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WIDE REWIND
BY 06/15

1895-2015: CINEMA CELEBRATES 120 YEARS

APRILIA IN HOLLYWOOD MOVIES

USA: Aprilia on the Road America circuit at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin

MEGAN FOX & THE APRILIA RS 125 IN TRANSFORMERS 2

TRANSFORMERS 2 – TRAILER

To mark cinema’s 120th anniversary, let’s remember some of the movies where Aprilia motorbikes take a co-starring role. One of the most famous is “Transformers 2 – Revenge of the Fallen” (2009), the second film in the sci-fi series inspired by the globally successful Transformer toys. The second episode was directed by Michael Bay, with a certain Steven Spielberg as executive producer. Bay and Spielberg both worked on the first movie in the series (which then continued with Transformers 3 and Transformers 4 – Age of Extinction).
The star of “Transformers 2” is Megan Fox, seen riding a red Aprilia RS 125 in some scenes, with co-star Shia LaBeouf on pillion.

A BADDIE ON THE RACE CIRCUIT, WITH “DECEPTICON” STYLE FAIRINGS

The film went on general release in the USA on 24 June 2009. For the launch, Aprilia and Hollywood met up… on the race-track! At the AMA Pro Daytona Sportbike championship, during the race on the Road America circuit (Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin), Aprilia fielded a special RSV 1000 Factory, with Transformers-branded fairings painted in the style of the Decepticons, the baddies in the film. Take a look at the photogallery of the Aprilia “baddie” on the US circuit.

TORQUE: THE APRILIA RSV 1000 WITH THE ORIGINAL LIVERY

Five years earlier, the rugged Aprilia RSV 1000 “played” in another American movie, made by the producers of “The Fast and the Furious”, “S.W.A.T.” and “XXX”. The film was “Torque” (2004), directed by Joseph Kahn and set in the biker community. The main character, Cary Ford – played by Martin Henderson – rides his Aprilia to get away from gangs and the FBI. He also wears Aprilia leathers, and of all the bikes in the film, his is the only one to appear in its original livery: red-black with touches of white. A beauty that had no need of make-up and costumes!

MOTO GUZZI IN THE MOVIES IN WIDE NO. 5-2015:
wide.piaggiogroup.com/archive/wide5_15

THE ORIGINS OF CINEMA: THE FIRST PUBLIC PROJECTION IN PARIS

The first motion picture seen by the public, and for this reason regarded as the starting point in the history of cinema, 120 years ago, was “Employees leaving the Lumière factory” (original title: La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière). With a running time of 45 seconds, shot by French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, it shows a group of workers leaving the company factory on the outskirts of Lyon.

“La sortie de l’usine Lumière”, 1895

The film was one of ten shown at the first public cinema screening, on 28 December 1895, in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.

At the event, the Lumière brothers presented their patented cinématographe, a machine that could project on to a white screen a sequence of separate images recorded on a photographically printed film, giving the effect of motion. A few years earlier, in 1889, Thomas Edison had developed a motion picture camera (the Kinetograph) and a peep-hole viewer (the Kinetoscope): the camera was used to take a series of photographs in rapid succession on a 35 mm film, while the viewer enabled the sequence of images to be watched as a motion picture, by one person at a time.

The Lumière brothers had the idea of projecting films, so that the show could be seen by large numbers of spectators. Cinematographic film was invented 130 years ago: it dates back to 1885 and was the brainchild of George Eastman, while the first filmed material (of a group of friends walking in a garden) is believed to be Roundhay Garden Scene, a 2-second film recorded in Britain on 14 October 1888 by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince.

1888 - Roundhay Garden Scene