1902
DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER: GEORGES MÉLIÈS SCREENPLAY: GEORGES MÉLIÈS, BASED ON THE NOVELS FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON BY JULES VERNE AND THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON BY H. G. WELLS STARRING: VICTOR ANDRÉ (ASTRONOMER), BLEUETTE BERNON (LADY IN THE MOON), BRUNNET (ASTRONOMER), JEANNE D’ALCY (SECRETARY), HENRI DELANNOY (ROCKET CAPTAIN), GEORGES MÉLIÈS (PROFESSOR BARBENFOUILLIS/THE MOON)
A Trip to the Moon
STAR-FILM (FRANCE) • BLACK & WHITE (HAND-COLORED), 16 MINUTES (2011 RESTORATION)
A team of astronomers boards a rocket to the moon, where they encounter a tribe of hostile aliens.
Méliès as the man in the moon
It is appropriate that the first artist to creatively manipulate time and space on film was the first filmmaker to take the movies into outer space. Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, or Le voyage dans la lune, was not the first film to feature science-fiction elements, but it was the first true sci-fi film. And it was an overwhelming success. In its day, A Trip to the Moon was the equivalent of a big-budget Hollywood epic, packed with elaborate special effects in glorious hand-painted colors. At around fifteen minutes (and at a cost of 10,000 francs), it was much lengthier and more elaborate than anything moviegoers had seen.
Méliès, a former illusionist, instantly saw the magical possibilities of motion pictures. He opened his Paris movie studio in 1897, and began shooting films using his signature camera tricks, such as mid-shot replacements and multiple exposures. In 1898, he made A Trip to the Moon’s precursor, a three-minute short called The Astronomer’s Dream, in which a stargazer leaps into the mouth of an animated man in the moon. Four years later, Méliès would retool this moon concept to make his most iconic film, one that remains popular entertainment well over a century after its release. Only this time, the moon would be played by a human face—the face of Georges Méliès himself.
Certain silent-film images have the power to remain emblazoned in our mind’s eye, transcending the bounds of language or time. Like the gun being pointed straight at the camera in The Great Train Robbery (1903), or Charlie Chaplin’s distinct Little Tramp walk, the rocket landing in the eye of the moon’s face in A Trip to the Moon is a universally recognized symbol of early cinema. But there are other memorable visions in the film: A troupe of chorus girls prepares the rocket to be blasted from a canon. A lunar goddess sprinkles snow over a crew of astronomers as they sleep. A race of Selenites inhabits a bizarre subterranean moon-world filled with mushrooms. Each scene abounds with imagination and energy, with flights of fancy that only a magician could create.
Georges Méliès
In the wake of Méliès’s moon epic, other films that dealt with sci-fi themes (many of them now lost) began dotting the motion-picture landscape. A Message from Mars appeared in New Zealand in 1903; Les invisibles was a 1906 invisible-man story from Méliès’s rival, Gaston Velle; Thomas Edison’s studio produced A Trip to Mars in 1910. None captured the public’s imagination quite like A Trip to the Moon, the granddaddy of cinematic sci-fi. Méliès himself produced a follow-up film, The Voyage Across the Impossible (1904), a similar story about a group of scientists who travel to the sun on a magic railway car.
Méliès not only conceived, directed, produced, and edited his films, but acted in them and even painted the backdrops by hand. But by 1912, other directors were making more sophisticated films by refining techniques he had pioneered, and he was left behind. In the 1920s, Méliès and his wife opened a toy shop in the Montparnasse train station, a real-life scenario that inspired Brian Selznick’s fictional children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Martin Scorsese, who directed the 2011 movie adaptation, Hugo, was first exposed to Méliès’s work at age thirteen, when he attended a screening of Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Before the feature, Scorsese recalled, “They showed A Trip to the Moon in its entirety. The audience applauded, laughed at the moment when the rocket struck the eye of the moon.” The image stayed with the director his whole life.
Behind the scenes at Georges Méliès’s studio
Believed lost for nearly a century, the color version of A Trip to the Moon was found in 1993. In 2011, the film was restored and given a new score by the band Air. With its contemporary music and bold colors, the restoration is a surreal journey back to the early twentieth century, when the first manned craft to land on the moon was still sixty-seven years away. Back then, one man envisioned it all. “It is absolutely necessary to create the impossible,” Méliès once said, “then to photograph it so that it can be seen.” By launching his rocket to the moon, Georges Méliès launched the art form of science fiction in the movies.
KEEP WATCHING
THE VOYAGE ACROSS THE IMPOSSIBLE (1904)
DESTINATION MOON (1950)