Tag Archives: film history

Chris Marker ‘s influence

For all of us Chris Marker fans – great article in the Guardian

‘Thrilling and prophetic’: why film-maker Chris Marker’s radical images influenced so many artists  The Guardian.

Chris Marker was a phantom, an escape artist, a shapeshifter. He told friends he came from Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Born in 1921 in a pleasant Parisian suburb, Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve racked up many pseudonyms and monikers: Sandor Krasna, Jacopo Berenzi, Fritz Markassin. Early on, as if in anticipation of the new vocabularies and identities that would proliferate in the digital era, he signed himself Chris.Marker.

… Across many fields – in graphic design, multimedia, but most of all in film – he made the activity of thinking about images, whether photographic or moving, seem both profound and playful… [read more]

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more at chrismarker.org

George Méliès: Trip to the Moon in color

George Méliès – Le Voyage Dans La Lune A Trip To The Moon
(Restored and Complete Version)

I would mute the sound – the original was silent and this new soundtrack by the French band Air just doesn’t seem right

Notes from the youtube page by Johnnypt13 who did the research on this film and because it is in the public domain put it online despite the fact a new DVD has been released.

Like many of Méliès’ films, A Trip to the Moon was sold in both black-and-white and hand-colored versions. A hand-colored print, the only one known to survive, was rediscovered in 1993 by the Filmoteca de Catalunya. It was in a state of almost total decomposition, but a frame-by-frame restoration was launched in 1999 and completed in 2010 at the Technicolor Lab of Los Angeles. The restored version finally premiered on May 11, 2011, eighteen years after its discovery and 109 years its original release, at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, with a new soundtrack by the French band Air.

Watch Trip to the Moon in B&W but *mute sound/narration*.

As mentioned above, Trip to the Moon was restored to its original color in 2010. Click here to read about restoration and a view a slideshow. For links about Melies and the film Hugo, click here.

>> More info on my page on Moving Image History

BAUHAUS links

Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century (1994)
The Bauhaus school of design, craftsmanship and architecture, was founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar, Germany in 1919. This documentary covers the full range of the work of the Bauhaus, which encompassed architecture, design and disciplines as varied as weaving, theatre and ballet. The film includes comment from architects, teachers, ex-students and experts on the Bauhaus, and includes anecdotes and vintage footage of the work of its founding members.  watch

Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity  exhibition website at MOMA

So much to learn from ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Alfred Hitchcock Profile on Sense of Cinema

Hitchcock’s sound notes for Psycho: Through the killing, there should be the shower noise and the blows of the knife. We should hear water gurgling down the drain of the bathtub, especially when we go closer it, during the murder, the sound of the shower should be continuous and monotonous, only broken by the screams of Marion.

read more on sound in Psycho

A good resource site from the Netherlands