Abstract

Irish filmmaker Tadhg O’Sullivan’s cine-rumination, To the Moon (2021), evokes the moon as it has been represented through history and across geography in cinema and literature. O’Sullivan created a network of filmmakers from many countries to shoot moonlight scenes, and asked archivists from various national archives to find representations of the moon that moved them. He combined clips from a century of cinema with his own images and the images offered by other contemporary filmmakers, organizing all of this into complex representations of the various phases of the moon. O’Sullivan’s commitment to analog shooting allows film imagery shot a century ago and ten years ago to evoke the continuity of cinema over its first century, as a metaphor for the moon’s continuing presence throughout every human generation.