Méliès, Georges (1861–1938)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison de Fren
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Silent Period ◽  
Main Stage ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Performance Skills ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Dream Imagery ◽  
Lumiere Brothers

Georges Méliès (born Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès) was a French showman, illusionist, and filmmaker best known for his early silent fantasy and science fiction films, such as Trip to the Moon (1902) and Impossible Voyage (1904). While most early films were actualities, he took an innovative, non-realist approach to the medium, employing its unique capacities for altering space and time to produce allegorical and dream imagery. He is sometimes called the first cinemagician due to his pioneering work in special effects, including the stop-trick film, double exposure, split screen, dissolve, and superimposition. Méliès launched his entertainment career as a magician in the arcades of late 19th-century Paris. In 1888 he purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the most famous magic theater at the time, which came complete with stage props, illusions, automata (whose parts he used to build his first film camera), and performers, including Jeanne d’Alcy, who became his muse, long-time mistress, and second wife. The performance skills that he developed in the theater were later incorporated into filmmaking, an occupation that he began pursuing passionately after attending the première screening of the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe at the Grand Café in 1895. A year later, he helped to found the Star Film Company and built what is considered the first film studio of the silent period, whose main stage area featured a steel frame surrounded by glass walls to capture the sunlight.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
Scientific Achievements

Le voyage dans la lune [A Trip to the Moon] is the best-known work of special effects and film pioneer Georges Méliès (1861–1938). It is generally considered to be the first science fiction film, and was lauded for its plot and special effects upon its release. It made Méliès famous worldwide; but piratical practices, particularly in the United States, denied him his due profits. In the film, Professor Barbenfouillis (Méliès) and a group of scientists fly to the moon in a capsule shot from a cannon and encounter its crustacean inhabitants (Selenites). After a narrowly escaping the Selenites, the explorers return to Earth. The film’s first half owes much to Jules Verne’s novel De la terre à la lune [From the Earth to the Moon, 1865], while the second half derives from H. G. Wells’s novel The First Men in the Moon (1901). It valorises science and the idea of research/exploration as an end in itself, but also satirizes 19th-century scientific achievements. Méliès had ties to the Symbolist movement and included symbolic scenes which comment on but do not further the plot, including the film’s most iconic image: the rocket hitting the moon in its eye.

scholarly journals From “the Moon Is Rounder Abroad” to “Bravo, My Country”: How China Misperceives the World

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haifeng Huang
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Global Affairs ◽  
Chinese Public

AbstractFor a long time, since China’s opening to the outside world in the late 1970s, admiration for foreign socioeconomic prosperity and quality of life characterized much of the Chinese society, which contributed to dissatisfaction with the country’s development and government and a large-scale exodus of students and emigrants to foreign countries. More recently, however, overestimating China’s standing and popularity in the world has become a more conspicuous feature of Chinese public opinion and the social backdrop of the country’s overreach in global affairs in the last few years. This essay discusses the effects of these misperceptions about the world, their potential sources, and the outcomes of correcting misperceptions. It concludes that while the world should get China right and not misinterpret China’s intentions and actions, China should also get the world right and have a more balanced understanding of its relationship with the world.

scholarly journals Isotopic evidence for the formation of the Moon in a canonical giant impact

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sune G. Nielsen ◽  
David V. Bekaert ◽  
Maureen Auro
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Isotope Fractionation ◽  
Main Stage ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Giant Impact ◽  
Bulk Silicate Earth ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Standard Model ◽  
Isotopic Measurements ◽  
Origin Of The Moon

AbstractIsotopic measurements of lunar and terrestrial rocks have revealed that, unlike any other body in the solar system, the Moon is indistinguishable from the Earth for nearly every isotopic system. This observation, however, contradicts predictions by the standard model for the origin of the Moon, the canonical giant impact. Here we show that the vanadium isotopic composition of the Moon is offset from that of the bulk silicate Earth by 0.18 ± 0.04 parts per thousand towards the chondritic value. This offset most likely results from isotope fractionation on proto-Earth during the main stage of terrestrial core formation (pre-giant impact), followed by a canonical giant impact where ~80% of the Moon originates from the impactor of chondritic composition. Our data refute the possibility of post-giant impact equilibration between the Earth and Moon, and implies that the impactor and proto-Earth mainly accreted from a common isotopic reservoir in the inner solar system.

