A Trip to the Moon, probably the first science-fiction movie, debuts in France.
Le Voyage dans la Lune created a pop-culture image: the man in the moon’s disgruntled face sporting an oversize space capsule stuck in his right eye.
It’s obviously not to scale, and it’s somewhat gruesome when you consider the pain a celestial body would experience with a heavy chunk of metal forcibly injected into its eye socket. It could be legally considered satellite abuse. If it weren’t science fiction.
Conceived by, produced by, and starring special-effects pioneer Georges Méliès and inspired by the words of Jules Verne, the black-and-white silent film tells the fanciful story of a group of dandy astronomers who journey to the moon via a rocket shot from a cannon.
After their projectile arrives, just south of the moon’s frontal lobe, the explorers venture forth in waistcoats and leggings into a wondrous landscape filled with craters, volcanic geysers, and spiraling rock formations. After descending into a crater, the astronomers discover primitive, contortionist moon people. They immediately kill the first beings they encounter and then must flee an enraged mob of spear-bearing moon folk to return to Earth.
Méliès is the grand-old-man character in the Oscar-winning 2011 film Hugo. He was genuinely ahead of his time in his mastery of still-developing film techniques, a pioneer of cinematic art direction and visual effects. Referred to by contemporaries as the Cinemagician, Méliès developed the use of substitute edits, dissolves, time-lapse photography, and multiple exposures. He also produced some of the world’s first color movies (see here) by hand-painting his frames.
Méliès produced an astounding 550 films in his lifetime. Most were early horror, fantasy, or sci-fi efforts—making Méliès the father of three genres.—JSL