We’ve seen light shows before. Some of them are good, some great and some (and we’re looking at you Nancy,) are really spectacular. We don’t want to sound like jaded travellers when we say that somewhere close to really spectacular, but for the absence of a gigantic square and with “only” the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world to use as a projection screen, lies Amiens’ nightly summer show.
Our lingering memory of it will not be of the thirty minutes or so of brilliantly clever animations which variously deconstructed the building or draped it in a luscious cloak nor any of the other special effects, mesmerising though they were, but of that final static illumination, “painting” the building as historical study suggests it may well have been in the middle ages.
We stayed as long as we dared, walking up, wanting to touch, knowing that the paint wasn’t real but unable to convince our brains otherwise. What happened, we wondered as we walked home around midnight, to our aesthetic sensibilities over the last thousand years or so, which allowed this wonder to turn beige? Perhaps it’s time to give the man from Dulux a call.
1 comment
We, too, wandered around the porch of the cathedral after the big show marveling at what must have been. I was suspicious, however, and went to the tourist office the next day and they assured me that the colors shown were what it originally looked like.
The best "son et lumiere" we've seen in France!
Don
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