Thursday, May 2, 2024

The Wolf House Review: A Different Kind of Quarantine The New York Times

wolf house

Employing stone, glass, and copper, the property is arguably one of Lautner's best midcentury designs. Heading on, you can walk the back trail, which takes you around the bend and has you walking along a dirt path with beautiful vines on one side of you. From here, drive your car the short distance to the upper parking lot, which has the cottage, silos, and pig palace. Jack London State Historic Park is located off Arnold Drive in the town of Glen Ellen, right in the Sonoma Valley. As you get closer to the town, you will see the signs for the state park off to the left, and after a 2-mile windy road, you will be at the entrance to the park.

Design and Construction

wolf house

It doesn’t take much research to figure out that the predatory wolf was inspired by Paul Schäfer, a German fugitive accused of child molestation, who fled to Chile where he founded Colonia Dignidad (“Dignity Colony”) in 1961. Former Nazis such as concentration camp doctor Joseph Mengele were among the colony members, whom Schäfer instructed to torture and murder dissidents during Pinochet’s military dictatorship, while enabling child sexual abuse to run rampant. The directors have stated that they based The Colony in The Wolf House on Colonia Dignidad (“Dignity” — a word that Maria repeats when she discusses raising her pig-children), a cult established in 1961 in Chile by ex-Nazi pedophile Paul Schäfer. One of many Nazis who fled to Chile after the war, Schäfer was able to continue committing atrocities in the remote area while harboring other SS monsters like Joseph Mengele. While people did eventually escape the camp and report what happened there, the colony continued on thanks to its collaboration with the Pinochet regime, for which it served as a concentration camp for political dissidents.

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These terraces create a greater feeling of spaciousness in the House Wolff, relatively small. It had 17 pens and was an example of the best sanitation practices during the early 1900s. Each of the pigs had their own pen, in what looked like a typical zoo set up. The silos were one of my favorite parts of this trail, as they were pretty cool for photographs. They have no real purpose now, but they are still in great shape and have stone walls that extend up about 35 feet in the air.

Story Tags

The Wolf House Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com

The Wolf House Blu-ray.

Posted: Sat, 17 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The rooms are smaller and more intimate, are located in the rear of the house, in each of its levels, mingling with the broader end against which opening. In the house were distributed 3 bedrooms, the master suite with bath and incredible views and two smaller ones. The ruins are quite impressive with all of the stone for the fireplaces, and some of the walls still in place. The house burned down in 1913 from a fire only months before they planned to move in (no one knows how it started). The house had cost over $75,000 to make, and so it was a huge loss to have it burn down like that.

Following an apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright in the mid-1930s, John Lautner set out to build his own storied career in Los Angeles. It didn't take long for the young architect to gain recognition, especially with his dramatic and photogenic residential spaces, which are frequently the location of professional photo shoots or movie sets. One of the late architect's "favorite five" commissions landed on the market in November, but given its pristine condition, it's little wonder the property didn't stay on the market for too long. According to the Los Angeles Times, Amanda Hearst, a great-granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, and her filmmaker husband Joachim Rønning purchased the house mid-February. The external walls are natural stone of various colors while involving the house are glass from floor to ceiling.The floors are wood and cantilevered decks are coated in copper and wood. The interiors of the house were designed with the vision characteristic of John Lautner on the nature of the juxtaposition with strong architectural lines.

The first clever conceit of this movie is that it, too, is a product of that colony, one with a lesson. What follows is the story of Maria, an escapee from there, who finds a house in the forest where she holes up with two pigs who become her adopted children. While they are not overtly explained, these roots are briefly teased in “The Wolf House,” which is inspired by a real-life case from the Colony and cleverly masked as a propaganda picture, narrated by a Schäfer surrogate.

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Directed by Chilean art duo Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña as their feature film debut, The Wolf House (or La casa lobo, if you prefer the original Spanish) is both simple and mindbogglingly complex. It has a loose fairy-tale narrative with sparse dialogue and only a few characters, but it’s also rife with symbolism and historical allegory. Did you ever wonder what it might be like to be one of the three pigs of children’s story and animated cartoon fame? If the “Fire Walk with Me” comparisons make themselves, not even that David Lynch masterpiece was this deeply suffused with the abject degradation of child abuse. It’s built into the very fabric of the world that León and Cociña have painstakingly created together here, and their work is so dense with evil that the film itself is swallowed into the maw of its own artistry.

wolf house

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And, as Pincohet’s dictatorship proved, pretty much anyone could be labeled as a dissident and thrown into Colonia Dignidad’s underground prisons for torture. And even scarier is what the tale exposes about the setbacks and horrors of a totalitarian regime; something you’d wish felt considerably less relevant today. Maria finds two pigs in the bathroom and decides to raise them as her children. She names them Ana and Pedro, and announces that “Maria is love and care” as they slurp away at the mounds of slop around her feet and morph into humanoid chimeras with their ass cracks sticking up in the air behind them.

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Although the characters are always in the process of becoming, never presented the same way twice, they are always sickly. It is clear that although Maria is part of this house she does not have a home. The remote Chilean commune Colonia Dignidad was founded by German expats who came to the country in the wake of World War II (fill in the blanks there). Over the decades, this quasi-Utopian community evolved into a cult, and became a hotbed of crime and child sexual abuse.

This means that the answer to the question of whether The Wolf House is based on a true story is yes. Although the majority of the plot is fictional, the context of the Colonia Dignidad is very real. The history of this area of Chile being used first as a Nazi refuge and later as a torture camp hangs heavy over The Wolf House and serves as an important piece of the movie’s puzzle. A bathroom changes into a bedroom not through camera movement, but by having the backgrounds painted over to concoct the new background. The characters themselves are constantly broken down and reconfigured. Everyday objects, sculptures and symbolism-rich contours emerge on the walls and windows (there is even one swastika in view for a split second), or rise out of sinks and toilet bowls, to then splinter, melt or burn and reveal their insides.

It is full of beautiful and historic spots, all only a small hike from the parking lots. Let me know if you have been in the comments and what you thought. It was interesting to see what he created here and how well it has been kept up. After checking out the Pig Palace, you can head back out on the small single track nearby to the parking lot. The trail from the parking lot is about .3 miles to get to the cottage.

Included in the sale is also the adjacent 1,169-square-foot guest house. Inside, an expansive living room on the main level connects various spaces. Beautifully restored hardwoods line the floor, while a staircase is tucked behind the large stone fireplace. The 1961 Wolff Residence is sometimes described as Lautner's homage to his mentor's Fallingwater—the iconic home built by Wright in rural Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Stop-motion is an incredibly time-intensive process, and León and Cociña took it several steps further than most animators. It was not shot with miniatures and dolls, but life-sized figures on full sets. (They frequently set up in various galleries and museum spaces, where patrons were able to watch them at work.) This enabled them to adhere to a unique style, wherein the camera is constantly moving and the film appears to unfold in a single shot. The effect is that of a nightmare that Maria — and the viewer — cannot escape.

As part of the US virtual theatrical run, viewers can elect to support local, participating movie theaters. The powerful thing about The Wolf House, though, is that you don’t need to interpret it this way. Sure, the context of Chile’s history seems to explain the movie well enough, but cinema doesn’t always need to be a neatly wrapped package. The Wolf House is vague on purpose, and you can take it as a metaphor for anything that fits for you. The traumatic effects of isolation are incredibly prescient as a theme right now, so there’s no issue in understanding this movie outside of the Colonia and Nazi Germany. As I said, I will love that some people will feel that they can do whatever is in their minds and hearts.

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