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Sunday, Dec 6, 1987
Le Voyage Imaginaire (The Imaginary Voyage)
René Clair's homage to Georges Méliès is, if anything, more fanciful than the films that inspired it, a beautiful dream fantasy with breathtaking sets and decor. In Clair's world, humans and spirits meet on equal terms, and people assume their symbolic roles as casually as they don their clothes in the morning. It is a world in which morality is at once simple and profound. Le Voyage Imaginaire is the most lighthearted of Clair's fantasies, in which a shy young man's dreams eventually give him the self confidence to knock down his rivals and propose marriage to his beloved. His dreams first take him to an ornate, modernistic fairyland, then, turning nightmarish, to the wax museum, Musée Grevin, where he is saved from the scaffold in the nick of time by the kindly figures of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan. Along with Le Voyage Imaginaire will be presented rare treats by Clair's contemporary, Germaine Dulac, Invitation au Voyage and Theme and Variations.
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