Rabbit on the Moon: Folk Tales, Tall Tales, and Local Myths

Critics of modernity have often held that industrialization—and, by association, the industrial art of cinema—was responsible for destroying the purity of peasant cultures and their homegrown folklore, but the films in this series suggest that cinema, like popular culture more generally, has just as often absorbed and amplified folklore, rendering it as something new: call it poplore. The age-old tradition of Japanese ghost stories begets Ugetsu and Kwaidan; classics by Petronius and Boccaccio beget masterworks from Fellini and Pasolini; Galician mythology begets Lois Patiño’s majestic Red Moon Tide; and the rich oral tradition of the Thailand countryside begets Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon. From fireside vigils, bedtime stories, and antique illuminated manuscripts to the modern moviehouses, films that lend the mechanical wizardry of cinema to a shared heritage of international folk cultures and magical thinking.