MOVIE • 2004

The Astronomer's Dream

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Gehr's preferred title for this film was not actually The Astronomer’s Dream—a direct homage reference to the seminal Georges Méliès film (also known as The Man in the Moon)—but rather Curtains!, which represented for him a broader memory of the experience of going to the local theater in his childhood that not only showed films but also, on occasion, served as a performance stage of sorts, particularly magic shows for which the filmmaker had expressed fond memories. Distilled, spare, and precise in execution, the film is composed of little more than a grainy, black-and-white shot of closed stage curtains that intermittently reveal instantaneous fragments of a Méliès film and set against a soundtrack of film-based audio excerpts, yet achieves a strangely transfixing paean to film through cinematic history and personal memory.