Voyage dans le ciel

This is a French documentary short about possible future star travel. It spends the first few minutes talking about measuring distances. Using models, this visits the moon, the other planets, and beyond. I'm not sure if the stars are that well made. I may be corrupted by the real images that we now have. The real thing is so much more majestic although this probably would amaze the audience of its day. That's really what's important.

Here's another of the short subjects that Painlevé committed to film for the Mathematics department of the Palais de la Decouverte. Beginning with a primitive view of a flat Earth covered by the fixed dome of the sky, he considers the moon, the sun the planets and, breaking free, the stars and beyond to the farthest edges of the universe as seen and imagined in 1937.

In tone, it's by far the most Olympian of Painlevé's shorts I have looked at, and overtly the least humorous. Yet it is in the consideration of the vast scale of the universe as a whole and the unimportant tininess of this earth of ours, that I see the root of the mordant humor he displays in his more accessible, less lecture-like movies. If in considering the egg of the stickleback, he uses microphotography to examine what goes on at a scale of a micrometer, how can we, an entire world, be considered as particularly important, lost in a universe where our galaxy, let alone our sun, cannot be seen?

I think the charm of these astral documentaries is the way they reflect wonder and awe on things we just take for granted today. This is an eleven minute investigation into our universe. It treats tens of thousands of years of science in a few seconds, takes us on a journey to the nearest planets, and ends up looking at how insignificant we are in the whole universal realm. We can't be too critical because the technology was not there. The special effects were pretty good (although Mars is badly presented). It was worth a few minutes.

Viewers are taken on a trip from Earth to the furthest limits of the Universe. Not surprisingly, French documentarian Jean Painlevé's tour of the cosmos is badly dated, both technically and scientifically, but the short film remains visually interesting and engaging. The depiction of nearby planets is the weakest section, especially in light of current knowledge, and the statement that the ebb and flow of dark areas on Mars is due to seasonal variations in vegetation was probably out of date even in 1937: that the negligible Martian atmosphere couldn't support life (at least as we know it) was recognised by the mid-1920s. The film becomes more lyrical when the narrator leaves the solar system and heads off to Alpha Centauri and the depiction of a planet in a dense star-cluster, where stars shine in the daytime sky and dominate the night, is enchanting. Along the way, viewers are treated to a brief lecture on how parallax is used to measure astronomical distances before the voyage ends in a poetic vein - closing with a reminder of just how small and insignificant we, our planet, and our star really are. Pleasantly retro and worth investing in its brief running time.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos is an amazing series that tells viewers about the seemingly endless wonders of the universe (including our own planet) in a comprehensive and exciting fashion, but we're not discussing that series today. This short from the 30s really does remind me of Cosmos even if it's puny compared to it. It's a science based short, so there isn't any plot. It essentially talks about how because your eyes are spaced slightly apart from each other, the appearance of objects can change a small difference if you keep one eye closed, and the effect is more noticeable the closer you are to the object. This applies to astronomy too, since astronomers in different parts of the world can look at the moon and, depending on their vantage point, can see different angles of it. We're then told that the moon is about a quarter of a million miles from Earth, and that 30 earths can fit in that space. The narration goes on to explain the origins of nebulae and how the surface of Mars probably looks like up close. We also see how Saturn is such a big planet that earth can fit in the space between the planet and where its rings begin. Saturn's rings are composed of ice and rock fragments drawn close to the planet by its gravity. One of my favorite parts shows how if we don't count the sun, the closest star to earth is Alpha Centauri, about 4 lightyears away. It's mind blowing to think it would take the fastest thing in the universe 4 years to get to this place. Even if you traveled at normal speed your entire life, you wouldn't reach it. The short also touches on how small earth is in the scheme of things, as the universe appears to go on forever. Humans are basically just a race of advanced apes who have evolved to the point of understanding our planet and creating wondrous technology, and that makes us special. Still, the earth itself is so small compared to the unimaginable vastness of space that it's little more than a grain of sand in the cosmic sea. While the ending of this short might make you depressed when you think about how unimportant earth seems, it's still an interesting thing to watch because it gives us some understanding of how people back then were often smarter than they are today. Despite this being a 1930s short, it still has a decent amount of accurate information on space.