The Hammock Papers: Voyage.

05 November 2011

Voyage.

When Serge Bromberg learned that a color version of Georges Melies’ 16-minute silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon)--a rendering that had not been seen in almost a century--had been found in Barcelona, he had to have it. That the celluloid relic had deteriorated into a solid decomposed mass and was damaged beyond all likely repair only made the film preservationist’s resolve deeper. “When you have a piece of the Holy Grail in your hand,” declares Bromberg, in a phone call from Paris, “you say, We have to save it!”

So he did. A decade later, Bromberg is putting finishing touches on The Extraordinary Voyage, a documentary that chronicles both the making of Melies’ groundbreaking 1902 film and the meticulous, against-all-odds process of restoring it to its full-color glory. The documentary, which closes with the color A Trip to the Moon, complete with a new soundtrack by the electronica group Air, will have its world premiere November 11 at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (the restored short itself debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year).

Read the rest at Fast Company.

Georges Méliès at MoMA.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret author Brian Selznick's website is here. For the past two years, this has been the first book that I read aloud to my students. It's such an imaginative and a wonder-filled voyage.

Hugo opens over Thanksgiving ...

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL