Land of the Rising Sun 2009
Though the beauty of vernal cherry blossom season in Japan is globally regarded, the country is equally gorgeous in autumn, when the leaves turn vivid shades of gold, orange and red. The Japanese themselves have a name for the practice of viewing autumnal splendor: momiji-gari, literally "red-leaf hunting". It was for momiji-gari that I fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit the Island Empire in November of 2009.

Joan of Arc (1900)
Note: the narration on this film is out of synch.As a patriotic Frenchman of the fin de siècle, Gothic Revivalism could not escape the notice of Georges Méliès. Paris' great cinematic fairyteller had such an expansive field of interest that it was an inevitable marriage, in no mean way prefigured in his adaptations of Perrault's Mother Goose stories. Joan of Arc is an early epic of Méliès, drawing in equal parts from the rise in Mediaevalism of his contemporaries and his own previous historical reinactments. Not only did it in a sense combine the themes of his 1899 films Cinderella and The Dreyfus Affair, but a

Le Globe Celeste
One of the great icons of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle was the striking image of Le Globe Celeste - the Celestial Globe - against the Eiffel Tower. The cultured student may even notice the abstracted similarity between those and the later Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Unfortunately, of the four structures, only the Eiffel Tower still exists. The Celestial Globe no longer graces the shores of the Seine. Furthermore, because the particular image of the globe against the tower was so picturesque, there is a paucity in anything but th

The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul (1913)
Though produced in Italy rather than France, this 1913 film nonetheless captures the spirit of Albert Robida's bizarre misadventure through the worlds of Jules Verne. Unfortunately, this particular version smuggled online has Italian intertitles and Spanish subtitles, so we wish you the best of luck in interpreting what is going on. Even if you can't get the text, there are still a hearty helping of visuals like divers being swallowed by whales and a war between airships.

The Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul (1879)
Noting that Albert Robida's great strength as a futurist was in his keen satirical mind, it is unsurprising that his first foray into Scientific Romances was a parody. Published in 1879, the full French title of the work is Voyage Très Extraordinaires De Saturnin Farandoul Dans Les 5 ou 6 Parties Du Monde Et Dans Tous Les Pays Connus Et Même Inconnus De M. Jules Verne. This translates roughly as "Very Extraordinary Voyage of Saturnin Farandoul in 5 or 6 Parts of the World and in Every Country Even Known and Unknown to Mr. Jules Verne". If the title and its contents weren't epic enough, the volume came it at 800 pages with some 450 illustrations. Over the course of his a