Film Review
Le Voyage dans la lune is the film for which Georges Méliès
is best known. A major technical accomplishment for its day, deserving
of its status as the first science-fiction film, this eccentric flight of
fancy has given us one of cinema's most enduring icons - the moment when
the lunar bound rocket pierces one eye of the unsuspecting Man in the Moon.
(No one has since come up with a more apt visual metaphor for man's habit
of desecrating nature.) The film was a blockbuster for its time, even
though it runs to just fifteen minutes in its most complete version and looks
like a quaint piece of bricolage by today's standards.
By the time he made this film, Méliès was already a world leader
in his craft. His films (few running to longer than ten minutes) impressed
not only with their imaginative design and dazzling effects, but also with
their sophisticated storytelling. These included stylised fantasies
such as
Cendrillon (1899) and
Barbe-bleu
(1901), historical tableaux like
Jeanne d'Arc (1900) and reconstructions
of recent news events (
actualités reconstituée), the
best being his
L'Affaire Dreyfus
(1899). All played a part in the development of film narrative and
paved the way for the director's most ambitious work so far, a literally
out-of-this-world adventure.
The inspiration for
Le Voyage dans la lune is often credited to Jules
Verne's 1865 novel
De la terre à la lune (a.k.a.
From the
Earth to the Moon), although the encounter between the explorers and
the moon-dwelling creatures in the film's second half clearly owes something
to H.G. Wells's
The First Men in the Moon, which was first published
in 1901. (The moon dwellers are now usually referred to as Selenites,
after the insect-like creatures in Wells's novel.) Another important
influence on the film was the
féerie, a theatrical genre combing
fantasy plots with striking visual effects that was hugely popular in the
19th century. In common with many of Méliès's fantasy
films,
Le Voyage dans la lune is brazenly fashioned after the féerie
style, with cartoonish sets and dazzling effects contributing the look of
a theatrical spectacle. French theatre's long tradition of burlesque
is also represented by the abundance of sight gags that Méliès
throws into the mix. There is no place for realism or even logic in
this kind of film - Méliès is out simply to entertain and offer
his audience an enjoyable fantasy excursion.
Fun though the film is,
Le Voyage dans la lune is more than just a
lunatic farce dressed up with clever effects (this is apparent when it is
compared with the inferior imitations that followed in its wake). The
film makes an effective anti-colonialist satire and takes an almost malicious
delight in mocking the pomposity of the scientific establishment. When
we first meet the lunar explorers at their meeting place they are arrayed
as pantomime magicians, with pointed hats and flowing gowns adorned with
cosmic symbols. They look more like a disorganised rabble than a gathering
of learned men of science. And when they arrive on the moon do they
betray any trace of an enquiring mind? No, as soon as they meet a race
of unfamiliar beings they panic and start killing it. (Admittedly the
Selenites are damnably easy to kill - one prod with an umbrella and they're
done for - but that's beside the point.) The white colonialist instinct
to dominate soon asserts itself, so rather than make peace with the cute
little aliens (a job lot of acrobats from the Folies-Bergère), our
enterprising men of science smack their leader to kingdom come before beating
a hasty retreat back to Earth - and a hero's welcome. It's worth noting
that as well as being a busy filmmaker, Méliès was also a gifted
caricaturist and he furnished various French magazines, including
L'Illusioniste,
with some fairly cruel caricatures.
Méliès had a hand in every part of the film's production but
his real genius was in devising the special effects that make it so special.
Chief amongst these was the 'substitution trick', where he stopped the camera
to allow time for an object to be inserted into or removed from a scene,
before restarting the camera, thereby creating the illusion that something
has magically appeared or disappeared. The best example is the sudden
evaporation of the Selenites when they are hit by their human antagonists.
Another ingenious piece of trickery is the apparent zoom in on the face of
the Man in the Moon - this was in fact achieved by the actor being pulled
in a chair towards the camera, an effect that has widely been used since.
Georges Méliès made
Le Voyage dans la lune between May
and August 1902 and began exploiting it commercially the same year.
His hopes of making a healthy return in the United States were frustrated
by galloping piracy which later led him to set up a branch of his company
in New York so that subsequent films could be registered under U.S. copyright.
Thomas Edison was one of the most flagrant pirates - he reputedly made a
small fortune from the sale of unauthorised copies of the film. The
pirates may not have helped Méliès's bank balance but they helped to secure
for him a place in posterity, since most of the surviving prints of his films
are pirate copies distributed around the world without the author's awareness.
In common with quite a few of Méliès's films,
Le Voyage
dans la lune was exhibited in both black-and-white and colour versions.
The hand-coloured version was created at Elisabeth Thuillier's film colouring
laboratory in Paris, with each frame being painted by hand by a large team
of workers on a production line. For many decades, no colour prints
of the film were known to exist but then, in 1993, the Filmoteca de Catalunya,
an important film archive in Spain, received such a print in a badly decomposed
state. A painstaking restoration was undertaken by Lobster Films between
1999 and 2005 which, by combining the salvaged fragments from the coloured
print with better quality monochrome sources, resulted in the miraculous
recovery of a cinematic gem. Such was the success of
Le Voyage dans
la lune that not long afterwards Méliès attempted an even
more ambitious journey into the stars with
Le Voyage à
travers l'impossible (1904).
© James Travers 2015
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Next Georges Méliès film:
Le Chaudron infernal (1903)