Dreaming in the Desert
My Review of 'Dune: Exposures' (2024)
Throughout these pages, the cast and crew all appear as if they have been let in on some secret. The photography of Greig Fraser, and the writing of Josh Brolin make gestures towards this secret. Whether capturing a glimmer in the eye, or the wryness of a smile, their words and images provide windows into this unique creative event.
Published by Insight Editions, the cinematographer behind the Dune movies, Greig Fraser, in this work collaborates with actor and writer Josh Brolin, who plays the character Gurney Halleck in the films. In doing so, they continue the legacy of Frank Herbert, author of the original Dune novels, who was himself a professional photographer and acclaimed writer. According to the foreword, written by Brian Herbert, the author of Dune ‘liked to write scenes as if he were viewing them through a camera lens.’ Baron Harkonen, he explains, is ‘described over several pages as if seen through a camera lens that was opening very slowly, a little at a time.’ In many ways, this is how Dune: Exposures unfolds: slowly, subtly—then expansive, and subtle once more. When, in 1983 Frank Herbert first ‘clicked the clapboard to start the cameras rolling on the initial Dune movie’, at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, I wonder if he could have imagined that a group of passionate actors and a visionary director would once again be seen across a desert expanse some four decades later, bringing the series to life in new and exciting ways. It is this remarkable cinematic achievement that is explored throughout these pages.
As the chief purpose of this page is of a literary quality, particular attention in this review will be paid to Josh Brolin’s poetry and prose, both of which I found to be lasting and evocative. Though I must note that Fraser’s photography was a continual source of quiet wonder for me as I journeyed through these pages. Light and dark, colour and anti-colour, vista and portrait; a whole breadth of imagery is on display here, and this selection deserves far closer inspection by one with more photographic skill than myself. The harmony of word and image on display in Dune: Exposures is truly an achievement that these authors have every reason to be proud of.
As I was spending time with the book over this past week, I found there were more than a few lines of poetry which stuck with me, reverberating around the borders of my consciousness. I should note, for those seeking citations, that there are no page numbers in the book, an understandable stylistic choice that does well to highlight the seamless, unifying quality of the work.
This short poem in the opening pages sets the tone for the entire work:
Crystalline fields of Sand like Oceans, rise and fall. Our ego's defunct.
Our ego’s defunct. Anyone who has spent enough time in the midst of an expansive landscape must know the truth of these words. For Brolin especially, the extended stay in the deserts of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates seems to have left a profound spiritual resonance. Life, with its attendant care for identity and societal involvement, had been put on pause, with Brolin writing that ‘We will live our own stories somewhere else, at some other time, further away than what here is’. Indeed, throughout this intimate work there is a palpable process of painful, interior peeling, closely connected with the surrounding desert environment. In the following poem, the Sun’s light, bright and constant, assists in this peeling away, or purifying, of the fractured self:
[...] the crew looks on silhouetted against that sun that melts any ego that might have traveled here innocently [...]
This loss of ego surfaces in various ways, but I found its absence especially moving in the care and optimism shown towards younger actors on set. Typed above a candid photograph of Brolin and Timothée Chalamet laying back, in costume, against a cave interior, both laughing and at ease, he writes that ‘The younger generation is even younger today / than they were / yesterday’. I found this verse personally refreshing, especially given the cynicism and suspicion so common among the generational divide today. He further reflects upon Timothée (who plays Paul Atreides in the films), his youth and features ‘etched / by adolescence’, which recalled ‘a certain poetry’, unearthing a still more vulnerable moment between the two:
[...] and the way you hold my gaze / makes me fear my own age.And for Zendeya, he offers a moving haiku, placed beneath a series of half-lit, mysterious headshots:
Electricity has found residence inside the whites of your eyes
Brolin writes warmly of ‘The family / that you’ve inherited’, the cast and crew all ‘pulled toward the experiment’. This experiment, presumably, is the astounding fact of being involved in this moment of cinema history, though I am sure that this phrase holds a more personal feeling to all those involved.
Throughout the book, there are many of those small, subtle moments, brief glimmers pregnant with life. Writing of the Jordan desert at dusk, he draws on his love of paintings, describing a ‘brush sunset with coloured creams’. Writing of an intimate moment shared within ‘a hovel naturally dug by years of weather’, as they hide from a dust storm, Brolin takes care to address history and place, recalling that he must be crouching ‘just as the Bedounins did centuries ago under similar scenarios’, those ancient, nomadic peoples of the Middle Eastern deserts. In a slightly more lighthearted tone, too, he writes candidly of poolside antics at a Jordan hotel after work, mentioning ‘a lanky Timothée running around’, and Dune director, Denis Villeneuve, ‘with jeans rolled up, / feet in water, half smiling’.
Aside from the portrayal and documentation of life on set among the cast and crew, some of the most moving prose of the book concerns Brolin’s own interior life, and his close relationship with his family. In an evocative prose section in the latter half of the book, Brolin writes from the first person perspective of his daughter, as she treks with her father over the dunes as the sun is coming up, before the working day begins. As they walk together, ‘wander[ing] outside’, there is the exciting sense of ‘Another adventure. Another discovery’. Ascending the summit of ‘a high dune’, the child’s sense of freedom among the endless horizon of desert sands is vivid and expressive:
We're at the top [...] I can see everything from up here, and the face of the dune looks straight down. I feel like I could lift my arms and fly [...]
The emotional weight of being separated from family for long periods at a time comes through a few paragraphs later, as Brolin suits up and heads out to work. The child poignantly thinks of her father ‘crying somewhere because he likes playing with us more than he likes doing anything else.’
All of these descriptions, coupled with the close and intimate photography of Fraser, amount to a reading experience that is truly lasting. I have come away not with the impression of a cheap movie-tie-in product, desperately shipped out to sell a few more cinema tickets, but instead with a clear sense that a profound sense of care and humanity has gone into these pages, in the imagining of these ‘tactile dreams’, as Brolin describes them. Indeed, as Fraser notes in his dedication to Brolin at the end of the book, this was a project long in the making, a creative process that began ‘[d]uring the pre-production process of Dune: Part One’, and which organically developed as his relationship with Brolin grew across the filming process. For my part, I am grateful for this collaboration. As Fraser notes, ‘Images, combined with words, can become greater than the sum of their parts’; and Brolin, in his dedication to Fraser, echoes this sentiment, summing up this unique work in brightening prose:
So these are our paintings told through a potpourri of images and a swath of nomadic words to help you imagine our brief sojourn with Madame Art.
very interesting, every bit of it.