upcoming

Up and Away to Angel Falls

What:

The Humboldt Arts Council is presenting a program by Karen Angel about Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall, and the exploration of the ancient sandstone tabletop mountains known as Tepuis (pronounced tεp.wi) in southeastern Venezuela, at the Morris Graves Museum of Art, 636 F Street on Thursday, June 25th. Doors open at 6:00 P.M. and the presentation will start at 6:30 P.M. 

The new Disney/Pixar animated 3-D movie “Up” features the Tepuis and Angel Falls, which is called Paradise Falls in the film.  Angel is the niece of James “Jimmie” Crawford Angel (1899-1956) for whom Angel Falls is named. He first saw the waterfall on November 16, 1933 and made the falls and the region known to the world.  Angel has been researching the exploration history of the area since 1994 when she made her first trip to Angel Falls.                

Englishman Adrian Warren, a research associate of Angel, was a consultant for “Up.”  According to Angel, “Adrian is a documentary film maker and the aerial photographer who made the film ‘Living Edens: The Lost World.’  It was first shown on PBS in 2003.  The Pixar people saw it and were inspired by the beauty of the Tepuis and Angel Falls.  They invited Adrian to the Pixar studios in Emeryville, California where he showed them more images.  They were hooked on the Tepuis as the location for their new film.  Next,  he  took ten members of the ‘Up’ team  including the director Pete Docter, co-writer Bob Petersen, two production managers, and six Pixar animators led by story supervisor Ronnie del Camen on an expedition to Angel Falls and the Tepuis to draw the waterfall, rock formations, and plants.”

           “I’d been hearing about the film for months from Adrian. The animated versions in ‘Up’ are accurate and gorgeous. It is also a good lesson for people who put off going the places they dream of going – until it’s too late,”  exclaimed Angel who saw the film at a local theatre the day it opened on May 29th. 

          “UP” director Pete Docter remarked in a recent AP interview, “We were looking for places to put our characters in and put them stuck together. We thought a tropical island … (But) we saw a documentary by Adrian Warren and he came to Pixar to show us some other places … We said, ‘We need to go there!’   This place is unique, very specific, we really needed to experience what it’s like to put it in the movie. We spent three days drawing, painting, taking lots of photographs. It really affected the film both on the images and the story … Really, a lot of ideas grew out of this mysterious rock shapes that look like people. That’s real and we put it in the film: that’s how we introduced our character ‘Dug’.” For those who have not seen “Up,” Dug is a dog.        

                “Since childhood, Angel Falls has always been part of my family history, but being there and standing in the mist of the waterfall made it real for me,” said Angel.  With the assistance of other interested people in the USA and Venezuela, she founded the Jimmie Angel Historical Project (JAHP) in 1996.  The JAHP is a nonprofit organization incorporated in the state of California to foster research and to provide accurate information about Jimmie Angel, his associates, and their era of exploration to film makers, journalists, and educators.  The JAHP also maintains a photo archive and promotes the preservation of Jimmie Angel’s Flamingo airplane El Rio Caroni, a national monument in Venezuela. 

Humboldt County’s namesake, Alexander von Humboldt explored Venezuela and the Orinoco River and its tributaries between 1799 and 1800.   When he was in his early twenties, Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar, the Liberator of South America, was in Paris and met von Humboldt who had just recently returned from his scientific explorations in South America.

     Angel Falls is located south of the Orinoco River in the Gran Sabana region.  The Gran Sabana is a vast 200,000 square mile plateau some 3,300 feet above sea level.  It is home to the Tepuis and to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World; a place he never actually visited but had heard about at lectures by botanist Everard Im Thurn who had scaled Roraima, a Tepui on the border of Brazil-Venezuela-British Guiana, in 1884.

            The Tepuis, referred to as “Islandsin Time,” are the remaining towering sandstone structures from the vast continent of Gondwana which broke apart about 135 million years ago to form the continents of Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and parts of the Asian subcontinent.   Estimates for the age of the Tepuis range from 1,800 to 3,600 million years.  Each Tepuis rises from the Gran Sabana as an isolated   island with its own unique botanical world. 

         Tepui means house in the language of the indigenous Pemón of the region. Auyan-tepui, the “House of the Devil,” the home of Angel Falls, covers 348 square miles.

Through her research and travels to Venezuela, Angel has interviewed and corresponded with hundreds of people, published and presented research papers, and has been a guest researcher in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Angel’s talk will present recent photos by Adrian Warren, herself, and archival photographs of Angel Falls, the Tepuis, Jimmie Angel, and fellow explorers of his era.  A $5 suggested donation in support of the Humboldt Arts Council and the Morris Graves Museum of Art will be accepted at the door.  For questions or more information please contact Karen Angel at kangel@humboldt1.com or call (707) 442-0278 ext. 201. 

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