This is a very interesting and informative thread. I had no idea that flight was so recent, only beginning in the late eighteenth century, although designs for flying started much earlier.

It makes me wonder, though. I wonder why people didn't think of hot air or smoke balloons earlier. In "Andrei Rublev," Tarkovsky shows a medieval Russian town working to put a man in flight that way, and he does fly for a little while before crashing. The message was that the idea and experience of flying are sublime and archetypal, and that the experience, though failed, was worth it. The whole scene was a tribute to the myth of Icarus and Brueghel's painting as well.

I suppose such an archetypal love of flying accounts for the way humans still love the idea of traveling into space, even after such horrible failures. As for Tarkovsky, the whole film was pretty much an exercise of his imagination attached to centuries of religious belief, symbolism, and art. He also used pictures of hot air balloons in "Solaris," these being on the walls of the dacha on Earth and on the great intelligent planet's island created to imitate the dacha and its environs.

Sue



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/26/2005 02:58PM by Sue.