Summer Reading. 3.

Having left Berlin a week ago, and now, ready to pull out of Munich and head down to Croatia, I could leave you with "Travelling to the Margins of Europe," a big chewy piece on two German road movies by Ewa Mazierska for the Fall 2001 issue of Kinema. But you probably wouldn't find it as interesting or as fun as this one:

Sometime around 1895 Albert Einstein, a 16 year-old schoolboy from Ulm, in Germany, began to think about what it would be like to ride on the crest of a light wave - or, as one could say, to surf it. Ten years later he published 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies', a paper that dramatically changed our way of perceiving space, time, and their relationship. Given that cinema was officially born in that same year 1895, one could wonder if the new invention, with its ray of light clearly visible against the darkness of the auditorium, played any role in the young boy's reflection. Probably not. Nevertheless, the theory of relativity and cinema do have something in common - a fatal attraction for time travel.

"Scopic drive, time travel and film spectatorship in Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and Bigelow's Strange Days," Laura Rascaroli, Kinema, Spring 2001.



Posted by dwhudson at July 19, 2003 4:55 AM