original title: Le voyage dans la lune
The cinema’s first trip to our nearest celestial neighbour came appropriately enough from the French pioneer Georges Méliès who invented just about everything that we hold dear in horror and science fiction cinema. Many years later, Méliès suggested that Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and its follow-up Around the Moon, first published in 1870 were his primary influences for the film though there are also undeniably traces of H.G. Wells’s novel The First Men in the Moon (1901), notably the encounter with the moon dwellers in the film’s second half. At 14 minutes, it was the longest film that Méliès had made to that date and was certainly his most ambitious, making use of several beautifully detailed sets, more actors than he was used to directing and even more technically advanced special effects than the ones he’d already largely invented.
The astronomer Professor Barbenfouillis leads an expedition to the moon aboard a capsule fired from a huge gun. They land in the eye of the man in the moon in one of cinema’s most iconic shots and, exhausted by their journey, immediately fall asleep on the lunar surface. They miss the passage of a comet, and the appearance of the constellation the Big Dipper, the stars featuring the faces of women, Saturn watches on from a window in his planet as Phoebe, the goddess of the moon, appears on a crescent-moon swing. On awakening, the space travellers seek shelter in a cavern full of giant mushrooms and are attacked by a race of moon dwellers who explode when the travellers strike them with their umbrellas. Escaping from the palace of their lunar king, the astronomers return to Earth where they are rescued by a ship and towed ashore.
It’s easy now to under-estimate the impact A Trip to the Moon must have had on contemporary audiences. The film was a huge hit, punters enthralled by the film’s spectacle, especially in it’s hand-coloured version. It was so popular that it was widely pirated by rival producers who simply made copies of the prints that Méliès sent out, fobbing them off as their own work. It also inspired more scrupulous film-makers who weren’t content to simply steal Méliès work but weren’t above being “inspired” to make similar films of their own, most notably Segundo de Chomon’s Excursion dans la lune/Excursion to the Moon (1908) which is an almost shot for shot remake.
A Trip to the Moon was lost for many years until a print was discovered around 1930 though the beautiful hand-coloured print – which adds immeasurably to the film’s impact – remained lost until 1993. its influence has been long-lasting, not least because of that remarkable shot of the moon with the rocket in its eye – as recently as 2003, the surrealist comedy duo The Mighty Boosh (Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding) regularly featured a man in the moon not dissimilar to the one in Méliès’ film in their eponymous BBC television series. Méliès had featured a similar lunar creature in his 1898 film La lune à un mètre/The Astronomer’s Dream in which the face appears to an astonished stargazer, disgorging a host of dwarfs and dancing nymphs from its mouth.
Although hailed as an early milestone in the history of science fiction cinema, A Trip to the Moon is in truth more of a fantasy – its space-travelling pioneers are more akin to wizards with their long beards, pointed hats and flamboyant cloaks than they are to astronauts and scientists. Celestial bodies are anthropomorphised and the aliens are strange, tumbling creatures that explode when struck by the visitors. Later visions of trips to the moon may have been more realistic but few have been quite as charming, as much fun or as iconic as Méliès’ gloriously inventive vision. The director followed it up with the even more elaborate and inventive An Impossible Voyage (1904) in which space travellers make their way to the sun, but it’s A Trip to the Moon that has stood the test of time and quite rightly so.
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