scholarly journals The voice and the void: the scream in 1950s American science fiction film

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Hergott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
American Science ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Society

In the United States, science fiction film rose to prominence as a critically recognized genre in the 1950s, a decade fraught with cultural complications and contradictions and also inspired by optimism and upward trajectory. Warren Susman characterizes the period as one marked by a "dual consciousness," a time when "the fulfillment of our sweetest desires [led] inevitably to the brink of danger and damnation"; the fifties, he writes, was an age of anxiety as much as it was a time of abundance, freedom, and possibility (30). For historian David Halberstam, while a retrospective examination of the decade suggests to some a "slower, almost languid" pace, social ferment "was beginning just beneath this placid surface" (ix). Throughout the decade, notions of national security played out in conflicting ways that traversed both the public and private spheres. Science fiction, a genre that coincided with massive industry changes that saw the development of a sizable low-budget, teen-oriented independent sector, resonated deeply with such opposing and anxiety-laden articulations of both public and private security. While most previous discussions of the genre tend to focus on such concerns in their public dimension (particularly as related to political unease during the Cold War), what follows will address sci-fi' s depiction of anxieties in that other, more private realm of American society, particularly in relation to the expression of gender, sexuality, and desire. Cold War politics, the postwar consumer boom, re-entrenchment of family values and suburban home life, and industry upheavals in Hollywood are all important for understanding what is now thought of as the golden age of American science fiction film. These socio-political factors contextualize the genre's rise to prominence, its defining stylistic and thematic characteristics, and its treatment of gendered subjectivity. As we will see, while some science fiction films of the 1950s engaged or challenged cultural rhetoric related to expected norms of gendered behaviour, for the most part these films upheld the era's return to more traditional gender roles for men and women, an observation which has been taken up in the critical literature, particularly within feminist film scholarship. However, within this body of films exists a common and recurring convention that has been largely neglected by science fiction film scholars, one that warrants further study due to its implications for understanding the return to domesticity in the American postwar period. This filmic convention is the scream, a visual and aural articulation of fear expressed mostly by women (but also, and just as importantly, by men). Far from being a mere cheap gimmick employed by filmmakers alongside special effects and insatiable monsters, the scream provides valuable insight into the domestic ideologies that prevailed during the 1950s.

Waste

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
Marissa K. López
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
South Texas ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Future ◽  
Similar Disease

Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the mass graves of unidentified immigrants discovered in South Texas in 2014. How, confronted with these decayed, dismembered border bodies, can literature and art move us beyond horror into a more just tomorrow? To answer, the author turns to two Chicanx science fiction novels: Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) and Pita and Sánchez’s Lunar Braceros (2009). Morales’s novel begins in colonial Mexico with a tale of La Mona, an unidentified plague similar to AIDS, and ends in a Los Angeles of the future, now known as LAMEX, beset by a similar disease curable only by the infusion of blood from “pure” Mexicans and threatened by waves of trash, which have taken on the characteristics of an animated organism, rolling in from the Pacific. Lunar Braceros, about nuclear waste workers of the future living on the moon, presents trash as a similarly transformative threat. Both novels offer conflicted visions of the human body as simultaneously of and apart from the land, a vulnerable but powerful catalyzing agent for change. The author frames this chapter with analyses of works in Mexican Canadian digital installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture series.

From the Earth to the Moon, via Berlin

Willy Ley ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared S. Buss
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
General Public ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Specialized Experts

This chapter follows Ley during his early twenties, when he became an intermediary between specialized experts and the general public. Ley constructed his persona as a freelance writer and journalist, who could translate complex concepts for a broader audience in Weimar Germany. This chapter explores Ley’s entrance into rocketry clubs, amateur science, and circles of journalists during Weimar’s rocketry fad. It concludes with an analysis of his role in the ground breaking science fiction film, Woman in the Moon (1929).

