Better Homes & Gardens: Dream Evil Labs edition -Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931, dir. Rouben Mamoulian)
Photographer: Gordon Head
The truth behind solar eclipses via The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon (1907, dir. Georges Méliès)
Harley Wood smokes her first joint (aka “the weed with roots in hell!”) in Marihuana (1935, dir. Dwain Esper) (via). This film clearly subscribes to the “Gateway Drug Theory”, because within 10 minutes of that fateful puff, sweet little Harley has morphed into a depraved, knocked-up, skinny-dipping, orgy-having, heroin-dealing harlot. Let that be a lesson to you (film online here).
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask (1972, dir. Woody Allen) (scene)
“I’m not getting shot out of that thing. What if he’s masturbating? I’m liable to end up on the ceiling.”
The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès)
The explorers crash inside the sun, where they fear they will die from the heat. Good thing the flying space train had a giant ice tank!
In The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès), a group of intrepid explorers fly into outer space in a rocket-train hybrid, only to accidentally fly straight into the yawning mouth of the rising sun (this film, like most of Méliès’s color films, was hand painted by a team of women in a production-line method - the coloring was done frame by frame)
Lunar flight plans via Woman in the Moon (1929, dir. Fritz Lang)
‘For the human mind, there is no never – only a not yet.’
A Trip to the Moon (1902, dir. Georges Méliès)
“That same evening everything was ready; the crowd was beginning to arrive, the public was crowding in front of the big moon, but the poster, while it made people laugh, was greeted with all kinds of wisecracks. ‘It’s a joke, it’s trickery! Do they think we’re idiots around here? Do you imagine they could have gone to the moon to photograph it? They’re pulling our legs!’ The audiences of that day imagined that it was impossible to photograph anything but real objects.”
-Méliès, on public reaction to his poster for A Trip to the Moon, which featured the scene from the film in which a rocket ship lands on the moon’s eye (via)
Drama in the Air (1904, dir. Gaston Velle) (via)
“Who are nobler than the martyrs of science?” cried the lunatic. “They are canonized by posterity!”
(May this terrible narrative, though instructing those who read it, not discourage the explorers of the air.)
-Jules Verne, Drama in the Air (1851)
Prof. Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray) tests out “Flubber”, the anti-gravity flying rubber he’s invented in The Absent Minded Professor (1961, dir. Robert Stevenson)
The Seahorse (1934), one of Jean Painlevé’s “scientific-poetic” sea documentaries
“In the early 1930s, when Painlevé set out to make one of the first films ever to use footage shot underwater, he chose as its subject the seahorse—a species with unusual, and to Painlevé, commendable sex roles: whereas it is the female seahorse who produces the eggs, it is the male who gives birth to them. ‘The seahorse,’ he would later write, ‘was for me a splendid way of promoting the kindness and virtue of the father while at the same time underlining the necessity of the mother. In other words, I wanted to re-establish the balance between male and female.”
-excerpted from Maverick Filmmaker Jean Painlevé (via)
Jean Painlevé with his underwater camera (1935, via)
“Without free thinking, no progress is possible. Governments may be able to fabricate statistics about agricultural or industrial production, but they cannot invent art, literature, or science.”
Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) (via)
Set design by Charles D. Hall.
What’s really causing your nightmares: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906, dir. Edwin S. Porter) Full film online here.
Clara Kimball Young in Lola (1914, dir. James Young)
In the film, sweet & virtuous Lola is killed in a car accident. She is restored to life, by means of her scientist father’s electric ray machine, but too late to prevent Death from carrying off her soul. The now soulless Lola promptly turns into an amoral jezebel who enjoys anonymous beach sex and making men cry with statements like, ”When a man says to me, ‘I want the only things you have - your beauty, your youth, your love,’ haven’t I the right to say, ‘What will you give me for them?’”
Order is restored when “too much excitement” (i.e. too many adulterous orgasms) fatally weakens her heart, and her heartbroken father, having learned his lesson, lets her go.
