Shooting the Moon - Softcover

Willems, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178279848X ISBN 13: 9781782798484

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Films about the moon show that even after the lunar landing of 1969 our celestial neighbor has lost none of its aptitude for being made of green cheese. In fact, as soon as you put the moon on screen it is lost. This is equally true for a wide range of moon films, including the theatricality of Méliès, the incredulity of camp, the illegibility of footage shot by Apollo astronauts and the revisionary history of Transformers 3. Yet, as paradoxical as it might seem at first, it is only when we "lose sight" of the moon that lunar truths begin to come forth. This is because fantastic elements of the moon—by their mere absurdity—can indicate non-fantastic elements. However, what is of interest here is not realistic or fantastic lunar truths but rather that the moon is an object which invites, or even demands, more than one truth at once.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Brian Willems is assistant professor of literature and film theory at the University of Split, Croatia. He is the author of Hopkins and Heidegger and Facticity, Poverty and Clones.

Brian Willems is assistant professor of literature and film theory at the University of Split, Croatia. He is the author of Hopkins and Heidegger and Facticity, Poverty and Clones.

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Shooting the Moon

By Brian Willems

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2014 Brian Willems
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-848-4

Contents

List of illustrations, 
Introduction: The First Men in the Moon, 
Part 1 - Early Films, 
1. Le Voyage dans la Lune/A Trip to the Moon, 
2. Frau im Mond/Woman in the Moon, 
3. Kosmicheskiy Reys/The Cosmic Voyage, 
Part 2 - Camp, 
4. Radar Men from the Moon, 
5. Cat-Women of the Moon, 
6. Nude on the Moon, 
Part 3 - Almost There, 
7. Destination Moon, 
8. Countdown, 
9. 2001, 
Part 4 - Close-Up, 
10. Moonwalk One, 
11. From the Earth to the Moon, 
12. Was It Only a Paper Moon?, 
Part 5 - After the Fact, 
13. Space: 1999, Manhattan, 
14. Apollo 18, 
15. Transformers 3, Iron Sky, 
Conclusion: Moon, 
Endnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

Le Voyage dans la Lune/A Trip to the Moon (1902)

[Blackboard] The first time the moon appears in Georges Méliès' classic Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) it is a small, white circle drawn in chalk on a blackboard. The leader of a group of astronomers, Professor Barbenfouillis (played by Méliès), explains his idea of how to get to the moon; his theory is that a large cannon on the earth will propel a capsule to the lunar surface. The trajectory of the capsule is represented by a slightly convex dotted line, perhaps indicating the pull of the dense gravity of large celestial bodies. At the end of this line the capsule is depicted going "face-first" into the moon, indicating the crash landing that is, strangely enough, shown twice in the film: first in the eye of the Man in the Moon and then again on the fantastic lunar surface. While the moon on the blackboard is depicted as a small white mass (perhaps with the face of the Man in the Moon drawn on it), the earth is different: it has a number of geodesic lines which indicate an understanding of its curvature. Looking like a basketball, these lines point to a number of differences in how the earth and its moon are understood in the film: Earth is an entity which scientific understanding has encircled, while the moon remains a fuzzy blank mass, waiting to be filled with knowledge.

[Telescope] While the blackboard shows an image of a "fuzzy" moon, a prominent prop in the first shot of Le Voyage indicates how this fuzziness can be "filled in": a large telescope is pointed out of one of the windows in the background of the astronomy hall, indicating what Marjorie Hope Nicolson calls "the telescopic moon," referring to the shift in literary representations of the moon after Galileo first saw and described the lunar surface with something to aid the human eye. The connection between the moon and the telescope is also made by the composition of the shot. Both the trajectory of the capsule on the blackboard and the body of the telescope point from right to left, going out the window. Thus it could be argued that a comparison is being made: the telescope is a means (like the rocket ship) for seeing the moon more clearly. Or, because the moon had already been observed by telescope for centuries, yet still remains "fuzzy" on the blackboard, the rocket ship is poised to continue where the telescope leaves off, creating a "rocket moon" to replace the "telescopic" one.

[Gun] When the launch of the capsule eventually takes place, the extension of telescopic vision into rocket vision is manifest in the shape of the gun used to fire the bullet-shaped capsule to the lunar surface. The images of the telescope and gun are connected in that both take the form of a diagonal rising from left to right, both are seemingly made from a similar metal, and both have been constructed out of multiple sections. Thus both telescope and gun can be read together as inventions which extend the limited range of humanity's visual power, the former through magnification and the latter through projection. However, as these two inventions are read together an important difference between them comes forth: the shape of the telescope widens, from smaller to bigger, meaning that the eye-piece of the telescope is smaller than the other end, while the shape of the gun tapers, with the end for inserting the capsule into the chamber being "large" and the end aimed at the moon, through foreshortening, being considerably smaller, almost coming to a point. Although the extreme foreshortening of the gun is a part of the film's style (because in a literal sense the barrel would have to be the same size as the chamber in order for the capsule to exit), the image of the gun could be said to form a counter image to the telescope.

This argument can be supported by a more abstract difference between the inventions in the film. The telescope is connected to the fuzzy image of the moon which appears on the blackboard in the astronomers' hall. The astronomers have presumably already used the telescope to observe the moon and what is on the blackboard represents the limited nature of their observations. Therefore, a rocket has been built to improve them. This line of thought is supported by the image of the moon which appears in the launch scene, for it is depicted with a similar "fuzziness" to the moon on the blackboard; thus the rocket is aimed at obliterating a lack of understanding. However, connecting the telescope to limited knowledge and the trip to the moon to improving what is known by direct observation brings forth one of the paradoxes of the film, a paradox which will never quite be absent from the history of the moon on film, for landing on the moon is very often about the loss of knowledge. In this sense, as the astronomers get physically closer to the moon they lose sight of it, as seen by the film's (and maybe cinema's as a whole) most famous image — the Man in the Moon. Thus the images of the moon in Le Voyage are most accurate when the moon in shown from a distance, although this is a "fuzzy" kind of accuracy. At the same time, the trip to the moon does not resolve this "fuzziness," in fact it increases it.

[Approach] On the one hand it is naïve to state that because for most of its history humanity has known the moon from afar, film presentations of the "far away" moon will be more accurate than the lunar surface seen from up close. However, despite the surface validity of this argument, fictions which take place on the moon often surface a certain kind of truth (and a lot of hooey) that direct observation misses. This truth is due to the fact that because for so long it was impossible to see the moon "up close" multiple strategies for lunar representations had to be developed. Some of these strategies contain "lunar truths" in themselves. Once humanity landed on the moon the situation did not change; in other words, just because the surface of the moon was recorded from the surface of the moon, this did not mean that the use of multiple representational strategies together came to an end. In fact, it only increased.

The initial example of how such truth gets located in fiction can be see in the approach to the moon, which is shown from the point of view of the capsule coming in for a landing. There are three main elements in the representation of the moon in this scene: at first it is shown in a fuzzy manner, meaning a mainly white disc with a few marks roughly indicating what can be seen with the naked eye from Earth; then, as the capsule approaches, a dissolve replaces the fuzzy moon with one with a visible face; then the capsule is famously shown landing in the Moon Man's right...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 178279848X
• ISBN 13: 9781782798484
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 221
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar