Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination
Please join us on Thursday, March 3, 2016 for
Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination
Georges Méliès Film Screening and Lecture by Matthew Solomon
5:30pm
Warner Bros Theater
National Museum of American History
12th St and Constitution Ave NW
Washington, DC
For access services please contact SILRSVP@si.edu or 202.633.2241, preferably 2 weeks prior to the program.
Georges Méliès was one of the most prolific early filmmakers. He and his collaborators produced more than 520 short films in France between 1896 and 1913. In this presentation, Matthew Solomon (University of Michigan) will discuss Méliès’ extraordinary career as a magician, caricaturist, and filmmaker, while considering his relationship to the nineteenth-century tradition of science fiction and the Incoherent art movement. The presentation will include screenings of two of Méliès’ fantastic voyage films, A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902) and AN IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE (1904).
Some of Méliès' forays into science fiction film, including the famous Le Voyage Dans La Lune from 1902, are highlighted in the Smithsonian Libraries' exhibition Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910.
Matthew Solomon, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, where he teaches film history and theory. He is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, winner of the Kraszna-Krausz award for best moving image book in 2011, and of the BFI Film Classics monograph The Gold Rush, published in 2015. He is the editor of Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, the 2011 book for which he also produced an accompanying critical edition DVD.
For more information about this program, call 202.633.2241. Please RSVP by clicking here.
