All Movies Love the Moon is now available for order! Check out http://www.rosemetalpress.com/Catalog/robinson.html for more details.
All Movies Love the Moon is a collection of linked prose poems and original artwork tracing silent cinema’s relationship with words—the bygone age of title cards. Here, movies that are lost or fading serve as points of origin, places to begin. It will be available from Rose Metal Press on March 18, 2014.
Early Reviews:
"All Movies Love the Moon is as much the autobiography of a cinéaste as a history of silent film and the linguistic windows through which it makes meaning. Interspersed with real and invented intertitles to guide us through his poetic underworld, Gregory Robinson's prose poems conduct a cinematic séance in which an array of personal and celluloid spirits parade before the reader. Inquiry gives way to elegy both historical and personal, and the book's great trick is ‘to bend trust without breaking it, to lead by the hand rather than by the wrist’ as Robinson guides us gradually into the imaginative space between words on a screen. Robinson sees the irony in nostalgia for those days before film was given voice, but if we are not tempted by his ‘Vertov Kino app, which makes the iPhone weigh 40 pounds and replaces the battery with a wooden crank,’ then, reader, we are the cranks.” ~Amaranth Borsuk, author of Handiwork
“In the eighteenth century Laurence Sterne broke all the rules of novel-writing that hadn’t yet been written with Tristram Shandy. In 2013 Gregory Robinson’s All Movies Love the Moon travels back in time to the dawn of cinema, when silent movies were as surreal, playful, dislocating, and dumbfounding as the twentieth century itself. In deadpan prose poems Robinson tracks the gradual emergence of narrative out of the dream logic of pure images, and the more sudden birth of pop culture as we know it, until we see Theda Bara and Sylvester Stallone silently side by side at last. The poetry in film, the film in poetry: the book is a delirious romp through the grammar of their entanglement. Or as Robinson puts it, ‘Any great detective will tell you the trick is not walking into movies but finding the way out again.’” ~Joshua Corey, author of Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy
“All Movies Love the Moon, with its titular salute to Georges Méliès, is somewhat like the visionary himself: mischievous, innovative, enigmatic, witty, and captivating. Robinson’s book is a beautiful hybridization of film history and poetic journey. Roaming through the celluloid cemetery of silent films, Robinson becomes a Dr. Frankenstein as he reconstitutes pre-existing material into new forms: he is both alchemist and ‘cinematic recycler.’ This book has the noteworthy skill of persuading the reader to revisit it immediately, while concurrently enticing the reader to (re)see the films it so lovingly pays tribute to. Pour a glass of wine, settle in, and be transported. . .” ~Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos
“In the eighteenth century Laurence Sterne broke all the rules of novel-writing that hadn’t yet been written with Tristram Shandy. In 2013 Gregory Robinson’s All Movies Love the Moon travels back in time to the dawn of cinema, when silent movies were as surreal, playful, dislocating, and dumbfounding as the twentieth century itself. In deadpan prose poems Robinson tracks the gradual emergence of narrative out of the dream logic of pure images, and the more sudden birth of pop culture as we know it, until we see Theda Bara and Sylvester Stallone silently side by side at last. The poetry in film, the film in poetry: the book is a delirious romp through the grammar of their entanglement. Or as Robinson puts it, ‘Any great detective will tell you the trick is not walking into movies but finding the way out again.’” ~Joshua Corey, author of Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy
“All Movies Love the Moon, with its titular salute to Georges Méliès, is somewhat like the visionary himself: mischievous, innovative, enigmatic, witty, and captivating. Robinson’s book is a beautiful hybridization of film history and poetic journey. Roaming through the celluloid cemetery of silent films, Robinson becomes a Dr. Frankenstein as he reconstitutes pre-existing material into new forms: he is both alchemist and ‘cinematic recycler.’ This book has the noteworthy skill of persuading the reader to revisit it immediately, while concurrently enticing the reader to (re)see the films it so lovingly pays tribute to. Pour a glass of wine, settle in, and be transported. . .” ~Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos
Each piece in All Movies Love the Moon is named after a film, and the titles progress chronologically. The book begins with Cecil Hepworth's How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900) and ends with City Lights (1931). The movies below correspond with the titles from the book.
Other Reviews
Nano Fiction
Short Curator
The Ampersand Review
Battered Hive
Vegas Seven
LitCity
The Los Angeles Review of Books
Largehearted Boy
KMSU
TNBBC
Paint this Desert
Short Curator
The Ampersand Review
Battered Hive
Vegas Seven
LitCity
The Los Angeles Review of Books
Largehearted Boy
KMSU
TNBBC
Paint this Desert
Movies that inspired the first eight pieces
1. How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900)
There were plenty of movies before this one, but if you have to pick a place to start, you could do worse. Hepworth wrote about this movie in his autobiography (Came the Dawn), mostly impressed that he was able to shoot it outside. (Most movies in the late 1800s were shot in studios.) He does not say anything about all of the film's implications, including the transgressions of technology or the uncanny collision of image and text. This is totally okay, because I said it all for him in this article, which you should never ever read.
2. A Trip to the Moon (1902)
The next best title for A Trip to the Moon would be Moon People Get Clobbered by Old French Guys. I feel a little bad for the Moon residents (Selenites), but it is difficult to imagine (on an evolutionary scale) how they actually managed to live as long as they did considering their fragility. There are a few alternative endings to this movie where the French explorers capture a Selenite and parade him/her through town. That one actually does feel a little bad.
3. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902)
Uncle Josh thinks movies are real, which ultimately leads to an all-out brawl with the projectionist. The film ends before the fight does, but I am positive Josh ends up winning.
4. The European Rest Cure (1904)
Josh comes back in the European Rest Cure and gets abused at a series of different historical landmarks: falling off pyramids, getting dropped on his head while trying to kiss the Blarney stone, etc. If this were not an American film, you would think it is a European film picking on Americans.
5. College Chums (1907)
There is not a lot worth mentioning about College Chums, but the entire film is worth saving for the 43 second conversation between the two characters. It uses a form of stop-motion that Porter called "jumble text," which allowed the speakers to hurl words back and forth. When one interrupts the other, the words collide.
6. La Maison Ensorcelée (1907)
Get ready for physical comedy and a particularly good stop-motion scene where a spooky knife cuts lunch meat.
7. Birth of a Nation
There is a lot to dislike about Birth of a Nation, but scenes like this make it worth watching. The Little Colonel (fighting for the South) risks his life to "succor" one of the Union soldiers. The Union soldiers cheer him on, but still shoot at him. Moral: war is complicated.