Close Encounters: Genre and Context

2016 ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Jon Towlson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
The Third ◽  
Close Encounters ◽  
Human Need ◽  
Science Fiction Films

This chapter discusses the genre and context of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It begins by tracing the emergence of science fiction in literature and in cinema. The chapter then looks at how film serials popularised pulp science-fiction cinema in the form of rocketships, ray guns, alien invaders, evil intergalactic emperors, and damsels in distress. One can see them as the inspiration for the likes of Star Wars and the myriad superhero blockbuster movies that continue to dominate Hollywood today. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey returned science fiction to its origins in Greek mythology. It is perhaps the first example of ‘transcendent’ science-fiction cinema, exploring the human need to place trust in a force larger than ourselves. In the early 1970s, science-fiction films were more overtly concerned with identity and environment, and how both were increasingly shaped or misshapen by technology. Meanwhile, post-9/11 has seen a move towards intelligent science fiction as a bankable commodity within Hollywood. Part of the genre's continuing appeal is, of course, the showcasing of state-of-the-art cinema technology within the sci-fi narrative. Special-effects technology has evolved in line with cinema's own development.

scholarly journals Commission 19: Rotation of the Earth

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ya. S. Yatskiv ◽  
W. J. Klepczynski ◽  
F. Barlier ◽  
H. Enslin ◽  
C. Kakuta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Time Frame ◽  
Laser Ranging ◽  
Earth’S Rotation ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Earth's Rotation ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Terrestrial Reference System ◽  
Rotation Of The Earth

During the period, work on the problem of the Earth’s rotation has continued to expand and increase its scope. The total number of institutions engaged in the determination of the Earth’s rotation parameters (ERP) by different techniques has been increased significantly. The rotation of the Earth is currently measured by classical astrometry, Doppler and laser satellite tracking, laser ranging of the Moon, and radio interferometry. Several long time series of the ERP are available from most of these techniques, in particular, those made during the Main Campaign of the MERIT project. The various series have been intercompared and their stability, in the time frame of years to days, has been estimated for the purposes of establishing a new conventional terrestrial reference system (COTES). On the other hand, the difficulties of maintaining a regular operation for laser ranging to the Moon (LLR) have been recognized. It resulted in the proposal to organize an one-month campaign of observations in 1985 in order to complement the COTES collocation program and to allow additional intercomparisons with other techniques.

Modernist Alternatives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the dark themes and moods that characterize some of Ray Bradbury's short stories, a reflection of his deep ambivalence toward an increasingly destabilized world. Bradbury never developed a postmodernist dislike of where technology and science had brought the world, but he always remained wary of where science may lead mankind in the future. This predictive urge led him to use his science fiction stories to work through some of the issues left unresolved in his failed novels. This chapter discusses “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and several of Bradbury's tales, written in the 1946–1948 period, which are distinguished from other Bradbury stories of the period by their science fiction trappings, their unrelieved darkness, the lack of any familiar points of reference, and their relative obscurity within the Bradbury canon. It also considers the relationship stories that eased Bradbury through his impasse with Modernist themes.

Low selenocentric orbits stability analysis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chongrui Du ◽  
O.L. Starinova
Keyword(s):  
Rate Of Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Space Systems ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Orbital Structure ◽  
Motion Modeling ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Stability

The tasks of studying the Moon require long-term functioning space systems. Most of the low selenocentric orbits are known to be unstable, which requires a propellant to maintain the orbital structure. For these orbits, the main disturbing factors are the off-center gravitational field of the Moon and the gravity of the Earth and the Sun. This paper analyzes the stability of low selenocentric orbits according to passive motion modeling and takes into account these main disturbing factors. We put forward a criterion for determining the stability of the orbit and used it to analyze the circular orbit of the Moon at an altitude of 100 kilometers. According to different initial data and different dates, we obtained ranges of the Moon’s orbits with good stability. At the same time, we analyzed the rate of change in the longitude of the ascending node, and found a stable low lunar orbit which can operate for a long time.

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