Le voyage dans la lune was Georges Méliès' longest, most ambitious and most expensive film to date when made. It was one of the earliest films to break the boundaries of the short single scene, stitching together numerous shots – most linked by primitive dissolves – to achieve a running time of approaching 15 minutes, depending on projection speed. The film proved a massive international success and remains the most famous of the director's works, though not his personal favourite nor arguably his best, and has recently become UNESCO's first World Heritage Film.
For his theme, Méliès plundered the work of the newly popular literary genre of scientific romance, as represented by Jules Verne and HG Wells, so this is also the first significant science fiction film, depicting a moon mission mounted by a society of astronomers, six of whom make the journey in a capsule fired from a cannon. Not that the director is especially interested in the science – crossing the final frontier is really an excuse to let his imagination run riot.
The lunar surface turns out to have a conveniently breathable atmosphere and earth-like gravity, and after seeing the earth rise on the horizon – a shot that presciently pre-echoes the later significance of real views of our planet from space – we witness stars and planets metamorphose into human form. Below the surface are caves full of giant toadstools, where an umbrella from earth itself turns into a toadstool and grows to giant size: the moon has the power to subsume even non-native matter within its own fantastic nature. The visitors are assailed by insect-like, gymnastic selenites who explode on impact, and the capsule literally falls back to earth from the edge of a cliff, splash landing in another curious anticipation of real space travel.
The astronomers are portrayed as a comic bunch of squabbling, gesticulating elderly eccentrics, led by Méliès himself, almost unrecognisable in a ludicrous long white wig and beard. Their depiction has been interpreted as a critique of establishment science, but it seems to me more a logical expression of Méliès' factional world, rooted in stage magic and illusion. These astronomers are more like wizards – they even dress up for their meeting in robes and pointy hats decorated with stars and planets.
Similarly pantomimic is the film's best known shot, depicting the moon itself as a big round grinning humanoid face – Méliès again, of course – that zooms into view using the same technique as in the same director's L'homme à la tête en caoutchouc, before getting a capsule in the eye in yet more early cinematic ocular violence. The shot gave film its first icon, still parodied today. Interestingly, it's followed by a shot of the capsule sliding into view on the moon's surface, so what in narrative terms is the same event is seen from two very different angles (compare for example Porter's Life of an American Fireman). Other innovations include an early use of stock footage of the sea and a model shot through a fish tank to show the capsule crashing to the sea bed and bouncing up again, a technique later much favoured by Gerry Anderson.
For all these innovations, the storytelling remains primitive and stilted, accomplished in a simple series of tableaux. The film consists of just 18 setups, most of them long shots – you can almost imagine the curtain falling and rising or the stage rotating during the dissolves. Méliès packs the frame with crowds of characters all on the move, including a chorus line of pretty young women in swimsuits obviously added for no reason other than sex appeal.
Modern audiences used to being guided through the narrative by a complex vocabulary of camera angles and cuts may well find it hard to follow what's going on, for example in the scene near the beginning where the lead astronomer explains the mission to his colleagues using a blackboard on the extreme left. Early audiences had the benefit of a live narration read from a script supplied with the prints, written by the director himself. Contemporary film makers who ask viewers to look so hard at the frame (for example Michael Haneke in Caché) may please the critics but risk baffling audiences.
Some original prints of the film were hand coloured, and a digital restoration of an example rediscovered in the 1990s was released in 2011.
For his theme, Méliès plundered the work of the newly popular literary genre of scientific romance, as represented by Jules Verne and HG Wells, so this is also the first significant science fiction film, depicting a moon mission mounted by a society of astronomers, six of whom make the journey in a capsule fired from a cannon. Not that the director is especially interested in the science – crossing the final frontier is really an excuse to let his imagination run riot.
The lunar surface turns out to have a conveniently breathable atmosphere and earth-like gravity, and after seeing the earth rise on the horizon – a shot that presciently pre-echoes the later significance of real views of our planet from space – we witness stars and planets metamorphose into human form. Below the surface are caves full of giant toadstools, where an umbrella from earth itself turns into a toadstool and grows to giant size: the moon has the power to subsume even non-native matter within its own fantastic nature. The visitors are assailed by insect-like, gymnastic selenites who explode on impact, and the capsule literally falls back to earth from the edge of a cliff, splash landing in another curious anticipation of real space travel.
The astronomers are portrayed as a comic bunch of squabbling, gesticulating elderly eccentrics, led by Méliès himself, almost unrecognisable in a ludicrous long white wig and beard. Their depiction has been interpreted as a critique of establishment science, but it seems to me more a logical expression of Méliès' factional world, rooted in stage magic and illusion. These astronomers are more like wizards – they even dress up for their meeting in robes and pointy hats decorated with stars and planets.
Similarly pantomimic is the film's best known shot, depicting the moon itself as a big round grinning humanoid face – Méliès again, of course – that zooms into view using the same technique as in the same director's L'homme à la tête en caoutchouc, before getting a capsule in the eye in yet more early cinematic ocular violence. The shot gave film its first icon, still parodied today. Interestingly, it's followed by a shot of the capsule sliding into view on the moon's surface, so what in narrative terms is the same event is seen from two very different angles (compare for example Porter's Life of an American Fireman). Other innovations include an early use of stock footage of the sea and a model shot through a fish tank to show the capsule crashing to the sea bed and bouncing up again, a technique later much favoured by Gerry Anderson.
For all these innovations, the storytelling remains primitive and stilted, accomplished in a simple series of tableaux. The film consists of just 18 setups, most of them long shots – you can almost imagine the curtain falling and rising or the stage rotating during the dissolves. Méliès packs the frame with crowds of characters all on the move, including a chorus line of pretty young women in swimsuits obviously added for no reason other than sex appeal.
Modern audiences used to being guided through the narrative by a complex vocabulary of camera angles and cuts may well find it hard to follow what's going on, for example in the scene near the beginning where the lead astronomer explains the mission to his colleagues using a blackboard on the extreme left. Early audiences had the benefit of a live narration read from a script supplied with the prints, written by the director himself. Contemporary film makers who ask viewers to look so hard at the frame (for example Michael Haneke in Caché) may please the critics but risk baffling audiences.
Some original prints of the film were hand coloured, and a digital restoration of an example rediscovered in the 1990s was released in 2011.