Six degrees
One hundred years ago today, what is considered to be the first fully animated film, Fantasmagorie, was screened in Paris. It was made up of 700 drawings (such as the one above), each of which was double-exposed, leading to a running time of almost two minutes. It was produced by French caricaturist Emile Cohl, who died in 1938 and was buried in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery ...
The largest in the city of Paris, Pere-Lachaise is reputed to be the most visited cemetery in the world. Alongside Cohl lie, among many other notables, novelist Honore de Balzac, mime artist Marcel Marceau, singers Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf, American author Alice B. Toklas, Polish composer Frederic Chopin, Irish rascal Oscar Wilde and Nestor Makhno ...
Makhno was an anarcho-communist revolutionary born in what is now Ukraine. He became something of a Robin Hood figure for the peasants he championed. Long before he made a name for himself, however, he had been arrested for his revolutionary politics. In 1910, Makhno was sentenced to death by hanging, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was sent to Butyrskaya prison in Moscow ....
Many years later, Butyrskaya would briefly house an inmate who would become much more famous. In 1945, a Russian soldier was sentenced to eight years in labour camps, to be followed by permanent internal exile, for the crime of writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a friend about Soviet leader Josef Stalin. That soldier was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died this month, aged 89 ...
Solzhenitsyn gained notoriety for his writing about life inside the Soviet penal system. In 1974, he was deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. He then moved to Zurich, Switzerland, before he was invited to stay in the United States by Stanford University ...
Two years prior to Solzhenitsyn's arrival, Stanford had said farewell to Sigourney Weaver, who graduated with a BA in English. The actor, best known for her role in the Alien series, will star in next year's Avatar, a film that, explains director James Cameron, has been delayed since the 1990s as he has been waiting for advances in animation technology to enable the creation of photo-realistic computer-generated characters.