Dorrington is also as haunted as Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester. As a 14-year-old experimenting with explosives, he had lost parts of two fingers; later, in Sumatra, a colleague died in an airship crash for which the aeronaut still feels guilt. Occasionally oppressed by his melodramatic mien, Herzog turns to Dorrington?s Guyanese assistant, the gentle, mystical Mark Anthony Yhap. But the attempts to get the White Diamond up are at the heart of the film. And when, accompanied by beautiful choral music, the airship finally rises to soar over...
...made great films (Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo) about men who follow their obsessions into the South American jungle. Now Werner Herzog has a real-life visionary in his viewfinder. Graham Dorrington, seated behind Herzog, above, is an English scientist who dreams of building and flying an airship--not a giant Zeppelin but a small vessel shaped like a white diamond. Handsome and haunted, Dorrington has traveled to Guyana to make the damn thing...
...fiction films and documentaries show, Herzog is also an adventurer with a mystic bent. He is both enrapt by this land's riotous beauty and bound to honor its secrets. When the airship finally flies, Dorrington says he is "high on helium," and in a symphony of pristine images and gorgeous choral music, The White Diamond achieves its own ecstasy. Here Herzog proves that films don't need to make things up. The world is full of miracles, if only you know where to look...