Moon Dreams

We’ve been meaning to do a programme like this for ages, and the 400th anniversary of Galileo first pointing his telescope at the sky seems as good a time as any. From Georges Melies onwards filmmakers have been looking upwards for inspiration...

Featuring: Georges Melies; Walerian Borowczyk & Chris Marker; Jeanne Liotta

We’ve been meaning to do a programme like this for ages, and the 400th anniversary of Galileo first pointing his telescope at the sky seems as good a time as any. From Georges Melies onwards filmmakers have been looking upwards for inspiration. The shorts, animation and artists films here range from playful to awe-struck to scary and back, taking in the star-gazing of Emily Richardson and Jeanne Liotta, an early collaboration between Walerian Borowczyk and Chris Marker (Les Astronautes) and lunar voyages by Francois Vogel and Mr Melies himself. Closer to home, there’s Scott Johnston’s super 8 record of the Optophonic Lunaphone project (using telescopes to capture the music of the stars) and Mark Locke’s latest video for Mistys Big Adventure, about a boy and his rocket. We close with the fairy godmother of all educational films, Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten.

Then to top it all off we welcome Andrew Smith, author of the hugely popular book Moon Dust in which he tracks down the nine surviving Apollo moonwalkers. He’ll be reading from the opening passages of the book, with Eno tunes and archive space footage as accompaniment.

Powers of 10