time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: 1918 – dugout in Aisne, northern France
Journey’s End is a British film adaptation of the play Journey’s End by R. C. Sherriff. Written by Simon Reade and directed by Saul Dibb, it is the fifth film adaptation of the play, following Journey’s End (1930), The Other Side (1931), Aces High(1976), and a 1988 BBC TV film.
From the exhibition walls to the wonder and beauty of artists’ gardens like Giverny and Seebüll, the film takes a magical and widely travelled journey to discover how different contemporaries of Monet built and cultivated modern gardens to explore expressive motifs, abstract colour, decorative design and utopian ideas. Guided by passionate curators, artists and garden enthusiasts, this remarkable collection of Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century will reveal the rise of the modern garden in popular culture and the public’s enduring fascination with gardens today. Long considered spaces for expressing colour, light and atmosphere, the garden has occupied the creative minds of some of the worlds greatest artists. As Monet said, ‘Apart from painting and gardening, I’m no good at anything’. (exhibitiononscreen)
spacetime coordinates: Bastøy prison for youths, Norway 1915
King of Devil’s Island (French: Les Révoltés de l’île du Diable), (Norwegian: Kongen av Bastøy) is a 2010 French-Norwegian film directed by Marius Holst. The story is based on true events that occurred at Bastøy Prison in Norway.
Although it is set in winter, the film is a fictionalized retelling of a rebellion among the youth at the Bastøy Reform School in May 1915. The reformatory was located on Bastøy Island in the Oslo fjord south of Horten municipality in the county of Vestfold in Norway. The Norwegian government purchased the island in 1898 for 95,000 kroner, and the reformatory opened in 1900.
See Bastøy Prison for the real events which the film fictionalizes.
spacetime coordinates: Paris, c. 1912
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (French: Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec), released as Adèle: Rise of the Mummy in Malaysia and Singapore, is a 2010 French fantasy adventure feature film written and directed by Luc Besson.
It is loosely based on the comic book series The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec by Jacques Tardi and, as in the comic, follows the eponymous writer and a number of recurring side characters in a succession of far-fetched incidents in 1910s Paris and beyond, in this episode revolving around parapsychology and ultra-advanced Ancient Egyptian technology, which both pastiche and subvert adventure and speculative fiction of the period.
The film incorporates characters and events from several of the albums, in particular the first, “Adèle and the Beast”, first published in 1976, and the fourth, 1978’s “Mummies on Parade”.
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“In Cairo ten years ago, in the museum, I saw all the mummies, torn out of their tombs, stripped of their flowers and gods, and laid out in plain wood cases under glass with their blackened faces exposed; on the walls an American scientist had put his X-ray photos of their skeletons, and the urn containing the entrails of Queen Hapshetshut was split open and brightly illuminated.” Dangerous Emotions Alphonso Lingis
spacetime coordinates: desolate South Atlantic island the edge of the Antarctic Circle 1914, just after of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination that eventually caused World War I
Cold Skin is a 2017 French-Spanish fantasy adventure / sci-fi horror film directed by Xavier Gens based on Albert Sánchez Piñol’s novel of the same name. The film owes a good deal to HP Lovecraft’s tales of Innsmouth folk.
“cinematographer Daniel Aranyó takes the pebble-strewn shores and grey skies of the island and fills them with uncertainty, finding in all that bleakness something that beguiles and something that chills. The waves that swirl up against the shore can be cool, clear turquoise or a deep, obscure blue-black, and either way they could be hiding something deadly just beneath the surface. Though at times we glimpse an awful tide of grey flesh like that once said to have pursued a man who stayed overnight in an Innsmouth hotel, there’s a sense that the real horror here is just out of sight – perhaps because we dare not look at it. And still, when morning comes, we can almost taste the salt air and the sweet fresh water from the fountain by the shore: the island is undeniably beautiful.” Review by Jennie Kermode
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034385/
spacetime coordinates: 1915 small Armenian village of Sirun in the southeast part of the Ottoman Empire > Constantinople / Istanbul, Taurus mountains
The Promise is a 2016 American historical drama film directed by Terry George and starring Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon and Christian Bale, set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. The entire budget for the film was donated by American businessman of Armenian origin Kirk Kerkorian.
Ara Sarafian, director of the Gomidas Institute in London and a leading historian of the Armenian Genocide, praised the film for its historical accuracy. “The key themes were historically accurate,” he said. “The producers did not take license to go beyond the historical material at hand yet they managed to capture much of the enormity of the Armenian genocide.” Sarafian also commended director Terry George for his “well balanced and creditworthy” sense of history.
spacetime coordinates: the Gallipoli Campaign // 1919 Australia > Ottoman Empire
The Water Diviner is a 2014 American-Australian historical fictional war drama film directed by and starring Russell Crowe in his directorial debut. The film is loosely based on the book of the same name, written by Andrew Anastasios and Dr Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios. The film centres around Joshua Connor, an Australian farmer and water diviner searching for traces of his three lost sons on the battlefield of Gallipoli (watch documentary here)
TimeSpace Warps 