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Friday, November 26, 2010

Zobeide Invisible Cities


Above is my very awesome English project. For my project I had to take a book that was in the textbook, but had not read. Then I had to study about it, write a paper on it and give a presentation to my class. We were allowed to get creative and do what we want.

So I decided to do a puppet show. Yes it is silly and no its not supposed to look professional. It was my 1st time doing a puppet show and making a movie. I was very excited and the fact that I got an "A" on it just makes me even more happy.

For my topic I focused on Italo Calvino's Invisible City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino

Invisible Cities is about a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Kublai Khan feels that his empire is failing and so he has Marco Polo tell him stories of the many wonderful places that he has been to. But the more Marco Polo tells Khan stories, the more the emperor begins to doubt Polo. About what?? Well that's something you will have to find out. :D

Now here is the back ground story to this video to see where I got the idea from. Remember the movie is not an actual representation of this part:


From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.
New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.
The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

This is only a part of the book and the part of the story. You will just have to find out what the actual conversation that took place between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.

I hope you all like it. You can go to the youtube and leave comments there if you want to.

Enjoy!!

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