Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889–1977) is considered one of the first movie stars ever and made film history with his acting and his works. He is also one of the few artists who managed the transition from silent films to sound films.
Because of using archetypal imagery and symbols in his films, it is natural that the moon could also play a part somewhere. We found four references:
The Rumanian fairytale “The shepherd in the Moon” tells the story of a shepherd:
He once came to a rich nobleman and received the gift of a piece of land and a herd of sheep from him. He settled as shepherd and began to play beautiful melodies on his flute at night, which – as you’ll find out later – reminds him of his deceased beloved. These songs were so wonderful that all sheep gathered around him to listen, even the ones of the neighbouring shepherds. They now became envious of the flute player and tried to blacken his name with the nobleman. But when he stuck by the shepherd with the flute, the other shepherds made attempts on the life of the good shepherd and tried to kill him. He escaped and left the country full of grief and pain.
The German poet and novelist Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788–1857) counts among the foremost representatives of Romanticism. Many of his poems had been set to music and were sung.
Von Eichendorff, born in Ratibor (today Racibórz in Poland), studied originally law and worked in a variety of administrative civil service positions, up until he retired. Simultaneously, he devoted his time to his writing and publishing skills, until he died from pneumonia in 1857.
Let us still stay with the music for a little while and let us bring our attention to a grand musical genre of theatre, the opera. We recently saw TOSCA (from Puccini) in Madrid and lo and behold! In the first act, we suddenly heard »luna piena«, which is Italian for full moon. A real highlight!
Then we had the idea to rummage through some libretti (opera lyrics) to find out if the full moon motif may also play a part in other operas. For this purpose, one can view the libretti online. We were interested in particular in the actual mentioning of it, as these were created by the composers themselves, whereas the appearance of the full moon on stage was usually the part of the stage designer.
The jazz classic »Fly Me To The Moon«, originally written by Bart Howard in 1954, gained worldwide fame through Frank Sinatra (1915–1998). His version from 1964 accompanied the space mission Apollo 10 to the Moon in May of 1969, and was played when the spaceship orbited the Moon. Further, it was the first song ever that was played on the Moon, when Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon with a portable cassette player during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.
Our article “Fishing during a full moon” has already indicated the discussion about whether moonlight might influence the behavior of fish. Now we have found a study, which was conducted by Australian scientists in 2013, who have examined the diving behavior of 39 gray reef sharks in Palau (an island country in the Pacific Ocean), namely with regards to environmental influences, like water temperature and also lunar happenings, in particular the full moon and the new moon. They tagged the sharks with transmitters and thus were able to measure where and how deep they dived during certain times.
The American-British space thriller »Gravity« of 2013, offers next to its extraordinary suspenseful action, breathtaking images of space that show apart from the Earth and the Sun also the Moon. The director of the movie is Alfonso Cuarón (who also directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). The movie is commercially very successful and has already brought in the multiple of its production cost, shortly after its release.
Scorpions have the quality that they are fluorescent and glow when in contact with UV radiation. This becomes clearly visible, when they are directly exposed to UV light. However, the UV components, which are contained in the sunlight and the moonlight, are hardly sufficient to produce this glow to an extent that it is visible to humans. Still, scorpions appear to detect the UV components and hence react to moonlight.
Quite a lot! The date of Easter is actually determined by the full moon. Quite contrary to Christmas, the Easter date is part of the changing holidays and defined as follows: “Easter is on the Sunday after the first full moon in spring.”
At first glance, this appears to be quite easy: one look at the calendar, beginning of spring is currently on 20th March (though historically or in the future it may also fall on 19th or 21st March) and then simply search for the next full moon and the weekend after will be Easter.
»Moonstruck« is a romantic comedy from 1987, where next to Cher and Nicholas Cage, the full moon plays a leading part. It can be seen countless times in the film, in the night sky, quite differently compared to »Sleepless in Seattle« for example, where you can only see it on the movie poster. The word »moonstruck« in the title, refers little to the subject of sleepwalking, but rather to the fact that human behavior can be quite peculiar at times during the full moon.
In 1984, the song »New Moon on Monday« was released by the British music group Duran Duran. This was deep in the 80’s, when men and women artistically draped their hair and wore gear that makes you chuckle looking at them from today’s perspective. The ambitious music video tells the plot of an underground rebel group called »La Luna«, who fight against a military regime, and who call upon the power of the Moon to help them. Back then, this was shot in the French village Noyers with great efforts during winter temperatures.