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A Trip to the Moon / Le Voyage dans la lune - 1902

A Trip to the Moon / Le Voyage dans la lune - 1902

EarlyCinema.com Maries Georges Jean Méliès was born in Paris in 1861 and from a very early age he showed a particular interest in the arts which led, as a boy, to a place at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where Méliès showed particular interest in stage design and puppetry. In 1884, Méliès continued his studies abroad, in London at the request of his parents - they insisted he learn English after which they intended him to work at his father’s footwear business. While in London, he developed a keen interest in stage conjury after witnessing the work of Maskelyne and Cooke. On his return to Paris he worked at his father’s factory and took over as manager when his father retired. From that point on Méliès worked full time as a theatrical showman whose performances revolved around magic and illusionist techniques which he studied while in London as well as working on his own tricks. top Méliès discovered from this incident that cinema had the capacity for manipulating and distorting time and space.

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Un chien Andalou (1928) Descripción Un Chien Andalou (English: An Andalusian Dog) is a 16-minute surrealist film made in France in 1928 by Spanish writer/directors Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and released in 1929 in Paris. It is one of the best-known surrealist films of the French avant-garde film movement of the 1920s. It is also considered one of the most prominent films in Spanish Surrealism. Tags: Buñuel Dali chien andalou perro andaluz surrealism 1928 Illuminations: Kellner By Douglas Kellner Paul Virilio is one of the most prolific and penetrating critics of the drama of technology in the contemporary era, especially military technology, technologies of representation, and new computer and information technologies. For Virilio, the question of technology is the question of our time and his life-work constitutes a sustained reflection on the origins, nature, and effects of the key technologies that have constituted the modern/postmodern world. In particular, Virilio carries out a radical critique of the ways that technology is transforming the contemporary world and even the human species. Yet I want to argue in this study that Virilio has a flawed conception of technology that is excessively one-sided and that misses the emancipatory and democratizing aspects of new computer and media technologies. Speed, Politics, and Technology For Virilio, the city and its institutions have military origins. Disappearance and Loss: Virilio's Complaint

Film Analysis: Man with a Movie Camera Man with a Movie Camera (1929), directed by Dziga Vertov, is a unique film. It has no actors nor story. It takes place over the span of one day and is a montage of the urban life in and around a Russian city. There are a wide array of interesting camera angles and editing techniques employed throughout, demonstrating movie capabilities and methods that had been developed and explored at that time (1929). An important aspect of this movie is in the ways scenes progress and the types of montage employed. An interesting aspect of "Man with a Movie Camera" is that it is a universal film in the sense that there are no title cards and no needed prior knowledge of anything. Something that really struck about this version of the film was the accompanying music.

Hugo, Remediation, and the Cinema of Attractions, or, The Adaptation of Hugo Cabret It’s obvious that Martin Scorsese’s movie Hugo (2011) showcases its director’s great love of cinema and cinema history. Less obvious, perhaps, is the film’s love of books. Hugo adapts Brian Selznick’s bestselling children’s novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for best children’s illustrations. Hugo does not explicitly signal its adaptation status in conventional fashion by, for example, opening with a shot of a copy of the book being opened or even with titles that indicate “Adapted from the book by…” or trumpet, for example, “Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Adaptation”. Such a construction seems appropriate for a movie that adapts a novel that is itself a kind of adaptation of one element of movie history to the form of a semi-graphic novel. Don’t you like books? The character who most clearly foregrounds the importance of books in the film is Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), Méliès’s young goddaughter. Cinema history and the automaton

Money and the Greeks (2012) | Korsakow What is life like in Greece? How do people deal with the crisis, you hear so much about, when you turn on the news? This project started in late 2011 when Florian Thalhofer and his partner (now wife) Elissavet Aggou traveled through Greece to talk with people about how they were dealing with their economic situation. They came back from their trip with lots of material: more than 30 hours of interviews. With the help of the Goethe-Institut Athen all the material was translated and with the help of the greek editor Lefteris Fylaktos the material was pre-edited into 203 clips with a duration of 4 1/2 hours in total. This material was then previewed in public viewings in Berlin and Athens, where the audience became part of the editing process. There were three groups that participated in the previewing process: Greeks, Germans, and Greeks living abroad. This is not a ‘normal’ film, where it’s the same every time you look at it. There are so many fragments; impressions of Greece.

OMER FAST - Article detail CT: The Casting seems your most ambitious work to date, and also your most directly ‘political.’ What made you create it? OF: Originally, I had planned on shooting a more documentary-type project in Fort Irwin. This is the huge base in the Mojave Desert where the US Army trains soldiers in full-scale copies of Iraqi villages inhabited by Arab-Americans pretending to be Iraqis. After many strange, almost autistic conversations with the Army’s Offi ce of Public Affairs, I went to in , where I met with soldiers who had just returned from their fi rst tour in . and braided into a script, which was given to a group of actors to interpret in a series of silent tableaux. Anyway, I’m not sure if The Casting is my most directly political work. debated in the at the moment. of its own aesthetics: the way it appropriates an admittedly heavy subject matter, then literally makes a ‘production’ out of it. CT: Your most recent work, Looking Pretty For God (After G.W.), is a video that pans art shows.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Having earned wide recognition with his film The Casting (2007), Omer Fast now presents Continuity at dOCUMENTA (13), his first film with German actors and filmed in Germany. In his video installations and projections, Omer Fast plays and calls into question the ephemeral transformations of experiences into histories, memories, and narrations. In his recent work, Fast is dealing with soldiers and their traumas after returning from war and their impossibility to fit into society and continue living life where they left it. Returning from Afghanistan, a young soldier is being expected at the station by his parents. They drive home together and have dinner, like they used to, but it is unthinkable to leave what has happened behind. Omer Fast is showing this scene in various iterations, it begins as an emotional story of homecoming and grows strange with each rendezvous. Omer Fast was born in 1972 in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin. DAUER: June 9 - September 16, 2012

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